"Eleven hundred," said the Guild man.
Tamsin Reed put her cup down.
She had been in that room four minutes. She had been offered a chair, which had never happened, and a cup of something, which had never happened, and she had known from the doorway that whatever was coming was very bad indeed.
"Eleven hundred marks is four years of my work."
"It is."
"So it is the Salt Road."
Ferren of the Guild had the grace to look at the table.
"It is the Salt Road."
Here is what everybody in Vennow knows and has known for a hundred and eleven years.
It runs south out of the town between two ridges. It is four days' walk to the sea. There is nothing on it — no village, no river, no ruin, no reason whatsoever for it to exist — and there is a stone at the top with a hand carved into it and a stone at the bottom that nobody living has seen.
Forty-one people have gone down it since the year the records begin.
One has come back.
"Why me?" said Tamsin Reed.
"You are the best surveyor in four counties."
"I am the best surveyor in four counties and I have spent seven years drawing field boundaries for men who are suing each other about ditches," she said. "This Guild has passed me over for eleven contracts since I was one and twenty and given four of them to Aldous Pike, who cannot hold a level in wind and who I have watched fake a closure.
"So ask me again, Master Ferren. Why me."
Ferren of the Guild looked at the table for about four seconds.
"Because you have no children," he said.
"Your father is dead and your mother is dead," he said, "and your aunt at Cowl Street is seventy-one and will not outlive the enquiry.
"And there is nobody who will come into this building in the autumn and stand in that doorway and ask us what we did with you."
Tamsin Reed sat entirely still.
"The last four we sent were men with families," said Ferren. "I have stood in this room and told four women what we had done. Two of them shouted and two of them did not, and the fourth was in the January of last year and she had a child on her hip.
"And I am nine and fifty," he said, "and I have decided I will not do it again."
"That is the first honest thing anybody in this building has ever said to me," said Tamsin Reed. "I will take it."
"Mistress Reed — "
"I will take it, and I want the eleven hundred paid before I go, in full, to my aunt at Cowl Street, and I want it in writing today with your seal on it and not the Guild's."
She stood up.
"And I want you to know," she said, "that you have got the reason wrong, and that I am not going to correct you."