The motion was about the dog, and by the time Tallow had written it out in full the dog had already been fed, named, admitted to the shares, and found asleep under the Warden’s chair. The Chamber had not yet voted on any of this. It had simply accepted it as a fact, as a body accepts a stone it has swallowed.
“Motion,” said Tallow, from his stool at the minute-board. He read it in the flat voice he kept for motions. “That the dog which came up from Lowgate on the fourth day of the sixth week be entered on the Hold’s roll of shares, as a Hand’s dependant, and be fed from the granary at a rate of one bowl per sitting, the rate to be set by the Chamber.”
He had written the Chamber twice in that sentence without meaning to, which was a sign he had not slept. He noticed it and did not correct it, because the Chamber would notice it for him.
“Objection,” said Gaunt.
The Chamber answered him all at once.
“It is a dog,” said Korrin, from his chair by the door, in one flat imperative. “It guards. Guard is worth a share.”
“The dog has thirty-one teeth,” said Harrow. He had got up from the window and come to stand at the foot of the table, where the dog lay with its chin on the Warden’s boot. “One. Two. Three. Four.” He stopped. He began again, with his mouth opening for each tooth and his hands behind his back, and at the fourth he lost count entirely and started over from the front.
“The dog is called Pim’s Dog,” said Pim, from the bench, in the tone of someone correcting a slight in a shop. Every head at the table turned to him. He sat up straighter under the attention. He had not meant to be listened to in quite this way, and he was pleased with it, and he tried to look as if he were not. “I named him in the court this morning. He has not argued.”
“The dog has been on the stair twice,” Ysra said. She was standing at the door, with the gap of the court behind her. “Once going up and once going down. The stair is not mine to lend. I have not lent it.”
“The dog has been on the stair,” said Tamsin, speaking to the dog and not to the Chamber, “and the dog has enjoyed it. Do you enjoy the stair? You do. That is good. The stair is a very good stair, and you may sit on the bottom step whenever you like, for the goats will not mind.”
“The goats will mind,” said Sella, from the stool beside the Warden’s chair, with the ledger on her knee. “The dog’s diagnosis is that he is three years old and has eaten a great deal of rope. The comfort is that he has stopped eating the rope. Put him on the roll, Clerk. Put him at the bottom, under the goats.”
“The dog is hungry,” said Pell, from the Kitchen door. “That settles the matter. You may argue till the candles go out, and the dog will still be hungry, and I will still be feeding him, so argue sensibly.”
“Motion has been objected to,” Gaunt said, rising to a height he did not need. “On the grounds that the Hold’s shares are not to be paid to animals whose loyalty is not on the record. I object to the dog’s loyalty. His tail is worse. He looks at the Warden’s boot as if it were a Lessary coin, and the Chamber is letting him.”
“The dog has been counted,” said Harrow.
“The dog has been counted by Harrow,” Gaunt said. “Which means it has been counted wrong.”
Tallow, at the minute-board, wrote the names of every Hand who had spoken, one after another, in the order of their speaking, and found he had written the same name twice. He did not cross it out. He had learned, in the past six weeks, that the Chamber’s arguments went more smoothly when the minute-board was not corrected in the middle of them. A minute could always be corrected at the end.
“Clerk,” said Idrin, from the Warden’s chair. He was watching the room with his scarred hand resting on the table’s edge and his face carefully neutral. “The Charter requires a clause to carry any motion touching the shares. Which clause?”
Tallow stood up. He cleared his throat, and then he did what he always did, which was to find the clause in the original text and read it aloud, with the range of meaning he had worked out in the night. He had not quite finished his second breath when the Chamber, impatient, began again to shout over him.
“Clerk!” said Korrin.
“Clerk!” said Pell, and then Gaunt, and then Harrow, who had reached the count of his own voice and wanted to check it. Ysra said stair in a clipped, precise tone. Sella said diagnosis. Tamsin said please to the dog, very softly, as if to ask it not to join in, and the dog thumped its tail twice against the Warden’s boot. Pim said share and then double and then Pim’s Dog once more, to be sure it was on the record. Even Morrow’s place at the end of the table was not quiet, for the chair there had been turned, sometime during the afternoon, to face the room.
