The Old Flint Sluice was a massive ruin of dressed dark rock and drowned brickwork at the eastern mouth of the Silt Ditch. Built a hundred years before to regulate the tidal backflow from the estuary, its central arch had collapsed during the 442 flood. He dropped three hundred tons of stonework into the canal bed.
Below the collapsed roadway lay the old town check vaults. An underground maze of arched cellars that had been abandoned to the black water, rotting timber shorings, and colonies of river leeches.
Tomas Reed and Nessa Vale stood on a slippery ledge of dark rock thirty feet below street level. There, the cold, salty water of the canal lapped against the crumbling brickwork. Tomas had stripped down to his wool undershirt, leather work trousers, and hobnailed boots. Around his waist was tied fifty feet of tarred manila rope, with the other end secured to an iron mooring ring in the living rock where Rowan stood guard.
“The Treasury office was in the west bridge pillar,” Nessa said. She held her grease-lantern over the black pool. She pointed with her brass divider to a half-sunk granite arch twelve feet out. “Look at the keystone: the three engraved river salmon of the town mint. The ceiling is supported by high-pressure brickwork that cures underwater. If the arch held, the deed recess in the north wall will be above the silt line.”
Tomas took a deep breath of the cold, stone air, gripped his six-foot ash quarterstaff in his right hand, and lowered himself into the black water.
The shock of the cold was instant and brutal. The water was foul, tasting of coal runoff, decomposing timber, and sour river mud. Tomas waded forward, his boots sinking into six inches of soft, sucking silt, his staff feeling ahead for underwater timber baulks and jagged iron bolts.
The water rose to his chest, then to his chin. He reached the underwater arch, caught the cold granite stones with his left fingers, and hauled himself into the flooded vault.
Inside, the darkness was complete save for the faint, yellow beam of Nessa’s lantern reflecting off the black ceiling. The water here was calmer, trapped beneath the brick groin-vaults. Tomas edged along the north wall, his bare hands exploring the slimy stonework. His fingers traced the lime joints, feeling for the square outline of the registrar’s deed recess.
At the third pier, six feet above the water line, his knuckles struck cold, hard metal.
It was a heavy iron box recessed into a granite niche. It was sealed around the edges with thick, black pine pitch to keep out moisture. Tomas wedged the square metal ring of his quarterstaff beneath the rusted iron lid. He set his feet against the brick pier. Then he threw all his weight backward.
With a sharp, tearing screech of rusted metal and cracking pitch, the lid gave way.
Tomas reached into the dark cavity. His fingers closed around a heavy, tube-shaped object wrapped in layers of stiff, animal fat-soaked lambskin—an iron deed canister eighteen inches long. It was sealed with an intact town lead wafer.
He held the canister high above the water, turned back toward the archway, and shouted:
“I have the metal tube! Haul on the line, Rowan!”
Two minutes later, Tomas hauled himself out onto the dark rock apron. He shivered wildly as the cold wind bit through his soaked wool. Rowan wrapped him in a dry horse-blanket. Meanwhile, Nessa right away set the iron canister on a flat stone.
Nessa took her cold chisel and cut the lead wire. She unscrewed the threaded iron cap, peeled back the animal fat lambskin. Then she tipped the contents onto her dry wool cape.
Four long, flat sticks of seasoned hazel wood slid out into the lantern light.
They were nine inches long, smoothed with a spoke-shave, each rod split down the center with a jagged, irregular fracture. Across the split faces were carved forty deep, box-shaped notches—each notch representing ten bushels of prime upland wheat. At the head of each rod were burned the four official registry marks:
MINT & TREASURY · 442
LOWER HOUSE WEAVERS · 442
MILLER KAEL · 442
FACTOR TAVIN DOSS · 442
Tomas reached down, took the Factor’s hazel rod and the Weavers’ rod. Then he fitted their jagged split faces together.
The irregular fibers of the seasoned hazel wood interlocked with tiny, flawless care, the knife notches aligning into forty nonstop grooves as if the wood had been split only ten minutes before.
Tomas looked up at Nessa, the shivering in his limbs forgotten as a fierce, steady warmth pulsed through his chest.
“The four rods are whole,” Tomas said, his voice ringing against the dark rock walls. “Let’s go to the steelyard.”
On the flat dark rock ledge above the black pool, Nessa knelt beside the dry wool cape and used her bone scale and magnifying glass to examine the forty box-shaped notches carved across the split hazel wood before wrapping each rod in its own labeled sleeve of oiled linen. The tally rods had been split down the irregular grain of a single seasoned hazel branch in the autumn of forty-two. Because of that, no carpenter’s plane or counterfeiter’s knife on earth could ever duplicate the linked fiber teeth where the four quarters met. She recorded the burned registry brands of the Mint, the Lower House Weavers, Master Miller Kael. Factor Tavin Doss in her field ledger, noting that the unbroken town lead wafer from the iron deed canister still bore the die-stamp of the sub-treasurer who had drowned at his post. Just then, the central water gate arch gave way.
While Nessa secured the canister and rods inside the leather sample case, Tomas stripped off his soaked wool undershirt, wrung the foul, coal-black canal water out over the ditch stones. Then he pulled his dry gray porter’s coat over his chilled shoulders. Rowan knelt with a horn knife to scrape three fat black river leeches from the welt of Tomas’s hobnailed boots, then coiled the fifty feet of wet manila lifeline back over his forearm with the careful steadiness of a lifelong cart driver. Up along the stone low roof wall of the Silt Ditch roadway, four dozen weavers and lightermen who had kept watch against Doss’s cudgelers leaned over the broken coping, their faces lighting with grim, silent triumph as Tomas lifted the pitch-stained iron metal tube into the morning sun.
Before leaving the sunken dark rock ledge, Tomas paused by the half-sunk granite keystone bearing the three engraved river salmon of the town mint and rubbed a cake of white animal fat chalk across the weathered date-stone beside the arch. With a sheet of coarse cartridge paper from Nessa’s satchel, he took a dry heel-rubbing of the mason’s bench-mark and the vault number (TREASURY VAULT III · EAST SLUICE), signing the margin with his wet thumb so that Guard Kroll’s clerk would have physical proof of the exact lawful storehouse from which the metal tube had been raised. Even the cold black silt clinging to his bruised knuckles smelled of old lime and iron. The honest mortar of engineers who had built their vaults to outlast the men who betrayed them.
They climbed the stone steps to the South Ward street as the morning bells of Bellwether began to ring the sixth hour.
The four hazel rods rested securely in Tomas’s haversack, wrapped in clean dry linen. Behind them, forty South Ward lightermen fell into step, their heavy boots making a rhythmic, thunderous rhythm on the wet cobblestones.
The carrier had retrieved the receipt. Now the factor would pay the debt.