Pardahni

The Cistern Road carries the Reach dead down off the plain to the Solmarch barge head, thirty or forty a year in dry cases, and Ferrovane's toll house charges a third again on anything with a body in it. Pardahni pays the surcharge, records it as an insult, and the shortest stage that avoids the toll house adds nine days.

Pardahni escorts the Sunjara charcoal trains and horse lines from the spine foot to the barge head, sixteen riders to a train, paid in charcoal and remounts. The two houses are kin on the water records office and neither will put the escort in writing, since a written escort contract at Ferrovane would make Sekhemra answerable for what the riders do on Corvantine ground.

The Sunjara iron furnaces turn out ninety tons of bar and cart iron a year and the Cistern Road takes half of it for tyres, chain and pen iron. Both houses settle in Sekhemrite form, cut into a wall at Pardahni, which no Corvantine records office will accept as an instrument and neither of them has needed one to.

Salt beef and oats come up the Cistern Road to Maeryvane, four wagons a month out of Pardahni's pens. Pardahni's drovers water at the combes on the way and Maeryvane's foresters count the beasts through the charter gate in both directions.

Maeryvane's ironletters supply the argument that a rented caravan stage is not an assessable holding, which has kept the Cistern Road off the survey through two re-surveys. The fee is the beef contract at a price fixed for twenty years, and neither house has put the connection between the two in writing.

Two of the nine wells carry registered shares for the Cistern Road, cut into the wall of a Meketri tomb at the Reach and copied on papyrus for the drovers. Pardahni draws four hundred barrels a season for the cattle pens and pays in hides, and neither house has told the survey that a water right exists on ground it does not list.

Pardahni's caravan stage and cattle pens stand on Sorrenmark remount pasture under a rent renewed each spring. Sorrenmark has raised it in every year since 806 AF and Pardahni has paid every time, there being no other watered ground between the badlands and the barge head.

After the 812 AF raise Sorrenmark began impounding Pardahni cattle found off the leased ground, arguing that where there are no boundary stones there is no boundary. Pardahni's escorts have twice cut the impound fence, and Ferrovane holds an action from each side and has heard neither.

Cindralis discounts the Cistern Road's caravan-stage rents at eleven per cent and takes the paper in two copies, one sealed in Amasekan seating order and one witnessed at the cattle pens, because Pardahni's ground carries no boundary stones a deed could describe. When a stage went unpaid in 803 the Amasekan copy was refused at the Forge for a junior seal and the whole sum had to be reclaimed at Ferrovane.