Ninety-Nine Spans of Pictures

The gatekeeper at Cobble Staithe was a broad, slow woman named Hollis Marr, and she had never minded what a traveller carried so long as it paid. This morning nearly nothing that paid was a traveller. Down the ramp came crates of slate, and every slate was cut with something: a toad in a crown, a run of tally-marks that meant nothing to her, a face drawn badly enough to be someone’s cousin. Scribes’ porters stacked them aboard at ₿0.1 a span, the same as anyone, and the ferry filled with pictures like a cart filled with gravel.

She counted the hold the way she always did, by the hand, and gave up at the end. Ninety-nine spans in every hundred were slate. In the last corner a tinker, a goose and a girl with a letter sat knee to knee and were grateful.

“They’ll outlast us all,” said the Scribe’s clerk, tapping a crown-toad. “Forged in. Can’t be unmade.”

“Neither can a bad tattoo,” said Hollis.

House Spider’s bell rang from the hills before she had finished saying it, so close behind the last that the two peals nearly shared a breath. Up there Ilse Thornmere’s lamps would be burning on the gift and a thimble of oil, carrying a toad to forever. The ferry pushed off. The goose looked at the slates as if it, too, had questions.