Tallow read the count to the Chamber on the second morning after the opening, from the minute-board, standing, with his feet together and his hands folded over the page as a clerk stands when he has been asked to swear to something. He had prepared the reading for a night and a day. He had written it out three times in the Register’s own hand, once with a figure, once without, and once with a note for the minutes saying that the first two were wrong.
“Nine hundred and ninety-nine,” he said. “With a margin of none.”
The Hall was full. The Hands sat in their usual places, and the Warden sat at the head of the table in the chair with the slate under its short leg, and the dog lay under the bench with its nose on Pim’s foot. Ossane was not present. She had asked, politely, through Pell, that she be allowed to hear the count from the guest room, where she had been sitting with her paper since the Writ had run out at dawn. Tallow had said the Chamber would be glad to read it to her later. He had not said that the Chamber had not yet agreed to.
“The tokens are of pale tin,” Tallow went on. “Each has a device on its upper face and a builder’s sign beneath. I have read the devices from the Chest one row at a time, with Harrow’s cord beside me and the lamp at my back, and I have written them into the Register of Tithe in the order they lie. There are nine devices in all. They are not repeated across the rows. Each device belongs to a single trade, and each trade has its own line in the Chest, and I have written the trades beside the count, so that the count can be checked by anyone who wants to check it.”
“Read the trades,” said Idrin.
Tallow read them. He read them off the page in a flat, careful voice, one at a time, and he kept his eyes on the page until he had finished. “Build. Feed. Watch. Record. Carry. Mend. Ferry. Survey. Mourn.”
There was a pause.
“Those are the trades of the Hands,” said Pell, slowly, from the Kitchen end of the table. “All of ours. Build is Gaunt and Harrow’s, and Feed is mine and Tamsin’s. Watch is Ysra and Korrin. Carry is the boy. Mend is Sella’s, and Record is yours, Clerk.”
“Yes,” said Tallow.
“And the other three?” said Gaunt.
Tallow looked down at the page. He had known the question would come, and he had prepared the answer as carefully as any range he had ever given. “Ferry, Survey and Mourn,” he said, “have no Hand awake to answer to them. I have checked the Register’s roll twice. I have checked the Chamber’s seats. There are nine chairs at this table and nine Hands sitting in them, and none of the nine is a ferryman, a surveyor or a grave-tender. The trades are in the Chest, but the men who held them are not at the table. I cannot tell the Chamber why. I can only tell it that they are not here.”
Nobody spoke. Harrow’s hand moved to his belt, where the cord would have been, and then stopped, as though he had remembered that the cord was not his to take out during a reading. Korrin looked at Ysra. Ysra looked at the door. Tamsin, on the floor by the wall, said softly to the dog, “Some of them are not here yet,” and the dog, who had been listening, thumped its tail once against the boards.
Tallow had expected the objection. He had heard it from the Chamber in every form the Chamber could manage, from the first sitting to the last, and he found he was almost relieved to hear it said plainly.
“Count it again,” said Gaunt.
He said it from the bench, very loudly, as if the words had been waiting in his mouth since the start of the reading and he had only just been permitted to let them out. Tallow looked at him. The Chamber looked at him. Gaunt stood up, which he did not often do, and folded his arms, and then unfolded them, because he could not find a way to hold them that felt like objecting.
“I do not trust a count that comes out so tidy,” Gaunt said. “It has been too easy for the Clerk. Nine trades, nine hundred and ninety-nine, three trades gone, and not one of us to say who took them. Count it again, Clerk, and this time let the chest count itself.”
“A Clerk cannot refuse a count,” said Tallow.
“Then count it.”
They went down the stair together, all of them, the Chamber going in a body with its lamps, to the Chest in the back room. Tallow counted. He counted the way he had been taught, in a straight line, touching each token with a pen and calling its number aloud, and at each row he stopped and wrote the number in the Register and drew the line beneath it. Gaunt stood at his elbow the whole time and objected to the pen. Pell counted with him, in a whisper, and at the end of the last row the two of them looked at each other and said, together, “Nine hundred and ninety-nine.”
“Again,” said Gaunt.
“It will say the same,” said Tallow.
“Then it will say it twice,” said Gaunt, and he sat down on the bottom step of the Chest’s little stair, which was not a stair so much as a wooden box with a lip, and he put his head in his hands.
Tamsin came to sit beside him. She did not touch him. She sat on the next step up with her shawl around her shoulders and asked, very gently, whether he was ill.
“I am not ill,” said Gaunt, through his fingers. “I am a fool. Look at the hinges.”
Tamsin looked. The Chest’s hinges were iron, black and heavy, each with a broad flat leaf and a pin as thick as a finger. Gaunt had oiled them. The pins had been turned on a lathe, and the turning had left a fine, spiral mark on each one, like the grain on a good piece of wood.
“My people made those,” said Gaunt. He did not lift his head. “I know the mark. It is a single line across the pin, with a hook at the end, the way my family cut it on everything it ever sold. My grandfather cut it on the gate-hinges of our street when I was a boy, and his grandfather before him, and I have seen the same line on a thousand pins. I did not know, until this morning, that the Foundation had hired a family of smiths to make the box that holds us.”
“Did he never tell you?” asked Tamsin.
“He never told anyone anything,” said Gaunt. “He was a smith. A smith objects to his own work for the rest of his life, and then he dies, and somebody else has to finish the objection.” He lifted his head at last. His face was wet and furious. “So now I am the objection. And I do not know what I am objecting to.”
Idrin had come down the stair behind them. He stood at the foot of it, with the lamp in his good hand and the scarred one resting at his side, and he looked at the Chest a while. Then he asked the question everybody in the room had been waiting for, though they had not wanted to be the one to ask it.
“What does a wage-token buy?”
Tallow turned back from the Chest to answer. He did it in the Register’s own words, which he had learned by heart in the first week and had never once used. “The tokens are redeemable,” he said. “Against the Token-Chest. The Chest is the only creditor in the Hold, Warden. It is the only creditor the Hold has ever had. Each token is a claim on the Chest, and the Chest is a claim on the builders’ wages, and the wages are owed to those whose trades are stamped on the tokens. Redemption requires the token to be surrendered, and the surrender to be witnessed, and the Chest to be opened in the presence of the Register.”
“And who would redeem them?” said Idrin.
“I do not know,” said Tallow. “The clause does not say. It says only what must be given to the Chest in exchange.”
“What must be given?”
Tallow reached for the Register. He turned the pages back, past the Charter of Shares and the minutes of the first share day, past the first Register line on the gatehouse board, to the old clause in the back leaves, written in a hand that was not his and yet was his own, in the colourless ink. He ran his finger down it. He stopped. Then he read it aloud in a voice that wavered.
“One token shall be given to the Chest for each builder’s name that is spoken in the Hold, and the name shall be entered in the Roll.” He stopped. He read it again, quietly, to himself. “One token for each name.”
“There are nine hundred and ninety-nine tokens,” said Pell.
“There are nine hundred and ninety-nine tokens,” Tallow said. “And the Hold has never once, in all its years, been able to say the names.”
He closed the Register very gently, and set his palm on its cover, and was surprised to find that his hand was cold.