The Confiscator’s Empty Column

The canal lock at Wicken Steps had a Wakeful lamp in its upper window. Agna Fellowes worked by it with the night’s link spread across her table: Fishpond’s catch, Tamsin Reedwater’s mark at the foot. She checked it the slow way. The seal held. The gift claimed was three coins and an eighth, not a drop over. Travellers had paid two drops a span, which the lock-keeper downstairs would call robbery and the Houses would call charity.

Then came the band in grey. Dozens of travellers had crossed together, each paying in and taking out the same even measures, so the pages showed only a wall of matching cloaks. Every coin had come from somewhere real and gone somewhere real. Which hand had passed to which, the link didn’t say.

Corvin Ashby had been lodging at the lock for a week, pleasant, generous with his tobacco, and a Confiscator of the Glare. He leaned in her doorway with his own book open. “You see more than anyone here,” he said. “Just mark me the likely pairs. A guess. There’s a silver in it, and a warm room in Copperhythe if you ever want one.”

Agna looked at the cloaks a while. “The Chain says nothing was made and nothing was stolen,” she said. “Who’s under the cloak isn’t mine to say.”

She wrote sound in the margin and sanded it. Ashby smiled, unoffended, and ruled a fresh column in his book that he couldn’t fill.