Garrow Tilney Refuses Credit

The Antswarm’s bell came down the valley to Pennick Wharf so soon after the last that Garrow Tilney thought it was an echo. It wasn’t. Ilse Marrow’s runner was already on the stair with the oil-tally, breathless and pleased with himself, because twenty-seven seconds is a story you tell at supper.

Garrow unrolled the tally on his scale-table and read it the way a factor reads anything, bottom line first. Eleven thousand three hundred and sixty carried. Of every hundred spans aboard, ninety-seven held Scribes’ marks: little stamped sigils, numbered pictures, a kingdom of tiny carved owls. Three spans in a hundred for people with somewhere to be. All of it at a tenth of a drop a span. He set the oil-weight on his brass scale, and the pan barely dipped. The Lantern’s gift, on the other pan, sat like an anvil.

Bede Lanyard of Scriveners’ Lane was waiting by the door with clay still under his nails. “Same again for the next run,” he said. “On account. The owls are selling.”

“To whom?”

“To people who bought owls.”

Garrow looked at the scale a while. Scribes paid oil honestly, he’d grant them that, more honestly than most. But a wharf that lived on owls would die with them.

“Coin on the table,” he said. “No account. And next week I’m keeping three spans back for anyone carrying fish.”

Bede paid, sour, and went. Garrow wrote fish in the margin and underlined it twice.