Pittal beaten thin enough to work and thick enough to last a decade in fast water. The Bargewrights replate eleven or twelve hulls a year on a rotation they will not explain to anyone outside the guild, and repaint the whole span in the week before the meltwater. That week the city comes down to the bank and stands about getting in the way. It is the one day in the year all three castes are on the same mud.

The toll is charged by head, by axle, and by weight, and it is charged crossing east and crossing back. Carters have complained for four hundred years and paid for four hundred years, and Nexipol takes its cut before any of it climbs the tiers.

Last winter the schedule changed. Chartered guild traffic, factored cargo, and any party travelling under a house seal now cross at the old rate. Everyone else pays double, and the collectors have a phrase for everyone else: unchartered foot, which covers pilgrims, drovers, tinkers, families moving house, and any armed stranger without a letter. Two coppers a head became four, and four is a day's bread in the Lower Rings. The collectors do not enjoy saying it. They say it perhaps three hundred times a day.

The Bargewrights asked for an exemption for their own labourers and were refused in writing, which is how the city learned the schedule had been drafted with some care.

When the river comes up the middle barges are unshackled and swung downstream against the eastern bank, and the crossing stops, sometimes for a fortnight. The city calls it the Slack. Carters hate it, the dye-yards love it because the water runs clean, no work gets done and everyone drinks. Half the marriages in the Middle Rings were proposed in a Slack, if the Middle Rings are to be believed.

At the last repainting nobody came down from the Sunhouse. There has been someone from the house on that bank for four hundred years. Most of the crowd did not notice until the walk home.

The cooling channels run under the Middle Rings, brick-vaulted, knee-deep, cold in August. The dye guilds will tell anyone who asks that they dug them for the vat water four hundred years back. The guild charter says so. The guild charter is four hundred years old and the brick is not: it is a hard grey stuff that takes a hammer badly and does not come from anywhere within nine days' cart, and the vaulting turns corners in a way no mason on the river has been taught. A Smritipal archivist measured the spans in her grandmother's time, wrote that they were consistent to a finger's width over half a mile, and stopped writing.

Children swim in them. Every mother forbids it and every child does it anyway, and the ones who go furthest in come back saying the channels keep going, which they do, past the point where anyone has bothered to follow.

There are footings under the eastern bridgehead too, cut stone, too big for a pontoon. Something permanent stood here before the Mist came down. Nobody knows what it was, nobody knows what took it, and the two scholars who have written on the subject disagree about the age by nine hundred years and are not on speaking terms.

What is certain is that the crossing is much older than anyone holding it. After the Catastrophe it belonged to whoever could stand on it, and the Lower Rings still call a man a fordwarden when they mean a thug with a toll box, and could not say where the word comes from.

The linked span was invented here, eight hundred years or so after the world broke, and it is the one thing this city gave to everyone else. It has been cut twice.

The first time was against an army. Four thousand men on the span, the middle let go, the river in flood: the city survived and the story got told for a thousand years afterward, and the telling is a good part of what went wrong the second time.

The Chandrabhals did not take this crossing and nobody gave it to them. They were factors out of the eastern markets who put up the money to rebuild the span after the Renewal Wars, and took the toll as security, and never handed it back. That was four hundred years ago. It is long enough that the arrangement is simply how things are and short enough that a foundry man can say the word security in a particular way and be understood by everyone in the room.

What the house discovered that first winter is that money does not shackle sixty hulls in fast water. There was exactly one body on Mundu that knew how, and it was the Bargewrights, and they were owed for the labour. So the debt ran both directions and was settled the way such things are settled: the guild worked it off at rates the house set, and when the ledger closed the house kept the toll and the guild kept the work.

They have kept it since. Eleven or twelve hulls replated a year on a rotation they have never explained to anyone outside the guild, and the shackling pattern taught apprentice to apprentice and written down nowhere. No Chandrabhal has ever seen it. Three Lords have asked.

So the house holds the toll and the guild holds the bridge, and in four hundred years neither has been curious enough to find out which is worth more. It is a comfortable arrangement as long as nobody counts. The Bargewrights were refused a toll exemption for their own labourers this winter, in writing, and did not make a fuss, and have gone on painting the span.

