That evening, as the violet dusk settled over the slate roofs of the Tram Ward, Heth Ash sat at the scrubbed pine work-table in the quiet back accounting room of the communal kitchen, helping her father sort through the town grain manifests.
The room smelled of dry spelt flour, animal fat wicks. The faint, sweet warmth of roasted barley loaves cooling on the racks in the adjoining bakery. A single brass oil lamp burned on the center of the table. It cast a warm, steady circle of amber light across the ruled thick parchment sheets and the neat stacks of freight waybills. Outside the small six-pane window, the autumn wind whistled through the iron roof beams of the raised switching yard. It carried the distant clatter of shunting freight carts and the calls of wagon drivers unhitching mules in the dusk. For twelve years, those tracks had been patrolled by dead conductors walking clockwork beats in the dark. Now, living workers in patched wool jackets were unloading timber baulks and bags of river oats under the open evening sky.
Bram Ash was working with painful, careful slowness.
His right arm was bound securely against his ribs in its black linen sling, the shoulder stiff and throbbing with a deep, dull ache from the tension of the day’s trial. He was holding the graphite tally-pencil in his left hand. An awkward, clumsy grip that forced him to plant his elbow firmly on the wood to steady his fingers. Each number he…
