The stub of chalk was not white, nor was it the sharp scarlet that Prit reserved for mortal penalties and unbacked defaults. It was the color of dry river slate, greasy to the touch, and it smelled of wet tomb earth and stagnant cellar pools.
Prit set his white chalk down in the groove of the table. He did not drop it with his usual brisk snap; he laid it down slowly, as if he feared the sound of the gypsum clicking against pine might wake something sleeping beneath the floorboards.
“In thirty-six years of stewardship across six deceased cores,” Prit said, his dry voice dropping until the tallow flame seemed to dip in sympathy, “I have used the grey audit chalk twice. Once when the garrison-armory Iron-Vow claimed it could feed four hundred lancers on boiled harness leather, and once when the young core in the western fen told an itinerant peddler that its cellar had no bottom.”
“What happened to the one with no bottom?” Cale asked, looking up from his calfskin register with his quill suspended over the inkpot.
“It swallowed three sheep, two butter firkins, and the peddler’s cart,” Prit replied without looking at the clerk. “When the backlash matured, the cellar fell forty cubits into a limestone sinkhole and the core drowned in black slurry before dawn. The Crown surveyor simply wrote Unstable Karst across the district roll and struck the tax assessment.”
