Harrow stood up in the middle of the rite.
Venn had told the Hands, at the first bell, that the rite must not be interrupted, and that a Hand who rose from its seat while the bell was ringing would break the bell’s count and would have to be closed a second time. Harrow had heard her say it. He had heard it from the bench with the count-cord across his knees and his eyes open, and he had not moved, because a mason did not stand up in the middle of a course that had been set on a bad bed. But the bell had rung its eleventh stroke, and the low sound under the floor had gone on counting, and Harrow had found that he had stopped counting with it. He had lost the number of the strokes. He had never lost the number of anything in his life.
So he stood up.
He did it slowly, with a hand on the bench’s arm, and the bench creaked under his weight, and the acolytes at the ring’s edge turned their heads. Venn did not turn. She went on swinging the bell, very gently, from the wrist, and her face did not change. Harrow walked round the edge of the censers, through the ring, past the sleeping Pell and the humming Tamsin and the slumped, knotted figure of Gaunt, and he came to the Roll’s lectern, where Tallow sat with the minute-book open and his pen trembling in his…
