Five hundred starving fragments.
The phrase sat on the trestle table in the upper hall like an unexploded mortar shell while Prit unbuckled the leather straps of his oilskin portfolio. Outside the narrow arrow slits, the third morning of the siege was breaking in a bleak, windless gray over the snow-choked valley. Down by the river willows, thin ribbons of breakfast smoke rose from the infantry lines; up here in the fort, Noll Vey had called Tessa Dene, Sella Rusk, and Sergeant Berr together before the children woke to hear what the voice behind the ninth door had said in the dark.
Above the inner hall arch, the white chalk tally stood at:
LAST GUEST DEBT DUE IN ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-FIVE HOURS.
“Read the precedent, Prit,” Noll said from the western wall seam. “Don’t spare the arithmetic.”
Prit adjusted his small brushed-wool coat, licked the tip of his left claw, and turned the stiff, salt-stained vellum leaves of his portfolio until he reached the oldest records at the back—the files of the six dead masters he had served before waking in Noll’s ruined cellar.
“File Number One,” Prit said, his dry clerk’s voice steady despite the early chill. “The Well of Measure, a municipal cistern core in the lower salt marches, sixty-eight years ago. Master Number One held a Threshold-rank claim over four parish water-gates. During the dry summer of the third regency, the town tax-farmers forced the core to issue a public guarantee of six hundred thousand gallons of…
