The Roll of the Named had been kept in the Register’s back leaves for two hundred years, and Harrow had never once seen it opened. He had heard of it. Every mason in the Hold had heard of it, as a child hears of a grave-plot in a churchyard where its grandmother lies: a place of iron corners and numbered lines, always spoken of in a lower voice, never visited. The Roll had been brought out of the Register’s back leaves that afternoon by Tallow’s own hands, and carried down the stair by the fifth step, and laid on the bench beside the Keystone, and it was open now under the lamps, and its lines ran away from the first one into the dark like a course of stone with nothing yet laid on it.
They were numbered. One to nine hundred and ninety-nine. The first forty-two had names written in them, in the Ink, in Tallow’s careful hand. The rest were blank.
Harrow stood at the ring’s edge with the count-cord in his fist.
It had come back to him that morning, carried up from the gatehouse by a Lowgate boy with the Keeper’s compliments and a folded note in Mireille’s cold square hand. Count it again if you wish. You need not. But the Hold should hear the number from the mason’s own mouth. He had not wished to, at first. He had sat at his table in the Mason’s Yard with the cord in his lap and…
