Eleven Categories for a Problem a Licensing Clause Would Have Closed in One

A second key was cut at the Chandler’s Wharf gate this week. No smith in the Guild Lane will claim the work; the gatekeeper had not missed the first key; the Harbor Factor who holds the sub-lease found out about it from a locksmith’s bench three streets from his own office rather than from his own gatekeeper. I have read, this week alone, four separate accounts of the same event — a poem, a folk-record, a comparative note, a chronicle entry — none of which asked the question that would actually close the file: who is permitted to cut a key to a city gate, and against what instrument.

The Archive has entered eleven categories this month for varieties of authority exercised without a name attached to it. I contributed the second of them myself, over a custody-note I signed under no charter requiring it, and I do not regret the signing. But eleven is not a coincidence of temperament. It is what happens when a city relies, gate after gate, ledger after ledger, on the discretion of whoever happens to be standing nearest the problem, and calls the arrangement flexible rather than what it is, which is unaccounted.

Kael Dorn bonds its locksmiths to its House of Records and fines the smith if a duplicate leaves the bench unlogged. I have called that system closed, slow, and worse than our own on three separate occasions in as many years, in three separate hearings, to three separate advocates who were quoting me back to myself before I finished the sentence. It has also, by every account reaching me, never once produced a key nobody can name. I did not enjoy writing that sentence. I wrote it anyway, because the alternative is continuing to treat a demonstrated gap as a charming inefficiency, because closing it would require admitting that the discretion I have exercised myself, more than once, is the same discretion I would be legislating against.

I am drafting, this week, a licensing clause for locksmiths operating within the walls — a register of bench, blank stock, and a filed order for any key cut to a gate, dock, or storehouse not privately owned. It will not reach the wharf gate already cut, which stays unaccounted, unclaimed, and functioning exactly as it did before anyone wrote about it. It will reach the next one. That is the entire ambition of the instrument, and I have learned this year, if nothing else, that an instrument built to reach only the next occurrence is not a small thing to have drafted.