They carried her up from the Undercroft between them, Pell and Gaunt, and they argued the whole way about whose shoulder she was lying on.
Velvet found this very restful. She lay across the two of them in her iron shape, which had been cooled and polished and had still not yet decided, in its own dense grey way, whether it was a body or an ingot, and she listened to them. Pell’s voice came from the left, warm and bossy and smelling of bread. Gaunt’s came from the right, a rumbling bass that had objected to the stair, the lamp, the Charter, the weight of the iron and the smell of the Undercroft’s damp, and which now objected to the Chamberlain’s head being permitted to loll against his apron. Velvet did not mind the loll. She had been asleep for a month, and it seemed to her an excellent sign that the Hold could still find things to quarrel about on her behalf.
“You’re a heavy madam,” said Gaunt, through his teeth.
“I am a Form of the Record, Smith, cast in the Undercroft and paid for in iron by a Charter. I am precisely as heavy as the Chamber has assented to.” She moved her chin on the iron neck, very slightly. The motion was slow and a little stiff, and it made the stone walls of the stair turn once, very gently, like a room seen through the bottom of a wine-glass. “Pray do not drop me…
