The Register board stood at the back of the Gatehouse where the lamplight barely reached, and Tallow liked it there. Things that were written in the Ink did not need light. They needed to be looked at by someone who already knew what they said.
Entry 0001 was still legible. Citizen One: the Mantle, resident, non-departing. The letters had been cut into the oak with a colourless hand that gave back no shine, and each one had sunk into the grain so cleanly that a reader could miss them entirely if he was looking for the words and not the wood. Beneath the Ink, very faint, a second line showed through the grain where a name had once been written and then struck. Tallow did not read the struck name aloud. He had not needed to for ten years, and he was not going to start on a morning when the gate had sent him a factor.
He held Mott’s letter up to the lamp and read it to the runner in the plain voice he used for the minutes.
“To the Citizen of Ormhold and Any Who Are With Her,” he said. “From Tessaly Mott, factor of Mott and Lark. The Coldharbour grain is on the road against shares. The lodging instrument is asked for by name.” He turned the sheet over. “Dated the nineteenth of the wet month. By the clause.”
