Eight bells at the Gate of Iron Sails

Turn 1 of 7

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

The bell is still ringing — eight strokes, deep and bronze, rolling through the stone throat of the harbour like a warning that knows exactly where you sleep. You are standing on the main deck of the *Lamplighter's Daughter*, a mid-weight sky-barge with a patched silk envelope and a hull that has seen better decades. The morning fog sits in the harbour basin like soup in a bowl, and through it you can see the cliff-face quays rising in tiers above you, each one studded with mooring posts and capstans and the dark mouths of warehouse tunnels. Four days you have been quartermaster here. Four days is not long enough to learn where the money went, only that it is gone.

The clerk — Anneke Sund, her badge says — holds the writ out to you with both hands, as if she is sorry to be touching it. She has a round, earnest face and ink on her left cuff. Behind her, the two harbour-wardens are running a knotted cord along your starboard mooring line with the unhurried competence of men who have done this a hundred times and never once been moved to hurry. They are measuring because measuring is the first step in cutting, and cutting is the first step in impounding.

"Eleven hundred marks," Anneke repeats, quieter now, as if the number might shrink if she speaks it gently. "Outstanding fees, fuel debt, and a customs judgment from the seventh tier. The previous quartermaster — a man named Vos — signed for all of it. But the debt runs with the ship, not the man. I'm sorry."

From somewhere below decks, you hear Grieve's voice — unmistakable, even through oak planking — say something short and profane about wardens, followed by the metallic clang of a wrench being set down with authority. The deck vibrates faintly under your boots. The engine is warm. The *Lamplighter's Daughter* could fly, if she were not tied to a quay by lines that men are already measuring to cut.

You have four hours until the twelfth bell. Eleven hundred marks is more than you have seen in your life, let alone in a ship's cash box that you already know contains forty-two marks, a button, and a receipt for cheese. You look at the writ, at the wardens, at the fog sitting over the basin. Somewhere up on the upper tiers there are merchants, factors, and people who owe favours — or who might, if the right argument were made. The captain is not on deck. That, too, is a fact you notice.