He had never been north of the Ninth Lock in this life.It struck him somewhere about the fifth league, sitting on the cabin roof of a coal barge with his collar up and a dead dog across his feet. He was seventeen. He had lived his whole seventeen years inside the sound of one bell. The other man, the one who had carried frames from Tollenhaven to the Sarthic border, was a thing that he remembered. He was not a thing that these legs had done.They called it the Lockshire. It was canal country, flat and brown under the first hard frosts, with the water lying in it like a ruled line. There was a lock every league. He knew each of them by name before the barge came round the bend. They had all been in his father's talk at supper. Withy Lock. Three Sisters. The Long Pound. He had not expected that to hurt, and it did.Kheshi sat in the bows with her bow-case across her knees and watched the banks. She had not asked why an examiner's errand wanted two of them and a hound. She had asked wha

They went into the Tannery Pits at the turn of the year, in the dark of a short afternoon. Vey's people had gone down two hours ahead of them, by the upper door.Ravel did not hurry. He had read Castor's survey, which was posted with the paper, in a hand like engraving. It said what three descents had found. It did not say what to do about it. He thought that it was the most honest document he had ever seen on that board.It was one hall. The old tanners had dug it under their yards, a hundred paces by sixty, and sunk it with stone vats as big as rooms. There were lime vats, and bark vats, and the deep ones that they had called the drenches. All of them were flooded to the lip with something that was no longer water. Stone walks ran between them. Overhead hung the tanners' gear: beams, and chain hoists, and hooks.There was the mist as well.It lay on the vats waist-deep and stood up between them in walls. It ate the lamp at five paces. It ate sound. Nessa spoke at his elbow, and he s

He woke on his own pallet the next morning feeling like a house that somebody else had moved into.It was the Settling. He had been through it twice in this life, and it had been a tiredness. This was more. Everything in him had been taken down and put back a size larger. Nothing sat where his hands expected it. He reached for the water-jug and knocked it over. He stood up too fast, and two cracked ribs told him so."Sit," said his mother.She had him strapped again before he could argue. She used a strip of sheeting, pulled tight, with her knee in his back. She was two months back at the copper, and she breathed like a girl."A stag," she said. "Under the tanneries.""Yes, Mam.""I'll not ask how big.""No, Mam.""Was anybody killed?""Nobody.""Hm." She tied it off. Her hand rested for a moment on his shoulder blade, flat, as it had rested on him when he was small and feverish. "Then it was well done, whatever it was. Eat something."There was a thing that he had not expected. He fo

The hall was laughing at somebody.He heard it from the steps. It was not the good-natured noise that the wall had made over a boy falling down. It had an edge on it. It was the sound of forty people who have found somebody lower than themselves and mean to enjoy it.It was a fortnight since the Stag. He had sixteen locks, a class with no road in it, and a calendar. He had come up to the board to see what a level thirty-five might be paid to kill."...and forty on arrival! In Dunmarch paper!" That was Garrick Stroud. He had his boots on a bench and a pot in his fist, and he was playing to the room. "Do you know what Dunmarch paper's good for, lads? I'll tell you. It's soft. I'll say that for it."The room roared."It is a writ on the Stormhold treasury, countersigned by the Warden of the Pass." The voice was a woman's, young, and hard as a slammed door. It cut straight through. "It has been honoured for two hundred years. I should not expect a man who robs his own porters to know what

The inn was called the Drover's Rest, and it stood where the north road crossed the Kettle Water by a bridge of three stone arches.It was the stables that were burning. They could see that from the last rise. The inn itself stood whole, with its shutters barred. There were horses picketed in a long line by the water. In the yard, under the eye of two men with crossbows, a dozen people sat in the snow with their hands on their heads."Forty-two," said Kheshi. "They post sentries. They water by sections. They have not touched the ale. Those are not moor thieves. Those are soldiers who have stopped being paid.""We go round," Ravel said."There is no round. It is the bridge, or it is a dozen leagues back to the last ford.""Then it's a dozen leagues."He had counted too. They were five swords and a carter.Maren Calder was looking at the people in the yard.She had not said one word since the rise. Her face had gone still, in a way that he had not seen on it. He understood it a moment t