On Tuesday the Heart review closed at the sixth hour, the southbound took the visitors, and the plaza returned to working cold. Brinna Holt sold the pendant at her stall under the east stair for 74 bits. The stove wire still held a square of ration card. On Thursday a warm room struck the same pendant down at 75,800 bits, and the stamp the city had put on it as glass appeared in the catalogue as proof.
Holt keeps the week-four oats for the ponies on the stair who stay through the week the review empties. The sack had been splitting at the mouth. She ran a dull drop and a length of stove wire through the cloth, the way the stair has done since the Board stopped issuing proper ties. Soren Hale paid the 74 bits out of a coat pocket. He had come up for the review and missed the clerk's reading of the Ember Scale.
The Environmental Compliance Board's tag, written by junior clerk Nessa Quill, read "festival glass, non-heating, transferable." Quill had set the drop on the Ember Scale because anything that leaves a stall in review week needs a line. The scale returned a zero. A zero clears the object from the heating permit and from the coal account. Quill stamped it, knotted the tag into the wire so the draft would hold it, and went back to the lamp count. The east stair was two lamps short before Hale arrived. It was two lamps short after he left.
Next Steps handled the note for the warm room. The catalogue copy said the drop had come out of the Crystal Mountains before the third freeze, that the crack along one face was a winter signature, and that proximity to the Crystal Heart could be inferred from the cloudiness. The zero on the Ember Scale, the note said, proved age, on the ground that newer glass is made to register and this piece returned nothing. A polisher took the oat dust off the face and left the ration card in the twist. The card still read HOLT — WEEK FOUR — DO NOT FEED THE STAIR. The catalogue called the card an original ration cipher, untranslated, and priced the mystery as a separate charm.
The room filled with ponies who take the train up for the review and file their dispatches from the platform, a princess from the warm cities among them for the length of a toast. Hale stayed south and sent an agent. The agent opened at 4,000 bits, already more than the east stair's coal allotment for the month, and the bids climbed on the cipher, the crack, and the Board's stamp. The hammer fell at 75,800 bits. Next Steps billed a regrading fee for moving the Board's word glass into the catalogue's word shard.
Holt heard the figure from a neighbor who had seen it on a posted sheet at the mail slot.
"It kept the sack shut," Holt said. "Seventy-four bits covered the coal. If they want the card, they can read it on the stair."
Quill kept the lamp ledger open through the afternoon. The Board has asked her for a memorandum on how a zero became provenance. She has the original slip. The ink stiffens where the stair draft hits the desk, the same draft that came up the stair at dawn before any visitor counted the Heart.
"The scale read zero, so I stamped it and let it leave without a heating permit," Quill said. "The east stair is still two lamps short. The form on my desk buys lamps."
Hale's note reached the city desk from the platform office, which closes when the train does. "Northern glass is having a moment," the note said. "The crack is the whole story." The desk filed it with the other platform copy. The stair has sent nothing back.
The 75,800 bits sit in the warm room's settlement account. Holt's coal bin holds the delivery she paid for, in the short hundredweight the yard released. Quill signed the lamp-short form at dusk, the wall glass four marks under the line the Board calls acceptable for storage, and the week-four sack upstairs was tied in new stove wire no advisor has priced.
