The Foundation’s wage-ledger was heavier than it looked. Tallow had carried it up and down the Undercroft stair in the first winter, when the Chamber had first been told that the Hold kept its own wage-book and nobody had yet agreed where it should be kept, and he had carried it again every spring since, when the damp came up through the press floor and he had to move the Foundation’s paper to the dry shelf above the counterpart. He knew its weight to the ounce. He knew it was two hundred years old, and that its binding was calf, and that its corners had been rubbed to the grain by a hundred hands that were not his.
He had never opened it at the Keystone before. He had opened it at the press, alone, with the lamp on his right and his slate on his left, and he had read each page in order, as a clerk reads a ledger he has been asked to audit, and he had found nothing in it that he did not already expect. Wages paid to builders, by trade, one line each. Tokens drawn from the Chest in the first year, and marked as drawn. Paper given in place of tokens, in later years, to houses in Coldharbour whose names he knew from the Inquest’s spring list. Entries in a colourless Ink that never blurred and never faded, in a hand so even that Harrow had once said it looked more like a…
