A Fare Rubbed Out
- Cheap passage
- A king's ransom
Brannoch Vell stood alone on the Foundry’s lamp-floor after the bell, the fare-slate in his fist, and read the figure twice: 170,001 drops a span, paid by one man in a hurry. Across the combe Cinder Brow’s chimneys coughed white. He wrote the sum into the Foundry’s book in ink, then sat with the pen over the word he’d written beside it, patron, and scraped it out with his thumbnail until the page thinned.