Three miles south of the tidal drain tube. There, the underwater raised stone road rose toward the salt-marsh bluffs, sat Toll-Post Two.
Locals called it the Hanging Iron.
It was an ugly, brutal construction. A high timber tower perched upon an artificial earthen mound that dominated the narrow corduroy bypass road. Suspended from a forty-foot pine crane arm that projected out over the track hung a huge iron farm rake. A heavy three-sided frame of six-inch oak timbers, studded with forty forged iron spikes, each nine inches long and barbed like fish hooks. By means of a balance weight winch and a trip-rope operated from the tower guard-room, the court guards could drop the five-hundred-pound spiked frame onto the roadway in less than two seconds, instantly crushing any wagon or team of horses that tried to pass without paying.
Beside the track, trapped behind a heavy timber barricade, sat eight refugee freight carts from the lower salt-pans.
The wagon drivers had unhitched their beasts, tethering three gaunt mules and six oxen to the scrub willows in the ditch. A woman in a torn wool gown was boiling a kettle of muddy water over a small fire of dried dung. Four children huddled under a greasy wagon tilt, their faces pale and hollow-eyed with hunger.
Tomas walked down the line of stranded carts before stepping up to the barricade.
The misery of the commoners was written in the cold, greasy mud that covered every wheel, every spoke, and every hem of their clothing. An elderly woman sat on an upturned salt cask, her bare feet wrapped in rags, trying to coax a spark from a damp piece of charred linen with an iron striker. Beside her, a young father was binding the splintered felloe of his wagon wheel with wet rawhide strips, his breath wheezing with the rattling cough of marsh ague.
“How long have you been eating salt-oats, mother?” Tomas asked gently, stopping beside the woman’s fire bowl.
The old woman looked up with watery, bloodshot eyes. “Five days, master porter. We came from the lower pan at Willow Reach. The trade ring took six bushels of our fine pan-salt at the outer ditch for ‘bridge entry fees.’ Now this one on the tower wants five silver crowns to let’s cross to the high road. My boy has four silver coins in his pocket. Four silver coins doesn’t buy five crowns, does it, master?”
“No, mother,” Tomas said, his voice tightening. “It doesn’t. But you won’t be paying five crowns today.”
Tomas, Nessa, and Sile arrived at the barricade at the third bell of the afternoon.
Tomas had changed into a dry wool undershirt from his pack. But his leather boots were still damp and stiff. His left forearm throbbed with a persistent, dull ache from the cold water of the drain tube. He kept his satchel strapped across his chest, the approved copy of the Year 017 Causeway Bond resting safely inside its lead-lined sleeve.
At the barricade stood three trade ring hired blades, armed with short iron-shod bills and heavy lead-weighted clubs.
Above them, on the narrow high walkway of the timber tower, leaned Bailiff Gault. The trade ring’s second-in-command, a tall, gaunt man with greasy yellow hair, a missing right eye covered by a dirty linen patch. An unbuttoned buffalo-hide vest showing a dirty linen shirt stained with wine and grease.
“Hold on the road,” one of the hired blades barked. He lowered his hooked pruning blade across the timbers. “Nobody passes the Hanging Iron without an axle-token from the court guard.”
Tomas didn’t stop until he reached the timber barrier. He looked at the eight mired carts, then up at the spiked iron farm rake swinging gently in the cold wind twenty feet above his head.
“Why are these carts detained?” Tomas asked, his voice carry clearly up to the narrow high walkway.
Court guard Gault spat over the railing, the yellow glob landing in the mud three inches from Tomas’s boot toe. “Unpaid bypass upkeep. Five silver crowns per wagon, plus two silver coins a head for livestock clearance. The wagon drivers have thirty coppers between the lot of them. So they sit.”
“These carts are carrying salt and dried fish,” Tomas said. “Perishable common freight. Under Section Eight of the Sovereign Highway Act, no commercial cargo may be detained in distraint for more than seventy-two in a row hours without a formal hearing before a district judge.”
Gault laughed—a dry, rattling wheeze that ended in a wet cough. “You must be Reed. Taggart sent a courier down the levee two hours ago. Told me an uncalled porter was walking around the mud with a land-mapper’s lath, playing at being a town elder.”
Gault leaned over the rail, his single eye fixing on Tomas with cold, contemptuous malice. “Look up, boy. You see that timber crane? You see those spikes? That’s the law on the Silt Road. You take one step past that cross-bar, and I’ll trip the winch. Let’s see what your little thick parchment papers look like when they have four inches of forged iron punched through the middle.”
