Jory Fenn's wage card showed eighteen bits a shift and a blank where the Saturday half-shift had been. Reedmoor Wagonworks filled a larger blank the same morning. The operating line for the third quarter read as a loss of 5.86 million bits, and the note beside it named one cause: a writedown on Hartlane, the racing-carriage house Reedmoor still owns.
Hartlane was the number the board used when the common wagons looked dull. A Hartlane shell sold for more than a farm family clears in three seasons. Its wheel-magic was older, louder, and paid. Four seasons ago the house put that money into a silent crystal drive, told its wagon rooms the future would hum, and ordered packs molded to a shell it had not finished. On Thursday the packs were worth less on the books than the crates they sat in. Reedmoor ran the difference through the operating ledger and called the quarter a result.
Clerks marked the charge non-cash. The counting room sent out no chest of bits that hour. The yard schedule moved instead. Fenn's half-shift was one of forty cut at Calder Reach before the ink on the loss was dry. A notice by the gate kept the crystals on the rolls as strategic inventory. They sit in a humidity barn behind the paint shed. A watchpony is paid six bits a night to keep anypony from hitching one up, on the ground that a single lit pack would spoil the account that says the packs have no present use.
Reedmoor holds sixty-three parts in a hundred of Hartlane. Pell Stewardship holds the voting lot of Reedmoor and a side stake in Hartlane, which the stewardship left at the old figure. Ivy Pell, who signs for the stewardship, drew the seasonal steward's fee the same afternoon. The fee is fourteen thousand bits, set by a formula the family wrote when Hartlane was the line that made the rest of the page forgivable.
"The carrying value has been aligned with a revised pathway," Pell said. "This is synergy between a prudent crystal pause and a stronger core of ordinary wagons. The bits are still in the group."
Dorrie Keel sells two Reedmoor wagons a season out of a shed past the orchard road, most of them to growers who pay her after the second cutting. She took a family wagon in late summer, when Hartlane's quiet spell was supposed to make a plain Reedmoor look like the sensible sister of a racer. The wholesale bill is still on her spike. On Friday the credit office wrote that retail terms stood as agreed and that interest would run from the original date.
"I don't sell pathways," Keel said. "I sell a wagon with a price on it. Their price went up in the note. Mine can't, because nopony in the orchard has an extra bit for crystals sitting in a barn."
Bram Calder runs Reedmoor and sat Hartlane's chair while the crystal shells were ordered. He told clerks the dual seat had been a temporary efficiency. He left the Hartlane chair on the morning of the writedown and kept the Reedmoor one. The board approved a retention payment of twenty-two thousand bits in the same packet as the loss. Hartlane's new lead, Sera Dun, declined to put a price on the canceled shell. She said wagon rooms that had taken orders would be offered a louder carriage from the old line, fitted with extra brass, the crystal deposit held as a courtesy on that carriage.
Keel had placed one such order, to see the shell, and paid a deposit of forty bits. The courtesy is a credit toward a carriage she did not ask to stock. The credit expires at the winter count. A refund of the forty bits needs a form the credit office said is in revision. Her wholesale bill was not in revision. It is nine hundred and twelve bits, due Friday, the morning Fenn's card pays four shifts and leaves the fifth line blank.
Fenn counted the blank on his card against the notice by the gate. Forty half-shifts at Calder Reach come to the same Saturday the humidity barn still needs its watch. The night rate is six bits. The clerk who posted the loss said the watch was an operating cost and the half-shifts were a volume adjustment. Fenn asked which line he should put the missing nine bits on. The clerk said the card was already closed.