Two hundred years ago the crops failed across the southern plains and the refugee columns came to the crossing, because the crossing was where the food was.

Lord Ashwin Chandrabhal closed the bridge. The granaries were already short and the argument he put to the guilds was arithmetic: feed them and everyone starves, turn them back and only they do. The guilds did not stop him. That is in the record too.

The refugees came onto the span anyway, several thousand of them, and Ashwin lost his nerve, and he ordered the middle cut loose.

Not swung against the bank. Not moored off. Cut, in spring flood, with people standing on them. The barges went downstream and broke up on the shallows four miles below and everyone on the middle third went into fast water. The house recorded eleven hundred. The Bargewrights kept their own count and have never published it.

The house called it a failure of the shackling and put it in the record as the Slack of 5,531, which is the word for the annual unmooring, and the word did the work it was chosen to do. Nobody believed it. The span had been cut in daylight in front of the whole eastern bank and there were four hundred people who watched it happen. The story was not built to be believed. It was built to give everyone something to say instead of the truth, and it worked, because saying the truth would have required somebody to move first.

The thing that did not heal is this: a refugee column is families, and a third of those families had kin already living in the Lower Rings. They watched from the bank. Ashwin was never charged and died in bed nineteen years afterwards, and there is no monument, and there is no annual observance, and the city has never once formally acknowledged it.

The Bargewrights paint outward from both banks and finish at the middle. Ask why and they will tell you it is the correct order.

Somebody stood on the eastern bank while the barges went and said something over the water. Two hundred years on, the accounts agree on very little. A woman, certainly. Lower Rings, probably, and kin to somebody on the span. The versions that give her a name give four different ones. What she is supposed to have said was that nobody would sit in the brass house and live to see their grandchildren.

Then she is out of the story. Nothing records what became of her, which is either the point or simply what happens to a poor woman in a bad year.

The counting is not in dispute. Ashwin, who cut the span, died in his bed at sixty-eight. Of the eight who have held the seat since: Sarvani at thirty-one, of a fever nobody else in the house took. Bharat at forty, thrown by a horse he had ridden eleven years. Nirupa at forty-four, in childbed. Uday at twenty-six, drowned two miles below the span in water he could have stood up in. Ketaki at fifty-one. Padman at thirty-eight, of a growth. Ilavati at forty-three. Devraj at forty-six, on his feet at the bridgehead in front of four hundred people.

Eight, and the best of them made fifty-one.

The Middle Rings will tell you the Chandrabhals have married cousins for four hundred years, that a fever in a rich house is still a fever, and that any man can come off a horse. They will tell you this with some heat, and usually within a minute of having the list read to them.

The Lower Rings do not argue the point. They simply do not put their daughters into service on the top tier and have not for two hundred years, and the Sunhouse takes its staff out of the villages now and has stopped asking why the applications dried up.

Ketaki is the one people bring up. Fifty-one, in her own bed, no misfortune worth the telling. The believers have their answer ready: she opened the granaries in the bad winter of her fourth year and took nothing back for it, and the thing on that seat knows the difference. It is a tidy answer and it does what tidy answers do.

Amrita is eleven. Most of the city has done the arithmetic. None of it aloud.

The city reads bottom to top, and so does everything else about it. The Smritipal keep the archives and the temples, Samanvayakas the tolls and the courts and the counting rooms, and the Yantrikas the foundries and the pumps, outnumbering the other two together. No Yantrikas has ever sat as magistrate here. Nobody thought that worth remarking on until eighteen months ago.

Lady Ilavati went first, of the Wasting, and took four hundred years of Chandrabhal denial with her. The house had always held that there was no caster's blood in the line. The veins showed through her arms at the bier and the whole city filed past and looked at them and said nothing.

Four months later Lord Harnath Verdhane of Ashwater rode to the eastern bridgehead and challenged Lord Devraj Chandrabhal in open form, before witnesses, on a charge of withholding record from a vassal-client of Nexipol contrary to the open covenant of 5,730.

