By mid-afternoon, Broad Street had transformed from an avenue of commercial terror into a grand civic marketplace of restored dignity. The winter sky had cleared to a pale, brilliant blue. The cold air rang with the crisp, metal clatter of silver coins dropping onto oak boards, mingled with the rhythmic scrape of forty goose quills signing duplicate receipts.
Across the four hundred yards of the avenue, forty extra tally tables had been set up on the granite stone floor by the independent porters, sheltered beneath long awnings of white canvas. Behind each table sat a two-person team—one apprentice scribe from Bellwether, one veteran cart driver from the coal wharves—working through the massive queue with clockwork, unrushed smooth speed.
Tomas Reed walked down the center of the avenue, his boots crunching in the clean sawdust that had been spread over the icy cobblestones. In his hands he carried a fresh tally ledger, recording the hourly disbursements reported by each table. Beside him walked Apprentice Olla, her canvas messenger satchel bulging with sealed red-wax vouchers.
“Table Twelve just completed the seamstresses’ block,” Olla reported, checking her split-bamboo slips. “Sixty-four women from the Weaver’s Ward. Total payout: eight hundred and forty silver crowns. Martha received her twelve crowns, Tomas. She’s already running down the High Way to the town sick room to pay the surgeon for her mother’s care.”
