Forty years on the Line

The year book of the Saltreach Runners' Hall, kept by its clerks since 2 AS. This copy was written out fair for the new year of 40 AS by Tamsin Rook, junior clerk. Where the Line Authority's own yearbook gives a different date or number, the note says so. The hall's dates stand.

The first years

• 0 AS. The Snap. At 06:12 the ribbon is cut above Port Anselm, and over forty-one hours thirty thousand kilometres of it fall westward. Roughly twelve thousand dead.
• 0 AS. Within a month, salt carriers from the Glass Sea are pushing handcarts along the top of the ribbon, because it is the only flat thing that goes anywhere.
• 1 AS. The last signal from the station is logged at Port Anselm in the dry season. Nobody has heard from it since.
• 1 AS. Petra Lisle of Whiteholm fits a sail to a salt cart riding on clamps taken from a wrecked climber car. She covers 140 kilometres in a day and is laughed at in every town she reaches. This is the first sail-sled.
• 2 AS. The raftwrights of Tarry begin raising the sunken ribbon across the Long Shallows onto pontoons. The first runners' hall opens at Saltreach, in a salt shed. Its clerks start this book.
• 3 AS. The Toll Wars begin. Cistern chains the ribbon at its wells and charges runners a toll in water. Within the year, seven towns are doing the same.
• 4 AS. The ambush in the dunes outside Windbreak. Eleven runners die. (The Authority's yearbook gives nine. The hall has the eleven names.)
• 5 AS. Saltreach refuses to charge tolls and is cut off from the east for most of the year.
• 6 AS. The Couriers' Compact. Runners from nine towns meet at Saltreach for eleven days and agree the four rules of the Line. The Toll Wars end, mostly.
• 7 AS. The first reading of the Compact at new year. Every hall on the Line has read it at every new year since.
• 9 AS. The Line Authority is founded at Port Anselm. Its charter declares the station lost with all four hundred crew. (The Authority's yearbook dates its founding to the charter's ratification in 10 AS. The hall keeps the date written on the charter.)

The middle years

• 11 AS. The Authority issues the first sled licences. The halls call the fee a toll with a stamp on it. The Authority calls it a licence. The argument continues.
• 12 AS. The Authority's survey sets kilometre posts from the foot of the Stump. Saltreach is fixed at kilometre 6,200, a figure the hall disputed for three years and then painted over its door.
• 12 AS. Runner Abe Lorrimer reports hearing the ribbon "sing" for an hour before a storm near Windbreak. This is the first written report of it. It is not the last.
• 14 AS. The first hanging houses go up inside the loops at Coiltown. The same year, the halls rule that pulling off onto a pontoon hard is not the same as stopping on a pontoon section.
• 17 AS. The Long Burial. A Dunmarrow storm buries three hundred kilometres of ribbon for nineteen days. Runners from five halls dig it out by hand.
• 20 AS. The first Glass Sea race at Saltreach. It is won by a sled with no name, sailed by a man nobody knew, who never came back to defend it.
• 25 AS. A storm breaks the pontoon line in the Long Shallows at kilometre 7,900. Three sleds are lost. The Compact's second rule is painted on every pontoon from Tarry to the far shore.
• 28 AS. The Authority puts patrol sleds on the Line. Runners learn to recognise them at fifty kilometres.

The late years

• 31 AS. Ilse Kaan, formerly of the Pontoon Office, is appointed warden of the western reach.
• 32 AS. The Dunmarrow storm of the dry season. Lost: Sela Quell of Saltreach, Garrow Pike of Windbreak, and Ines and Tobiah Marsh of Cistern. The hall rang its bell for four days.
• 34 AS. The Authority agrees that its patrol sleds will give way to a red pennant like everyone else. The halls agree to give way to a patrol flying one. It mostly works.
• 36 AS. A dry year. The fourth rule is tested and holds: every sled through Dunmarrow carries water for two, and some carry it for six.
• 37 AS. A toll gang chains the ribbon east of Saltreach, the first in a decade. (The hall keeps a separate account of that run. The Authority's yearbook does not mention it.)
• 38 AS. Two reports of the ribbon singing in a single season, one from Tarry and one from Coiltown. The hall sends both to the Authority, as the Authority asks. It hears nothing back.
• 40 AS. This copy. The Compact will be read aloud at Saltreach at noon on new year's day. There are thirty-nine names on the hall's wall of the lost. There is room for more, and the clerks would rather there was not.

A note on the singing

Readers have asked why this book records the ribbon singing alongside storms, wars and the deaths of runners. The answer is that the hall's first clerk, Hob Arden, wrote down everything that a runner came in and swore was true, and left the sorting to later clerks. Later clerks have kept the habit. It costs a line of ink, and runners are not usually wrong about the ribbon.

Only the first and the latest appear above. The rest are in the hall's register of reports. The hall draws no conclusion from them. It notes only that there were none in the first eleven years, that there have been twenty-three since, and that most of them were made before a storm.