Tallow wrote the Roll’s lines in the Ink, one for each name, and checked each line against the Chamber’s read count with his finger on the page, as he had been trained to check every ledger the Foundation had ever kept. It was slow work. It was the slowest work he had ever done in the Hold, and he did it with the candle at the corner of the minutes and the Ink drying in its well, and he did not hurry, because a Roll that was hurried was a Roll that would have to be re-counted, and he would not be the clerk who made the Dead count twice.
Four names were read in the first hour. Four more would come after them, before the candle-clock turned. The Chamber had sat through the first thirty-four with the patience of a Hold that knew it was listening to something it had never been allowed to hear, and Tallow could feel that patience now, in the ring and the stair and the gallery, a long slow breath that nobody was in any hurry to let out.
Tobin read these four.
“Tibbald Stroud. Sawyer.”
Tallow wrote it. He wrote the sawyer’s trade and the sawyer’s Writ and the Assent in the Ink, and he checked the line with his finger. He had known Tibbald Stroud’s trade from the Foundation’s own sawyer’s column, in the wage-ledger he had carried up and down the stair for three years. He had never once thought of…
