A striker at Hearthstone Smithy earns eighteen bits a day. The sheet on the nail beside the wage book asks for one thousand two hundred, due on the twelfth, and names no goods.
The Common House seated forty-one new members on Tuesday. On Thursday each of them had a priority card on file with the Ways Desk. Nineteen cards began with the same sentence, set down in a round careful hoof: "We cannot be afraid to do big things." Twenty-two began with "Big things" and a mark pointing at the sentence. In the space where the desk prints a sum, every card carried a dash. The printer told the desk the dash was not a fault in the type.
Clerk Halven Croft collects for the Seating Office. He said the dash was the correct figure for a thing not yet chosen, and that the seating levy was a different paper.
"The dash is the big thing waiting," Croft said. "The levy is the lamps and the card stock while it waits. Twelve hundred bits from each town that seated a member, due the twelfth. A town can be brave on its own time. The desk runs on the twelfth."
Ponyville seated one member. The levy did not go to that member. It went to Hearthstone Smithy. The town's industrial stamp lies in the smithy's drawer, and the Seating Office bills the stamp. Willa Kern keeps the wage book. She worked the division on the back of a shoeing slip and checked it twice.
"Eighteen bits is a day on the floor," Kern said. "Twelve hundred is sixty-six days and twelve bits. They can have a big thing. The thing ought to be written on the line that takes my strikers' pay."
Delegate Marrow Pell, the member Ponyville seated, repeated the sentence for the reporters under the hall stair. He said the previous House had flinched, and that a flinch was how a small repair acquired a monument's price.
"We cannot be afraid to do big things," Pell said. "A bridge, or the feeling of a bridge. We can pass the feeling this session."
The Bold Works Board, a desk outside the House and missing from every priority card, sent a supplement to the towns the same hour. The supplement called the levy a partner contribution already in motion and thanked Hearthstone Smithy for leadership. Beneath the thanks, the board had printed the word synergy and a second sum: the levy, plus a wing for the district school, total to be refined after the feeling was voted. The Ponyville Education Board had signed the supplement before noon. The smithy had not been asked about a wing. It had been asked for twelve hundred bits.
Mayor Pippin Pines said the town was proud of its member and that ambition counted as a civic asset. Her clerk then set the levy against the festival contingency. The contingency held four hundred bits. All four hundred were already owed to a second run of cider bunting, the first run having gone to mud in the last rain. The clerk wrote the shortfall in pencil beside the bunting line and left the pencil on the book.
Ponyville Property Pros copied the levy to every tenant on the smithy lane, for awareness, and added a handling charge of forty bits a door. Skyline Sprocket rents the gear loft over the east stall and buys his coal from the smithy at the posted rate. He carried his copy down and laid it on Kern's bench. He had paid the forty bits at the Pros window. The window does not accept a dash, and the loft key sits behind the same pane.
Croft said a town that needed time could file Form 9 and split the twelve hundred into three. Form 9 costs nine bits, paid to the Intake Desk. The nine bits do not reduce the levy. They buy the split. Kern asked whether the strikers' eighteen could be split the same way. Croft said wages were not a House form.
By late afternoon Pell's card had a footnote in a second hoof: "Bridge or feeling — see courage." No sum followed it. The dashes on the other forty cards were still dashes. Kern put the levy back on the nail above the wage book, under the shoeing slip for a plow horse that had already walked out on new shoes. The horse's owner had paid cash. The Common House had sent a sentence.
