CRYSTAL CITY — The Bright Bench spent the last night before the Half Count telling anypony still in the facet hall that the nausea was a kind of hope. Chair Elowen Peck said it twice from the little stair, once before a bucket was passed and once after. The line had arrived that morning on a southern advisory sheet. By dusk it was the only sentence the majority could say without looking at the seat chart.
The Count Eve Gladness closed at the second bell, after a niece of the southern throne had taken her portrait and the evening train, and the square heaters were shut whether the speeches had finished or not. The air in the hall dropped fast enough that the cocoa skinned over in the cups. Ponies who had clapped for the chair put their mufflers back on inside.
Outside, the night sat colder than the festival lamps are built to admit. On Cinder Lane, under the first rise of the Crystal Mountains, the boarding houses had their shutters cottoned and their coal counted in scoops. If the cold holds, the week's chit runs three days. The Half Count runs one.
Peck's caucus holds the Lower Lattice by a margin that fits inside one ward walk, and has held it since the last full seating. Fourteen seats are marked in play on the sheet an aide will show a visitor. A second sheet, left on a cocoa tray when the southern advisor went to find the platform, marked six of those seats with a small drawn bucket and the words "do not tour." Advisor Brant Sallow's dispatch, filed before his train moved, called the room "resolute and warmly composed." After he was gone, a bucket by the stair was back in use.
"We are choosing a hopeful sickness," Peck told the ponies who remained, most of them staff. "If the body protests, that is enthusiasm looking for an exit, and enthusiasm fills a seat."
The Environmental Compliance Board had signed the hall fit for festive occupancy at three in the afternoon. The approval listed bunting, cocoa, and mild celebratory dust. It did not list Cinder Lane, the boiler allotment, or the forty crates of ginger biscuits the caucus had stamped with a smile and billed to the winter clothing fund. The biscuits went largely uneaten. Several came back to the crates with the smile intact and a bite out of the edge, as if a pony had started to be loyal and then thought better of it.
Nessa Pell keeps the boarding house at the lane's end and the salt list for the ponies who rent the cold rooms. She did not go up to the square.
"They can be ill where the banners hang," Pell said. "I need the salt in before the pass ices, and I need a chair who can say so without the smile."
The lower ward's lamps belong to Tobin Reeve after the ceremony staff leaves. He is the night clerk for oil, wicks, and the small boilers that keep the lane pipes from seizing. The Gladness burned the big units. His book shows the square written in for a full glare on count night and the lane cut by a sixth to pay for it.
"The count doesn't refill a can," Reeve said. "They want the plinth bright at dusk. Somepony still carries the oil, and it will not be anypony who spoke from the stair."
Aides spent the late hours teaching one another the chair's sentence until it sounded like a note from a physician. One junior practiced it at the shuttered window and had to stop. The buckets were rinsed and stacked in the cloakroom, in the space where the extra mufflers had been before the biscuit crates arrived.
On Tuesday the ward slips are taken at dawn, and the public note from the Bench says the tally will be up before supper. The private note does not name an hour. Ridge Street's ration window opens with the slips. Reeve expects the coal cap to close that window before midday if the night does not ease. The Bench has set a second Gladness for the afternoon, outdoors, with the heaters entered on the sheet as "to be determined."
Sallow sent a late line from the first stop south of the mountains. It said the Bench was already mending, and that any stomach trouble had been the ordinary thrill of a city united. Peck had the line read aloud. Two ponies applauded. A third kept a napkin in his teeth and did not.
Pell barred her door at the usual hour and marked the salt short by a sack. The square stayed lit. The lane behind the coal shed did not.
