The weigh-house stood at the back of the Great Hall, behind a door that had been painted green in some earlier century and had since worn back to bare wood at the handle. Tallow had found it in the first week, and had not been inside it for longer than a quarter of an hour at a time, because the room made him uneasy. It was small and cold and had no window. It had a single long table, and in the middle of the table, on a heavy iron stand, there was a pair of scales.
They were the Hold’s old scales. They had been made, Tallow thought, to weigh wool or grain or perhaps coin, in the days when a weigh-house was the most important building in a market town and the men who kept it were the most trusted men in the place. The beam was long and dark and gleamed with oil. The two pans hung from brass chains that had been polished so often the links had worn thin at their bends. The stand was black iron, bolted to the floor by four bolts, and each bolt had been stamped with a mark that was not quite the Hold’s and not quite the Lessary Crown’s, and that Tallow had decided, after long consideration, to call the Chamber’s mark.
“They are mine,” said Gaunt, from the doorway.
He had come in without being asked and was standing with his back against the frame, arms folded, glowering at the beam. He had soot on his cheek and a file in one hand, and he seemed to have forgotten the file was there. “The scales are mine,” he said again. “I made the pans. I hung the chains. I put the bolts in the floor, with my own hands, in the first winter, and I will not have them used on a marsh-man’s salt.”
“The scales are the Chamber’s,” said Tallow, without looking up from the table. He had laid out his weights in a neat row beside the pans: a standard iron ingot, grey and squat, which the Hold had weighed against the Crown’s own measure in the first year and found to be honest; a block of Hold stone, cut to the same weight, to show that stone and iron could be made to agree; and a small brass tray with a range of smaller weights in it, for fine correction. “And the minute will say so.”
“The minute will say whatever the Clerk wants it to say.”
“The minute will say what the scales say,” said Tallow. “That is the only thing a minute is for.”
Pell had come to the doorway behind Gaunt, with a spoon in her hand and a streak of flour on her forearm. She peered past the smith at the beam. “They have never been wrong about bread,” she said. “Not once. I weighed a loaf on them every morning for a month, boy, and they told me it was right, and it was. I trust a scale that is never wrong about bread. I have never trusted a Clerk.”
“Thank you, Cook,” said Tallow.
“Do not thank me. I have a sauce on.”
Idrin came in last. He had been on the wall with Harrow since the bell, and he came into the weigh-house the way a man enters a church he has been told to respect and does not yet believe in. He stood at the table’s end with his scarred hand resting on its edge, and he watched Tallow lay out the weights, and he said nothing at all. He had asked for this, two days before, in the Great Hall, in front of the whole Chamber. He had asked to know the body’s weight in plain words.
Tallow had been dreading it since.
“The Measure is twelve hundred weights,” he said, to the room, and touched the brass chain on the nearer pan. “That is the full mass of the body, when it is whole. Below six hundred the weave thins, and the faces drift, and the voices go quiet. The floor is six hundred. The Measure is twelve. We are somewhere between.”
“Where?” asked Idrin.
“I am going to find out,” said Tallow.
He took the first weight from the table, the stone block, and set it in the left-hand pan. Then he took the iron ingot and set it in the right, and the beam moved, slowly, groaning a little on its brass pivot, until the two pans hung level and the needle at the beam’s centre quivered in the middle of its brass scale and stopped.
“Equal,” said Tallow. “One stone block equals one standard ingot. This is our measure of a weight. It is the unit the body reckons in.”
“Harrow,” said Idrin, from the table. “Count the weights.”
Harrow had come in from the Hall with his cap in his hand and his face calm. He stood by the scales and put his hands behind his back and counted aloud, as Tallow lifted each iron weight from the brass tray and set it on the right-hand pan, one by one, until the needle began to tremble and then slowly to swing upward, away from the middle of the scale. Harrow’s voice did not change. He counted up through the tens and then the hundreds, and at each hundred Ysra, who had come to the weigh-house door and stood there with her back to the passage, said the number again, very quietly, from the stair.
Tallow watched the needle. The body was not in the room. He knew that. The body was in the walls, and under the Hall, and along the length of the causeway with its stones and its shadows. But the scales were calibrated against the body’s own mass, a fact the Chamber had agreed on in the first winter and had never since tested. If the body was heavy, the needle would swing. If it was light, the pans would hang. He had always assumed the scales would tell him nothing he did not already know.
“Nine hundred and sixty,” said Harrow.
The needle steadied.
“Nine hundred and seventy,” said Ysra, from the door.
Tallow added a small brass weight. The needle swung a little, and steadied again, and then a little more, and Harrow counted the next two, and Ysra said them back.
“Nine hundred and eighty,” said Harrow.
“Nine hundred and eighty,” said Ysra. “On the stair, and the stair agrees.”
Tallow looked up. He had been holding his breath without knowing it, and he let it go. “Nine hundred and sixty to nine hundred and eighty weights,” he said slowly. “That is the body’s mass as the scales have it. I will give a margin of twenty, which is wider than I like and narrower than the Chamber deserves. It is better than last month. It is worse than the Measure.”
“Plain words,” said Idrin.
Tallow took a breath. He was aware of Pell in the doorway, with her spoon held up and her face gone still. He was aware of Gaunt’s silence and of Ysra’s breath on the stair. He gave the plain words the way he gave everything, precisely, with no ornament.
“The body is heavier than it has been since the spring,” he said, “and lighter than it ought to be.”
Idrin nodded, very slowly. He was looking at the beam. His face had the look of a man who had been feeling something in his chest for a long time and has just been shown where it is.
“I can see it now,” he said quietly. “The weight. I have only ever felt it before. Now I can see the needle move.”
“That is what a scale is for, Warden,” said Tallow. “It shows what the hand cannot.”
“What does the Measure do, when it is full?” Idrin asked, as Tallow lifted the brass tray and set it aside. “If the body reaches twelve hundred weights, does it stop?”
“It has never reached twelve hundred,” said Tallow. “Not in any record I have. The Register gives the Measure once, in the Foundation’s hand, and then gives no reading of it at all. I have a range for the reading. It is very wide, and it includes the word never.”
“Then it is a number nobody has tested.”
“It is a number nobody has been allowed to test,” said Tallow. For a moment he sounded less like a Clerk and more like a man who had been asked a question he had secretly wanted asked for years. “The body does not like to be weighed above its own name, Warden. I think it would sooner be lighter than honest.”
Tallow reached for the last of the brass weights. He meant to take the reading off and write it in the Register, and then go out into the court and tell the Chamber the figure, and then go to sleep, which he had not done properly for four nights. He lifted the weight, and reached for the pan, and the needle, which had been resting quite still at nine hundred and eighty, quivered.
It quivered once, sharply, very far to the right of its brass mark.
Then it came back, and slid up the scale by the width of a hair, and stopped, and rested there. It was a little above the figure Tallow had written in the Register. It was a little above the figure Harrow had counted, and a little above the one Ysra had said on the stair. It was above the range.
Nobody spoke. Gaunt had stopped glowering. Pell had lowered her spoon. Harrow’s hands, behind his back, had gone still.
Tallow looked at the needle a while. Then he took up his pen, and wrote in the Register’s margin, in the small hand reserved for matters of record that might later be disputed: Body mass, nine hundred and eighty and a hair. The body has rounded itself up.
He had never, in his whole life, seen a body do that. He did not know whether it was the scales, or the Clerk, or the body itself that had decided, for the length of one reading, to be a little more honest than the figure it was given.