The Silver Went First

House Vandahl's silver collapse reconstructed from a mine clerk's own tally book — the falling weights, month by month, and the marginalia beside them going from routine to frightened to a single line about water.

[Found loose in a strongbox pulled from the Cleave Gallery's counting-room before the second flooding sealed the lower stair for good. The hand is the mine's own scale-clerk, one Corlan Fenn, who does not appear anywhere else in House Vandahl's surviving records. Copied here exactly as found, tallies and marginalia both, misspellings not corrected.] Sowing, first weighing: 337 marks. Sowing, second weighing: 344 marks. Best week since the spring before last. Sent word up to the keep myself, which I do not often trouble to do. Sowing, third weighing: 339 marks. All quiet below. Foreman in good spirits, which is worth entering because it happens rarely enough to be news. Thaw, first weighing: 340 marks, sound ore, the deep face holding true. Thaw, second weighing: 338 marks. Thaw, third weighing: 341 marks. Good week. Told the foreman so. He said the deep face has held true for nine years and would go on holding. Highsun, first weighing: 296 marks. Face is narrowing. Foreman says it is the vein pinching, nothing more, and I have no cause to doubt a man who has read more rock than I have read ledgers. Highsun, second weighing: 301 marks. Better. See above. Nothing more. Highsun, third weighing: 260 marks. Foreman not available for comment. Third week running, the night shift has come up short of the day shift by numbers too even to be bad luck. Harvest, first weighing: 240 marks. Someone is skimming, or the face is truly dying, or both, and I find I would rather it were skimming, because a thief can at least be caught and the numbers made to come right again after. Harvest, second weighing: I did not weigh. The lower gallery smelled of standing water where it has never in nine years smelled of anything but rock-dust and lamp oil, and I sent the shift up early and did not think it worth an entry until now, three days on, entering it anyway, because a clerk who only enters good news is not keeping a ledger. He is keeping a lie with numbers in it. Harvest, third weighing: 190 marks. The smell has not gone. If anything it is stronger on the lower stair than it was three days ago, though I am told by men who would know better than me that a smell cannot get stronger on its own. First frost, first weighing: 140 marks. Lord Vandahl visited the gate today — not the gallery, the gate — and was told what the foreman judged he should be told. I was not consulted on what the foreman judged he should be told, which I record here only because it is the kind of thing a ledger is for. First frost, second weighing: I was not permitted to weigh. The lower gallery is closed pending the foreman's inspection. There is nothing pending about a wall you can hear seeping from the upper stair with the door shut. First frost, third weighing: — Deep winter: The spring broke through in the night. Not clean water — ash-water, the grey kind that stains the props and will not drain for any pump House Vandahl's coin can still buy, and House Vandahl's coin, I have good reason to know from this very book, cannot buy much pumping any longer. Every man on shift came up. The gallery did not. [a long gap in the hand, then, smaller, cramped into the last inch of the page] I am short one column. I have the marks taken, all nine years of them entered fair, and I have the marks owed against the year's wage, which I can still enter, because a number is a number whichever way a mine happens to be facing. There is a third column I have never once had to keep before this week: what is owed to men who came up out of a working mine three days ago and go home tomorrow to no mine at all. I do not know how to enter it, because Lord Vandahl does not consider it a column he keeps. He wants the year's accounts balanced regardless, by the new year, as though a ledger can be made honest by simply being made to add up. I am going to try anyway. It is the only arithmetic left in this gallery that still answers when it is asked a question.

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