I had to get out of bed to reach my boots. --- I had to get out of bed to reach my boots. That is not how I keep a room. I keep it the way I kept a shield line, everything an arm's length from where the arm will be, because the morning you have to hunt for a boot is the morning somebody is already through the door. Eleven years in that room over the cooper's yard and I had never once put a foot on the floor before a boot was on it. I sat up, reached, and my hand closed on cold boards. I looked. The boots stood where I had left them, heels to the wall, tongues out to dry. The wall was further away than it had been. I sat there a while with that. The bed had not moved. I got down and looked, because a man who has been robbed in his sleep checks the obvious things before he admits the strange one, and the four old marks where the legs stood were exactly under the four legs, worn pale into the wood by years of my weight rolling over. Nobody had shifted it. The floor between the bed and the wall was simply more floor. Three of my feet, heel to toe, where two had always fit. Downstairs Widow Orrin was frying onions in fat, and the smell came up through the boards the way it did every morning, and my stomach answered it the way it did every morning, and I stood in my shirt with one boot in my hand feeling like a man who has walked into the wrong house and found his own coat on the peg. The cooper's boy banged twice on my door on his way down, which was his way of telling me his father wanted the rent by Friday. Friday was tomorrow. I had a fighting jack that had belonged to a bigger man, a sword I kept better than I kept myself, a shield with a fresh rim of brass over an old crack, and eleven silver owed me by a mender I had walked home the day before through the worst end of the Cinder Market. Eleven silver would cover the rent and a week of Widow Orrin's onions. It was the only sum in Brackmill that had my name on the right side of it. So I dressed, and I did not think about the floor. I have found that a thing you refuse to think about waits for you politely, like a dog outside a shop.

The posting had been on the board so long the rain had got under the pin. Wolf cull, the Ashcombe, paid by the head, same-day, posted by the Road Watch. Three. Somebody had written three and then gone away with the rest of the Watch and left the paper to speak for them, and the paper had been speaking to nobody for two winters, because a man with any sense does not walk a mile and a half into bramble for a purse held by a body that no longer exists. --- The posting had been on the board so long the rain had got under the pin. Wolf cull, the Ashcombe, paid by the head, same-day, posted by the Road Watch. Three. Somebody had written three and then gone away with the rest of the Watch and left the paper to speak for them, and the paper had been speaking to nobody for two winters, because a man with any sense does not walk a mile and a half into bramble for a purse held by a body that no longer exists. Ita Fulton held the purse. That was the thing the paper did not say and everybody on the landing knew. When the Watch left the annex they left their ledgers, their key gauge, their locker, and the wolf money, and they left it all with the one person in Brackmill who would not spend it, and she had kept it two winters in a drawer under her counter next to the cash for the drowned, because a posting is a posting. I had two crown, and both of them were Lore's, and a tag in my coat that wanted a place to be kept and a warehouse district I could not walk into looking like a man with two crown. So I read the posting twice, and took my shield down off the peg, and went. --- The Road Watch Annex stands above the landing with its door open. I had never been inside it. In eleven years I had walked past that door perhaps a thousand times and it had always been shut, and now it stood open on a room with the ledgers still on the shelves and a brass key gauge on the desk and a locker with its hasp hanging, the way a house looks when the people have gone to a funeral and not come back. The bell rope hung by the door. I did not touch it. The road out went through the far side of the room and out of a second door I would have sworn was a wall.

