The scale was an honest machine, and Tallow loved it for the same reason he loved a good column of figures. It did not care what a thing was. It cared only what the thing weighed. A beam of pale ash balanced on a brass knife-edge, with a pan at either end and a needle that stood upright in a slot cut into the frame, and when a weight was set in one pan the needle leaned, and the leaning was the same leaning whether the weight was a sack of barley or a Lessaran minister’s dinner.
On the second day of the fair, Tallow stood beside the Assembly’s clerk at the foot of the scale and watched the faces step up on it, one after another, and wrote the weights down.
He wrote them in his own hand, in the margin of the Hold’s ledger, which he had brought down from the gatehouse in a leather satchel and had set on a folding stool at his elbow, open to a clean page. The clerk wrote the same figures in the Assembly’s ledger. Their two columns stood side by side at the edge of the causeway, and Tallow had decided, somewhere in the first hour, that he would not let the clerk’s column be the only honest one.
