Tansy Wearne had offered a tenth of a drop a span for herself and her basket at Haverstoke Landing, because that was what passage had cost all morning, and because she had done the sums twice on the cart. Then the hills went silent. No bell from the Kilnrows, no runner, nothing. The far bank stayed where it was. Her soft cheeses, wrapped in dock leaves and wet cloth, began to sweat in the noon heat, and the gate filled up behind her with people who had their own reasons to be across.

When House Foundry’s bell finally came, the wait had run to most of an hour, and the gate-clerk, Absalom Prewitt, read out the new terms with the face of a man who expected to be shouted at. Three drops and more a span to make this boat. Those who had bid early and cheap stood aside. Brannoch Vell’s carters went down the plank with the purse already counted.

Tansy watched the boat leave without her. Then she unwrapped the first cheese, pressed a thumb into the rind, and smelled it turning.

She could raise her offer and cross on the next link, and sell at Tallowmarket for less than she’d paid in passage. Or she could sell here. She cut the cheeses into wedges on the gate-post and called the price low, and by the time the next bell rang the basket was empty and she was walking home lighter, a little poorer, and done waiting for anyone’s lamps.

At Pale Quarry above the Lake Road, Idony Forrest cut the tracery of a rose window into pale stone meant for a wall that will not stand for a century. Far down the valley the Antswarm’s bell rang its link, and she kept her chisel moving, each tap a small word for pilgrims who will one day stand under the glass. She will never see it set. She has stopped minding that, most days.

At Kestle Ford a carter pressed a scrap of paper, folded small enough to hide in a boot, into the House Sec runner’s hand before the boat pushed off. It was Piran Dodd’s note to his sister Bett, saying the baby was feeding and the mill had not, after all, shut. It crossed on House Sec’s link with 6,869 others, and nobody on the boat asked what it weighed.

On House Via’s lamp-floor at Harrowby Sluice, Nan Gillow worked the wick-scissors through the last trim of the shift, each snip a small dry click under the glass. She had pawned her wedding shawl in the spring to buy oil, and every clean wick she trimmed was one the House would not have to buy again. Hesper Quill heard the clicking from the hatch and said nothing, but she left the spare oil where Nan could reach it.

At Greyhithe Gate a girl in a patched coat tugged the old lamplighter’s sleeve and asked whether the Lantern was tired or only dying. Eben Fray watched the Tide House’s smoke lift off the water, where Maudry Kell’s lamps had just taken their link. “Both, love,” he said. “Tired is how it looks from the ferry. Dying is what it is. Hold my hand till the rope’s clear.”

Brannoch Vell’s voice went up the lamp-floor like a hammer on a bell: drain the cooling trough, refill it from the cistern, and somebody find the boy who left the hatch open. Four hands ran for buckets, slopping water over the boards. The trough came back full and cold, the hot glass went into it with a hiss, and it came out clear, ready for the next pull of light.

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.

The Antswarm’s bell came down the valley to Pennick Wharf so soon after the last that Garrow Tilney thought it was an echo. It wasn’t. Ilse Marrow’s runner was already on the stair with the oil-tally, breathless and pleased with himself, because twenty-seven seconds is a story you tell at supper.

Garrow unrolled the tally on his scale-table and read it the way a factor reads anything, bottom line first. Eleven thousand three hundred and sixty carried. Of every hundred spans aboard, ninety-seven held Scribes’ marks: little stamped sigils, numbered pictures, a kingdom of tiny carved owls. Three spans in a hundred for people with somewhere to be. All of it at a tenth of a drop a span. He set the oil-weight on his brass scale, and the pan barely dipped. The Lantern’s gift, on the other pan, sat like an anvil.

Bede Lanyard of Scriveners’ Lane was waiting by the door with clay still under his nails. “Same again for the next run,” he said. “On account. The owls are selling.”

“To whom?”

“To people who bought owls.”

Garrow looked at the scale a while. Scribes paid oil honestly, he’d grant them that, more honestly than most. But a wharf that lived on owls would die with them.

“Coin on the table,” he said. “No account. And next week I’m keeping three spans back for anyone carrying fish.”

Bede paid, sour, and went. Garrow wrote fish in the margin and underlined it twice.