Location:Kaelport — The Granary Yard
Date/Time:10 Blazepeak 9943 AZI, Quenchday, The Seventh Bell
Realm:Lower Realm
The dust in that yard gets into everything, and Heiteng had stopped minding it in the first month.
It comes off the drying floor and hangs at about the height of a man's chest all afternoon, flat and sweet, and it settles in the seams of a shirt and in the corners of the eyes and on the surface of every cup of water anybody sets down and does not drink within the minute. Four years of it. There was a black coat somewhere in a chest that had not been out since the second winter, and when he thought about that coat at all, which was not often, what he thought was that it would be full of this by noon.
Heiteng came back down the yard at the seventh bell and the haulage man was still standing by the weighbridge with the tally in his hand.
"Fourteen," the man said.
Heiteng put his hand on the rail and looked at the tally without taking it.
"You said eleven."
