Ysra counted the Forms because she counted everything, and because the Chamber would ask her to, and because a Watch who had not counted the Hold’s spare bodies in the week before midwinter could not be trusted to count anything else.
The Form-store lay under the Mason’s Yard, down a short flight of stone steps behind a door bound in iron. It had been built in the first year, when the molds were still in the Cradle and the Hold had not yet understood what it would need to keep in the dark. There were racks along both walls, and on the racks were crates, and in the crates were the copies cast from the Cradle’s nine originals in the Undercroft’s own casting pit. Each copy was sealed with the Hold’s plain wax and marked on its lid with the trade-sign of the family it had been poured for. Ysra knew every sign. She had drawn most of them.
She went along the racks with her lamp and her slate, one hand on each crate’s lid as she passed, as she had once walked the wall-walk at night checking the bolts. The Kitchen’s rack was empty. Its crate had been spent in the Edict of Labour, and the chalk line painted across the empty rack’s back board had faded to a grey smear, and she could not read what it had said. She wrote Kitchen: spent (512) in her tally and drew a line under it, because the number was…
