Mudflat Market

There is a market out here, and most days you would never know it. Mudflat Market keeps its hours by the river, not the sun: when the water pulls back off the flats it leaves a black glistening apron of silt, and out of that silt the market rises — plank walkways laid on sunk poles, awnings the color of the mud beneath them, and the mud-dwellers themselves, who have lived on these flats long enough to have stopped minding. Come at the wrong hour and the whole of it is under six inches of river. The locals like it that way. A market you can only reach half the day is a market that keeps its own counsel.

What changes hands here is not fish, though there is fish — dried, strung, traded by the length. What changes hands here is the founding period. The flats sit downstream of everything the old kingdom ever built and lost, and the river has been quietly filing it all down toward the sea for a very long time. What it can't carry, it drops here. So the mud-dwellers wade the low tide with their toes reading the silt, and they come up with relics — a carved fragment off a fallen tower, a token stamped with a crest nobody living can name, a scrap of a matrix that once pressed letters into wax. These they trade for dried fish and river-tokens, no questions offered and fewer welcomed. The most interesting discoveries never make the walkways at all. They go pocket to pocket, under the awnings, in the dark of a falling tide.

The market has a stone. Everyone who trades here knows it — a flat slab bared only in the dry season, when the water drops far enough to show its face. Cut into it is a single word, or most of one; two of its letters lie buried again under fresh silt before you can read the whole. The mud-dwellers will tell you it says SILT, and grin, because of course it does. Silt covers everything here, in the end. It is the flats' one honest advertisement.

It is also, if you are unlucky or unwise, where the low water uncovers something best left alone. There is a story the traders tell only obliquely — of a witness who saw what the tide bared one bad season and had time enough to scramble a warning into the mud before the river came back to bury it. SECRET, the letters said, tumbled out of order. The flats keep theirs underwater, and they do not thank you for reading them.

For all its mud, Mudflat Market is a hinge in the business of the pass. When Cody, the centaur courier, tries to explain how he came to be carrying a sealed letter for Duke Aldren with one letter of its seal sheared clean away, the trail runs back to here. "I collected it at Mudflat Market," he says. "A factor handed it over — no name, paid in advance, which I found very organized of him." The same factor, same short crest on the same green wax, had a second letter already gone — up to Confluence Watch, to the pass-keeper. To Corvin.

So the erasure at the heart of the whole affair passed through here, on the flats, under an awning, paid in advance and asked nothing. That is Mudflat Market exactly. Everything it knows, it hides under six inches of silt and discretion — and it charges you fish for the privilege of not being told.