Tallow stood before the gatehouse board in the grey morning, with his slate under one arm and the pen behind his ear, and read its first line in the Ink.
Citizen One: the Mantle, resident, non-departing.
He had read it every day since the first winter. He had read it at the Register table and in the Great Hall and on the stair, and he had copied it into the minutes so often that he could have written it out in his sleep, and sometimes, in the small hours, he believed that he had. It was the first line of the Hold’s Register, the first entry of the book, the one the Foundation’s wage-clerk had written before anyone in the Hold had a name to be written under. The letters were colourless. They were not black like the Chancery’s ink or brown like the marsh’s. They were the grey of old pewter, very even, very plain, with no flourish and no blot, and they had been cut into the gatehouse board in a way that made them look as though they had been written by a hand that had never once been asked to make a mark for its own sake.
