Sect Year 4 · seventh month · day 5 · Serai, the north post-house
Serai had been built on the mouth of three rivers. Every street in it was a canal, or had been one before the canals silted and somebody laid planks over the mud. The water ran brown between walls of black ledger-stone. Bridges crossed it every few paces, and at every gate hung a weight on an iron hook, a stone or a bronze pan or a block of grey lead, and no two of the hooks matched.
Some were rusted through and some were polished bright. Lin came up from the salt-wharf with his pack on his shoulder and found himself counting them the way he counted everything, and then stopping, because the numbers gave him nothing he could use.
The salt-wharf had been loud. Wagon drivers shouted to one another over the heads of the crowd. The salt-barrows went up a stone stair one after another with their wheels grinding, and at the bottom of the stair the water came up brown and smelled of tar and river mud. Lin had stood a while at the edge of it with the cord on his wrist and the strip of sacking on his palm. He watched the barrows, until a porter told him to move or be run over.
