The Mantle spoke at dusk, in its own voice, and the voice was the cold lamp coming on at last in the Survey House hall.
Idrin had heard Morrow speak only a handful of times in the whole of his life in the Hold. He had heard it at the Charter of Shares, when the Hall was first given a Warden’s name, and once in the Lantern Hall, in the dark, when the cold lamp had said nothing at all and he had known it was listening. Each time the voice had come up through the weft the way the marsh cold came up through the floor of a house in the night, not loudly, not warmly, but with a steady, patient weight that made the listener want to sit quite still and let it pass over. It did not sound like a person. It sounded like something that had decided, a long time ago, that a person was not the right shape for the things it needed to say.
This time it came up through the table.
The hall had gone very dim. The lamps had been lit, and the fire had been banked, and the last of the sun was a bar of pale red on the marsh outside the east window, and inside the Survey House the air had the close, still feel of a room in which nine people are all trying to hold their breath at once. The Writ lay on the table between the…
