On the broad, covered loading platform of the central town grain depot in Tram Ward, the air smelled of dry chaff, clean burlap. The cool, pine-scented pine of new floor timbers.
Bram Ash stood beside the third weighing bay. His left hand held a thick carpenter’s pencil, tallying forty sacks of winter barley that had just been unloaded from a southern canal barge.
His right arm remained bound against his ribs in its dark linen sling. The gunshot wound he had taken through the shoulder muscle and shoulder blade during the raid on the state oil depot had healed into a purple, indented hollow beneath his collarbone. Brant Sallow had pulled out the lead ball and three fragments of coat wool with bone-metal tongs. But the forearm nerve had been grazed. The arm hung stiff, heavy, and numb, capable only of steadying a light bundle or tucking a ledger against his side.
Writing with his left hand was an agonizingly slow, clumsy discipline.
He had to plant his left elbow firmly on the zinc-topped check counter to stop the tremor in his fingers. Each numeral he inscribed on the delivery ticket was heavy, square, and slightly crooked. But he formed every digit with stubborn, unrushed care. A five was not a quick loop. It was three distinct strokes that left deep graphite grooves in the parchment, ensuring that no clerk in the winter could mistake a forty-pound bag for a fifty.
