Mireille came to the Ink-room to copy her cipher, because the Chamber had asked whether the key to the Quiet Census ledger could be filed with the Register, and because she had decided, somewhere between the Lantern road and the gatehouse, that a key kept in one person’s head could be bought, and a key kept in a clerk’s drawer could only be read.
The Ink-room was small and warm. It smelt of lamp-oil and dried ink and the sweet bread-smell that Pell’s loaves left on everything within a corridor of the kitchen. There was a long table, scarred and stained, and a window too small to let in more than a finger of light, and a gatehouse box at the end of the table with a new brass lock turned on its lid. Tallow sat across from her with his coat off and his sleeves pushed up, a pen in one hand and a ruler in the other, as if he had decided that the Chamber’s work could be done only with both tools in the air at once.
She had come to the Hold first under a clerk’s name and a grey hood, long before the Chancery had decided what to do with her. Then she had spent a long season in the Quiet Wing at Sallowmere, which was the Lessaran Crown’s own prison for the struck, until the Assembly of Seats found it inconvenient to keep her and let her go under an amnesty that nobody had…
