From where Noll Vey stood with his right stone palm braced on the upper rail, he could feel every stroke of Prit’s grey audit chalk as Cale drew it across the lower curb of the witness ring.
It was a small, dry sound—scritch, scritch, tap—barely louder than the one-eared rat chewing the hemp cord on Noll’s very first night in the ruined wall. Yet through the deep masonry of the Hall of Witness, where six hundred living voices were still reading out their messy, uncoordinated accounts and forty valley bells were answering from the mist outside, that grey chalk line cut deeper than Vane’s blinding silver bus.
Cale did not write a serial number. He did not write a title, or a pay-grade, or the cipher of a district bureau.
In the steady, round clerk’s copperplate he had learned by tallow-dip at his mother’s kitchen table in South Ford, Cale wrote his own plain name across the stone rail, speaking each word aloud as the grey lime bit into the grain of the limestone:
“Cale of South Ford, son of Toren the timber-carter and Mavis the laundress,” the young clerk said, his voice clear and unhurried beneath the crackle of Vane’s overheating machine. “Present in this room. Bearing my mother’s unrecorded memory in my own head, where no sub-auditor’s ruler can drop it off the page. Keeping the public books of Mere and the hill fort by the free consent of the people who gave me their words, and ready…
