By the morning of the sixth day, the main counting room of the Office of Unfinished Claims in Bellwether had ceased to look like a legal office. It had become a sorting exchange. He smelled of damp thick parchment, sealing wax, horse sweat. The pungent aroma of dried herrings eaten over open ledgers. Across the floor, twenty wooden sorting bins had been built from river pine, each labeled with the name of a country canton.
Apprentice Olla stood on a ladder before the grand dispatch board that covered the entire north wall of the room. In her hand she held a bundle of notched bamboo slips, shifting them from the ‘In Transit’ column to the ‘Checked and Closed’ column with rapid, rhythmic clicks.
“Three hundred and twelve,” Olla called down to the frame stand table. “That’s the count as of the noon relay from the South Basin. Fifty-four closed in the Western Lowlands, seventy-two in the River Wards, eighty-six in the Canal Reaches. An even hundred in the Timber Cantons.”
Tomas Reed sat at the head of the frame stand, his sleeves rolled to his elbows. His fingers black with was dark oak-ink. Beside his left elbow sat a pile of approved audit slips, each one signed by a field pair and co-signed by a local parish reeve or village court guard. Every slip represented an abandoned promise dragged out of a dark guild drawer and settled in the light of day.
