Without his spectacles, Tallow could not see the faces of the people he was questioning, so he listened to their voices instead, and he wrote down what they said as they said it, in the order he had decided to ask.
He sat on the cistern walk with the minutes board across his knees and the last lamp at his shoulder. The Hold’s Chamber had given him one rule for an interview with an enemy, and he had kept it for thirty years in every court and council hall he had ever been sent to. The rule was that the questions must be asked in the order the Chamber needed the answers, not the order the enemy wished to give them. The enemy always wished to begin with grievance. The Chamber needed to begin with the object.
“What does Corvanne want from the Hold?” said Tallow.
He said it in the flat voice of a clerk reading out a motion. He could not see the commander’s face across the black water, only the faint shape of her against the light of her own lamp, and the small pale glint of her hand where it rested on the stone. He had heard her laugh once, very softly, when the prince had said he was sorry. He had not heard her laugh since.
