As Len stepped out of the intake office into the cold, drizzling mist of Depot Two, a heavy, iron-clad gauntlet clamped onto his right shoulder with enough crushing force to grind the collarbone directly against his shoulder blade.
‘Hold your ground, hauler,’ a harsh, gravelly voice barked directly into his ear.
Before Len could shift his balance, a huge physical mass slammed into his flank. He was spun wildly around and driven back against the damp limestone wall of the sally port, the rough stonework scraping through the wool of his coat. His boots skidded across the greasy flat stone slabs. But Surefoot engaged automatically through his ankles, absorbing the impact and preventing his knees from buckling beneath him.
Standing eighteen inches from his face was Inspector Korst—the chief of security for Gate Depot Two.
Korst was a massive, scarred veteran of sixty winters, with shoulders like an iron anvil and a broken, flattened nose that whistled with every breath. He wore a blackened steel brigandine vest studded with copper rivets, heavy leather vambraces strapped over his forearms. A wide copper gorget that covered his throat. In his left hand, Korst held an iron bullseye lantern fitted with a thick, faceted emerald glow-stone lens.
With a sharp, metal flick of his thumb, Korst snapped the lantern’s brass shutter wide open.
A packed, blinding cone of cold green light blasted directly into Len’s face.
The glare was painful. The glow-stone crystal packed the copper-doped flame into an intense, spectral beam that burned Len’s eyes, instantly stripping away his night vision and replacing the courtyard with swirling vortexes of violet and emerald afterimages. Tears of reflex chemical irritation welled in Len’s eyes, stinging the wind-burned skin of his cheeks.
Inspector Korst was the kind of man who had made a lifelong career out of the office terror that flourished beneath the sky shield. He wasn’t a thinker. He didn’t draft emergency edicts or calculate heat-powered constants. He was a headsman who wore an official copper badge. That man derived huge, gut-deep pleasure from breaking the bones of independent carriers who had forgotten to bow when entering a town gate.
His heavy leather vambraces were heavy with riveted iron strips, stained dark with dried sweat and old machine oil. His left thumb, scarred by an old crossbow misfire, had no nail. The tip was a blunt, calloused knob of scar tissue that pressed into the side of the lantern casing with iron stiffness.
The glow-stone light hissed with a high, irritating whine, smelling of spark-charged air and burning copper paste.
Len felt his eyes burning under the beam. His Long Breath controlled his heart rate, preventing the surge of fight-or-flight rush from causing his knees to knock or his breath to hitch. But the physical assault on his sight nerves was undeniable. The intense, monochromatic green light bypassed the normal pupil contractions, piercing deep into the rods and cones, leaving blinding purple scotomas that danced across his visual field whenever he tried to focus on Korst’s features.
‘You’re very light on your feet for a northern timber carter, Vey,’ Korst growled. He stepped so close that the stale stench of raw onion, cheap grain spirits, and tobacco washed over Len’s face. ‘And your fingers have an awful lot of fresh copying ink on the knuckles for a boy who claims he only pulls an ash handcart.’
Korst’s right hand moved. The heavy, blackened steel blade of an eight-inch trench dagger slid from its leather sword sheath at his hip. The checker didn’t raise the blade to Len’s throat. He brought the flat of the heavy iron steel up and tapped it with rhythmic, threatening malice against Len’s left breast pocket. The exact spot where his black route book and Cira’s dispatch rested against his ribs.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The cold steel struck the calfskin cover through the leather of his coat. It sent a sharp, icy tremor through Len’s chest bone.
‘Let me explain the law of the canopy, boy,’ Korst hissed. He leaned in until his scarred, bristled cheek was two inches from Len’s ear. ‘You have a conditional visitor’s voucher good for exactly twenty-four hours. That voucher exists solely at the discretion of the Gate Security Board. It exists so long as you keep your mouth shut, sleep in the assigned foreign barracks on Gate Street, and walk out through the canopy gate tomorrow morning when the outward lane opens.’
Korst twisted the trench dagger, the iron guard pressing hard against Len’s ribs.
