Mara opened the tally book at the Board’s table and added Tal’s loss.
The tally book was the Board’s first book. The clerk had bought it that morning from the stationer on Cinder Row: a plain ledger with ruled columns, bound in grey cloth, its pages blank. The Board had named it the tally. Every figure the Board acted on would go into it. Every pressure path, every allocation, every tolerance. Every cost.
The Board’s table was the signing table, moved to the side of the hall after the signing. The hall was emptying. The delegates were putting on their wet coats at the pegs. The chair had gone. Eshel sat across from Mara with his slate. The Board’s junior clerk, the young woman from the Directorate who had asked for a planning figure a few days ago, sat at the end with the retirement queue in a folder.
Mara wrote the outlet plan into the tally first. The pressure paths, from Eshel’s board. The relief each could carry. The tolerances. In the first column: Power. Kilowatts. Each path’s figure. Then the tolerances, the dates and the outlet names, each in its own ruled column across the page, the way the yard’s sheets ran.
