The mud inside the holding pen had the consistency of cold axle grease.
It sucked at Tomas’s boot welts with a squelching pushback that needed three inches of heel-lift at every stride. He moved with the steady rhythm of a porter carrying a sixty-pound dead load, planting his iron heel-plates upon the corduroy log tracks between the sodden wagons.
Behind the turnstile, a timber platform stood four feet above the marsh on creosoted wooden support posts. Nailed to an oak upright was a pine notice board banded in rusted sheet iron. Dozens of parchment decrees, tax tariffs, and quarantine schedules had been pasted over one another with rye flour glue. That created a ragged crust of mildewed paper.
Tomas stopped at the edge of the platform, resting his pack frame against a support post.
“Hold the frame, Nessa,” he said, unclipping his chest harness.
Nessa gripped the notched ash dowels, taking half the weight before the straps slipped from his shoulders. Tomas rotated his scarred left shoulder. He felt the familiar pull of gristle along his inner arm, then reached into his satchel for his brass rule and scraped spatula.
He stepped onto the platform. At the center of the notice board, freshly inked in lampblack, hung the current heavy tax schedule. Above it, stained with water marks, sat the original city law of Year 14.
