Jem’s cousin charged them for the test before she agreed to perform it.
Her name was Liss Tarl, and the apprenticeship yard called her Mistress Tarl when it wanted something. Today it wanted her to approve a week’s worth of badly cut joints. She had made the apprentices leave the joints on a table where everyone entering could see them.
“If I put them away,” she told Iven, “they’ll think the problem went away.”
The table was long, scarred, and crowded with wooden pieces. One joint looked respectable until Iven touched it. The parts separated in his hand.
Liss watched him. “That one belongs to the boy who told me the grain would settle.”
“Did it?”
“Yes. On the floor.”
Her press stood beneath a covered roof with open sides. A broad screw turned through an iron frame, driven by a wheel taller than Iven. A dial showed the load through a spring and a rack of small teeth. Liss had checked the gauge against known weights that morning, and she made Tavin watch her repeat the check before the test.
He counted the weights twice. “I believe you.”
“You don’t have to. That’s the useful part.”
They had brought one intact pin and left the second in a sealed box with Neri’s crew. Liss cleaned the test pin, measured it, recorded both marks, and sketched the head. Iven did the same on a separate sheet. Then she fitted the pin across two supports and lowered the press until the screw touched its center.
A few apprentices gathered at the edge of the roof. Liss allowed them to stay on the condition that nobody spoke while she read the dial. One boy opened his mouth, then closed it and took a step backward.
Tavin stood with his arms folded. Neri stood beside the dial, close enough to read it and far enough not to interfere. Iven held the end of a safety rope attached to a screen between the press and the apprentices. If the pin snapped, the screen would catch most of what came off it.
Liss turned the wheel. The pin bent almost imperceptibly. The dial climbed, its needle trembling as each tooth on the rack engaged.
“That’s half the rated load,” she said.
The apprentices looked at the number. The boy who had stepped backward leaned forward again.
Liss turned the wheel another quarter turn. The pin’s coating whitened along the top. A fine line appeared across it. The dial was still well below the load specified for Cage Seven.
“Stop there?” she asked.
Tavin shook his head. “Can you record it without destroying the gauge?”
“I can record it while destroying the pin.”
“That’ll do.”
She turned the wheel. The coating split with a dry sound. A piece sprang against the screen and fell to the floor. The pin did not break in two; it folded, the middle bulging sideways until the outer sleeve peeled back from the core.
Nobody spoke for several seconds.
Liss backed the screw away and lifted the pin with tongs. “That’s enough. If your delivery record promises the rated load you gave me, this is unsuitable.”
“Can you say when the fault entered it?” Iven asked.
“No. I can say the pin in my hand failed this test. If you ask whether someone made it this way, I can show you the join. If you ask who made it this way, you’ll have to bring me a person.”
Tavin let out a breath through his missing teeth. “Fair.”
One of the apprentices pointed at the peeled sleeve. “Would a better one break?”
“Eventually,” Liss said. “Everything breaks eventually. The point is to know what you’re asking it to hold before you put people underneath.”
The boy seemed disappointed by the answer. Iven had once been disappointed by the same thing.
Liss wrote her results in a ledger. She gave one copy to Tavin, kept one in the yard, and pinned a third beneath a glass plate at the office door. The names of everyone present went at the bottom. Tavin paid her from a purse that looked too light afterward, and she counted the coins without pretending the work had been a favor.
As they left, Neri touched the page in Tavin’s hand. “There’s our first witness.”
“Not the first,” he said. “Dorel’s worker was in the cage when the pin failed. The passengers were waiting outside.”
“First witness with a calibrated press.”
“Ah. Those are rarer.”
They parted at the stairs. Tavin went to warn the other captains about the shipment. Iven expected Neri to head back to the yard, but she caught his sleeve.
“Come for supper.”
He looked at her hand on his coat. She released it immediately, which made him wish he had looked somewhere else.
“Is that an invitation?”
“No. It’s an order. We’re testing whether you can be fed without trying to repair the table.”
“Your table needs repair?”
“It has survived six years without you.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
She pointed toward the street. “Bring bread. Proper bread, not the kind that’s mostly ambition.”
He spent the afternoon on a leaking joint for a laundry two levels above the yard. The owner offered to pay him in folded shirts. Iven suggested money. She countered with one shirt and less money. They reached an agreement, and he came away with a clean blue shirt that was almost the right size and enough coin to buy a round loaf from the bakery near Rung Gate.
The gate was open. People crossed it without looking at the mechanism above their heads, and he was glad of that. A cart loaded with baskets passed a woman pushing two children on a board with wheels. One child had a red ribbon in her hair; the other held a stick and announced that the board was a warship. The woman told him the warship would have to stop for turnips.
At Neri’s yard the roof had been patched over the worst leak. Jem had done it with a strip of canvas and three pieces of wood that clearly belonged to different projects. The rain buckets were now a respectable distance from the table.
Dessa took the bread from Iven at the door. “You’ve bought your way in.”
“I was told it was compulsory.”
“That’s what bought means.”
Neri had pushed two benches together. A pot of bean stew stood in the center, surrounded by chipped bowls and a plate of sliced roots. Jem sat at one end with Liss, who had apparently come for the meal after swearing that the press had exhausted her interest in the family for the day. Brin Cal was there too, leaning over the table and arguing that a courier needed two desserts because he walked twice as far as ordinary people.
“You don’t walk twice as far,” Dessa said. “You walk the same distance and then come back because you forgot something.”
“That is twice as far.”
“It isn’t a qualification.”