‘If I catch you asking one more question about where those crates of cinchona are going,’ Korst continued, each syllable dropping like a lead slug onto stone, ‘or if I find one scrap of town bookkeeping or warehouse inventory copied onto your person, I revoke your visitor’s pass on the spot.’
Behind Korst, Bram Ash stepped forward, his iron staff held horizontally across his chest. ‘The boy has his discharge token, Checker,’ Bram said, his voice flat and warning. ‘He signed the indemnity release with Vane. Malan cleared him for the guest barracks.’
Korst didn’t look at Bram. His cold, hungry eyes remained locked on Len’s squinting, tear-filled face.
‘You know what happens to an unbonded foreigner with a revoked transit permit, Vey?’ Korst asked softly. ‘We don’t give you an escort back to Oakhaven. We don’t write a polite letter to your sister. We put an iron collar around your neck, hand you a sixteen-pound sledgehammer, and march you down to the midnight claim barracks beneath the Quarry pit. You spend the rest of your life breaking limestone in the water drain pits until your lungs rot out with stone dust.’
Korst’s trench dagger was a brutal weapon. An eight-inch three-sided spike of blackened hard steel, forged in the Quarry armory for close-quarters fighting in narrow drainage tunnels. The blade had no cutting edge. It was ground to an acute, needle-like point designed to punch through padded leather tunics and puncture a man’s subclavian artery before he could shout for help.
The cold point rested directly over Len’s left lung. It pressed through his wool coat, through his linen shirt, until Len could feel the hard steel dimpling the skin over his fourth rib.
‘I know what you’re, Vey,’ Korst whispered, his yellow teeth catching the emerald lantern light. ‘You’re one of those northern postal bastards who thinks because you have an outside transit bond, you can walk through our gates and spy on our supply lines. You think we don’t know who your father was? Deren Vey was an agitator and a saboteur. He spent three days filling the heads of our quarrymen with treason before we dumped him down the central chute. If I see your face in this depot after eight o’clock, I won’t waste time taking you to Malan. I will drive this iron spike through your chest bone and toss your body into the coke ovens.’
Len kept his eyes wide, his mouth slack, his hands trembling with calculated weakness.
He didn’t let the hatred behind his ribs reach his eyes. He had learned from his father that when dealing with an armed dog, you don’t bare your teeth. You let the dog believe you’re already broken, wait until the chain goes slack. Then walk through the gate when the dog is sleeping.
Korst shoved the flat of the dagger against Len’s chest with sudden, bone-shaking violence, rattling the boy’s skull against the stone wall.
Len didn’t resist. He dropped his chin. That let his eyes go wide and hollow with feigned terror. He allowed his shoulders to slump and his knees to tremble in visible, submissive cowardice.
‘Yes, Checker,’ Len gasped, his voice cracking with convincing adolescent panic. ‘I understand. I just want to go to the barracks. I have my lodging token.’
Korst stared at the cowering boy for five seconds, searching for any flicker of northern defiance. Seeing only a scared, shaking hauler clutching his chest, the checker sneered with disgust.
‘Get this northern garbage out of my yard, Bram,’ Korst spat. It slid his trench dagger back into its sheath with a dry rasp of leather. ‘If I see his face outside the guest hostel after eight o’clock, shoot him.’
Korst snapped the lantern shutter shut. He plunged the alley back into cold, rotten-egg darkness. Then he strode away across the wet cobblestones toward the guardhouse.
Len stood against the wall, blinking away the purple blind spots in his vision, feeling his route book safe against his ribs. The checker thought he had scared a boy into submission. In reality, he had merely confirmed that the Survey Board was scared of what was written inside that book.
The cold damp of the limestone sally port seeped through his coat, chilling his shoulders where Korst’s iron-clad gauntlet had bruised the flesh. Len took two slow, measured breaths under Long Breath. He felt the sharp sting in his collarbone subside into a dull, manageable ache. In his inner pocket, his father’s cracked brass bell lay silent beneath its wool muffler, unharmed by the checker’s rough assault. He stepped away from the stonework, planting his boots into the center gravel of the lane, his Surefoot carrying him into the dark.