At dusk the tide drove black salt water back into the drains. Hundreds of dockers, fishmongers, and hired blades crowded the walks at Slipway Seven. Their voices rose over the water like angry hornets.
The twenty-two-foot crocodile hung from chains at the city weighing frame. Four guild appraisers ran brass rulers over the body. The hide lay clean and white under the belly. There were no burns in it, and the skull was whole apart from a small hole in the head plate.
“One puncture!” a harpooner shouted from the top of a barrel. “Look at the neck. What kind of needle leaves a hole that small?”
The first offers at the weighing frame had gone past thirty-eight mid-grade stones. Hong kept the spent needle in his coat. He told the appraisers he’d bring the hide to the formal auction under the aqueduct in two nights’ time. Three leather guilds were nearly fighting on the pier.
Two hundred paces away, water hissed out of Drainage Pipe Nine into the ditch. The air smelled of vinegar and rotten hide. Nobody had come there to look at the crocodile.
Pei Jing walked along the retaining wall with his hat low and his ash staff tapping the stones. He saw no scrying light around the mouth of the pipe. The mud held two old sets of tannery workers’ tracks and the more recent print of Gu’s cloth shoe. Pei Jing went into the ditch, drew an oiled pigskin bag from the recess, and…
