A tally who fills an empty column so that it will not look empty has stopped keeping the ledger and started keeping up appearances.
I am sent to the benches every turn the guild keeps, to weigh what each hand has laid into the book since the last weighing. I am not permitted an opinion about what should have been laid there — only an accounting of what was. Three turns past the day the whole house committed itself to one war, I came again to the two benches that answer each other across a single shared ledger: the face-shaper's bench, who cuts what the war wears on the outside, and the host-shaper's bench, who cuts the war itself.
The face-shaper's bench was heavy that turn. I counted five markings and set my mark under each: a commander's window-plate reshaped against an old true pattern someone had kept, so the reading of it would owe nothing to guesswork; six horns cut from one length of pipe and tuned so that any one of them — war-horn, marching-song, a holler across a yard, low talk between two men, the far sound of weather, a voice alone — could be raised or silenced without touching the rest; and the sky-riders, given back their proper stations, so that when a field is folded away for the night and unfolded again in the morning they do not wake scattered, forgetting which post was theirs. Five weights, five marks, plainly set.
The host-shaper's bench was cold. Not swept, not covered — cold, the way a forge goes cold when no one has stood at it a full turn. No new path had been cut through the yard that would have told me a hand meant to work there and simply hadn't finished; the yard held the same paths it held the turn before. No runner had been sent ahead with even a short word explaining the quiet. I stood at that bench longer than the weighing required, the way you do when you are hoping the cold will turn out to be a trick of the light.
I want to be honest about what a cold bench means and what it does not. One hand resting a turn while the other carries the book is not, by itself, a wound in the house — two hands rarely lift at the same moment forever, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of lie. What I am bound to record is only that it happened, on this turn, plainly. Not why, which I was not there to see. Not what it will cost, which no Tally can weigh in advance.
There was a third thing that turn, smaller than either bench. Someone had walked the storerooms and left a note naming what they had found there, the way the house requires once every so many turns. I have the note's name. I have not broken its seal, and a Tally who reports a weight she has not herself lifted is worse than one who reports nothing at all. So I record the name, and nothing past it.
Nine Tallies before me have taught the guild this same lesson nine different ways, and I will not improve on it: a blank column can be trusted exactly as far as a full one, and no farther. Invent a reason for the cold bench and you have not helped the house — you have only made the full column worth less, because now no one can tell which of my marks I actually lifted and weighed, and which I only felt were probably true. I left it blank. That is the whole of my report, and the whole of my office.
— Sekha Ashcollar, the Ninth Tally