Brannoch Vell Weighs the Purse

The Foundry’s bell rang twice in the Kilnrows before the first echo had left the hill, and Brannoch Vell, halfway through a heel of bread, put it down on the window ledge. Forty-nine breaths, by the sand-glass his clerk kept. The Antswarm’s chimney next door was still smoking over its last catch when the Foundry’s glass flared and held.

The clerk, a narrow woman named Edda Pike, came up the stair with the oil purse and the manifest. Seven thousand one hundred and ninety-nine souls had gone across on that link, packed in shoulder to shoulder, fishwives and drovers and men carrying letters for other men. Brannoch weighed the purse in his palm. It weighed about what a purse weighs when everyone has paid a tenth of a coin for each span they took.

“Full ferry,” Edda said.

“Light purse.” He tipped it onto the table and the coins barely spread. Beside them sat the Lantern’s gift for the link, three and an eighth, heavy and bright, outweighing the oil many times over. Out of every two hundred and fifty measures of light the Houses had burned lately, one came from oil. The rest came from a god that was going out.

He swept the coins back into the purse and picked up his bread again. Across the gap between chimneys an Antswarm lamp-hand was leaning out of a window, rubbing soot from her eyes and swearing at the sky for being so quick.