Granary Court after dark is a different room. The frames that had looked abandoned in the afternoon looked stopped now, which is a worse thing for a frame to look, and the three lengths still tensioned in them hummed when the wind came under the shingle roof, a low note you felt in your teeth before you heard it. Lore had a lamp on the tally bench and another hung on the hook by the store-room door, and between the two lamps the court was a long black corridor of pitch smell and cordage with a woman at one end of it not looking up. --- Granary Court after dark is a different room. The frames that had looked abandoned in the afternoon looked stopped now, which is a worse thing for a frame to look, and the three lengths still tensioned in them hummed when the wind came under the shingle roof, a low note you felt in your teeth before you heard it. Lore had a lamp on the tally bench and another hung on the hook by the store-room door, and between the two lamps the court was a long black corridor of pitch smell and cordage with a woman at one end of it not looking up. "Shut that," she said. "It pulls." I shut the yard door behind me. The note in the frames went down by a hair. "You brought it." I put the tag on the bench beside her lamp. Then, because she had said tag and not tags, I put the mender's agreement down beside it, and the Rider's wax strip, and the crate wax, lifted whole, that I had been carrying since the landing. Four things on a bench. She looked at them the way she looks at a delivery, which is to say she counted them before she touched one. "That is a freight tag." "Whitley's." "I know whose. I have cut for him." She turned it with one finger so the number faced her. She did not pick it up. "This is a length." "The Sealer said a cage." "A cage is a length. Every cage is. You cannot hang a door that swings without knowing the span, and you cannot put a bar across it without knowing the span, and if you want the bar to come out again for the next one you cut the cord to the span and mark the cord and mark the cage the same." She said all of that to the tag, not to me. "Fishing hawsers are the public book. Nobody asks about a hawser."

I went to the wall in good light, the way I had told myself I would, and it did not help. --- I went to the wall in good light, the way I had told myself I would, and it did not help. The drowned names run along the low wall where the barges tie up, at the height of a man's knee, so that you have to crouch to read them, and most people never do. The millhands cut them. Nobody with a seal would pay for stone, so the men who pulled the bodies out of the mill race cut what they had into the wall with whatever they had, and they have been doing it for longer than I have been in Brackmill. The old names at the upstream end are cut deep and square by somebody who knew letters. The newer ones wander. Some are only a first name. Some are a mark. Toward the downstream end, where the wall is still being added to, there are numbers cut beside the names, because the Watch clerk stopped recording the drowned two winters ago and the millhands started copying what they could get off the barge papers instead. I found him in the third course from the end. Tilo Buckley, and a number, the number the same as the one on the tag in my coat. The letters were full of salt. That is what the wall is like. The river is tidal this far down, and the salt comes up with it twice a day and goes back without it. The river throws spray on the wall every day the wind is off the water, and the spray dries, and the salt sits in the cut of the letters and hardens there, white in the grooves, so that a fresh name reads dark and an old one reads white. The mender's name was white to the bottom of every stroke. You could have run a thumbnail along the crust and not reached stone. There was a man working the wall a few paces along. Old, bent, a mason's cap gone the colour of the wall itself, a cold chisel and a wooden mallet, cutting a name I did not look at. He had a bucket of river water beside him and a rag. He was cleaning the salt out of an older name so it could be read again, and then cutting it deeper, and then leaving it for the salt to fill.

I did not go to the wall. --- I did not go to the wall. I want that understood. I did not go to the drowned names that morning. I stood on the landing with the Rider's coin in my coat and the mender's agreement in my hand and I looked at the low wall by the water, and the wall looked back, and I decided that half in advance buys the afternoon. That is a coward's arithmetic. It added up beautifully. --- The crates were where the Rider said, in the lee of the crane ring, under a tarpaulin that had been tied down by somebody who wanted it to look tied down and had not bothered with the knots. Six of them. Barge freight, the ordinary kind, stencilled for the Decent Plate and the salt store and a name I did not know up in Ashcombe. I lifted the tarpaulin and let the rain in and went down the row with my back to the river, which is the side a man comes at you from on a quay, and read the lashings. The first three were Sealhouse wax. Red, stamped, boring. The fourth was black. The same cut-cord mark. Two turns and a nick, pressed into a wax I could have covered with my thumb. The crate was stencilled for the Decent Plate, which is the tavern, which meant nothing on its own, because half the landing's freight goes through the Decent Plate's back door and out the front as supper. I got my knife into the wax and lifted it the way you lift a scab, whole, and put it in my coat beside the Rider's strip, and then I did a thing I am not proud of, because there was a freight tag under the lashing, and it had a number on it, and I took that too. I have recovered stolen property for a living. I know the difference between a man inspecting a consignment and a man stealing from it. The difference is who you can explain it to afterward. I told myself I could explain it to the Sealer. The fifth crate had been split. Not by me. Somebody had put a bar under the lid and opened it and closed it again badly, and the wax on that one was black too, and the crate was empty except for straw and a smell I knew from freight work and did not want to know. Straw that has had a person in it. I put the lid down.