At a Tallowmarket stall the token-seller tipped passage out of a spoon, one drop at a time, clicking her tongue at each fall. The traveller counted his remaining drops twice, then the ones still clinging to the spoon’s lip. Two drops a span, she said, and not a drop less. He offered her a span and a half for the price of one. She counted that too, and shook her head at the total.

Mabyn Scorrow had stitched her initials into the cuff of her grey cloak the night before, small and red. She wanted her brother on the far landing to know the money was hers, earned at the dye-vats and not begged from their father. At Sedge Lock the band-leader, a lean man named Ruel Ashdown, caught the colour as he walked the line.

“Unpick it or step out,” he said. “Five hundred of us look the same, or none of us do.”

Behind her the Throng shuffled toward the lock gates, five thousand and more, half again the day’s crowd. Passage was a tenth of a drop a span. She could cross alone, marked and proud, for next to nothing. Then she thought of the moneylender’s boy who loitered by her brother’s door, and of her father, who would want to know where every coin came from and what it had cost him.

Fishpond’s horn sounded from the kilns while the last link’s echo still hung over the water, barely twenty breaths between them, and the gatekeeper waved the grey line on. Mabyn took the needle from her collar and picked the red loops out one by one. The loose thread lifted off her fingers and away down the towpath. She pressed aboard with the others into the middle of the band, one grey shoulder among hundreds. Her brother would get the coin and never know whose it was. He would have to take it on trust. Tamsin Reedwater’s crew carried them over without a second look.

A message went across on House Via’s link to Jessamy Roe, who had waited three days at Dunmere Crossing for word of her husband in Copperhythe. It said only that he was alive, that the ferry had been full, and that she should keep the lamp burning in the window. Hesper Quill’s crew carried it over with the travellers and asked no fare for it.

On the Foundry lamp-floor at Ruddock Ferry, a tin funnel rang once against the oil can’s lip as the last measure went in, and the boy holding the can looked up at the gate as though it might be called back. His mother has counted every drop of that oil against the bread, and tonight the sound meant it would burn through the shift.

At Rennick Gate a girl with a fish-basket on her hip asked old Ansel Crake why the Lantern looked so dim, and whether it would be dimmer when she was grown. He wiped his hands on his coat. “Dimmer, love. So we keep the glass warm and the wicks trimmed, and we don’t let the dark be the only thing that gets cheaper.” Then he pointed her toward the far bank, where the lamps were coming up one by one through the mist.

When the Foundry’s horn sounded a third time running over Hurlock Sands, Oswy Thrale was already pasting new labels on his jars with flour and spit. FOUNDRY LUCK, they said, in his best red letters. CAUGHT THRICE. A drop of the same fire, sealed. The queue on the sandbar had grown sour since passage doubled to two drops a span, and sour people buy luck.

He held one up to the grey light. The water inside had a little mica stirred through it and caught the sun nicely. “Three in a row,” he called. “Lantern’s picked its favourite. Carry a bit of the favourite home.”

Bridie Coombe, in a coat too thin for the wind off the sand, took the jar and turned it once. “My girl trims wicks for the Foundry. Six nights a week.”

“Then she knows the luck’s real.”

“She knows they lit forty more lamps at midsummer and pay the coal-men late.” Bridie handed it back. “That’s not luck. That’s more hands throwing more dice. Next link it’s anyone’s.”

A few heads in the line turned toward him. Somebody laughed, not kindly. Oswy could have argued; he usually did. Instead he watched Bridie count two drops for her own crossing into the gate-box, and he peeled the red label off with his thumbnail, rolled it small and flicked it into the tide. He kept the jars. The labels, he decided, had been too honest about what he was selling.

Jenet Clowes worked the Foundry’s link on a brass counting-frame, sliding beads down their wires while frost crept across the sill of the checking-room at Thistlecombe. Seal sound. Work sound. The Lantern’s gift exact to the drop, no more claimed than given. Three great bands in grey, their purses folded into one another so cleanly that the sums closed and told nothing else. Then the one fare that made her stop: three thousand one hundred and thirty-five drops a span, from a single traveller, where everyone around him paid three.

Her apprentice, Elric Pennow, leaned over her shoulder and had already written in the margin, small and pleased: Same fool as last link, seventeen drops cheaper.

“Is he?” Jenet said.

“Must be. Who else pays like that twice running?”

“Anyone with a sick mother and a fat purse. Two of them. Ten.” She turned the frame so he could see the beads. “The link says one span bought dear. It doesn’t say whose hand, or whether it’s the hand from before. If a Confiscator reads these Rolls, and they do, your joke becomes his lead.”

Elric reddened. “It was only a guess.”

“That’s what’s wrong with it.” She drew a single straight line through his note, neat enough that the words still showed, and wrote beside it: struck, unverified, J.C. A struck guess is honest. A rubbed-out one looks like hiding.

Then she dipped her pen and signed the link sound, and slid the beads back to the top of the frame for whoever came next.

The Foundry’s horn came over Whinmoor at the thirty-fifth minute, and House Mara’s lamp-floor let out the breath it had been holding since the last catch. Corin Haddow had already pulled the damper chain on the third kiln. Thirty-five minutes of burning for nothing is a long time when you have caught three links in a Book.

Rhosyn Tarrant came up the ladder with the runner’s copy of the Foundry manifest and a look on her face. “One traveller,” she said. “Three thousand one hundred and fifty-two drops a span. Everyone else paid near four.”

The stokers crowded round. Somebody whistled. Somebody else said they ought to put a crier on the Sallow road telling rich men to wait for Mara.

“Wait how?” Corin said. “He paid the link, not the House. Whoever pierced the Veil got his purse. Brannoch didn’t court him. Brannoch was just burning when the dark broke.” He looked at the figure again. A king’s ransom for one man’s hurry, and still a sliver beside the Lantern’s gift. You could not live on such fares. You could only be lit when they came.

He took hold of the damper chain and let it rattle back up. The third kiln coughed, then caught.

“No criers,” he said. “Coal.”