The board hung on the Gatehouse’s inner wall where it had hung since the Hold was a ruin, and Korrin did not trust it any more than he trusted the wall it was nailed to.
It was oak, black with age and smoke, and as wide as a man’s arm was long. It had been planed once, by someone who had cared about the grain, and then left to the weather for two hundred years, which had raised the grain again in long soft ridges like the ribs of an old boat. The first Register line had been cut into it at the centre. The cut was clean and deep and it had been filled with the Hold’s colourless Ink, which had gone grey with time and looked, in the lamp’s light, like a thing that had been written in dust.
Citizen One: the Mantle, resident, non-departing.
Under the Ink, someone had struck a name.
Korrin stood with his arms folded and read it, the way he read every clause before he let it into his head. The struck name was cut too. It was not written, the way the line above it was written. It had been drawn over in a single clean stroke of the Chancery’s own black ink, a line from one end of the name to the other, so straight and so sure that it looked like the work of a ruler rather than a hand. The letters under the stroke were still legible. They were…
