Meldrath

Sekhemra cuts 3,000 cords a year in Meldrath's oak on a licence Meldrath's proctors renew and no living Meldrath name has signed since the roll closed. The payments go into an office and are entered without query, and the cut was doubled in 818.

Meldrath's drill field commissions the Watch's officers, eleven of them since 800 AF, at twenty crowns a head and a season's keep. Ferrovane stopped accepting Meldrath certificates for court clerkships when the Meldrath plate went cold, so the men Halvresk hires are now cheap and unemployable anywhere with a records office.

Meldrath's still enrols Umbermere's water-clerks and still issues certificates under a seal with no living name behind it, at forty silver a term. Umbermere keeps paying because a certificate refused at the Forge would void nine years of cistern filings, and three other houses have asked Meldrath's remaining lecturers whether the seal can be transferred.

Meldrath has taken no Reach entrant since the house went cold, and Cuiveril has since had nine of its lecturers and its main incomes treaty-jurisprudence course. Meldrath's proctors still send the Forge an annual list of Cuiveril's poaching, and the Forge still files it.

Drusenberg holds eight thousand crowns of Meldrath paper, taken in 801 AF against the victualling of Meldrath's drill field. Vaskarni practice requires the debt formally read at the summer assembly in the debtor's name; since the Meldrath plate went cold there is no name to recite, so the rememberer reads out the holding instead and everyone present notes the substitution.

Nine hundred quarters a year go from the Ironfurrow granges through the gated road into Meldrath, which is what the lecture halls and the drill field eat. Sorrenmark holds rye up against Meldrath's ditch and will not sell across the road fork, so the grain comes half a day downhill from a dwarf concession instead.

Ferrovane struck Meldrath off its list of recognised halls the year the Meldrath plate went cold, and no Meldrath certificate has been accepted for a court clerkship since. Meldrath halved its fees and began taking men Ferrovane had failed, and there are now two grades of clerk on the Solmarch road who will not sit in the same room.

Maeryvane has entered a claim on Meldrath's oak, pleading a charter the Corvantine confirm rather than issue and which predates the survey by four centuries. Maeryvane says it acts on instructions and will not say whose, and it waited until the Meldrath plate went cold to file.

Sorrenmark's legion camp sits on the road fork and closes it to Meldrath traffic during the spring and autumn musters, eleven days each time. Meldrath's convoys go round by the Ironfurrow oxen road and pay Vaddrek for the privilege, which is the only part of the quarrel that has made anybody money.

Two hundred and forty volumes lent from Meldrath before the last Meldrath name was struck are shelved at Ythelas, which will not deliver them to a house with no living names. Meldrath's remaining officers have twice put men on the leased towpath below the library and Aldemarch's watch has twice taken them off it.