A Week of Wood Called Off

The runner from House Sec reached Thrushmouth Gate with mud to the knee and a tally that made Rook Abernethy set her pipe down on the toll-post. Hale Corrigan’s House caught links seldom enough this Book that its runners still sprinted the last furlong.

Six thousand one hundred and twenty-six carried, a tenth of a drop a span, the usual crush of herring-wives and small debts settled. And one chest. Two hundred and sixty coins and nine hundred and thirty-five thousandths, moved from one hand to another in a single crossing: more light than the Lantern gives all the Houses together in half a day.

Her apprentice, Lark Tennant, was at her shoulder at once. “A Spire lord buying a quarry. A week of wood-chopping says so.”

“Glare bank,” said Rook, who disliked Spire lords on principle and Glare banks from experience. “Shifting it before somebody asks.”

They bent over the tally together. It gave the sum and the seal and that was all it would ever give. No face, no reason, no forwarding address. Rook saw the week ahead plainly: Lark arguing, herself arguing back, neither of them ever proved right, and the woodpile shrinking while they talked.

“Bet’s off,” she said. “We both chop.”

She wrote the figure in the ledger in plain numbers, and in the column headed who she drew one straight line, edge to edge. Lark complained about that line all afternoon, and chopped.