It was the fifth day of the rite, and Venn was tired, and the Hands were tired, and Tobin was awake because he had never once gone to sleep in a room where somebody was counting the sleepers.
He had counted them from the first morning. He had counted Pell’s breath going slow on the bottom step and Tamsin’s humming going soft in her chair and Gaunt’s knotted grey cloth rising and falling over his mouth like a sail on a windless day. He had counted the acolytes, who were nine on some mornings and ten on others and once, very early, eleven, before the eleventh had gone down the Undercroft stair and not come back up. He had counted the censers and the strokes of the bell and the number of times Venn had walked the ring, which by the fifth morning was past forty. He had counted, under his breath, the stones of the Great Hall’s floor from the Roll’s lectern to the postern door, and had got a different figure each time, and had decided that the floor was not the trouble.
The trouble was the bell.
He stood up in the middle of the ring with his cloth in his hand. It was a plain grey cloth, the one the acolytes had used to tie over Gaunt’s mouth, and Tobin had taken it from the back of the Kitchen’s pile that morning because he wanted something in his hands while he spoke. He did not tie…
