The shelf road in the Crystal Mountains, above Crystal City, took a coach and a wagon together an hour after dusk, and twenty-two ponies were dead by the time the lamps on the lower run were counted. Nineteen of the dead had been riding back from a burial at High Cleft. The other three were the wagon's crew. The wagon was Environmental Compliance Board freight, bound for the warmth sitting the Nine Thrones had refused to move.
The boiler grade, the only road that holds a wheel in this cold, stayed ribboned off. On Tuesday the Board had shut it so the portrait could use the banked boiler as background, a plume the sitters' advisors called authentic and the notice called compliant. Traffic chalk on the ice lane read CEREMONIAL — SLOW COAL. The funeral coach was waved onto that chalk behind the freight. The sacks were weighed for the color of the plume.
At the switch the air had gone hard. Breath whitened on manes between sentences. A water butt by the lamp stair had split before noon and frozen where it spilled. The lower shelf remains on the half-scuttle fixed after the primaries. The mourners were returning two empty tins to the depot, the burial supper having been entered as a meal already issued. Those tins rode in the coach. The wagon's bill, dry in a tin of its own, listed eleven gilt chair-backs, a jar of rose-ash for the sitters' cheeks, and four sacks of portrait coal.
Sable Merrin keeps the rooming house at the foot of the stair. She had the kettle on the half-flame and the bowls set for the party from High Cleft.
"They buried Bram Keel this morning," she said. "They were due at my table. The lane has been a picture lane since the notice. I heard the iron. After the iron there was nothing I could use."
Two of the dead had boarded with her through last winter and this one. She put their bowls back in the cupboard and left the kettle on, which is the work a house does once the evening train has gone and the names are still penciled on the stair card. That train left with a southern dispatch already filed from the platform, the whistle still up, the sitting described as uninterrupted.
Ivo Brenn, junior clerk of lamps, walked the lower run with a can lighter than his list. The sitting had taken six lamps off his circuit to fill the portrait. He set the can on the step and watched the well, which ices when its lamp fails.
"I can hold the stair and the well until midnight," Brenn said. "After midnight I am choosing which ponies see the step. The sitting has its oil. I have the oil the sitting left in the can."
The Hall still holds the fever ward. Eleven injured from the shelf lay in the lamp passage behind Brenn's office, on blankets drawn from the winter stores. The ward remains under the Hall's use, the same arrangement that stood when the chief warned the Ember Scale could run the mountains. The passage has no boiler of its own. Brenn set a lamp at each end and copied the names he could make out onto a slate the Board uses for compliance tallies. The heading on the slate still read EMBER COUNT.
Pelham Drape, the warm-coast liaison attached to Next Steps, gave his account from the platform with the folio under one foreleg.
"The portrait is a warmth intervention," Drape said. "Lane questions will be sequenced after the varnish. Residents will serve this best by declining to classify ceremonial freight in emotional terms."
The Nine Thrones kept their hour in Crystal City while visiting royalty sent a wreath and stayed on the train. Chair-backs came off the ice in the order the painter had numbered them, and the Board entered the chairs as recovered ceremonial property while the coach was still being counted. A clerk at the depot marked the two empty tins as returned inventory. The names that went with the tins waited on Brenn's slate.
By full dark the half-scuttle stood where it has stood. Merrin fed whoever reached her door from the pot she had set for Bram Keel's party, and the pot went around once. The ribbon on the boiler grade was the Tuesday ribbon. On Brenn's slate the lines ended at twenty-two, and the last mark he added was the well lamp, which he kept burning.
