On Tuesday the Environmental Compliance Board posted a single sheet from the Ember Scale. A living resident of Crystal City runs 1.4 degrees hotter than the Spire Tyrant, the jaw lifted from the Crystal Mountains and kept on a trestle in the museum cellar. The sheet was addressed to "you." It went on the coal-slot wall after the Crystal Heart ceremony had closed and the courtesy train had left on time.
The tooth still carries its winters in pale bands of enamel. Clerks ground a grain of the third band, ran it through the Scale, and returned a body heat for an animal that last walked before the city had a name. The clinic was full of benches for the Heart, so the living sample was taken in the lower-ward ration line. Forty-one ponies stood for the glass. Most had been outside since the first bell. Averaged, they sat 1.4 degrees over the tooth. For a check, the day clerk set a kettle of ration broth inside the jaw and left it one watch. The broth fell to the tooth's number, skinned, and was entered in the margin as agreeing.
Next Steps, stamped the same afternoon, made the tyrant's heat the ancestral comfort baseline for any enclosed room the Board claims. A room hotter than the fossil by two degrees or more now needs a variance. The night boiler, which feeds the lower crystals and the water pipes from one fire, was pulled under that cap before dusk. The week's coal strap had already been cut to the festival allotment. The festival cut in the strap stood.
The Heart was lit at the second bell and dark by the fourth. Lumen Cordial, southern advisor for festive climate, read the gap from the platform as the carriages loaded, with Prince Calder already aboard and already calling the gap a triumph of kinship. The dispatch Cordial filed from the platform said Crystal City had grown into the same warmth as its eldest neighbor.
Sable Marron keeps a room over the glass pour and has taken the lower-ward winter for nineteen years. She was third against the glass. "They put it on my side and wrote me down as the warm one," she said. "I had been out since the first bell. My kitchen would have lost to that jaw before they ever set the kettle in it."
Pell Ramie, third clerk of the night boilers, got Next Steps at the boiler door. The cap, the lamps, and the pipes sit on one strap. She took the street crystals down two stops and held the ward lamps at what the Board calls a working brown: enough light to punch a new hole in a strap. The stairs went dim. "I can keep the pipes off a freeze," she said. "I can keep the corners lit enough to walk. The paper wants both of those inside a dead tyrant's weather, and the strap is the strap I had yesterday."
Cordial's office put a note on the wire before the train cleared the last switch. The gap, the note said, ought to be celebrated as proximity and felt outdoors, where the ancestor had lived. His outdoor figure had been taken on the platform, in sun, under the bunting. The cellar tooth holds the same reading at every bell, and the Board adopted that reading as the baseline. Cordial's name is on the departure roll. A junior from his office stayed with the variance forms. Each form costs twelve bits and asks whether the applicant's heat is habitual or festive. Ramie has forty copies and a drawer to lock them in. The form carries one line, for one name.
By the late bell the lower ward sat half a degree under the tooth. Four lamps were still burning. Broth issued at the third bell had skinned over in the bowls. Marron carried hers upstairs and ate it with the stove ring cold, because that ring is on the same strap as the boiler. Ramie closed the log with the pipes at a shiver and Wednesday's coal already assigned to the lamp oil the Heart torches burned off by the fourth bell.
The museum cellar kept its own lamp, paid from the display fund. At the late bell the trestle jaw still read the number on the sheet. Marron's stove ring stayed cold.
Ramie initialed the shiver in the log and left the variance drawer locked. The junior from Cordial's office had already written "festive" on the top form, in a platform hand.
