The night book at Keel & Daughter opened Tuesday with the hearth charge already in the column: nineteen bits, winter peak, due on the twelfth. The coal line under it was blank. Dorrie Keel, who keeps the dry-goods shop on Cooper's Stair, had the invoice in the drawer and frost on the inside of the shutter.
The Pale Compact struck the Wicklands' energy network again before the book was ruled. Crews and cloud-cutters took the boiler hall at East Sluice, the crystal dynamo on Hobb's Ridge, and the two coal lifts that feed steam to the lower town. The warm circuit failed between the second bell and the third. The pipes knocked once and went quiet.
It was the eleventh night of the campaign. The Compact's sheets, on the days a sheet gets through, call the strikes "pressure on surplus heat." East Sluice warmed the stair, the school boilers, and the market-well pump. A clerk in the lower town could not find those loads on any surplus list the Wicklands publish.
Keel sells flour, nails, and stove lengths to the flats over the shop. Four hearths sit on her meter. By morning the back room, where the night clerk sleeps when the coal trains are late, was cold enough that the ink had skinned in the well.
"I paid November," Keel said. "November is ice on the stair. They have written December at the same nineteen, and December is not in the pipe."
The Wickland Hearth Board posted no amendment. A notice in the shuttered collection office called the outages "a period of reduced delivery." The rate card still showed nineteen bits a hearth and a two-bit continuity charge for "network presence." Clerk Pellamy Greer walked the bills up Cooper's Stair because the office press was dark. Each copy needed a wax seal, and the wax needed a flame.
He bought the candle from Keel. Six bits. She watched him warm the board's wax over her stock and stamp the bill for heat East Sluice was no longer making. He paid out of the continuity tin. She wrote him a receipt. He left her the demand.
"The card has no price for heat that did not arrive," Greer said. "I bill the price I am authorized to bill. The continuity charge keeps the account from looking empty."
That charge is the only line in the midwinter book that has cleared every week of the strikes. It holds the Lantern Gala at forty thousand bits, which the chair has refused to freeze. The morning after East Sluice fell, the chair wrote that canceling the gala would "forfeit the synergy between public light and public confidence." The note went by hoof. The lanterns are in a warehouse off the warm circuit. The warehouse fee is paid up.
The school over the market closed Wednesday. Wash water and ink froze in the same hour. Teachers were told the wage would post on the ordinary day. The closure slip has a space for the lesson missed. The line after that is the signature.
Harl Penn made eleven bits a shift stoking at East Sluice. The hall is open to the weather. The foreman paid the last full shift in coin at the gate and said the next would wait on a salvage count. Thursday's salvage line listed brass fittings, a bell, and the gala portion of the continuity fund. It did not list Penn.
East-ditch pumps died with the dynamo. Farmers are breaking stock water by hoof and carrying it. The carter who supplies Keel's oats brought half a load and wanted payment before he faced the hill. The hill had no lamps. His rate for the trip back does not change when the sacks do.
Greer got two signatures where the stair tops out, from ponies who needed his lantern to see what they were signing. Keel did not sign. She kept the demand, left the coal line blank, and set the nineteen bits aside in a tin. The flour money stayed in the other tin. The board's tin stayed shut.
The Lantern Gala remains set for the first night with no new strikes. Tickets are four bits. The chair's card names the night and the price. On Cooper's Stair the nineteen bits are due on the twelfth, the coal line is blank, and the six-bit candle is already entered on the board's side as an office cost.