Then all nine of them spoke at once.
It was not a shout. Tallow had heard the Hands shout before, and he had recorded the shouting at nine, which had seemed reasonable at the time. This was different. It was nine voices, each in its own key, each saying its own word for the same idea, so that the words ran together and made a single sound that was neither speech nor song. It was the sound, Tallow thought, that a Chamber made when it was agreed in everything except the order in which it wished to be agreed. The minute-board shook under his palm. Idrin put his hand over his ear. Harrow’s count went up and up and then stopped, as if it had been cut.
The sound ended on Pell’s voice, which said, very clearly, “Enough.”
It was quiet. Tallow took the quiet and wrote it down in the Register of Tithe, under the motion, where it looked very short on the page. Then he read the clause aloud, all of it, in a plain voice and with no range at all, because some things the Chamber had to hear in the words they had been written in.
“Each Hand’s share shall be set by the Hand’s own labour, and by no other Hand’s appetite,” Tallow read. “The Charter says that. Appetite is not a share, and it is not a dependant. But the Charter also says a Hand’s share may be paid to any living thing that the Hand has undertaken to carry. Pim has undertaken the dog. It is in the minutes from the second share day, under his name, in Pim’s own hand. The clause, in my reading, carries the motion to the dog.”
“In your reading,” said Gaunt.
“In my reading, which is the only one I was asked to give.”
“Carried,” said Idrin, quickly, before anyone else could find an objection. “On the Clerk’s reading. Nine voices in favour.”
“Nine voices,” said Harrow, counting them on his fingers, “which is nine.”
“Ten, with the dog,” said Pim.
“The dog does not vote,” said Ysra.
The dog barked twice.
It barked from under the Warden’s chair, where it had retreated during the argument and lain down with its nose on its paws. The barks were short and deep and perfectly timed. Tallow looked at the barks and then at the minute-board, and he saw that the Chamber, in a single movement, had turned to him and waited.
“That is a second motion,” said Gaunt darkly.
“It is a motion in favour,” said Tamsin.
“It is a second motion,” Gaunt repeated, “and the Chamber refuses to hear it.”
Ysra was counting. She stood at the door with her back to the stair and her lips moving, and when she reached two she said the number aloud, quite firmly, as if someone had asked her to do a thing that was perfectly reasonable, and she was surprised at the others for objecting to it. “Two barks,” she said. “Recorded.”
“The Chamber does not hear barks,” said Idrin.
“Then the Chamber has not heard them,” said Ysra, “and I have counted them anyway, and the stair has heard them, and the stair does not forget.”
Tallow wrote two barks, not heard, counted by Ysra in the margin, in the small hand reserved for matters of record that the Chamber would later pretend had never happened. He kept his head down. He did not want to see the dog’s face.
When he finally did look up, the dog had got to its feet and walked the length of the table, past the bowls and the candles and the stool and Sella’s ledger, to the foot of the Warden’s chair, where it sat down, very deliberately, in front of Idrin’s boots. It did not bark again. It did not wag its tail. It did not get up when Pell called it from the Kitchen door, or when Tamsin called it in full sentences, or when Pim offered it the last bone from the table, which it looked at with polite dignity and declined.
Idrin bent to move it. He put out his scarred hand, and then, very slowly, he drew it back again, as if the dog had told him something he did not yet want to hear.
“The Chamber will settle the matter by the dog’s silence,” he said.
“That is not a Charter clause,” said Tallow.
“It is the only one he is going to give us,” said Idrin.
The dog settled its chin on its paws and shut its eyes. As it did, the flagstones of the Great Hall, under all their lamps and benches and the tenth chair turned to the door, shifted by a finger’s width toward the dog, and the whole Hall seemed to lean with it, as a room leans toward a warm stove, and then leaned back, and was still.