Harth Keep will grow its receipts six times faster than the other memory houses, according to a note Next Steps filed from the platform on Thursday as the public book prepares to open. The train that carried the note also carried the authors. The works stayed. So did the cold.
The subscription ceremony in the heart square closed at dusk. It had run two hours, long enough to put four hundred demonstration crates under a toast price and to leave the civic lamp schedule unsigned. At the close the square stood at eleven below, a visiting princess having called the crates a kindness and taken the southbound before the count. The braziers went out when her carriage left. The coal that had fed them went back to the command that holds the mountain volunteers' allotment. The bins on the lower rim were left empty.
Next Steps puts Harth's coming season at eighteen billion bits and the peer bench at three billion. Six times is the whole finding. The eighteen counts flakes still in waxed crates, priced at the rate called out during the toast, including the demonstration crates, which the Environmental Compliance Board has already stamped shown and which stay unsold. The three is last autumn's peer total with every week of closed stair stoves entered as zero. Those stoves closed Tuesday. Ember Scale still heads the strike list. Under that entry those weeks add nothing to the bench.
Harth Keep cuts keep-flakes in the Crystal Mountains, thin crystal sheets that hold a lamp's last order after the flame is pinched. The charter belongs to the works. The sale of shares will be taken in the south, where the book is warm and the stairs stay lit. Jubilee Mint read the note aloud from the platform and boarded with it.
"The multiple is for the book," Mint said. "Winter can file its own paper if it wants a different number."
Pellin Ash keeps the night book for the lower lamps. He has a ring of keys, a short wick budget, and the flakes the ceremony left behind.
"I was told twelve stairs would stay lit if we were careful," Ash said. "They took the spare flakes up to the square and the spares are still up there. Nine stairs are lit. Two of the nine blink. I walk those two every hour so a pony can see the step."
The ration board met after the ceremony, still in its coats. Thursday's posting is barley, a heel to a house, and coal only for the kettles that have held noon's heat. Houses over a closed stove were told to borrow heat from a landing that still had some. Hester Dunn lives on the third turn of Lower Rim, over a stove shut since Tuesday. She stood in the clerk's line with a pail and came away with the pail empty.
"They read the eighteen billion out loud like it was already in the pot," Dunn said. "The pot was cold when they finished. I cannot feed a house on a speed."
The Environmental Compliance Board holds the heat schedule that belongs inside the share papers. The schedule is unsigned. A clerk there said the shown-stamp on the demonstration crates has to be reconciled with the eighteen before any pony in the south is asked to buy a season in which those crates sell a second time. Next Steps has called that reconciliation a formality. The Board has called it the form.
Ward Fenn, yard manager at the cutting sheds, confirmed the crates are real and that spoken orders cover a portion of them. Of the eighteen billion bits he could point to buyers for a little under four billion, most of it a crown purchase of flakes for offices that already have light. The rest is the toast price times the wax. He left the peer arithmetic as Next Steps had printed it. The other houses have slowed their cutting while their crews stand with Ember Scale and their coal sits with the command.
The public book is set to open on the first day the southern exchange calls fair. Buyers will be offered a piece of the sixfold. The note lists the eighteen, the three, and the opening day. At nine the lower rim had nine stairs burning, two of them unsteady, the Thursday ration was on the board in a hand that had shaken with the cold, and the coal was still up the mountain with the command.
