A Walker takes a living Form, and a living Form is not a thing the Hold had ever made before. Everybody knew this. It was the reason the Chamber had spent a whole morning arguing about the Articles’ fourteenth clause, and the reason Gaunt had objected to the word living on four separate occasions, on the grounds that everything in the Hold was alive in one way or another and the word was therefore a Crown’s word for something it did not understand.
The Form was the difficulty. Lune’s weft Form had been cast from the Survey copy in the Undercroft’s store, which was the only Survey copy the Hold had left. That copy was spent by the Walk. A Walker’s weft Form does not shelve the Walker; it simply goes, as a coat goes when its owner steps out into the rain and does not come back for it. So the Undercroft’s copy was spent, and the living Form had to be made fresh, and the only mold that could make it was the Survey original, which lay in the Cradle’s vessel-pit under the Foundation’s stone, with its nine empty brothers and its one filled mold, which was the Mantle’s face.
