Dury Mallin’s Daughter Writes a Line

Dury Mallin’s girl had come up to Sec’s terrace in the Kilnrows to hear the Glare’s print read aloud, as Hale Corrigan had promised. No lamp had come yet, only Sec’s own catch, the third the floor had seen this Book. She sat on an upturned coal scuttle and watched Wilm Garside rule lines for two thousand four hundred and thirty-five travellers at two drops a span.

Near the foot he stopped and wrote one long line where there should have been dozens.

“Why’s that one fat?” she asked.

“A grey band. A whole crowd in the same cloak, paying in together. I can see it crossed and what it paid. I can’t see who gave what to whom.”

“Is that cheating?”

Wilm looked at her father. Dury shrugged with his whole black-dusted body. “Ask the head.”

Corrigan was leaning on the rail, watching smoke from the Foundry’s chimneys. “It’s sound,” he said. “The light’s real, the oil’s paid, the Wakeful will pass it. It’s only private. Sec carries it the same as a fishwife’s basket.”

She chewed on that. “Then write it plain. Don’t make it look guilty.”

Wilm held out the pencil. She took it, licked the tip as she’d seen him do, and wrote beside the fat line in round, careful letters: one band, grey, carried whole. Her father didn’t stop her. Corrigan initialled it underneath, and the tally went into the box that way.