Neri ladled stew into a bowl and set it in front of Iven. “Sit before the bread disappears.”
He sat. The stew was hot, peppery, and better than anything he had cooked for himself that week. He said so, and Neri looked suspicious.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you saying that?”
“Because it’s good.”
Dessa put a hand over her heart. “He’s learned manners.”
“Only the one,” Iven said. “Don’t make me use it twice.”
They ate. Conversation moved from the press to a neighbor’s leaking bath, then to whether Jem had actually repaired a roof if it still leaked somewhere else. Jem said that if a roof leaked only where he had not touched it, his work was beyond reproach. Liss said that by the same measure a cook could claim a meal was excellent because the pot had not caught fire.
Brin asked Iven whether the graft made food taste different. Iven told him it made beans taste like beans, which was disappointing but dependable.
“Could you repair a spoon and make it feed you?” Brin asked.
“No.”
“What about a better spoon?”
“Still no.”
“That’s a poor advertisement for restoration.”
Neri pushed the bread toward Brin. “Eat before you discover a way to charge it rent.”
A gust of wind came through the open end of the yard and made the lamp lean. Beyond the rail, buildings rose in braced steps, their windows lit at uneven heights. Mercy’s slow movement traveled through the deck, too familiar for most people to mention. The stew shifted in the pot without spilling.
Iven watched Neri catch the pot by its handle. She did it without breaking her conversation with Dessa. His own hand had moved toward it a fraction later.
“You’re slow,” she said.
“I wanted to see whether you needed help.”
“And?”
“I’ll let you know.”
She smiled into her bowl. He had seen her smile before, usually at somebody else’s expense. This one was smaller, and it stayed with him longer than it had any reason to.
After the meal, Liss and Jem argued over the best way to reinforce the bench. Brin offered to fetch more nails and was given a list so that he could not return with sweets instead. Dessa took the bowls to a basin. Iven helped without being asked, drying each bowl with a cloth that became wetter with every bowl.
“You’re making them worse,” Dessa observed.
“I’m distributing the water evenly.”
“An important civic service.”
Neri came to the basin carrying the empty pot. “Leave him alone. He brought bread.”
Dessa handed him the cloth. “I hope it was expensive.”
When the others had drifted back toward the table, Neri leaned against the workbench. “Liss said the pin wasn’t merely worn.”
“No.”
“Someone could have bought cheap stock and put Krail’s mark over it.”
“Or someone at Krail’s could have done it. Or Sable could have sold it that way to somebody else. We know what it is. We don’t know the route.”
“That’s why I asked you here.”
“The stew was a trap.”
“The stew was excellent. Pay attention.”
She picked up a scrap of paper from beneath a mug and unfolded it. A list of deliveries had been written in a neat hand, with dates and quantities. Beside one entry was a small ink blot shaped like a squashed insect.
“Dessa’s sister works at the loading house,” Neri said. “She keeps her own notes because the official book keeps going missing. She saw Krail’s wagon there before the cage shipment. Sable’s wagon too.”
“Did she see the pins change hands?”
“She saw a crate moved from one wagon to the other. She didn’t open it.”
“Would she say that in front of someone who can record it?”
Neri’s gaze shifted toward Dessa, who was laughing at something Brin had said. “She might. But she’s got a child and an employer who can decide she doesn’t need work. I won’t ask her to stand alone in a room with Krail.”
“Neither would I.”
“I know. I’m telling you because you’ll want a clean answer.”
“I want a safe answer.”
“And if there isn’t one?”
He took a moment. “Then we make the danger belong to more people than her.”
Neri studied him. “That’s a good answer.”
“I’m having an unusually good evening.”
She folded the paper again. “The loading house has a store attached. Shipments wait there before they go to Krail’s yard. If we can find the lot records, we can ask her about a specific crate instead of asking her to remember every wagon she saw.”
“Can we ask the storekeeper?”
“We can. Krail pays him.”
“Then he may have a strong professional interest in telling us nothing.”
“Or in telling Krail we asked.”
Iven looked at the list. The entry beside the ink blot named a loading berth and a date, but not a destination. It was enough to begin and not enough to prove anything.
Dessa came over, wiping her hands on her trousers. “My sister says the storekeeper leaves after evening count. There’s a side door for damaged goods. It doesn’t always latch.”
Neri raised an eyebrow. “You said she wouldn’t stand alone in front of Krail.”
“She won’t. She didn’t say we had to be polite to his door.”
Iven imagined the warehouse: high shelves, dark passages, and the sort of lock a person noticed only after it shut behind him. He could also imagine the pin folding under Liss’s press. The second image was more persuasive.
“We don’t take the only copy,” he said. “If there’s a record, we copy the relevant lines. If we find parts, we leave them where they are unless we can show where they came from.”
Dessa nodded. “And no one mentions my sister until she agrees.”
“Agreed.”
Brin appeared beside them with the nails. “I heard the word door.”
“You heard nothing,” Neri said.
“I heard a lot more than that.”
“You’re not coming.”
He looked affronted. “You haven’t even told me where.”
“That saves time.”
Iven caught Neri looking at him again. This time he did not pretend he had been looking elsewhere. She lifted one shoulder, as if to say that the decision belonged to both of them now.
He touched the folded list. “Tomorrow evening,” he said. “After the count.”
From the table, Jem called, “If you’re planning a crime, at least bring the bread over first.”
Neri took the loaf and cut him a generous slice. “We’re planning a conversation.”
“With a door?”
“With whoever’s on the other side of it.”