Bell
Floor bookkeeper
The Brass Heron
The Brass Heron’s bookkeeper, where every line has a number and every number is somebody’s contract.
Cerys Bell did not have to earn a shorter name. Bell was already short enough. At the Brass Heron it has become less a surname than a job title spoken by people who want to know whether a line is real.
Nothing mystical about odds
Bell is wry, calm, and aggressively unmystical about gambling. A line is a price. A stake is a contract. A streak is a streak. She wears a compact abacus bracelet and has been known to correct a payout while continuing an unrelated conversation.
Why the Heron hired her
She began auditing ferry pools after a rigged storm wager emptied three dock crews’ pay chests. The Brass Heron hired her years later when she proved its own bookkeeper had been shading odds for a private Circle.
Too many small winners
Bell has found a pattern among small winning tickets that looks less like luck than information arriving early. The amounts are deliberately modest. That is what worries her.