A drum of haul oil at The Hearthstone Smithy holds twenty litres and costs sixteen bits. The duty stamp on the cap is four of those bits. On the Reed Cut sheets for Corrick Vane and Pell Ashcombe, the duty column for more than 4.5 million litres stood empty. On Tuesday the Revenue Bench filled that column with two fines.
Each fine sits above 3.34 million bits. The Bench entered the pair as one sum written twice. Vane brought the oil out of Sable Reach. Ashcombe hauled it inland. Between them the oil was the heavy distillate that fires forge blowers, night lamps, and the threshers still owed to the east-orchard harvest. The Duty Office called the missing tax a line on a form. The line had a box. The box had been left blank.
The gate forms called the loads mist. Drums crossed stenciled for the fair sprayers: MORNING MIST, KEEP UPRIGHT. That is a hard instruction for a liquid that blacks a hoof and smells of a lamp wick. Clerk Sera Quinn of the Reed Cut post stopped a wagon in the third week, dipped a measuring rod, and watched the rod come up dark to the second notch. The driver said the mist had ridden beside a coal tender and taken the color. Quinn wrote the color down. She wrote that the wagon sat low on its springs. Her note said a load of mist would not sit that low.
"The litre line was full and the duty line was empty," said Quill Mercer, the assessor who carried the sheets into the Bench. "I have no column for a story about weather."
Mercer set the volume down as litres. Four and a half million litres, he told the room, would lift the mill pond over the footbridge. The oil went into boilers, blower lines, and the east-road lamps. By the sitting, most of it had been burned. The fine names the litres the forge has already spent.
Ashcombe addressed the Bench. "It was moving oil," he said. "Moving oil is in transit. Transit is a condition. A condition is not storage, and storage is the thing with the tax." He used the word synergy for what he called regional flow. Mercer asked him to point to the flow on the form. Ashcombe pointed at the blank box.
Vane appeared by counsel. Counsel said the loads had been priced for passage. Asked who priced them, counsel named a broker in Sable Reach, then a second broker, and then sat. The Bench copied both names into the margin and used neither as a sum. The sum remained Quinn's count as Mercer's clerks closed it: more than 4.5 million litres, duty unpaid, sold on the near side of the Cut.
The Fair Lantern Board booked 380,000 bits in supply savings against this season's generator contract and sent a note of thanks to Reedcut Supply, the name on both importers' papers. Chair Linden Moss, reached during a fitting for lantern ribbon, said, "The program found synergy with available stock. The lamps performed." On the duty box she said, "We don't audit the far bank." The Board ledger still lists the 380,000 bits as saved. No drums are written beside the figure.
Wren Harth buys the oil the forge burns. She keeps the floor book at The Hearthstone Smithy and pays for a drum before a blower is lit. "Sixteen bits, stamp on the cap, my name on the slip," she said. "That drawer is full of slips. If a second bill is coming, the Bench has the address. This yard paid full price all season. The ribbon generator took the cheap loads."
Her carter, Hob Brenner, makes nine bits an hour. He spent half a shift hauling four stamped drums up from the rail siding after a cheaper lot failed to show. "Four drums is sixty-four bits before I eat," Brenner said. "Nobody handed me a box I was allowed to leave empty."
Mercer said the fines bind Vane and Ashcombe. Harth's yard is not on the order. That afternoon the Duty Office pinned a bulletin at the smithy door. Recovery, it said, may show up later in the drum price. Harth slid the bulletin under the sixteen-bit card. She sold Brenner's four drums before dusk, each with a stamp, and entered them in the drawer. At first light the Board's savings line still read 380,000 bits. The forge lit on the stamped drums.
