Fishing floats

In Vell the sea came in a little further every year, and every year the city stepped back from it, building new streets on the roofs of the old ones. At low tide you could look down through the green water of the harbour and see doorways, and steps, and the tops of lamp posts that nobody alive had ever seen lit.

Pell Arroway had blown four thousand fishing floats in three years. She knew because she had counted, carving a mark on the furnace wall for every hundred. Round green floats, the colour of the harbour, sold to the fishing boats by the dozen. Master Ossery said a glassblower who could not make a float could not make anything, and he had never, not once, let her make anything else.