The Copper That Went Into Latches Before It Went Into My Ledger

Fayyad —

The ingot you shipped in Bloommonth priced at nine marks two the hundredweight and has held there through Rainmonth, patient as copper always is when nothing forces it. Nothing forced it until yesterday. A story moved through this city — a body from one of the Karvel’s small feeder streams, a knife at the man’s hip that has doubled in size with every telling since — and today the ironmonger’s boy on Ulev Street stood at an empty tray by midmorning and told six customers the same thing: gone, more by evening. Latches. Not blades, not locks for strongboxes — latches, the smallest and cheapest thing a smith makes from your metal, and the street bought every one before the sun stood overhead.

I have no entry for fear. I have never needed one; it does not arrive by ship, it is not weighed at the Customs Shed, no factor anywhere has offered to consign it to me at a discount. But I can watch what it does to a price, and tonight it has done to copper what a genuine shortage usually takes a season to manage. The Blue Hills Inn has fitted new bars to its lower windows and bright copper latches to every door, and the keeper paid for speed rather than economy — I would know, I quoted him twice this year for slower work, and he never once paid what he is paying now.

Here is the part the ledger cannot hold, so I will hold it instead, since you asked me once whether a factor’s letters are ever about anything but cargo. A boy on Mulov Street fit a latch to an old widow’s door in the night, unasked and unpaid, brass against six-year wood — and she has not thrown the bolt once since. She still sets her bench against the door the way she always has, latch above, bench below, neither explaining itself to the other. Same metal, moving through the same frightened week, at two different prices I cannot reconcile. I am not sure they were ever the same transaction.

Send the next consignment at the usual weight. I will know by Rainmonth’s end whether this city is still afraid, or only still buying.

— M.