Bram Whitlock Pays for Sound Glass

The Sun-House of Luxor had never caught a link that anyone at Brackenreach remembered, so when its lamp-horn sounded, barely two minutes after a rival’s, the glassblowers in the yard stopped and looked up as if a stranger had knocked.

Bram Whitlock, Cathedral-builder, had walked three days from Longmere to buy clerestory panes. He stood at the trestle with Delphine Copthorne, the Sun-House’s head, who still had her sleeves rolled from the lamp-floor. She was flushed and pleased and trying not to show it.

“First one,” she said. “Seven thousand souls aboard, near enough, and they paid us a tenth of a drop a span for the honour. The Lantern’s gift does the rest.” She tapped two panes. “This one’s sound. This one has a seed in it, a bubble, there. Half the price. Nobody on the ground will ever see it.”

Bram held the flawed pane to the window. The bubble caught the thin light like a bead of sweat. Glass with a seed in it cracks in a hard frost, eventually. Eventually was his whole trade.

“The window goes in after I’m dead,” he said. “It has to outlast whoever puts it in, and the frosts after them.” He counted out the full price, which left him walking home without a cart. Delphine wrapped the sound pane in straw and kept the flawed one for her own kitchen, where nobody would mind.