Kurohane

The archive burns four hundred bundles of pine a winter to keep the vault dry, slid down off the Matsugane bluffs and carted up the Pardah gravel. Kurohane takes payment as two places a year at Cuiveril rather than coin, and values the places above the freight.

Half the 5,000 cords the firebrick kilns burn each year comes down Kurohane's slides off the Matsugane pine and over the badlands road in the mule months. The hold pays no part of it in coin, settling instead in firebrick and in the pit iron for the watch-towers.

Erevanth's walls are twelve feet and its watch is Kurohane's, on a standing contract of 300 crowns a year covering the ridge track and the orchard road. What Erevanth buys is that nothing has come down off the Matsugane bluffs onto the Pardah gravel in ninety years, and both houses enter the contract as insurance.

The foundry's charcoal comes off Kurohane's slides, 1,800 cords a year burned on Pardah gravel because nothing grows on it, and the ash goes back up the ridge as orchard dressing. The ash is not mentioned in the contract.

Naskarre borrowed 7,000 silver against three years of charcoal to reline its furnace, and the note is held at Kurohane, five cells and two cultures east. Naskarre is hair-trigger, so a missed payment is the act of the house, and Kurohane's factors ride up the gorge road twice a year to be seen doing it.

Rice, water and firewood for Verrigan's counting house come down the concession track from Kurohane's stores. Kurohane measures out in koku and Verrigan enters bushels, and the difference is argued at every quarter's audit and then split.

The three watch-towers and the slide crews eat 2,600 hundredweight of rice and millet a year, worked up the Yatsuhoshi coast from Emberlin's terraces in eight-ton coasters, landed at the coast yards and carted along the ridge track. Kurohane pays the freight in pine and the grain in coin, and has still not persuaded the Reach to sell the towers a cistern share.

Draveholt licenses the coast yards below the Matsugane bluffs to build off Draveholt draughts, three hulls a year at a tenth of contract value. Kurohane collects the fee under its concession and keeps a tenth of it, and both houses enter that tenth as freight.

Ferrovane's court hall takes Kurohane's concession clerks for a year each, so that the ridge-track concession can be pleaded in Corvantine form when the Reach records office disputes it. Kurohane pays 600 silver a clerk and a first refusal on mast timber, and Ferrovane takes no clerk from the house on the other side of the same concession.