Silt Harbor opened Operation Kindling on Tuesday with a street lattice that marks corners and drops a care chit. The Canterlot Institute ran the debut from a hall above the customs yard. The master slate drew 11,400 green marks. A second run, made the same night on a borrowed slate with the roof relays dark, drew 43. All 43 sat inside the yard fence.
The lattice is a set of iron posts chalked with a right-angle tag. Each post listens for a turn of about ninety degrees: an alley mouth, a stair, the lip of a stall. On a match it is meant to strike a paper chit for wool, broth, or lamp oil, redeemable at a parish desk. Forty relay lamps on the customs roof feed the master slate. The Institute's note calls this a city sweep. The posts carry the mark. The mark is supposed to become a chit.
At the debut the slate finished its draw in twelve minutes. Harbor Commissioner Pellin Ash read the number off the grant cover and said the harbor was covered. The demonstration chit followed a corner the tag scored inside a bakery oven on Bakers' Row, where the door stood ajar at 89 degrees. The chit arrived as a hot rectangle on the top of a morning roll. The baker, Fig Mallow, sold the roll at the usual two bits before any pony from the hall arrived to collect it. The bell on the post outside the shop rang once, the size of a bottle cap, and stopped.
"The count is the count," Ash said. "If the slate says covered, the harbor is covered."
Dusk Stripe kept the relay desk from dusk until the lamps were shut. The night log lists the same 43 posts, all in the customs district, clicking on a six-hour loop. Rope Alley clicked. The fish stair clicked. The drain court under the east bridge clicked. The chit slot on each of those posts stayed empty. The four marks any pony could pick up while still in the hall were assigned to the four corners of the grant document on the lectern. Stripe entered those four under the lectern line.
"The post at Rope Alley clicked all night and never dropped a chit," Stripe said. "I can hear a click. I cannot spend a click."
Celestia University's street-works room ran the repeat because the Institute's own sheet requires a second workshop before a sweep is called safe. Holt Vesper, bench lead, took a borrowed slate, left the roof lamps dark, and traced the same tag. The slate lit the customs yard and stopped. Vesper wrote the result in the same columns the debut used: posts reached, chits struck, corners that were rooms. The university sheet has one signature line. It is blank.
"I will sign a number I can run twice," Vesper said. "I ran it once. It lit the yard."
Parish desks had set out baskets for wool and oil on the strength of the noon announcement. By late afternoon the baskets were still full, and the desks had taken three chits, all brought in by clerks who had been in the hall. Fig Mallow's roll was gone. A clerk offered the baker a replacement chit. Mallow said the roll had been eaten on the step, and the chit with it, and that two bits was the price of bread.
The Road Ahead carried the launch live and read the Institute line that the lattice would see every corner the maps forget. The Equestrian Trade Council supplied the wool on a pledge tied to the debut number, 11,400 parcels, to be cut when the certificate posted. The certificate posted at dusk with the debut number. Stripe's pages were still on the desk. A runner had been sent for them. The runner came back with the grant cover, which already had the word covered written under the seal.
The university slate is in the street-works drawer. The posts at Rope Alley were still clicking at midnight. The parish desk closed with full baskets and a tally of three.
At 12:40 Stripe walked Rope Alley with a blank chit book and a hoof-lamp. The post clicked on the quarter hour. The slot was dry. Stripe wrote the time, the click, and the empty slot on three lines and left the book on Vesper's bench. The grant cover on the lectern still read covered.
