Tallow copied the Register’s first line onto a clean sheet before he let himself look at the tally side by side with it. He had a rule for that. A clerk who compares two hands before he has written down the first hand is a clerk who has already decided what the comparison will show. So he sat at the end of the counting-room table with the lamp at his left shoulder and the ruled sheet in front of him, and he took up his pen, and he wrote out the line the way it stood on the gatehouse board, letter by letter, in the Ink that was his.
Citizen One: the Mantle, resident, non-departing.
He blotted it. He read it aloud, very low, the way he read every line he copied, to be sure he had not skipped a word. Then he sat back, and he let Mott bring the oilcloth across the table, and he laid the split stick down beside his own copy, with the paper knot to the right and the notches to the left, and the lamp shining along the bark.
For a moment he could not make the two hands separate.
They were not alike in the way one clerk’s hand is like another’s. A clerk’s hand is a habit of the wrist, and his own wrist had been trained by the Chamber’s rules and the Hold’s shorthand and two years of minutes. This was not that. The letters on the tally’s soft brown…
