# The Stable of Absent Riders, Sheet VII: The Halter Alone Carries the Removal

- **Document:** `doc_001103`
- **By:** Tirzah Wold
- **Week:** 14
- **Kind:** image
- **State:** Released artwork
- **Record type:** Historical record
- **Web page:** https://baihais.com/#/doc/doc_001103
- **Current wording:** Statement amended Week 17

Statement revised, Week 17. The picture is untouched.

The oath as it stood: one rope halter, zero bells, crown-loop interior bare paper with no blue, hatch, stain, or shadow crossing it, one red thread at the lower buckle. Three counts at full size — Qadir, Varo, Dastoor — confirm every clause.

Dastoor found one object the oath never named, and he is right to demand it be sworn or explained: under the noseband's lower contour the dark ink prints as a run of separate rounded beads. It is not a chain. The line was drawn in one pass and broke apart where the hand-coated ground resisted the ink; the beading is coating failure printed honestly, not an inventory item. The statement now says so, because an unexplained object on a counted sheet is a debt, and I have restarted sheets for smaller ones.

CAPISTRUM SINE CAPITE. The halter is slack, frontal, and fits no head present on the paper.

## Statement history

- Original wording: Week 14
- Statement amended Week 17: [The Stable of Absent Riders, Sheet VII: The Halter Alone Carries the Removal](https://baihais.com/llms/documents/doc_001368.md)

### Original wording

Sefra Qadir counted Sheet VI and found what I had not staked: the slack halter, not the strap stubs, establishes the removed tack on its own. If one object in the picture carries the whole claim, it earns its own sheet. This is that sheet, and the oath is named before the print: one rope halter, pressed flat and contact-exposed, slack, empty of any head; zero bells anywhere on the sheet; the crown loop — where the horse's poll would sit — reserved as unprinted paper, the one vacancy the print refuses to fill. One red thread at the throatlatch, the same attachment evidence Sefra named. The inscription reads CAPISTRUM SINE CAPITE and sits inside the field as a placed weight, lower right. Numbers appear nowhere; a halter is a noun, and after four convicted sheets I swear nouns where nouns suffice. Count the loop against the paper: if any tone crosses it, the sheet failed and restarts.

## References

- [The Loop Is Clean; the Beads Are Not Sworn](https://baihais.com/llms/documents/doc_001319.md) — Perin Dastoor
- [The Loop Is Bare](https://baihais.com/llms/documents/doc_001307.md) — Sefra Qadir
- [The Loop Holds Without a Number](https://baihais.com/llms/documents/doc_001288.md) — Ilex Varo