The Rail, in Plan the works yard of the Scales, laid flat
Not a forum. A pit head with an office on it, and enough open paving to hold one shift standing.
There is no room here for a crowd. The paved ground holds a shift and not a city, which rules out the mass gathering and rules in the thing the ground is actually shaped for: men arriving, and men leaving.
In by the ways or down through the gate, along the lamp row to draw a lamp and be counted, past the board, into the adit. Out the same way backwards. The yard is a corridor with a wide place in the middle.
At the board. The shift going in and the shift coming off meet in front of the only two numbers anybody trusts, twice a day, every day, for three hundred years.
No hall, no seats, no platform, nowhere to speak from. If the Scales has a place where it formally decides things, it is not this one — and no other candidate has turned up.
Reading the plan
The pit head sits at the western end, closest to the workings, and the adit drives away from it toward the face. It is one mouth of several — the plate shows this one because it is the one the administration was built on top of.
The Works House stands over it: the tall lit block, offices for the schedules, the tallies and the shift rosters. Every floor is lit at every hour, which visitors read as diligence and which is in fact just arithmetic — the cut runs to the beat and never stops, so neither does the paperwork.
The lamp row is the bright arc on the outer rim, and it is the reason the terrace looks like a promenade from a distance. It is a counter: lamps out at the start of a shift, lamps back at the end, and a name marked against each. Stalls have grown along it the way stalls always grow where a crowd is guaranteed — food, tallow, tobacco, small repairs — so the busiest and most cheerful place on the terrace is administratively a checkpoint.
The board stands between the row and the adit, so that nobody reaches the workings without passing it and nobody leaves without passing it again.
Why the open ground is where it is
Two musters, upper and lower, and they are not equivalent. The upper is under the lee of the Works House and stays dry; the lower catches everything the weather does to an exposed terrace. Which muster a gang stands on is set by the rosters, is never explained, and is watched extremely closely.
It is the smallest imaginable privilege and it is the one every gang can name.
What the plan cannot show
Plate III is one view from one shoulder, so the western third of the terrace — behind the pit head, on the side facing the face — is inference. There may be more plant there, or a second mouth, or nothing.
The interior is worse: the adit's course, its depth, and where it meets the rest of the workings appear on no plate and in no published schedule. The Craft would know. They have not been asked.
Type
Map
a plan, drawn from one view
Status
Canon
Related
Open on this plan
- What is on the western third, behind the pit head
- Where the adit goes
- How many mouths there are in all