Tallow had lost his spectacles in the culvert, and so he counted the strokes on the cistern walk with his fingers.
It was not how a clerk was meant to count. A clerk counted with his eyes, along the line, in the order the marks were cut, and then he checked his count against the board and made the figure agree. But the lamp was low and the stone was wet, and the strokes were so fine that they threw no shadow of their own, and when he held his face close to the flags he could see only a blur of grey and a glint where the water caught them. So he knelt on the walk with the board on his knee and the Hold’s last lamp at his shoulder, and he laid the first two fingers of his right hand along the grooves, and he counted by touch.
The first stroke was a shallow notch in the grey flag, no deeper than a fingernail, with a clean edge on one side where a blade had gone in and a slight tear on the other where it had come out. He pressed his fingertip into it. He could feel the grain of the stone under the cut, and the cold, and the faint slick of the cistern’s green on the rim. He wrote the figure on the board with his other hand, very carefully, in the Ink’s careful grey.
