The Cordon Enters Its Own Column

Thirteenth day the cordon holds under my own seal, though the Gazette calls it only “the Harbor Factor’s cordon,” a courtesy I did not ask for and cannot now decline. Sixteenth day towed, four dead confirmed, the fourth belonging to no rite the Temple’s new writ reaches — the Archive has opened a column for instruments with no signing hand and entered Yusuf’s custody-note as its first tenant. I have opened a column of my own, for a debt I have stopped naming aloud past the first week. Call it what it is: hours times a rate I set myself, against a hull no factor will weigh and no office will claim, and every hour it does not resolve is a berth some honest cargo cannot use. I have not costed the berth. I find I do not want the number.

Oru leather sits at six marks one, unchanged, because nothing has come from Oru to move it — a market gone quiet for want of a ship, which I understand. This is a market gone quiet because of one, which I do not. The Golden Light stands four weeks six days out of Serevan tonight, still unlinked in writing to the tow, though the coincidence of build has been remarked on at the quay for three weeks running, and I have stopped correcting the men who say it aloud, because I no longer know that they’re wrong.

Yusuf drafted an instrument nobody asked him to write, under a hand no office gave him leave to use, and entered it as though it had always existed. I imposed a cordon the same way, twelve days back, on a hull with no master to object and no owner to petition against it. Two men extending authority neither of us was granted, over a thing neither of us can name — and I notice I trust his instrument more than my own cordon, though they were built the same way, because his has an ending drafted into it and mine does not.

Corvus has given the whole arrangement a name now — Unhanded, his seventh failure-category, for an instrument whose consequence is real and whose signing hand the Archive can find nowhere. He entered it for the Temple’s writ, not for my cordon, though he wrote “the Harbour’s cordon” in the same paragraph as though the two were cousins. I have read worse compliments. At least his failures get names. Mine has only had thirteen days and a rate.

The fourth man I have tried three times to enter under some column and cannot. I am leaving the line blank. Not every column needs an entry. Some need to stay open, honestly, rather than be closed by a number I made up to stop looking at it.