It gathered itself on the quay, where a harbourmaster would stand.The skin drew in from all over the cove floor like a tablecloth pulled by its middle. It came up off the shingle and out of the lower street. It heaped by the bollards, clear and trembling, twice the height of a man. Things came with it. He saw mooring-chain dragged in over the stones, and the staves of a herring barrel, and a long ragged veil of net. It took them into itself, as a wave takes weed.When it had done there was a figure. It had a chain for a spine and barrel-staves for ribs. It wore the net as a keeper wears his coat, and where its face should have been hung a brass ship's lamp with the glass out. In its left arm it held a slab of roofing slate as broad as a door.It lifted the other arm and pointed up the cliff."Get them back!" Ravel was already shouting it. "Hanne! Off the edge, all of them, back to the road!"The thing spoke. It did not use a voice. The words came

It was Pell who found the boat, and he did it without leaving his chair."You are all thinking like delvers," he said. He had the loft table covered in printed registers, borrowed from his cousin, and he looked happier than Ravel had seen him since his shop burned. "You want to follow it. Lie in the reeds, count the oars. I admire the spirit. But this is the League. A white barge cannot put to sea in the League without being somebody's." He licked a finger and turned a page. "It must have an owner. An owner must be a chartered body. A chartered body has a stated purpose, a bond, and a registered seat, and I have here the Guild's own list of every one of them north of the harbour chain.""And?""And there are four hundred and six, which is why I have been at it since breakfast." He put his gloved finger on a line. "The Hospice of Saint Ysolt, on Tern Isle, in the charge of the Canonry of Solace. Purpose: the care of incurables. One vessel, the Charity. Tern Isle is a rock two days up t

The card came the next morning, on a plate of apricots."Twelve," said Edda, when she had counted them. "So she wants you to notice." She read the card at arm's length. "A lady of Master Daal's acquaintance has arrived in the city and recalls a promise of your company at table. The seventh bell of the evening. I don't recall you promising.""I didn't. He said she'd take it kindly.""That's worse than a promise. You can break a promise." She set the plate down in front of Pim, who had been looking at it with her whole soul. "Go, then. You owe the woman two hundred crowns and a civil word. Wash your neck. And mind what you put your name to. That First Factor of yours had the right of it."He went to find Kheshi before he did anything else.She was on the roof of the sail-loft, fletching. She did not look round when he came up through the hatch."There's a dinner," he said. "At the Sarthic house. The legate.""I heard. Your mother's voice carries.""There'll be a file on the table. I'd b

The company lost its second archer in the Glass Stair, a week after Midsummer, and it was Ravel's fault.He said so to Rusk afterwards. Rusk told him not to be a fool, and that he had better learn the difference between a fault and a cost. The Glass Stair was a stone in the hills behind Carrick, where a party of the third letter had gone down in the spring and not come up. It was seven flights of something like green bottle-glass, with things in the walls. The widows of that party had clubbed together for the fee.They had brought all six out. He had done it by the book he was writing as he went. The dead Lockwatch went forward to lift, since nothing in a wall cares to bite wicker. The living stood behind on the frames. Kheshi went above with her bow and the Cold Harbour lad she had been training, a quick brown boy called Hew. Something had come out of the fourth landing that he had not seen in the survey. Marta had the rank closed up in a breath. He had held the stair-head for the co

"I've that sort of face," Ravel said. "People are always dreaming it. It's very tiresome."It got a laugh, and the table moved on. Sela went back to Tobiah's spectacles. He sat with his hand round a cold cup and did not hear a word of what was said for some time.She had dreamed the Gate Court. She had seen the pillars. She had seen him at thirty, with Dell on his back, in the last hour of a life she had been two years dead in. It had come to her at the turn of the year, in a fever. That was the week he had gone down into a gate-pit to set his Keystone, and the man of thirty-one had stood up in him and torn it in half.Emeric dreamed too. He had said so once, and had not been able to explain it.Something of that other life was leaking through into people who had been near it. He did not know what that meant. He put it with the other things he did not know, and the pile was getting tall.The bag from Brannoch came on a Restday, by a Tollman's boat, wrapped in oilcloth.Pell brought it