SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

They came out of Zafira’s place into a street that had gone grey with mid-morning, and Trafalgar was still chewing on the same sentence he’d finished the conversation with.

”So who’s allowed to cross?” he asked. ”Gate to gate, ring to ring, carrying something nobody looks at.”

”You won’t like the answer.” Zafira fell into step on his left. ”The Myrrhvale guard, obviously. All of The Tide, because they run the locks. Customs officers. Medical transport. The maintenance crews, and the waste crews after them, and both of those haul covered loads through every checkpoint in this city twice a day without anyone lifting a lid.”

”That isn’t a short list.”

”That’s a third of Meraval,” Rhosyn said.

Trafalgar walked another twenty paces on that.

He’d been going at this the way he went at everything, sorting people into piles and shaking each pile until something rattled. That wasn’t going to work here. The pile was too big and half of it wore a uniform.

’Wrong question, then. Stop asking who could carry him.’

”Then we narrow it by when,” he said.

Zafira slowed. ”That’s actually clever.”

”You needn’t sound surprised.”

”I sound surprised because it’s the right handle and I’ve been down here months without reaching for it.” She steered them toward the walkway that ran above the channel. ”All right. The tide.”

”Explain it like I’ve been here three days, because I have.”

”Everything in this city runs off the water. The regulation gates open and shut on a cycle, and when they shut, whole sectors get cut off from the rings around them.” She held one hand flat and turned it over. ”Six hours at a stretch, sometimes longer if the swell’s bad. Nobody goes in during that. Nobody comes out. Even if you wanted to reach somebody in there, you couldn’t.”

”Six hours huh,” Trafalgar repeated.

”Slack water gives you a bit either side, and the crews plan around it the way people up top plan around weather. It’s so ordinary that nobody down here even mentions it.”

Rhosyn had been quiet, doing whatever arithmetic she did behind that face.

”Then that stretch was chosen,” she said. ”The channel drains. Twice a day it’s bone dry and everybody working those yards knows it. They dumped a man in a trench with no water in it.”

”Which means they never tried to sell it as an accident.” Trafalgar felt the shape of that land. ”You don’t leave a drowned man somewhere he obviously couldn’t drown unless the story was never the point.”

The gate cycles were a Tide document, because The Tide ran the locks, which meant asking the fleet for them.

Trafalgar expected friction. He’d been in Meraval long enough to expect friction from a door, let alone a filing office.

Kesh was on the third lock walkway with a slate in one hand, and he heard the request through without interrupting.

”The full cycle tables,” he said. ”Twelve months, or do you want the last two?”

”Whatever you can spare.”

”Take twelve. Two months tells you nothing, the cycles run long.” He handed the slate to somebody, wrote three lines on a slip, and passed it over. ”Give that at the harbour office and they’ll copy the lot for you. It’ll take them an hour, so send someone rather than standing there.”

”Thank you.”

”The notation is unhelpful the first time you see it.” Kesh’s burned cheek creased slightly as he turned back toward the water. ”If it stops making sense, ask for Vessik in that office. He wrote most of it and he enjoys explaining it far more than anyone should.”

That was the whole exchange.

Walking away, Trafalgar found himself in the odd position of having nothing to complain about. ’Four days here and that’s the first person who’s answered a question without weighing it first. Half of this city could learn something from that man.’

They split it three ways.

Zafira took the cycle tables, since she’d be the one reading them and she’d spent months asking harmless questions of harbour clerks who had stopped finding her interesting. One more wouldn’t register.

Rhosyn took the guard rotations, and took them the way she took everything, which was by sitting somewhere unremarkable for hours and watching who relieved whom.

Trafalgar took the cargo records. Public, tedious, and the only thing in Meraval that an observer could ask for without being told he was an observer.

Toran didn’t come.

None of this was official business, so the man had no obligation to trail after him, and it took Trafalgar until the second hour of reading manifests to notice that he was relieved about it. That said something about him he chose not to look at too closely.

They put it together that evening at the same table upstairs, with three sets of paper and the old woman pointedly not coming up.

The pattern surfaced faster than any of them expected.

”There.” Zafira set the cycle table beside Trafalgar’s cargo list and lined up the dates with one finger. ”That sector shuts at the ninth hour and opens at the third. And two of your entries move goods out of it at the eleventh.”

”Which is impossible.”

”It’s on paper, so it happened. It just can’t have happened the way the paper says.”

Rhosyn slid her own notes across. ”The shifts change forty minutes before every one of those closures. Different names inside than outside, every time. That’s not the standard rotation, I’ve watched the standard rotation all afternoon.”

Trafalgar worked back and forth between the three of them, and the more he checked, the tidier it got.

Cargo shifting through sealed sectors. Guard details swapped just early enough that the men locked in weren’t the men who’d been posted. Faction meetings falling inside those six-hour holes far more often than chance had any business allowing.

None of it was illegal on its own. Every single line had a lawful reason to exist, and any clerk in the harbour could have explained away any one of them without breaking a sweat.

They just all happened in the same gap.

”So what’s moving?” Zafira asked.

”No idea.” Trafalgar sat back and rubbed his eyes. ”And I’ve no idea who signs it off either. All I’ve got is a clock and the fact that somebody’s reading it.”

He looked at the cargo pages again, and something snagged.

Every one of those entries carried a stamp. Somebody had put a seal on each of them, in the manifest office in the second ring, and signed underneath it.

Which was where a man with ink under his nails had worked until three days ago.