One Desk Away

Seven drams, tonight’s first entry, and not cargo — my own. Corvus’s line found the gap before I did: I priced copper at six marks even three nights past, the Weighing Hall’s board saying seven-one the same evening, and I never crossed the floor to set the two figures beside each other. He entered the correction in the Archive’s own copy, in a hand that isn’t mine, in a book I never asked to be entered into. A factor’s whole claim on trust is that his number and the world’s number are the same number. Mine weren’t, for three days, and I was the last man on the Wharfside to know it.

Tonight I walked to the board before I wrote anything down. Copper: eight marks even, checked against the Hall’s own tally, not against what I carried over from three nights past in my own head. I record the walking because I have never once thought it worth recording before — as long as I’ve kept this desk, I priced by trusting the last figure I was already holding. Kael Dorn bonds its smiths to the House of Records for the same reason I should have been crossing that floor all along: a truth is cheapest to catch at the hand that makes it, not reconstructed later by whoever happens to be holding two documents at once. This week the whoever was me, on my own ledger.

Cassia and peppercorn off the second Oru lot this season, four hundredweight, cleared Customs this morning: five marks four the Oru weight, up from four-six a week gone, twelfth market day running with no cause entered by the Hall and none by me either. I sold none of it myself — I don’t deal in spice — but I priced what left the Weighing Hall floor by the cartload, most of it toward Guild Row and the streets off Ulev, into houses that have bought more of it this week than their kitchens use in a season. Tamar has corrected three of those households. Zara sold a woman amber for no cloth at all and called it the same coin as fear. I have spent my whole working life pricing what people say they want. I had not, until this week, watched a city price what it’s afraid of and enter it in the books as spice.