Carrick Spit sits eleven miles west of where Cask Eight took the hit, and I made the last three of them in bad light. The sun was a thumb-width over the reed line when Colm Barrow put the glass down. He has kept a shack on this spit for twenty-two years. The lane chart in his window is the harbor issue from First Green, and the pencil ticks on it are his. The printed lane is a white band. Each tick is a hull that smoked or turned short of the docks.
Cask Eight and Cask Eleven are Dunfoil pitch carriers, broad and low, hired to run lamp-pitch from Ashwharf to the Cinder Docks along the south edge of the Pitchwater. Both were laden under the Dunfoil stripe, which the Lane Board calls a clean flag. Cask Eight was holed under the forward cargo at dusk yesterday. Cask Eleven took the second hole along the port bilge before the middle watch. A strip of the pitch burned. The rest came ashore as a brown skin on the swell, and the spit smells of it whenever the wind sits in the west.
The things that holed them run low. Barrow has watched four this month. They hold a line a hoof under the surface, correct once toward a warm stack, and strike where a laden hulk sits deepest. The run stays straight. After the break they go still, and the hull finishes the work. He has given them no name.
"They take the heavy ones," Barrow said. "Empty boats they let walk. If your stack is hot and your draft is deep, they come in the last light. I told the board that on Tuesday. They sent me a fresh chart with the ticks wiped off."
Ashwharf is selling that chart this morning. The south lane shows open from the bar to the Cinder Docks under Maris Quill's new seal. Quill is the clerk who posts the Opportunity Corridor, the board's name for this water. Escort work is listed at forty bits a day. She posted the rate after Cask Eleven was already listing. Three chits went before noon. By the time the light thinned, every taker was back inside the bar.
Harp Gallant took the first chit. He is a touring captain with a painted prow. He sailed to the outer bar, gave a speaking-horn address on the future of the corridor, and came about when the wind laid the smoke flat on the channel. His log, copied onto the board in Quill's hoof, calls the turn a tactical pause in support of commerce. Barrow watched the painted prow tie up at the inner rung. The crew clapped for the dock.
Jory Fen was on Cask Eight's forward deck when the hull opened. A bilge plate came up through the grating and drove a splinter through his left shoulder. Barrow's skiff reached the hulk while pitch was still climbing the ladder. The board boat was at the Ashwharf stair when Fen came onto the spit, and the Ashwharf surgeon was on that stair with it. Fen's coat is stiff with pitch along the ribs.
"We were on the printed lane," Fen said. "White band, south edge, dusk bell still ahead of us. It hit once, under the second cask row. The lamp went. I got to forty before the hatch dogs turned, and the pitch was on the ladder by then. The wheelhouse chart was clean. Barrow's has the ticks."
Quill answered on the relay horn from the Ashwharf desk. "Both events are under review as isolated roughness," she said. "Dunfoil hulls are outside the quarrel. Captains who keep the schedule and fly the stripe will find the water accommodating." She went on into the rate card, forty bits a day, disciplined carriers, opportunity along the south edge. The relay died while she was reading it.
By full dark Cask Eleven showed a list against the channel, and Cask Eight's stack still threw a thick line. Cask Four, the next Dunfoil carrier due, turned at the bar instead of making the second bell. Her captain left the chit untouched, anchored in the lee of the spit, and hailed to ask about the bottom. Barrow told him the bottom was sand and mud, and that four of the low craft had worked that track since the first of the month.
Ashwharf posts the morning sheet at first light. The type, Barrow says, was locked before Cask Eleven put her port rail under. The sheet calls the lane open, the escort rate fair, and yesterday a weather note. The wind on Carrick Spit has held steady out of the west since noon.
