On Tuesday the courtesy train left Crystal City at second bell with the bunting still knotted to the rail. The manifest carried four envoys of Brann. Their bench was empty. They were in the residency kitchen on Splitter Lane, working through a toast the program had already marked as given. At fourth bell the city put them out by the freight arch. The temperature at the arch was minus eighteen. By the switch it was minus twenty-one, wind off the Crystal Mountains on the open siding.
The departure order had been sealed the previous Thursday. It named the train, the bell, and the consequence: credentials void, lamp account closed, residency dark. Ambassador Selk Vann had asked the southern harmony desk to hold the hour while Brann sequenced its goodbyes. Glad Handler, the advisor who rides with the bunting, answered from the platform that the matter would be settled on arrival. Then he boarded with Princess Lior of the southern house.
The gate sheet Ivo Pell had to sign listed what the ceremony closed. The open lamp account. The double coal draw the legation had kept since heart-lighting week. The extra sentry. The hamper. The public farewell. Pell is junior lamp-warden, third grade. He keeps the lane wicks and the two brackets over the residency door. He turned those two down at fourth bell. The order had named the bell.
The envoys came out in court coats cut for a milder platform. A trunk missed the hopper mouth. The gate pony set a hoof to the lid, and the latch went. Thirty-one bottles of Brann cordial broke on the lane and froze before they reached the gutter. The sheet went red across the stones and stayed slick. Nessa Korr, who keeps the ration window in the next building, sanded it before the bread crates came up from the lower yard.
"They had a hamper on the table when I passed the kitchen glass," Korr said. "I had forty-one hearths on the book and a line to the corner. I sanded their toast off my step, and then I opened the window."
Pell walked the four to the hopper with the two gate ponies. Vann still held the toast card. He told Pell a reply was due from the south. The reply had left at second bell with the advisor who wrote it. The residency key was already off Pell's ring.
"The order says dark at fourth bell," Pell said. "I took the wicks down. They can file what they like from a moving hopper. I have the lane lamps at fifth bell, and those stay lit."
Vann's statement came back with the hopper guard before the switch. Brann had kept the order, he said, and had been completing a farewell the city itself had scheduled. A coal hopper affronted a sealed friendship. The cordial had been a gift, packed for a platform that had already gone.
Handler's dispatch left the second carriage and was on the wire before the arch opened. It called the close mutual, timely, and fully attended. It thanked the Crystal City chancellery for its cooperation. The chancellery posted the gate sheet on the board by the ration window: order executed, credentials void, four departed, one trunk damaged, thirty-one bottles lost to the lane.
Through heart-lighting week the legation had drawn festival weight, two bricks a grate, on a civic chit signed for guests. Splitter Lane's hearths draw one brick on odd days. Tuesday is an odd day. After the darkening, clerks moved eleven unused bricks, four sacks of southern flour, and the tart still in its tin into the cage behind Korr's window. The flour sits off the mill list. The bricks go on the book. The hamper and the toast had already spent a draw the ceremony closed on paper while the kitchen was still warm.
Korr's book at fifth bell showed forty hearths served and one held. That brick was the last in the morning cage. The cage stood a brick under the book before the envoys reached the switch. She served the held hearth a half and wrote the rest due Thursday. Pell came off the ladder at the end of the lane as the hopper bell faded past the outer mark. He locked the residency with the ordinary padlock, the one that sticks in the cold, and checked the two dark brackets again.
The wind held off the Crystal Mountains. At the window the temperature was minus eighteen. The sand on Korr's step was red at the edges. The lane lamps were lit. The residency was dark. The cage owed Splitter Lane a brick, and Thursday is the next odd day the book will take it.
