The Chaincrown’s clerk stood at the Chamber’s table with a motion in a neat hand, and Tallow, who had been writing the minutes of the Chamber for three years, recognised the hand before he had read a word of it. It was the grey neat hand of the man who had carried the Hard Hands’ silver to the Undercroft door. It did not shake. It was the steadiest hand Tallow had seen all day, and he found, to his own surprise, that he trusted it less for that.
“The motion,” said the clerk, “is that the Regent of Ormhold issue a Writ of one site. The Garrison Mound. To make the Mound’s voice assent to the Edict of Shelving by its own Writ, the Mantle’s Assent in its Writ form, so that the instrument may pass as Full, and the Dead may be settled as the Chancery has promised.”
He said it courteously, and then he laid the paper on the table’s edge, squared to the wood, and stepped back.
Tallow took it up. He did not give it to the Chamber to read. He read it aloud himself, slowly, in the flat voice he used for the minutes, every word given its full weight. It was a short motion. It had a single clause and a single Writ-form appended, with a space left in its foot for the Regent’s name and the date. The clerk had been very careful. Nowhere did the motion use the word compel. Nowhere did…