Nessa had walked the base of the timber mound, using her folding six-foot rod to measure the slope of the earthen breastwork. She dropped her plumb-bob three times against the corner king-post of the gate tower. Her eyes tracked the lead weight as it swung in the biting wind.
“Look at the foundation timber, Tomas,” Nessa called out, her voice loud enough to carry across the barricade to the hired blades. “They used green spruce logs for the lower mud-sills. Unpeeled spruce. The bark is rotting away under the soil, and the sapwood is weeping brown water. In another month of autumn rains, the fungal rot will hollow out the core of that left king-post. A two-horse cart bumping into the gate-post would bring the whole platform down into the ditch.”
The hired blades shifted uncomfortably, one of them glancing up at the heavy timbers above his head with sudden worry. Hired men hated bad carpentry. They knew that when a gate tower collapsed, the court guard was safe in his warm office. Meanwhile, the men under the roof were crushed under four tons of falling pine.
Tomas didn’t look up at the farm rake. He looked at the ground beneath the barricade.
Beside the timber gate, half-buried in the corduroy logs, lay an iron drag-chain. It was connected to a series of underwater iron eye-bolts driven directly into the dark rock slabs of the ancient raised stone road four feet below the mud.
“Nessa,” Tomas said quietly, not taking his eyes off the court guard.
Nessa stepped forward, holding her sound horn to her ear, pointing the flare toward the foundation timbers of the gate tower. She listened for five seconds, then looked at Tomas and nodded once.
“The tower isn’t anchored into the bedrock,” Nessa said. Her voice carried the crisp, technical care that made the hired blades glance uneasily at one another. “It’s built on top of a loose spoil bank. The timber stacked timber frame has settled four inches to the west. If you drop that farm rake from forty feet, the dynamic recoil on the crane arm will exert two thousand foot-pounds of sideways twisting force on the rear king-post. The entire tower will slide twelve feet into the salt ditch.”
Gault’s single eye widened slightly, his grip tightening on the narrow high walkway railing. “She’s bluffing.”
“Nessa Vale doesn’t bluff about mechanics, Guard,” Tomas said. He stepped up until his chest touched the timber cross-bar. “She was an apprentice land-mapper on the West Bridge in Bellwether. She knows exactly how much strain timber can take before it shears.”
He drew the duplicate copy of the Causeway Maintenance Bond from his satchel. He held it high so the crimson silk cord and the heavy lead bulla caught the gray light.
“I’m Tomas Reed, licensed carrier and custodian of the Sovereign Causeway Bond LC-044-DELTA,” Tomas declared, his voice ringing across the marsh. “This road isn’t a private bypass. It’s the Great Delta Causeway, chartered under the King’s Peace as an unending free highway. By power of this bond, I order you to raise this barricade and grant free, unhindered passage to these eight carts.”
“And if I refuse?” Gault snarled, his hand reaching toward the trip-lever on the crane winch.
“If you refuse,” Tomas said, his voice dropping into cold, lethal stillness, “I’ll log your refusal under the felony provisions of the Highway Robbery Act of Year 002. And when the maritime patrol cutter reaches Sunken Pilings tomorrow morning, you’ll hang from your own crane arm.”
For five long, painful seconds, the only sound was the whistling of the salt wind through the hanging farm rake spikes.
The three hired blades at the barricade glanced up at Gault, their hands hesitating on their weapons. They were hired thugs, paid three silver coins a day to bully starving wagon drivers. They weren’t soldiers, and they had no desire to die for an un-chartered timber tower that might collapse under their own feet.
Gault’s hand hovered an inch from the trip-lever. His face was mottled gray and purple with rage. But his single eye flicked from Tomas’s unblinking gaze to Sile Rook’s massive hooked pruning blade, and then down to the unbending lead bulla of the royal charter.
“Let them pass,” Gault spat, turning his back on the railing. “Let the mud-rats go through. But don’t try to bring Miller’s barge through the Black Shingle, Reed. You won’t find wood down there. You’ll find cold iron.”
The hired blades hastily unlatched the heavy oak cross-bar. It dragged the barrier aside into the ditch.
Tomas stepped back, turning to the wagon drivers. “Hitch your beasts,” Tomas said gently to the woman with the kettle. “The road is open all the way to the shell mound.”