Member-only story
FICTION SHORT STORY
Order of Seals
Six orderings — six fates — one of them a life
The building had been a customs house before it was anything else, and it kept a customs house’s habits. It woke early. It smelled of the river before it smelled of ink. The clerks came up by the water stair because the street door swelled shut in damp weather. In Lask, the weather was always damp, so that by the time Vinter reached her counter each morning she had climbed forty-one steps past the tide marks and could tell from the height of the wet on the stone how many petitioners would climb those same steps behind her with their papers held against their chests.
She had climbed the stairs for eleven years. The sign over the street door read Municipal Offices of the Port of Lask, and the petitioners called it the Seal House, and the clerks called it nothing at all, the way a person does not name their own hands. Three offices shared the second floor. The Harbormaster’s clerk kept a room at the river end, with a window that looked down on the quay. The Guild Assessor kept a room at the street end, with no window, because the guilds had paid for the room and had not thought a window worth the cost. The Registry of Persons kept the room between them, and the Registry’s door was the only one with a lock. Beyond the Assessor’s room, the corridor turned toward…
