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<span class="mu-i">In Scrimshaw Mount, all graves are shallow. Even on the Promontory, where Nature, through the permutations of the Pattern had placed soil on the otherwise nude basalt of the Mount, the bone white stone was never more than a few feet down, commonly less than one. As such, getting graves to the standard depth of eight feet was simply not practical for those interned in the Mount's public burying grounds. But those that lived their lives and died their deaths on the Mount didn't take overmuch umbrage at their shallow graves. For both the practical and pious among them understood full well that under the panopticonical Gaze of the Patternmaker Above …<span class="mu-s"> all things are shallow. </span></span>
Your name is Chlotsuintha, and right now you are wrestling with <span class="mu-i">yet another</span> complication that threatens to upend your schedule. You have just finished haggling over a stagecoach, team and tack in the office of Goodman Nasturtium, the owner and operator of a livery and coach-house immediately outside of Cleanport's section of the Landward Walls. You have paid him the agreed upon sum, thirty-six thousand eighth talents, and you have even received your change. What you have not received yet, however, is a Patent for the stage, or a bill of sale for your purchase. Without such documentation, you have no way of proving that you actually bought and paid for your conveyance. Now, you doubt that toll-men check for the Patents or bills of sale of conveyances - if they did, surely the goodman would have mentioned it when he explained that you would need a copy of a Family Patent to travel on the Imperial Thoroughfares - but you would feel much better with the papers for your purchase in hand. Unfortunately, you are not like to get them for a while. The goodman has just received word that another liveries coach has been held-up, on a nearby road - which he currently has coaches on. Concerned for the safety of his coaches, custom, horses and hirelings, he is looking to get his house in order ... not write you a bill of sale, nor take the time to find the Patent for the stage, which is apparently is 'somewhere' upstairs. He has set his counter-clerk to the task instead, but you don't know how long that will take him.
And right now, time is very tight. Starting at the seventeenth toll, your hand-cart, laden heavy with your relatively expensive purchases from a Dry Goods will be at risk of ejection from the lock-and-key safety of the room in The Hooded Heads, a richly appointed public house with an unnerving aspect and an eccentric proprietor. To the best of your estimation, you came into this livery five minutes after the sixteenth toll ... and you further estimate that you have spent at least twenty minutes here, meaning that you have to find a place to change out of your riding dress or riding habit or 'worn piece' or whatever in the Heights of Hell you are supposed to call it and then get yourself back inside the walls to the Heads in about a half-hour.