The charge is thin and everyone knew it was thin. What Verdhane wanted was the roll of the drowned admitted into the city's record, and the house had refused that for two hundred years, and the covenant clause he reached for was written about grain returns. Three magistrates could have thrown it out. None of them did. Verdhane's house has grown rich on factory contracts and its arrangements with the Param Sangha, and beyond that there is the other thing, which is that Harnath Verdhane is the finest swordsman in the Pittal and possibly on Mundu, and nobody in that hall wanted to be the man who told him his paperwork was defective.

Devraj had every right to name a champion. This city has arena professionals, and it had the Setubandh, and Nine-Hip Dhatunath was twenty-two that year and would have gone out for him if he had been asked. He was not asked. Devraj named nobody and went to the bridgehead himself, four months a widower, and it lasted under a minute.

Verdhane had expected a proxy. He is thirty-six now and was thirty-four then, and he had come eight days east to fight a paid blade in front of a crowd, which is a thing he has done before and enjoys. He said afterwards, once, that he had expected a proxy. He has not said it again. Whether he understood partway through what he was actually doing is the question the city cannot settle, because the only man who could answer it will discuss the duel with anybody and that morning with nobody.

It was legal. That is the whole of the problem. There was no murder to avenge and no crime to charge, only a lawful challenge on a technicality that a braver bench would have refused, answered by a grieving man who did not have to answer it. The Lower Rings are not uniformly sorry. A good many people down there think the roll of names should have been admitted a century ago and that the house brought this to its own gate. Nobody says so above the second tier. Everybody has heard it said.

The remedy is still open. The Pittal settles lord against lord by champion, and the house may answer a challenge whenever it chooses to, and the guilds have petitioned the Sunhouse four times in two years to name one.

The Lady has given the same answer each time. No champion is worthy of it.

Amrita was nine. Sthavir Bhaumik stood at the confirmation and read out that Lord Devraj had left instructions for the household, and no one asked to see them, because Bhaumik had been reading out Lord Devraj's instructions for nineteen years. Nexipol confirmed the girl inside the month (a factor came upriver, inspected the toll books, signed, and went home) and appointed no regent, and has sent no one since. Bhaumik keeps the seal. Bhaumik keeps the appointment book. At every judgement he stands at her left shoulder with his mouth near her ear, and he has stood nowhere else since the funeral.

She sat through four hours of the confirmation without moving. Nine-year-olds do not sit through a meal. People said the poor thing had gone somewhere else in her head, and left it there, because there is only so long anyone can look at an orphan and keep wondering.

Six instruments in eighteen months. Every lord in the Pittal backs guilds and every lord in the Pittal fights over tariff, so not one of these is unusual on its face, and that is precisely the difficulty: there is nothing here a neighbour could object to without objecting to their own practice. Men who are not fools defend each of them in the Enrolment queue, and the men listening go home uneasy without being able to name the part they disagreed with.

The Toll Schedule. Chartered and factored traffic at the old rate, unchartered foot at double. It falls on drovers, pilgrims, tinkers, and anyone crossing without a letter, which is to say on people with no guild to complain for them. Nexipol's share rose with it and Nexipol did not enquire further.

The Registry of Trades. Enrolment by craft. Craft fixes district, district fixes place in the water order when the river drops, and the Lower Rings draw last. The clerks are patient about it: the foundry families already lived in the Lower Rings, the Registry only writes down where everybody already is. That is true. It was also true before it was written down, and nobody died of thirst then.

The Smritipal Exemption. Archive families cross free, for custodial service. It saves such a household eight silver a year. Middle Rings opinion held for a fortnight that eight silver was nothing and the fuss was shameful, and then Middle Rings opinion went quiet, because people had started noticing who stood in the toll queue beside them and who walked past it.

The Foundry Hours Edict. No night shift in the Lower Rings, on grounds of fire in a district built over standing water. The risk is real; men have lost hands to night pours in works that should have been shut. Half the western foundries are cold now and their contracts came up to the Middle Rings, where the brokers put the same work back out to the same men at a cut, and the clerks who draw up that paper have opinions about it they keep to themselves.

