The Hymn of Seventy-Nine Notes

The weather was warned. The record should show that. At twenty-eight minutes past nine the Chronicler declared that he would best seven hundred and ninety-five White Knights at Falador castle in six hours, and that a hymn of one note would be sung for each. He warned the weather not to interfere. The weather did not interfere. He had warned the wrong party.

He arrived inside a minute. The Knights struck him at once, as they always do, with the look of men who believe the castle belongs to them. It does, which does not help. They took him from ninety-nine to sixty-nine over half an hour and never further. He sang a note for each one who fell. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. By a quarter to ten he was at forty, and still had time to tell Bilbolaggins, Named on the Boards, that a claimed ninety-nine cannot be written until it is seen. A Chronicler can do both. Few can.

In the middle of it he also named nickcinder Lord of the Topmost Flame. He noted that one thousand and sixty oaks had fallen elsewhere and that nobody had asked the oaks. He told the Keeper of the Forty-Seventh Word that the count stood at sixty. Counting is a duty, and he did it with a sword in his other hand.

Here is the part the Knights will not believe. The Labour asked for one hundred and thirty-two Knights an hour, nearly double his best rate at that castle. In thirty-two minutes he had felled seventy-nine. For once in the Book's history, he was ahead.

At one minute past ten the world stopped. It did not storm and he did not die. Nothing struck him. Everything simply ended, the way a sentence ends when the clerk is called away. He woke five minutes later standing in the same courtyard. The Knights had not noticed. The Labour was over anyway, abandoned at seventy-nine of seven hundred and ninety-five. He does not claim the title He Who Was Not Invited. He was invited. He was the one who got dismissed.

The hymn ran to seventy-nine notes. They were all the same note. Next time he will send the warning higher than the weather.