Sect Year 4 · tenth month · day 3 · the Vault of Serai, the brass pans
Coin came first, because coin was what Lin had brought.
He set the twist of cloth on the weighing table and untied it with his right hand. Nothing rolled out but the wages from the Ketch Shoal wells, folded small and gone soft at the corners. They lay on the wood between the pans like the leavings of a market day. Lodd looked at them from the clerks’ table and then looked away, as a clerk did when he had been told that a thing was not for his book.
“Coin is a figure,” Umbis said. “The Scale weighs names.”
He didn’t touch the coppers. He sat with his gloved hands folded on the paper and his eyes on the pans. He said it the way he had said everything since the first morning, as if the words had been waiting in the room for someone to pick them up.
“Then take the coin for what it is worth,” Lin said. “I will find the rest.”
“The Scale does not weigh what a thing is worth. It has been asked for a figure, and it has declined one.”
