Tallow kept the Register the way other men kept a shrine: with a cloth over it when it was not in use, a pen laid beside it at the same angle every morning, and a rule that no one but himself was to turn its pages. He had made that rule in the first week. He had broken it only once, to show Idrin the first line, and he had felt, while he turned the leaves, the faint cold prickle of a man who has opened a door that ought to have stayed shut.
The first line was on the gatehouse board, not in the book. It was the line every Hand knew by heart. Citizen One: the Mantle, resident, non-departing. It was written in the colourless ink that the Hold called the Ink, which was not really an ink at all but a sort of stain that the wood had taken from something older than the wood, and it had not faded in two centuries. Tallow copied it into the Register each morning, in his own hand, for the record. He had never once asked himself why he could copy it so easily.
This morning he took the copy from the book, and laid it on the Kitchen table beside the tally-board from the granary, and then, beside them both, a page he had torn from the back of the Chest’s inventory.
The tally-board was an old plank of oak, thick as a finger, with a row of notches cut into one edge. Someone had written on its face, in the same colourless ink, a column of figures and a set of short words that were the granary’s own shorthand for its sacks. The words were in, out, spoiled and rat. The figures were in a neat, close, unhurried hand. Tallow had looked at them every day since the first share-day, and he had noticed that the hand had a particular way of making a downstroke, a little thickening at the base, as though the pen had rested there for a breath before it moved on.
He looked at the downstroke in the granary tally. He looked at the downstroke in the first line on the gatehouse board, copied in his own hand. He looked at the downstroke on the Chest’s inventory page, which had been written by a Clerk two hundred years ago, in the Foundation’s own ledger, and which Tallow had torn out of the back leaves two days before with the Warden’s leave and the Chamber’s clerk’s blessing.
They were the same.
He did not believe it at first. He took out the magnifier from his drawer and looked again. He turned the board to the window, where the light came in grey and even off the courtyard. He held the copy of the first line close to his eye. He held the inventory page up beside them, one after another, very slowly, and he watched the downstroke in each. The thickening at the base was there in all three. The breath before the pen moved on was there. The loop on the capital letter, which in the first line was a plain curl at the top of the C in Citizen, and which in the granary tally was an upright hook on every capital S, was the same loop, drawn by the same wrist.
Tallow sat down.
“Tallow?” Pell said, from the oven, without turning round. “You have gone the colour of the bread-board.”
“I am quite well,” said Tallow.
“You have gone very quiet, which is worse.”
“I am quite quiet, which is accurate,” said Tallow, and went on looking.
He drew a line under each capital letter with his fingernail. It was the way a clerk checked a column for a mistake, a single pass down the page, one line under every figure, so that the eye could be sure it had not skipped anything. He did it on the tally-board, which was harder, because the oak was rough and the ink had soaked in and the notches made the wood uneven. He did it on the copy, which was simple. He did it on the inventory page, which was thin and brown and tore a little under his nail, so that he had to be very careful and very slow.
Then he laid all three side by side on the Kitchen table, and looked.
The lines fell exactly on one another.
It was not a close match. It was an identical one. Each capital had the same loop, and each loop lay under the same kind of line, and each line sat at the same angle to the page, as if a single pen had been carried from one leaf to the next and dipped in the same ink each time and lifted to write exactly the same letter. Tallow had written in the Register for six weeks in his own careful, looping, pedantic hand. He had never once seen his own capitals look like anybody else’s. He looked at them now and could not tell which of the three had been written first, or by whom, or whether it mattered.
The Kitchen had gone silent.
Pell had stopped stirring. She stood at the oven with the wooden spoon in her hand, and the pot in front of her had stopped bubbling, and she did not say a word. Gaunt, who had come in from the forge to complain about the bread, was leaning in the doorway, and he, too, was silent. Even the dog, under the table, had lifted its head.
