CLOUDSDALE — Next season's pit-burn is set to finish 2.6 haze-stones under this season, a 0.4 percent cut and the first lower tally in twelve seasons. The Canterlot Institute read the figure at third bell and used the next hour on the reasons a lower tally is not yet a result.
Gale Report, who keeps the seasonal card at the Institute, put the coming burn at 607.4 haze-stones. This season closed at 610.0. Pit-rock from the southern cuts is down 4.1. Lamp-pitch is up 0.9. Tar-oil is up 0.6. The net is still a minus. Page one of the forty-page note calls that minus "a moderation in the rate of addition."
The hall has been reserved since Ledger Year Four for a rise. Sixty chairs stood on the mark. The arrow on the board still pointed up. Before dawn the Institute print room had locked a one-column line with the word "down" in 14-point. At second bell the Wonderbolt press office named four words a first paragraph was not to carry: fall, drop, down, and less. The printer chipped "down" out of the form with a hoof-pick. The hole is still there. The letters sit in a tin on the rail.
Bramble Holt, crew chief on the late shift at West Sluice Foundry, had filed his slip before the jug was set out. The foundry feeds lift-water to the weather factory under the freight shelf. The day board had posted six boilers and a full pit-rock draw. The night board ran four.
"Two boilers were cold by midnight. I wrote cold," Holt said. "The sheet has no box for a moderation."
The idle pair are on a work order three weeks old. The firebrick cracked. Replacement brick sits on a cart Arcane Express Sparks Rail has not brought up from the junction. Holt logged 40 stack-hours under the day card, sent the slip to the foundry at dawn, and put a copy in the Institute's night basket. The basket is a crate by the side door. It is emptied after the briefing.
Sedge Pell flew the reserve circuit and did not attend. The billed flier had the noon pass, a show over the rail. Pell took the dark lane: stack mouths, the shelf, then the cliff where haze banks in the wind.
"It sat under the cliff mark. I could see the shelf lamps," Pell said. "Last season the lamps were gone by the second turn."
Director Calper Dunn of the Cloudsdale Foundry Board told the hall the cold boilers were a softness he had ordered in the spirit of the card.
"The night shift arrived late to a decision I took in the spring," Dunn said.
The morning slip pinned outside the hall still shows a rise of 1.2 at West Sluice. Under it, the bonus line pays the board 4,800 bits when managed burn grows. A fall pays nothing. The spring circular Dunn cited asks for longer firing on cold mornings. It says nothing about brick.
The Council's card, written in Ledger Year Four, still requires a cut of 28 haze-stones a season if the sky bank is to stop thickening inside the window the Council printed. The bank, which is haze already hung and not yet rained out, rose 3.4 on the Institute's own post. Gale Report read the 3.4 aloud. He did not read the 28. Under the Notice Rule, passed after three announced peaks failed to hold, a summary may use a downward verb only after four lower seasons. This would be the first. The rule runs eight lines. The page where the 28 is printed is page 40, behind the rule.
Fourteen towns are already on the press office tour. The crates in the yard carry the title in paint: "The Rise That Would Not Bend." Aden Moor speaks for the office. Moor did not fly the lane.
"The towns bought the rise," Moor said. "A smaller burn can live in an appendix. We do not refund a poster."
The captain spoke at the rail for nine minutes after the hall emptied. The remarks followed the crate title. They added no tally. In the office window the poster still shows a rise of 9.0, set in the lower corner before the first crate was nailed.
Windfall Margin keeps the Council's side tally and was not on the program. In the corridor, after the formal questions had skipped the card, Margin answered.
The card still says 28.