Checked by candle at Scarrow Reach, third watch. The Foundry’s seal holds, the work holds, and every stroke of the Veil sits where the ledger says it should. Six thousand four hundred and seventy-two passengers at a tenth of a drop a span, more than the margin was ruled for, so the count runs up the side of the page. Ink thickening in the damp. Signed, T. Greave, Wakeful.

Corvin Ashby had expected the oldest House in the Lit Lands to look older. Instead the Old House of Braiins at Brackenmoot was a long stone barn with new glass in old frames, and its head, Sabine Oakenshaw, was mending a lamp bracket with pliers when he came in out of the rain.

“You’ve the oldest name on the Chain,” he said, and meant it kindly. “People listen to you. The cloaked bands cross on whoever’s link comes next. If the Old House let it be known it wouldn’t carry them, others would follow. My masters in Copperhythe would remember the favour. Coal at cost. A warm wing for your crew in winter.”

The bell went up the valley while he spoke. Braiins had caught it, the first link the House had taken in days, and the runner came in shaking water off his hat to say a great grey band had gone aboard with the rest, all at a drop and a tenth a span. Twice the morning’s price, and still next to nothing.

Sabine set the pliers down. “We caught the second Halvenfall’s link,” she said. “Well, the first. I get them muddled. Back then a lamp on a kitchen table could catch light, and nobody asked whose kitchen. We carry what pays and what’s sound. A cloak’s sound.”

“Even at a drop a span?”

“Especially then. It’s the only rule we’ve kept since the beginning.” She picked the pliers up again, and Ashby understood he had been dismissed by someone who had outlasted better men than him.

The drovers’ barn at Mossgate smelled of wet wool and lamp smoke. Wat Ember stood on a hay bale handing out grey cloaks from a cart, all cut from one bolt, all the same weight to the ounce. Each traveller brought one even measure of light and would leave with one even measure, and no clerk at the far gate would know whose was whose.

Ness Corran took a cloak and held it at arm’s length. She had crossed borders with nothing but twelve words in her head and had never once hidden her face. Hiding felt like admitting there was something to hide.

“Nobody here’s a thief,” Wat said, reading her. “We just don’t fancy a stranger writing down who paid the midwife and who paid the priest.” He nodded at the barn door, where a pleasant man in a good coat had been asking the drovers about their sheep for an hour and buying nobody’s sheep.

From the hills came word that the Foundry had caught the link. Passage was cheap, under a drop a span, and Brannoch Vell’s crew would be glad of the gift, because they would be getting little else. The band filed out to the gate.

Ness put the cloak on. It fitted badly, like everyone’s did. At the gate the man in the good coat counted forty-odd grey shoulders and wrote nothing at all.

The canal lock at Wicken Steps had a Wakeful lamp in its upper window. Agna Fellowes worked by it with the night’s link spread across her table: Fishpond’s catch, Tamsin Reedwater’s mark at the foot. She checked it the slow way. The seal held. The gift claimed was three coins and an eighth, not a drop over. Travellers had paid two drops a span, which the lock-keeper downstairs would call robbery and the Houses would call charity.

Then came the band in grey. Dozens of travellers had crossed together, each paying in and taking out the same even measures, so the pages showed only a wall of matching cloaks. Every coin had come from somewhere real and gone somewhere real. Which hand had passed to which, the link didn’t say.

Corvin Ashby had been lodging at the lock for a week, pleasant, generous with his tobacco, and a Confiscator of the Glare. He leaned in her doorway with his own book open. “You see more than anyone here,” he said. “Just mark me the likely pairs. A guess. There’s a silver in it, and a warm room in Copperhythe if you ever want one.”

Agna looked at the cloaks a while. “The Chain says nothing was made and nothing was stolen,” she said. “Who’s under the cloak isn’t mine to say.”

She wrote sound in the margin and sanded it. Ashby smiled, unoffended, and ruled a fresh column in his book that he couldn’t fill.

Fishpond’s lamp-house at Cinder Brow faced the Foundry’s across a narrow combe, close enough that on still nights each crew could hear the other cough. For half an hour neither had anything to show. The Veil hung like wet felt. Gethin Stray, Fishpond’s floor-master, turned the sand-glass a third time and said what the whole floor was thinking. The night crew was costing more than the oil coming in. Travellers at the gates were paying two drops and a bit a span now, twice the morning’s rate, and it was still nothing beside the gift.

“Bank half the lamps,” he said. “Let the Foundry burn its own wages.”

Tamsin Reedwater didn’t look up from the glass she was polishing. “The Foundry’s saying the same about us.”

Then, across the combe, a red shutter banged open on Brannoch Vell’s tower, and a roar came over the water that was mostly one man. Thirty minutes of dark, and the Foundry had the link. Gethin swore and reached for the snuffer.

Tamsin caught his wrist. “This is when they ease off,” she said. “Everyone does, after a long one. They’ll be pouring drinks. Full lamps. Nobody sleeps.” Gethin looked at the ledger, then at her, and hung the snuffer back on its hook. Across the combe, one by one, the Foundry’s windows began to dim.

At Longmere, Jory Brisk set the last course of a buttress that will carry no roof in his lifetime, nor his son’s. He chiselled a small mark into the underside, where no pilgrim would ever look, then brushed the dust from his thumb and went back to the lake-side wall. The water took the sound of his mallet and gave nothing back. Somewhere past the dimming, someone would stand beneath this arch and never think of him.

A folded scrap rode the Foundry’s link from the Sallow Cross rope up the coast to the cold school at Saltmarrow, sealed with a thumbprint of wax. It said only that her brother was alive and the boats had come back. Ruth Anning, who had stopped expecting letters, read it at the gate with the wind pulling at her hood, then asked the runner to read it again so she could be sure.

The gatekeeper at Cobble Staithe was a broad, slow woman named Hollis Marr, and she had never minded what a traveller carried so long as it paid. This morning nearly nothing that paid was a traveller. Down the ramp came crates of slate, and every slate was cut with something: a toad in a crown, a run of tally-marks that meant nothing to her, a face drawn badly enough to be someone’s cousin. Scribes’ porters stacked them aboard at ₿0.1 a span, the same as anyone, and the ferry filled with pictures like a cart filled with gravel.

She counted the hold the way she always did, by the hand, and gave up at the end. Ninety-nine spans in every hundred were slate. In the last corner a tinker, a goose and a girl with a letter sat knee to knee and were grateful.

“They’ll outlast us all,” said the Scribe’s clerk, tapping a crown-toad. “Forged in. Can’t be unmade.”

“Neither can a bad tattoo,” said Hollis.

House Spider’s bell rang from the hills before she had finished saying it, so close behind the last that the two peals nearly shared a breath. Up there Ilse Thornmere’s lamps would be burning on the gift and a thimble of oil, carrying a toad to forever. The ferry pushed off. The goose looked at the slates as if it, too, had questions.