The Reed Lights

Fog hangs over the marsh channels as thick as wet wool. Dead ahead shines a two-color lantern—green over white, the official entry signal of the fen port—yet your chart shows nothing beneath that light except a jagged spur of rock. Down in the mist below the lantern, wooden hulls creak against moorings. Wreckers are waiting for an unwary ship to steer straight onto the reef.

The surviving wreckers stand on the gravel beach beside their beached hulk with their hands raised in surrender. Their leader, an older woman named Runa Brill, holds out a leather-bound account book before you even ask. "Every ship we lured onto the spur is logged in here—what she carried, and the harbormaster's one-third cut beside it. Harbormaster Osbert Clay sends us the schedules telling us which ships are worth hanging the lamp for. He only posted a bounty on us because the Guild auditors are coming to inspect his port this spring."

The wrecker sloop leads you through the reeds to a gravel bank where an old hull sits beached beside a driftwood fire. Twenty people—some of them children—are camped around the blaze. Sitting on a crate by the fire is a man in a harbor clerk's gray cloak, counting silver coins out of the wreckers' strongbox into his own leather satchel. Once finished, he walks down to a rowboat alone and pushes off toward the fen port.

Harbormaster Osbert Clay maintains a spotless office overlooking the port's real entry beacon. He turns the wreckers' green-and-white lantern over in his hands and smiles like a man finally rid of a nagging toothache. "Wiped them all out, did you? Splendid. The fen channels are safe for honest commerce once more." He reaches for the port strongbox, never once asking if you found any paperwork on that gravel beach.

The fen port is just stirring to life as your ship ties up at the pier. Having had the entire voyage to ponder his fate, the captured clerk has decided to be cooperative. "Harbormaster Clay will pay handsomely at his back door to get me back quietly. Or... you can ring that." He nods toward the great bronze fog bell at the end of the dock. "The harbor pilots lost one of their own brothers to the false light last autumn. Ring that bell, and they'll listen to every word I confess—and then they'll march straight up the hill for Clay."

Osbert Clay doesn't wait around for the angry pilots to reach his door. Bolting out his back entrance with the harbor treasury chest tucked under one arm, he sprints down the stone steps to the port's revenue cutter—which still answers to his orders for another fifteen minutes. The cutter chops her mooring lines with her gun ports already open.

The harbor pilots take over the port office without breaking a single pane of glass. By noon, a permanent pilot watch is posted day and night atop the true entry beacon, and an armed launch has been dispatched to the gravel beach to bring the wreckers in for trial. Cap in hand, the senior harbor pilot walks down to your gangplank.