The forty-eight work slates from the last seven weeks of Courtesy Bridge operations covered every square foot of the long deal table in the back kitchen. Eren Tal had arranged them in six chronological rows, their tin frames rusted to a dull zinc gray, their grease-penciled figures catching the flickering yellow light of two animal fat candles stuck into iron pipe collars.
Korr Var sat at the head of the table, his dip pen moving across a fresh column on his land-mapper’s ledger, dipping into the dense black dark oak-ink every forty seconds. Beside him, Eren held a flat carpenter’s pencil and a piece of scrap pine, calculating running totals with quick, angry strokes of lead on wood. The air smelled of cold chicory, damp stonework, and the faint, bitter silt stench rising from the floor gutter.
“Look at Slate Fourteen,” Eren said, tapping a tin corner with his thumb. “Day Six. The cooperage cellar on Fish Street. Ada came through for twenty-four minutes to clear an iron gate valve bound with pipe lime. What did we charge the cooper, Pella?”
Pella sat on her low ash crate, her hands clasped around Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs. Her fingers were stiff with cold. “One silver coin. That was our standard rate.”
