The counting room of Warehouse Number Four was furnished with the vulgar luxury of a river factor who had grown fat on town emergency contracts. A great hearth of polished snake-like marble blazed with imported sea-coal. It cast a greasy warmth across heavy dark wood desks, brass-bound deed boxes, and walls paneled in varnished fir.
Tavin Doss sat behind a massive desk of burled walnut, wearing a sleeveless doublet of plum-colored velvet lined with marten fur. He was fifty-five years old, with small, wet eyes set deep into doughy cheeks, a heavy double chin. A gold canine tooth that caught the firelight whenever he sneered.
Beside him stood Gid, his chief clerk. A thin, ferret-faced man with ink-stained fingers and an ivory-handled penknife tucked behind his ear. Four private warehouse guards with iron-shod cudgels stood against the paneled wall, their arms crossed over their chests.
Tomas Reed walked into the room without removing his wool cap. His boots left tracks of gray wharf mud across the Turkish carpet. Nessa Vale followed close behind, her land-mapper’s notebook tucked under her left arm.
“Who let this dock scum into my office?” Doss roared, slamming a silver sand-shaker onto the walnut desk with a violent crash. “Gid! Have the yard dogs lost their teeth? Throw this porter out the back gate!”
Tomas didn’t step back. He reached into his haversack, pulled out the heavy thick parchment copy of Docket LC-040-GRAIN, and laid it flat in the center of Doss’s desk, right between the silver inkstand and a dish of candied walnuts.
“Statutory Demand for Physical Inventory under Section Fourteen of the Common Carriage Act,” Tomas said. His voice dropped into the quiet, terrifying rhythm of an unbending cart driver. “Cargo: Four hundred sacks of upland wheat and barley consigned to this depot in forty-two. We demand immediate access to Bin Seven to verify volume, moisture content, and tare weight.”
Doss blinked, his doughy face turning the color of skimmed milk before flushing a furious, apoplectic purple. He glanced down at the official archive stamp of Chief Scroll-keeper Vane, his gold tooth flashing as his mouth twisted into a snarl.
“Are you out of your mind, boy?” Doss sneered, leaning forward over his belly. “That grain is subject to an eight-hundred-and-forty-crown town dock-wait debt claim! The Court of Claims attached that cargo thirty-nine years ago! Until the Weavers’ League deposits eight hundred and forty silver crowns in my strongbox, not a single grain leaves that bin!”
Tomas leaned forward, resting both palms on the walnut timber, and activated Read the Record.
The amber slate flared across his field of vision. Its light showed the ledger resting open on Gid’s counting slope five feet away. The numbers on the page began to shift and separate—the recent fraudulent entries peeling away to expose the underlying truth:
“You haven’t had four hundred sacks of wheat in Bin Seven since thirty-two, Doss,” Tomas said, his voice echoing off the paneled walls with clean, steady care. “On the fourth of spring, Year Thirty-Two, you sold sixty sacks to the High Ward military bakery for one hundred and twenty silver crowns. On the tenth of autumn, Year Thirty-Six, you sold another eighty sacks to private distillers in the West Reach. You replaced the weight with thirty tons of crushed river shale and damp brewery hulls.”
Gid’s penknife slipped from his fingers, clattering loudly against the inkstand. The clerk stared at Tomas as if he were looking at a ghost.
“How could you know that?” Gid whispered, his face turning gray as animal fat.
“Silence, you fool!” Doss screamed, leaping from his chair with unexpected agility, his velvet doublet straining across his gut. He turned on Tomas, his spittle spraying across the thick parchment docket. “Get out of my warehouse! You have no legal standing, no court warrant, and no rights on this wharf! If you set foot in this yard again, I’ll have the Harbor Watch throw you into the deep channel with your mouth full of river mud! Cudgelers! Clear the room!”
The four guards stepped forward, raising their leaded cudgels.
Tomas didn’t flinch. He picked up his thick parchment docket, folded it cleanly into his leather haversack, and looked Doss dead in the eye.
“The dyer’s yard meets at sundown, Doss,” Tomas said quietly. “Tell your cudgelers to sharpen their sticks. You’re going to weigh that bin on an honest scale.”
Tomas and Nessa walked out through the warehouse gates into the cold drizzle of the South Basin. The four guards followed them to the threshold, muttering curses and banging their cudgels against the timber wooden wall.
At the gate, Rowan and Leth were waiting. He leaned against the timber wagon with forty South Ward lightermen and wagon drivers gathered silently behind them.
Before stepping clear of the yard threshold, Tomas paused by the heavy cedar scale-post bolted beside the counting-house door and struck an official white chalk cross into the recessed tally board where public audit notices were needed by statute to be posted. Nessa stood beside him in the drizzle. She opened her brass-bound field ledger to record the exact minute of service—twelve-fourteen past noon—and took the thumb-marks of both Rowan and Leth upon the duplicate service return so that Gid couldn’t later swear before the Bond Court that the carrier had never presented the writ. Up at the bay window of the counting room, Gid’s pale, narrow face appeared behind the leaded glass, wildly pulling the heavy green baize curtains shut while Doss’s voice echoed inside, barking orders to double-bar the waterside crane doors and summon his night wagon drivers from the tavern on Coal Lane.
Along the outer wooden wall, the forty lightermen and draymen didn’t shout or brandish weapons where the harbor watch might find an excuse to clear the boat ramp. Instead, they unhitched three heavy two-wheeled timber dollies and parked them squarely across the deep granite wheel-ruts leading from Doss’s front gate, chocking the iron-rimmed hubs with blocks of seasoned oak and sitting down upon the wet shafts to eat their noon rations of cold salt herring and barley bread. While the front carriageway remained bottled up under forty pairs of watchful working-class eyes, Doss would have only one leftover route to strip the dry upland wheat out of Bin Seven. The unlit cobblestone alley behind the rear grain chute after the harbor lamps went dark.
Leth walked over from the crane pier with a canvas bucket of pitch and a short boar-bristle brush. He handed Tomas a pair of oiled leather wrist-guards and a length of tarred twine from his barge kit. The one-eyed lighterman pointed toward the high timber louver of the third-floor small roof-dome above Warehouse Four. There, a thin plume of gray dust was already puffing through the slats as Doss’s indoor shovel-men began turning the top tier of the grain pile toward the back drop-shaft. The warehouse floor beams were built of long-leaf pine laid over open granite piers. Because of that, every shovel-stroke inside Bin Seven sent a dry, rhythmic scraping through the timber wooden support posts that Nessa could measure with her brass horn pressed against the outer doorstep beam.
Tomas tucked the waxed twine into his belt. Then he checked the iron metal ring of his quarterstaff against the wet cobbles, noting how the afternoon drizzle was already pooling in the worn ruts between the coal tracks. By midnight, the harbor fog would roll in from the mudflats thick enough to hide a team of draft geldings at ten paces, and Doss’s clerk Gid would be counting on the rain to wash every trace of upland chaff from the rear alley stones before Guard Kroll returned at dawn.
“He refused the check?” Rowan asked, his jaw set hard.
“He refused,” Tomas replied, wiping the mist from his face. “And he’s going to try to move the evidence tonight. We take the night watch at the rear chute.”