Nessa Pell kept the charter lamp low. A bright flame put every thumbprint on the bronze in relief, and Ponyville City Council dislikes a marked plaque. The new letter lay on a folded cloth. It was an S, nineteen pounds, warm on the rear edge where the caster had broken the mold early for the morning cart. The socket in the plaque had been cut for an A. She set the letter in, felt it rock, and tore a tongue of waxed paper from the roll she kept for leaking jars.
By the time the wax held the face straight, Calder Voss had been talking for an hour at the Las Pegasus high gate.
He owns the ascent yard and the mind-works bolted to its manifests. For three years the bureau had gone out as S.A.I., spelled out in the tariff book as Southline Arcane Insight. Voss told the dock couriers, and then the yard wire, that the mark would be S.S.I., Southline Sovereign Insight. The barges would fly the same pennant. The clerks would say a different middle word. He said Thursday morning had brought the initial the work had been waiting on.
Dorrie Venn at Ponyville Market heard it from a customer who had heard it from a courier with dock sand in his coat. Four hundred visiting bands hung on her rack, finished Wednesday, sea-glass thread, the old initial backstitched in silver for a Friday party off the upper docks. She turned one band over, looked at the stitch, and set the rack by the door where the return cart would see it.
Luna Starlight was on the council steps with Report No. 441 tacked and damp at the lower corner. The Friendship Office prints a public improvement on pale green. A square in the second sentence had been filled with a letter taken off a soup notice. The serif was wrong by a hair, and the S sat high. Starlight read in the voice she uses when weather has agreed to behave. "A friend who changes one letter has offered the public a share in his becoming," she said. The clerks on the steps had their hats in their hooves. Pell stayed with the plaque.
The report ran four pages. It named the old initial a draft of the self and the new initial a door. It thanked the yard for letting the city grow where ponies could watch. On the last page a blank labeled "pony most improved" had been filled, in a round hoof, with the words "the public." The closing line wished the mark a long and instructive life. Pell slid the sheet under the plaque so the bronze would stop walking on the wax.
Voss sent a further line by the same courier. The yard nailed it to the gate board under the morning freight numbers. "The A was a waiting room," it read. "The S is the house." He asked anypony fond of the retired initial to attend the unveiling, promised a place near the new maps, and asked the Friendship Office to keep Report 441 in circulation until every outer socket had been opened to the new size.
Silver Hoof took the fee sheet at the bursar's wicket and read the amounts aloud to herself once. The filing was forty bits. The moral plate, the office's name for a pamphlet reset in civic type, was 2,200. A crane, if the wax failed and the bronze had to go back to the caster, sat on a separate card. She stamped the three. "They want the plate under type," she said. "I have a column for type. The wax is Pell's."
Pell finished the form after the lamp had smoked the chimney. In the box for the work she wrote that the new initial rocked, that kitchen wax held it, and that a pony could read the plaque from the corridor by standing a little to the left. She added the caster's rush, the nineteen pounds, and the soup serif on the pamphlet, which had taken a smear of wax where it touched the bronze.
"He can have sovereign on the tariff," Pell said, when Starlight's aide came for a copy of the lesson to nail beside the plaque. "The hole we cut was for the other one. I put that on the form."
She filed the city copy, the yard copy, and the pale-green report in one jacket. The retired A went into the miscast drawer. The label on that drawer, lettered in her hoof a year ago, read miscasts. On the jacket's face sheet, the page a pony sees before the pamphlet, she wrote the line the bursar would bill from: letter seated with wax, fit unproved, bill attached.
