There is a wall on Chartery Row where the unhired stand.Fighters go first, at first bell, while the day is cool. Then healers. Then anyone with a bow. The porters are taken last, like the bottom apples in a barrel, by whoever has left it too late to be particular.Ravel stood there on the sixteenth morning with a borrowed frame on his back and a strip of stamped leather on its strap.The leg held. It ached in the wet, and it would for a month, but it held. He had eaten at his mother's table for fourteen nights and felt nearly like a person.His tag drew looks."Summoner?" A big lad in new mail, reading it aloud for his friends. "What d'you summon?""Nothing yet.""Then you're a porter with airs."They laughed and moved on. He let them. He had been laughed at on this wall by better men.It was past second bell when the three came down the Row arguing.He knew the girl. He had watched her draw Warrior while her whole street roared. She was broad in the shoulder and brown from the found

The Lockwatch man came on at first bell with a pie in his hand, and nearly dropped it."That's the one off my slate.""Yes.""He was down the stair. In the east niche." The man looked at the body, sitting decently against the entry wall with its hands folded. He looked at the boy beside it: narrow as a lath, soaked to the thigh, grey with a night's work. Then he looked, with a countryman's slow care, at the stone between the door and the stair, where there was not one drag mark."You never carried him.""Not very well," Ravel said. It had the advantage of being true."Who's paying?""Nobody.""Then you're a fool, lad." But he had taken out his chalk. He wiped UNCLAIMED off the slate with the side of his fist and wrote in its place: HOLT, D. ARCHER, E. BROUGHT UP. "There's a mother, over the Ropewalk. She's been to this door twice." He did not look round. "Brought up by who, shall I say?"Ravel thought of a priest who liked to know things, and of a slate that all Lowlock walked past."

"I can't bring you the truth," Ravel said. "So I've brought you nothing."Ilse Varga considered him, standing there in the mud of the drill yard with the waster in his hand."As agreed," she said. She did not sound displeased; if anything she sounded like a woman ticking a line in a ledger. "Then hear me. A guard that nobody teaches is a question walking about on two legs. Until you can answer it, you'll not be seen asking it. Where there are eyes, you fight like a Lockwatch recruit. Badly. Do you understand me?""Yes, Examiner.""Keep the other for the dark."He kept it for the dark. There was a good deal of dark to keep it in.He went down into the Sluiceworks every night that week, at second bell, when the water was lowest. He took one of Pell's eels with him. It had a paper tag on a string through its gill: LOCKLURKER. SLUICEWORKS, FL. 1. KILLED R. ASHLOCK. That scrap of paper was the difference between a trade and a crime, and he checked the knot twice before he laid his hand on

Forty crowns was eight hundred locks. A porter on a third-share with three novices cleared, in a good week, six.He had done that sum on the walk to the wall, and again standing at it, and it came out each time to the same thing: two and a half years, if he neither ate nor slept. His mother had three winters. It was the sort of arithmetic that makes a man look up when a stranger says his name."Ashlock. You're Brandt's frame."The man was about thirty, and handsome in a thick way, with a brass gull pinned to the shoulder of a good leather coat. His tag said WARRIOR. D. He had the easy loudness of someone who has never in his life been the smallest person in a room."They say her three have come up whole four times running, and that it's none of their doing." He grinned. "I like a lucky porter. Mine's put his foot through a plank and broke his ankle, the fool. Garrick Stroud. The Brass Gulls. We've a cull on the third floor, forty locks posted, and I pay a true third."A third of forty

The eels had stopped paying.He had felt it for a week before he understood it. The Writ was a clerk, and a clerk will not pay full price for the same errand for ever. Each score of Locklurkers was worth a little less than the score before. By the twenty-eighth night he could have filled a barrow with them and not moved the line by a hair.So he went down to the second floor to find the thing that led them.He took three Husks. He could hold three now and have change left over: eels on a line of will, waxed until they shone, each with Pell's lead tag through the gill. They went ahead of him along the flooded culvert like hounds that did not sniff at anything.The Lockjaw was where a Lockjaw always was, at the foot of the weir, where the water ran fastest and the food came to it.It was twice the length of the others and as thick as his waist. It did not ambush. It breached. It came clean out of the race in a hoop of teeth, took the first Husk out of the air, and bit it in half.Good,