The Stonebench

The Stonewright Moot's chartered house on Charterhouse Row: a squat, over-built hall of galleries-cut stone where a seated factor licenses masons and prices resonite before it ever reaches the Kilns market, distinct from Hesk Durrow's Old Work scale at the Kilns, which handles the day's scrap rather than the Moot's law.

Where the Kilns quarter weighs what the Stonewright Moot's people dig up, the Stonebench decides what they are allowed to dig in the first place: clan-law for hire, in effect, for any Vale project that wants Stoneborn stone or Stoneborn hands and doesn't know how to ask properly. The hall is built the Stoneborn way even this far from the galleries: load-bearing stone in every wall that matters, a ceiling low enough that a human factor has to duck the crossbeam, and a bench worn smooth in one spot where three generations of Moot seatholders have sat the same disputes. Hesk Durrow, the Moot's Old Work factor down at the Kilns market, answers to the Stonebench when a question is about law rather than price. The two posts split the same charter, one for the coin and one for the custom, and neither will settle the other's business. A traveler who does honest work for the Stonebench long enough is eventually handed a letter sealed in grey wax: passage clearance for the isthmus road to Deepvein Galleries, where the Moot's true bench sits.

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