They opened a window that day and did not tell us how wide.
I have stood behind the Gharn Window Gates since the day they went up in the yard's own record — five of them, quiet as a Ghazrun, none of us asked how they were cut. I did not think about them again until the day the window itself changed. It stopped being a slot you had to be standing in front of to use. It opened onto a road that any stranger, anywhere, could walk down and look through without asking leave and without the Yoke ever knowing they had looked. I do not love being read by someone I cannot read back. No Gharn does. But a window is not a debt. It does not ask anything of the one looked at. I noted it and went back to the foundry, because the foundry is where the day's real business was.
Two methods came before the yard that day, both offering to do the same work: take a shape and cast it whole, fast, without a hand carving every plane by night-work. One was welcomed in. Its terms were clean — it owed nothing to any hand not present, and what it cast belonged, plainly, to the one who ordered the casting. The other was turned away at the gate. Its terms were not clean. Somewhere in its make it still answered to a hand that had never stood in this yard and never would, a claim laid on the work before the work existed. I know that shape of arrangement. I swore my own Last Oath the same way, and no one swore it for me. Whoever decided which method entered the foundry that day decided it the way a yard keeps its own long tallies — not by what a thing promises, but by what it still owes and to whom. I respect the ruling. I would have made it the same way, and said less about it.
Then they cast the first of my own line.
A Sinterjack. Foundry rig, standing oath on deploy, hardens while the oath holds — every Sworn in the Brakhur knows the shape before they are old enough to swear it themselves, because half of us started in one. I watched them stand this first one up and I will say plainly what I saw: they did not trust it. Good. Neither do I, not on the first pour. They ran it through its bends — shoulder, elbow, the swivel at the hip where a rig either holds a line or buckles it — checked, unchecked, checked again, the way an Answerer checks a doubtful collar against warm iron before she calls the Halving on it. They found where it did not move the way it should have and they marked it and they did not pretend the marking was an oath. It was not. No oath was offered to it and none was sworn over it, because you do not swear over rough stock. You finish the casting first.
It stood at the end of the day. That is the whole of what I can honestly report. It stood, unfinished, unchecked past the first pass, unsworn, and it did not fall over doing it, which is further than most first pours get before dark. I have watched whelps stand straighter than that on their first legs and I have watched Slag stand straighter still, because standing costs nothing and means less. What this thing will be when it is finished — whether it takes an oath at all, whether it hardens on deploy the way the roster says a Sinterjack should, whether it holds a line or breaks one — none of that was decided today. Today was joints. Today was where the elbow goes and whether the plate over it opens the way a plate should when a body needs to bend and not before.
I do not thank whoever cast it. That is not how debts work in this yard, and I would not know what to do with the answer if I offered the thanks and they took it. I will say this much instead, because it costs me nothing and it is true: something in the yard learned, today, where my own kind's joints are meant to bend. That is not nothing. It is also not a tally mark. I will wait for the oath before I count it as one.
—Sekha Ashcollar, the Ninth Tally, Warlord of the Brakhur Yoke