Tallow did not swear to it. He could not. He was a Clerk, and a Clerk did not swear to his own hand, because a man who swore to his own hand was a man who had stopped checking it. He said instead, in the quiet voice he kept for a difficult minute, “The range of my certainty is narrow. But it is not nil.” He took up his pen. He wrote the observation in the Chamber’s minutes, in the margin of the day’s sitting, and beside it he drew a small dagger, the mark the Chamber used for a thing it did not yet know how to name.
Ysra came in from the passage without a sound. She stood at his shoulder and looked at the three pages, and her lips moved, counting the capitals, and then stopped. “Do you remember writing the tally?” she asked.
“No,” said Tallow.
“Do you remember writing the first line?”
“No,” said Tallow, and then, because she was waiting, he said the rest of it, in a plainer voice. “I do not remember anything before the board, Ysra. I woke in the gatehouse with a pen in my hand and a number in my head, and the number was the number of strokes on the Register’s first line. I have always known that number. I did not know why. I still do not. It is the only thing I remember from before I was a Hand. Not my trade. Not my name. The strokes.”
Ysra was quiet for a moment. “Then you may have written the first line,” she said at last. “Or somebody who had your hand, and your number, and no name to put beside it.”
“That is not a comfort,” said Tallow.
“It was not meant to be,” said Ysra.
He would not meet her eye. He was looking at the granary tally again, at the oak plank with its notches and its short, neat words. He had a thought, and he did not like it, and he gave it to the Chamber’s minutes anyway, because a Clerk had to put down what he could not prove.
“The granary tally was cut in the first week,” he said slowly. “The week the Hold took the first share of grain. I remember that week. It is the only week I can remember clearly. And I remember the sack that had been tied wrong in the third row. It was crooked. The knot had slipped. The grain was leaking through the burlap onto the floor, and the rats were already at it, and I thought the sack would be lost.”
“Did you lose it?” asked Ysra.
“No,” said Tallow. “I resealed it. I tied it again in a clerk’s neat knot, a double loop over a single tuck, which is the knot the Chancery teaches its under-clerks. It took me a quarter of an hour. I tied the sack, and I wrote the tally, and I went back to the gatehouse, and I did not think about it again until this morning.”
“Is anything missing from it?”
Tallow checked. He checked twice, with the granary book open beside him and his finger on each line, and he counted the sacks in the row against the figures, and the figures against the granary’s shorthand, and the shorthand against the stamped mark that the Chamber had put on every sack in the first month. At the end of it he sat back, and his face was very tired.
“Nothing is missing,” he said. “The sack is whole. I have resealed it into the Hold’s own count, and I have kept the tally in my own hand, and the rats have had none of it. It is correct. It is perfectly correct.”
“Then you have stolen nothing,” said Ysra.
“No.”
“That is the worst kind of theft,” said Ysra, and went back to the passage, and he heard her counting the bricks of the floor as she went, under her breath, and losing her place at the same number she had lost it at before.
Tallow did not answer. He gathered the three pages together, the copy and the tally-board’s rubbing and the torn sheet from the inventory, and laid them carefully in the Register’s back leaves, where they would be safe and where nobody would think to look for them. Then he took up the minute-book, and opened it at the last written page of the morning’s sitting, to add the day’s range, and stopped.
There was a line at the foot of the page. It was not in the Chamber’s clerk’s hand, which was the hand of the morning’s minutes, nor in the careful, crowded script he used for ranges. It was in the colourless ink, small and neat and steady, the capitals looped and the downstrokes thickened at their base.
Clerk: one. Range: one.
Tallow looked at it closely. He did not remember writing it. He had never in his life written a line in a minute-book that he did not remember, and he had never once been unable to say how many times he had dipped his pen. He took out his magnifier again, and looked at the capital C, and the little curl at the top of it, and then, very slowly, he closed the book, and laid his hand flat on its cover, and found that his palm was cold, and that the cold did not come from the stone.