CANTERLOT — The Council marks post Tuesday at the second horn. The result line is blank. Forty-one suits are on the sheet. Fourteen are still open. Early marking has been live for twelve days.
The window opened on the 18th. Cloudsdale, the lower decks, and the rail towns have cast 86,412 sheets. Loft 4's night book puts 6,204 of them on hold. The Canterlot Council press loft posted a line at 16:10 calling the card orderly and the challenges routine. The hold count was absent from the line. Night chief Ansel Bruck keeps the count in a ruled book, lamp down, on the late shift.
The 6,204 split four ways. Roll challenges account for 2,206. Hoof-mark mismatches account for 903. Arcane Express Sparks Rail still has 486 sheets between stations. The last 2,609 sit under a stay that says count, then sequester.
A firm retained on the works slate filed the 2,206 across Monday and Tuesday. Bruck's crew ran the names against the shift board after the second horn. Of the challenged names, 1,973 had a posted shift in the last thirty days. Twenty-seven were the same pony entered twice. The crew left 206 unmatched when the sheet closed. Odric Vale, director of the Cloudsdale works, sent a note calling the filings housekeeping. He stayed in the works office. The office forwarded questions to the press loft.
"I can put a sheet in the read pile or I can put it in the hold pile," Bruck said. "Three letters came at supper. All three want a different pile, and two of them cite each other."
The 903 mismatches are being judged on a standard the Canterlot Institute wrote indoors. Enrollment marks for a large share of the east leg were taken on a Gale Report day, force 6, dock wet, carts held. The match crew flagged 140 of the 903 because the new mark was steadier than the enrollment mark. The enrollment mark was signed in that blow.
Tess Colm flies the reserve east leg, below the works poster for the weather-board seat. Her sheet is in the steady pile. She signed between squalls, coat still wet, while a clerk held the page to the board.
"They took it while the deck was moving," Colm said. "The new one I made on the ground. If the rule is the wind has to match, post it, and I'll sign on the leg."
The rail pile is the short one and the loose one. Sparks Rail accepted 2,118 mark-sheets from the outlying stops. The loft has logged 1,632. The 486 still out carry chops dated through Thursday. A rail-town bench ruled a chop sufficient. A Canterlot order, filed later the same afternoon, put every sheet still out at the first horn into the crate. The posted close is the second horn. Bruck has the in-loft rail disputes and the paperwork for the 486 in one crate under two tags. The top tag is a bench slip. Under it sits a brass weather pin stamped HOLD FOR WIND, a dock tool. The tag that governs at the horn is still unassigned.
Union Resistance filed one page for the late wing. The roll audit ran from 14:00 to 18:00, the east-leg window. Six hundred twelve of the challenged names were on that wing, aloft. The page asks that a pony on a posted deck stay on the roll when the audit sits on top of the shift. Vale's office added nothing to the housekeeping note. The press loft took zero questions. Vesper Dorn, the works-backed name on the weather-board poster, spoke for eleven minutes at 11:00. Questions after: zero. Her text left the hold number off the page.
The High Bench's next marks sitting is Wednesday. Bruck will read the untagged sheets when the second horn goes and log the rest by pile, on the same card he uses for a front that slipped its hour. Four ponies are on the late shift, plus one spare.
The press loft's orderly card was the city number. On the east deck, where the late wing casts, the night book shows 1,188 sheets held out of 6,130. That is 19.4 percent.
The fourteen open suits do not share a docket. Nine sit with town benches. Three are already at the High Bench, ahead of Wednesday. Two are still looking for a clerk who will stamp them before the horn. Bruck put the nine town filings in the column he uses when a squall misses its hour and still wants the card.
Pell Harrow has the spare slot, second year, off the poster. The 206 unmatched names are his, with one lamp. The works office left him on the card alone. On the 19th the loft cleared 40 clean challenges an hour. The 206 carry double chops and wet-day marks. His card after the first hour shows 61 read and 145 still open.
The firm that filed the 2,206 billed the works slate 18,400 bits. The late shift is on the card at 46 bits an hour.