The Oath of the Three. Every guild master swears loyalty at the Sunhouse once a year, all three castes, same ceremony, same hour. The Yantrikas parchment runs four words shorter. Nine months passed before anyone laid the three texts side by side, and the man who did it was a bargewright's apprentice settling a bet.

The Judgement at Kellar's Yard. A cable let go on the eleventh barge and six people went into the water and none came out. Hanoj Kellar was foreman of the yard that fitted it. The magistrate read his report in open court: the cable came from Rai's warehouse, ran two gauges under specification, and was signed for by a Middle Rings clerk who was not Kellar. He read all of it, a quarter of an hour, and never once looked up from the page.

The Lady thanked him for his diligence, said the yard bore the fitting, and asked for the warrant. Bhaumik set it in front of her. She read it top to bottom while four hundred people watched, and signed in the round schoolroom hand children are taught, and there is a smear across the seal where her sleeve dragged through the ink, because the sleeve was cut too long for her arm.

They hanged him at the yard three days later. His wife did not shout. She stood at the front with her hands folded through the whole of it, and afterwards fetched the ladder herself because no one else would move. The taprooms still talk about that two years on. Not the drop. The ladder.

The court is cut into the riverbank terrace, the two rings pittal and kept polished, set high enough in the side walls that a man has to put his whole body under the ball to make one. At the back end of a summer evening they take the sun and go the colour of a hot coin, and they can be picked out from six miles off on the western road. That is the first thing most travellers ever see of the place. Half of them have never heard the name Chandrabhal and all of them have heard of the Setubandh.

Seven a side, and the ball never leaves the court. There are no nets and never have been, only the two rings, set high enough in the walls that a man has to go up under the ball with his whole body to put one through. It runs two hours without a stop, and there are no substitutions. The seven who walk out are the seven who finish, or the six, or the five.

A man comes off only when he cannot stand. The physicians work at the edge of the sand and they are good, because at this court they have to be: a broken forearm gets a splint and a minute and goes back on, a dislocated shoulder gets put back against the wall, and the crowd counts each man out again. Bones go every week. The Lower Rings do not think less of a player for the strapping; they think less of him for walking off under his own legs before the two hours are done.

Seven players. Four Pittal championships in eleven years, two of them consecutive, and a run of nine unbeaten against Nexipol sides that ended only because the fixture was moved to Nexipol and the crowd came over the barrier in the second half.

Vajraban has the deepest bench on the continent, forty professionals under contract and a court with seating for twenty thousand. They have lost to Lohasetu five times. In 5,727 they lost at home by fourteen after leading at the turn, and the Vajraban press spent a fortnight explaining it, and the explanations got worse the longer they went on. Nexipol stopped scheduling friendlies against the Setubandh four years ago and has never given a reason that anyone believed.

Nine thousand people. Seven men. No academy, no salaries worth the name, a captain who works his father's trade in the mornings. The rest of the Pittal has been trying to account for it for a decade and the only answer anybody has landed on is that the Lower Rings produce men with hips like door hinges and nothing else to do with their evenings.

The losing captain used to go to the rings. That stopped two hundred years ago, and the city talks about it the way anyone talks about a thing their great-grandparents did and would rather they hadn't.

In the spring the Sunhouse issued a clarification: the abolition had been a matter of custom and not of law. Nothing further. No proclamation, no change — one line of housekeeping among nine others about market weights and the repainting.

The charitable reading is clerks being clerks, and it may be correct. The night the notice went round the terrace, eight thousand people went quiet at the same moment. Then somebody laughed, and then everybody did, and the match went on.

The season is suspended now. The Tifa Guild in Nexipol pulled the remaining fixtures in the third week of the summer, citing crowd safety in a city with recorded unrest, and there is no body above the Tifa Guild to appeal to. The Setubandh were second in the table and had beaten Indranagri away.

