The Regent asked Tallow what the Hold’s copy of the Royal Register was worth, and Tallow refused to give him a figure. He did it politely. He did it in the toll-house’s back room, at a deal table with a lamp on it and the Assembly’s offer lying face up on the wood, and he did it with his hands folded on the minute-book so that the Regent could see he was not reaching for a pen.
“I am not able to give a figure, Highness,” he said. “The Register is not a copy.”
“The Assembly calls it one.”
“The Assembly calls a great many things by names they have not earned.” Tallow looked at the lamp. “In the Assembly’s sense, a copy is a transcript, made by a clerk from an original, and kept in a vault, so that the original may be consulted without being handled. That is the Chancery’s habit. There is a transcript of the Royal Register in the Foundation Vault, under the Keystone, in a Chancery box with a Lessaran seal on it. It was made two hundred years ago by a clerk who could not spell Ormhold and did not wish to be corrected. But the Register itself is in the gatehouse, under my own hand, on the board where the first line is written. It is not a copy of anything. It is the original of itself.”
