SALT SCRUB — The Wide Purse cut this year's growth marks for all six salt keels on Tuesday and mailed the table from Haven Spire, nine days by fast courier and none of the miles this road takes.
This dispatch is eighteen miles west of Saltmer. Four hours of light remain, with the sun a little better than two hooves over the flats. The map issued with the spring mark shows a well at mile sixteen, a shade roof at mile seventeen, and a contract road called the Prosperity Cut running straight to Cinder Reach. The well is capped. The shade roof is a post. The road is a scraped line through saltbrush, and a gray dunerunner has taken the iron lid as a seat. It does not move for carts. It shifts once, when the shadow of the post reaches the lid, and not before.
The Purse's autumn table, filed in the tenth month, took the Six Keels from 4.1 to 1.8. Lamp sap is slower. Glass, guest hauling, and the inland grain the stewards said would stand in for sap did not stand in. Copper Gauge, who keeps the measure at Ledger Hall, signed the cut and left it bare.
"The sap is slower, and the replacement trade is not in the crates," Gauge said. "I do not print a wish in the column beside it."
A stamp in Haven Spire, and every wage clause on this coast that indexed itself to the published mark wakes up poorer. The stewards of Cinder Reach and Low Keel had already ordered road-markers cast with 4.1 in the iron. The markers came in on the morning courier, in the same satchel as the cut. They are stacked behind the customs shed at Saltmer because the foundry had been paid and the number had not.
Jory Hale took the Prosperity Cut off the Saltmer board in early heat, when 4.1 was still the figure nailed over the trough. He hauls out of the scrub edge. The contract pays a day-rate times the Purse's latest published growth for the keels. He split the left hind hoof on the capped well's gravel on the sixth day, the lid already on, the map still showing water. Bramble Stitch bound the hoof at her yard with a boiled strip and a cedar splint. The splint cost more than Hale's revised week.
"The sheet on the board said four and a tenth," Hale said. He lay on his right side in the shade of Stitch's wall, the bad hoof out where the sun would stay off the wrap. "They kept the miles and paid the new number. I walked the old ones."
Stitch has lived at the edge of this scrub since before the board printed opportunity across the top of a haul. She mends packs, sells the bitter water she has, and keeps a yard book that does not improve a fact for a visitor. In that book the Prosperity Cut is a tax track laid over a dry line. The touring maps sell it as a corridor.
"The lid's been on since the heat came," Stitch said. "I told the board the day they posted the ribbon. They paid for a better ribbon."
The ribbon is still on the board. Penny Ledger, clerk of the Opportunity Desk, reached Saltmer with a corrected pamphlet three hours after the Purse's table. The pamphlet calls the same scraped line a shorter opportunity. It notes the revision in a box at the bottom and recommends ambitious hooves. Ledger read from it beside the trough, where the spring mark is still nailed and the nail has rusted into the wood.
"A lower table is evidence the corridor is being watched," Ledger said. "The keels remain open to hooves with a plan."
Captain Yarrow Vane came through at midmorning with two banner mares and a painted route that still had the shade roof. He asked if the lizard was a hazard the Purse had classified. Stitch said it was sitting on warm iron. The party turned back before the second hour, banners rolled. The board will keep his posting until the wax fee expires. The fee was calculated on the spring mark.
Low Keel's steward sent a note by evening mule. The note said the sap jar remains deep, the guest halls remain staffed, and the year remains a year. Cinder Reach has hung the old banner over the quay rail, 4.1 cut into cloth, because the new cloth is still at the dyer and the rail looks bare without a number.
The dunerunner was on the lid when the light thinned. The yard book at the edge has the well down as capped on the eleventh of the heat month. The Purse reached that well on page forty, called the difference a forecast, and sent the table collect.
