Crystal City registered its hundredth lattice magister on Tuesday and, in the same notice, moved the rank to the first line of a form called Next Steps. The Crystal Mountains federation posted the tally before the oath finished. By the time the bunting came down, a magister certificate qualified a pony to ask for a seat at the preliminary table.
The ceremony occupied the upper gallery, where the boards are inlaid and the lamps ignore the municipal timer, after Princess Celestia cut the ribbon and took the southbound. Advisors from the southern harmony circuit dictated their dispatch on the platform, steam keeping the ink from freezing. The copy called the hundred a golden age and stopped at the gallery stairs.
Ember Scale keeps the gallery lamps and the lower-hall timer. She read the allotment after the last trunk went aboard. The oath, the exhibition, and three demonstration games had burned the week's oil through the fourth bell. She shut the lower hall at supper. The heated demonstration board stayed warm over an empty gallery. The boards the new magisters use went as cold as the stair.
"They can print a hundred names," Ember Scale said. "I can light one room. Tonight it will not be the one with the coats on the pegs."
A magister was once the end of a northern life at the lattice. The first pony to hold the rank kept it alone for years and played in a room that shared a chimney with the ration office. Norms then were three wins against whoever could be named, written in a book that smelled of smoke. A pony may now gather norms at weekend slates staged for visitors, against magisters who arrived the same week and leave when the purse is counted. The hundredth name belongs to a colt from the inner wards. He took his last norm on a board set beside the pastry stall. His certificate is smaller than his ration card. With it came a voucher for one hour on the heated board, good after the visitor season and void if the lamp budget is revised, which it was, before he left the gallery.
The notice under the tally lists the magister rank as line one. Next Steps requires a second certificate, four further norms at a higher slate, a fee in bits, and a letter from a coach licensed in the south. The letter costs more than the fee. The fee costs more than the grain supplement the city once paid the rank and stopped paying when the list passed forty. None of the hundred have finished Next Steps. Eleven have asked where the form is kept. Ember Scale keeps it in the drawer with the spare wicks.
Dorrin Keel has played in the lower hall since the chimney years. He has played all of them without a norm. The old book wanted winters, and the new one wants a weekend and a witness with a stamp. He swept the pastry crumbs off the hundredth board because the assignment sheet still carried yesterday's names.
"I watched a colt reach the summit in the time it takes a kettle to cool," Keel said. "He asked where the players sit. They sit where a lamp still reaches. Tonight I cannot show him that."
The platform dispatch said the North had made excellence common and therefore solved it. It named the hundred and left out the purse. The exhibition prize was a crystal chip and a citation the city printer ran on the backs of unused festival programs. The chip is ornamental. The programs advertise a harmony hour that closed in the fall. A federation clerk, reached after the train had gone, called the chip a symbol of ascent. Asked what a player could trade it for, he said morale, and then whether the dispatch had mentioned his title.
Keel took the lower-hall key from the hook Ember Scale leaves when she goes to argue for oil. He reset the pieces. The ceremony had closed the position without playing it out. The colt heard that the close was final only when he came back and found the board already starting over. An uncle walked the hundredth magister to the station for a line in the platform copy. The advisors' train was gone, and the local ends before supper. They came back on hoof as the grain line formed.
The ration board posted the week's grain on the same door that held the federation tally. The line reached the corner while the ink was still tacky. Ember Scale's revised order, written in the margin of the oath program, gives the lower hall forty minutes at dawn and darkness after. The heated-board voucher, numbered one hundred, is in Keel's coat. It expires at the end of the month. In the Crystal Mountains the dark arrives before the grain on that door is weighed.
