The third crown cistern is six miles past Cinder Ford and eleven short of the trees. Usable light, when I lifted the rod, was an hour and twenty minutes. The ridge had already taken the west half of the grade.
The Buffer Desk posted ninety-one days on Monday. That figure covers four cisterns on the south road, two on the salt track, and one at the Dragon Lands fringe that the desk still marks held in quiet. The fringe post has been sending night tallies for nineteen days. The salt track followed nine days later. On Thursday a third draw went up for lantern pitch on the west cut. The cut is not a fight. The order supplies it like one.
A buffer is the pitch you do not burn. The desk has been booking what remains under the same word.
Penny Ledger, who keeps the book, counted seven lids this morning. A lid counts when the wax on the hasp is unbroken. Haulers have been taking pitch over the overflow lip with a baking ladle so the hasp can stay intact. The ladle at cistern three was warm. It holds a bucket and a quarter. Somepony had widened the lip with a cook's knife. The road map does not show the cut, or the spur that reaches cistern four without passing the milepost where the orders are nailed.
Cistern four took the rod to a new yellow band painted under the old one. Pitch clung to the north wall, where the sun lands, and nowhere else. The desk map still hatches both vats full, the hatching it used before the night tallies started.
A black newt the length of a foreleg uses this road. It follows fresh pitch downhill and stops where the smell stops. Sable Nightshade keeps the last cabin before the trees. She said the newts used to turn at her step. This week they turn at the ditch under cistern three, a mile short. They lap the film, wait until it dulls, and go back uphill.
"Your map has four cisterns, a ford, and a road on the grade," Nightshade said. "It does not have the knife cut, and it does not have the place the newts quit. Provision off it and the buckets are gone before the trees."
She keeps her own vat shut against posted jobs.
Bramble Stitch was on a feed sack at the lip, fetlock wrapped in boiled cloth, the cloth already showing through. Stitch had been hauling the west-cut order. At dusk the skim over the sawn rim looked solid. It was not. The ladle handle broke. The rim took the leg.
"They said leave the seal," Stitch said. "The seal is for their book. I went over the lip with the ladle, and the lip got me."
Stitch owed the cut eight buckets before full dark. By the posted road the cut is fourteen miles. By the spur the map omits, it is nine. Neither distance fits the light that was left. The order has no line for the difference.
Under the order, at milepost nine, Questwell Banner has a card up. The outfit pays forty bits to any party that will open the pitch corridor and illustrate it for public confidence. Banner's party spent a night at cistern two, hung twelve lanterns for a marching picture, and cooked on a pitch flame because the wood was wet. The seal there is whole. The rod stops at the new paint. Banner left in the morning. The card is still nailed.
The Crystal Empire wrote one line on Friday and shipped no pitch. Its cisterns stay capped, a domestic instrument by its own wording. Ledger set the note beside the ninety-one days and did not change the number. Copper Gauge's last signed reading still shows one band of paint. The desk has been reprinting it with the new orders.
Nightshade would not pass the ditch. The smell line had moved, and she had traps to shift. She does not take the posted work.
At the milepost the Banner card turned in the wind. The lower paint came off on the rod, and the vat beside the card did not wet the wood above it.
