Scrawled Across the Sealed Passage

Vera Redhook's charcoal notice walling off the quartermaster's galleries — she names Pell's crew skimmers and dares them to prove she took a copper she didn't earn.

PELL AND ANY THAT RUN WITH HIM — this passage is shut. I mortared it and I'll open it when the counting's honest.

You want to stand in my hold and call ME greedy. Me. I pulled every one of you off a dead field or a debtor's rope and fed you off the road, and the season the take runs thin you decide the chief's been eating first. Come show me the crate I skimmed. Bring the tally. You can't, because there isn't one, because I take my chief's share off the TOP where every crew that ever worked has taken it, and not a copper past it.

Run your little market in the near holes if it keeps you fed. But the deep is mine and the shares in it are mine to move when the road's safe, and the first of Pell's counters I catch this side of the mortar goes in the sump. — V.R.