The queue board went up in the yard office at the tenth hour of the morning, and by the eleventh it had changed.
It was the Board’s queue, the one the junior clerk had stamped at the guild hall: every lamp, every scheduled retirement, every executed one. The clerk had sent a copy down to the yard on the relay, and the yard’s own clerk, the guild shop girl, had chalked it onto the slate board on the office wall so the crew could read it from the forge door. Beside it, Eshel had pinned his relay chart: a long sheet of drafting paper with the route drawn on it, the Custodian’s command route from the well beneath Meridian out through Hearth to every lamp, and a red pin at each relay station along it.
Mara stood at the queue board with her dressed arm in its sling.
Tavin pulled a crate over from the wall and sat down on it, slowly, on the bad knee, and looked at the board. Through the open door came the clatter of the cooks scouring the big pot for the noon shift.
The queue was live. The Board had ordered it so: published, and kept current, so that every new command on the Custodian’s route appeared on it as it was issued. Under the joint custody terms the Compact’s seals rested with the Board now, and the Board could read the route’s traffic, though it could not stop it.
