The Chancery’s clerks could not read the old wage-hand. Tallow had known it since the commission arrived, because he had watched them try, at the Chancery’s bench in the Great Hall, with the Foundation’s copy of the first wage-leaf laid out between them under a lamp and their faces growing more and more puzzled. They could read the Chancery’s own blue-black, and the Lessaran Court’s law-hand, and the Assembly’s roll-script that a child could follow. But the colourless Ink of the Foundation was not a script they had been taught. It did not seem like writing to them. It looked like the faint grey ghost of a mark left on the paper by something that had been pressed there and then lifted away.
So at the candle-clock on the second day of the Inquest, Dorr sent a note across the Hall, in the Chancery’s own hand, asking whether the Hold’s clerk would be so good as to read the copy aloud, line by line, for the Chancery’s record. It was a courteous note. It was signed with a flourish. It was not, Tallow thought, the note of a man who wanted to be helped.
He stood up from the minutes’ chair and went across the Hall with the Register’s copy under his arm, and he set it down on the Chancery’s table beside the blue-black ledger, and he opened it at the first leaf.
