Bram Ash knew the patrol rosters by heart. That was because his own initials were penned into the margin of the original supply order dockets five years ago.
He had sat behind the supply boss’s counter in the southern guardhouse. Just then, the Survey Board issued the decree to cut the civilian watch. The country treasury was running low on silver florins. But the sky shield needed nonstop moving upkeep. The solution proposed by Chancellor Morn and signed by Magistrate Halden Pell had been hailed as a triumph of office economy. Replace living town guards with bonded claimant manifestations.
A bound double was an ideal public servant. It didn’t sleep. It didn’t eat turnip mash or drink clean water. It didn’t strike for higher wages, complain about the damp in its boots, or join secret mutual-aid societies in the tram basements. It couldn’t be bribed with a sack of flour or a flask of winter liquor.
It simply walked. It carried out its programmed sharp-angled loop with the unswerving, clockwork fidelity of an iron piston, pacing the hemlock platforms until the friction of the gravel wore the leather of its soles down to the stitching. When that happened, the Survey depot didn’t buy new shoes from the cobblers’ guild. A repair crew simply held the double down on a workbench and drove three-inch hobnails directly through the horn of the dead heel into the dried sinew above.