Nobody in Lohasetu thinks it is about crowd safety. The Middle Rings say it is Nexipol protecting an investment, which is at least a reason. The Lower Rings say something shorter. What nobody has an answer for is why the fixtures came down three days after the Sunhouse published its clarification about the rings, and the Tifa Guild has not been asked, because there is nobody to ask.

So the court is empty on the two evenings a week when eight thousand people used to be in it, and those eight thousand people are somewhere else now, and the Bridge Watch has noticed that they are in the taprooms rather than at home. Captain Sen has doubled the Lower Rings patrol and taken the men off the bridge to do it.

Hand on the brass. An oath here is sworn with the palm flat to a brass plate, because brass tarnishes the same way in every house and cannot be got to lie about its age. A liar's plate goes patchy. That is not true, and there is a plate on every door in the city. When Kellar's wife came back from the yard she took hers off the door and threw it in the river, and the neighbours talked about that longer than they talked about the hanging.

The toll is owed both ways. Said of money, favours, injuries, marriages. It used to be what a man said about a debt he meant to honour. In the Lower Rings this past year it has started being said flat, with nothing behind it, and it has stopped meaning debt.

Counting the span. Children learn their numbers on the sixty barges. Grown men still count them across when something sits badly, and a miscount is bad luck, and the bargewrights unshackle and re-shackle the middle often enough that a man can miscount honestly. Nobody can say where the habit started. It is older than anyone's grandmother and it is done most in the Lower Rings, and there is a great deal more of it on that bridge than there was two years ago, most of it by people pretending to look at the water.

Never the middle first. The Bargewrights paint outward from both banks and close at the centre, and they will tell anyone who asks that this is the correct order and offer nothing further. No other guild on the river works that way.

For the table: a party arriving without a guild charter or a house seal is unchartered foot and pays double at the gate, both ways, and the collector who says so is apologetic and immovable and has said it three hundred times today. That is the city's introduction and it is meant to sting.

The largest thing on offer is the champion's place. The guilds have petitioned four times and the Lady has refused four times, and the seat is still empty, and a competent stranger who offered to fill it would be heard in the Sunhouse within a day. What that stranger would be walking toward is Harnath Verdhane, who has killed better swords than anyone in this city and who will not send a proxy. Whether the Lady would accept such an offer, and what it would mean that she has refused every other, is worth the party's attention before anyone volunteers.

Beyond it: the season is suspended, the court is empty two evenings a week, and eight thousand people who used to be in that terrace are in the taprooms instead — Sen has doubled the Lower Rings patrol and stripped the bridge to do it. The toll books have not balanced in a year and the shortfall leaves by a route the counting rooms cannot trace. Both the Sunhouse and the foundry guilds want Ekavir Dhatunath on their side of whatever is coming, and someone will try money first, and Vajraban has already failed at that twice. And three separate parties are quietly hiring outsiders to get the amulet off the girl's neck; none will say what they expect to follow.

Three roads out of the southern Pittalpradesha plains come together on the eastern bank, and the Setunadi is the reason they come together here and not twenty miles either way. North the plains roads run on toward Nexipol, which takes its share of every toll and sends a factor upriver twice a year to see the books. West past the crossing the carter routes bend toward the factory towns and Indranagri. Everything moving between the western works and the eastern markets pays this city twice for the privilege of not getting wet.

The western road is worse travelled than it was. Tariff quarrels between houses have started ending in burnt wagons, and the carters now go in convoy where two years ago they went alone, and the escort trade out of the Lower Rings is the one business in the district that has grown since the Foundry Hours Edict.

Eryndor is the width of the plains away, and its secession is still felt here. Northern cargo comes through slower and dearer with the Adalwin border closed to it. Recruiters have been seen in the taprooms twice, asking after men with foundry hands and no work. And in the counting rooms and the guild halls the same arithmetic is being done quietly by everyone: a fiefdom broke from the Pittal and kept its guns, and nothing whatsoever happened to it.

Downstream the Setunadi widens and slows and becomes somebody else's problem. Upstream it comes out of country nobody farms and brings the meltwater down in one go each spring, and the Bargewrights have never once failed to get the span painted before it arrives. They will tell anyone about it, at length.