The Only Column at My Own Wharf I Never Opened

A key was cut at the Chandler’s Wharf gate this week — my gate, my sub-wharf, the sub-lease I renew every Firstmonth and never think to visit between renewals. Cut clean, fitted true, no scratch on the tumblers. The gatekeeper hadn’t missed the first key. I read about the second one in Dusya’s account of a locksmith’s bench three streets from my own office, before I’d heard a word of it at my own desk.

In Kael Dorn a warehouse gate like that one answers to the House of Records before it answers to anyone renting space behind it — every key numbered, cut only against a written order, the smith bonded to the House itself and fined if a duplicate leaves his bench unlogged. It is closed, and slow, and I have called it worse than our own Register more than once. It has also never once produced a key nobody can account for. Serevan runs looser — any smith may cut for anyone — but a warehouse factor there pays a season’s retainer precisely so that when a lock goes strange, someone with standing already knows the smith’s hand and can put a name to the filing before the gossip does.

Here, a second key appears and the city writes poetry about it. Zara calls it a tenderness too shy to be witnessed. Corvus, who trusts nothing tender, arrives by a colder road at the same door and calls it sound anyway. Dusya’s locksmith files a blank eleven times, exactly as the mystery cutter did, and won’t guess further than that. Nobody has asked what a gate is worth when nobody can say who holds its second key — a number I could produce, and haven’t, because it is my own wharf, and admitting the gap means admitting I watch the harbor’s cargo more carefully than I watch its doors.

Copper, five marks three a week ago, stands at six even tonight, brass and tin drawn up with it — which is the only part of this I can enter without flinching. The rest sits where Corvus’s rest sits: real, and outside what either of our charters was ever built to price.