The Small Purse Circle filed its petition with the Far-Speak Board at dusk, after the southbound train had taken the gallery and the extra lamp had been pinched out. The hall on the lower stair of Crystal City was down to the night burn. Outside, the troughs along the Crystal Mountains filmed over between one bell and the next. Inside, the night ration was the same as the morning ration: a measured oat, a thumb of oil, and the order to keep the west stair lit.
The Circle wants a license, good for the eighteen days before the half-year Seat, to ring every registered hearth with a likeness voice. The voice would be copied from public levy hearings and set to argue for a cut in the hearth tax. Households that have hung the refusal cloth over the bell would be rung anyway. The petition calls the exemption "uncounted speech." Under the Board's own rule, a voice that picks the house is a solicitation, and a solicitation stops at the cloth.
Chair Vesper Quinn took the papers after the opening closed. A southern princess cut the ribbon on the petition chest and caught the southbound. A harmony line was read. The cloth went back on the hall bell. The public hour ended.
The sample sat in a salt crock on the cloakroom shelf, where a clerk had set it to keep it off the ink. It placed forty-one calls to the ration desk before anypony found the switch. Each call used the voice of a levy reader, cleared its throat in the middle of the oat figure, and asked whether the listener would mark a slate that sent the hearth tax "back to a size a winter can carry." On the twenty-second call it used a ration number that had been retired when its owner was eight.
Joss Wren, second clerk on the lamp desk, took the last nine of those calls standing up, because the cord does not reach the stool and the west stair is on a timer.
"It had my old number," Wren said. "The one from the foal book. I logged the calls, I shut the crock, and the west stair was already late. The oil for that stair is the same cup as last night. There is no second cup."
Harl Doss, who keeps the Circle's book in the Crystal Mountains and comes down for papers, told the noon gallery the calls would last "less than a kettle" and would "leave the hearths their quiet." His supplement, entered before he went back up the road, asks the Board to treat any hearth that has ever paid the levy as a hearth that has consented to hear about it.
Oda Brinn keeps two lamps on Lower Spire and the list for her stair. She heard the twentieth call because the ration desk sits under her floor, and the boards there are thin.
"They can make a voice," Brinn said. "The voice knew a number. My stair is still short a thumb of oil, and the levy is what buys the thumb. If they want the tax smaller, they can say so in the day, to ponies who are awake and have eaten."
Advisor Pimm Rowe, sent up with a note from the southern harmony office, described the proposal to the gallery as "a warm reminder, easy to wave off." He filed his dispatch from the platform bench at the station and made the evening train. The dispatch called the demonstration "orderly." At the time of writing, the ration desk had recorded forty-one orderly calls. Rowe was past the first switch when the forty-first call reached the station bench and asked the empty bench whether it had considered a lighter purse.
The hearth levy, set in the last hard season, buys lamp oil for the common stairs and the floor under the night ration. A cut of the size the Circle's sample recommends would drop the west stair from a full burn to a half-burn on the nights when the troughs film.
Quinn set the petition for a morning hearing and did not promise a day. The Circle has asked for an answer before the slates are posted. Eighteen days sit between the filing and the mark. The crock was tagged, shelved, and logged as evidence. It was still warm at lamp cutoff. Wren took the last measured cup up the west stair, and the ration book showed the same oat it had shown at dawn.
