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advocate lived from my days as a message runner from the different kennels. She was well enough, for someone who was paid to get Rats out of their rightful sentences. Still, there were times when we nabbed someone wrongfully, and then the advocates have their uses.
    It was a fair way from the Barrel's Bottom, and I took it at the trot. The servants didn't keep me waiting at the gate very long. Scarce ten minutes after I'd handed that strange eye charm to the manservant on duty there, he returned with the advocate, who was pulling on her robe as she walked.
    "Fetch my horse and two grooms suitably armed and prepared to ride," she ordered the servant. To me she said, "How many of our people do you have, Guardswoman, and where are they held?" She is always that way, straight to the point and no mucking about.
    "Two of them, Mistress Advocate, and they'll be at the Jane Street kennel," I replied.
    "Very well. You may go about your duties," she told me.
    And that was that. She did not ask me the prisoners' names or the charges. They never do, these busy, important folk. She and I both knew she could buy them out of the cages, given the guild's heavy purses.
    I returned to my partners as quickly as I had left them. Our captives were gone, tucked into a cage cart for transport to Jane Street and their advocate. We six Dogs and Pounce returned to Rovers Street.
    We spent the rest of the night in every drinking den and gamblers' hall on the side that lay within our district. We brought in seven others with more than two of the silver coles, but we'd no good feeling from them. The Yamani and his guard were our best bet for a scent of the colesmiths responsible for this run of false coin.
    "So who told the colemongers there was good coin to be made here?" Ersken asked after we'd mustered out. We were yawning over our reports, wanting to get them wrote up before we went home. I kept having to shove Pounce over to write mine. He likes to nap on my papers. "One of those colemongers that Flash District had?" Ersken suggested.
    I shook my head. "I'm thinking mayhap it's whoever made the coles, or who's in charge of passing them on. Gambling's a good way to do it, right? Folk will gamble for silver when they won't buy things with it. Silver makes folk like them that live in the Lower City crackbrained. They gamble and win, they gamble and lose. If you've a fistful of coles and you know how to gamble, you can trade your coles for coppers and your coppers back for good silver at the games. Your gamblers go out and play with other folk, sending your coles further along. No one asks your name, they hardly look at your face."
    "And they can't describe you for the Dogs," Goodwin said over my shoulder. She took my finished report from me and read it over. "Good, Cooper. Tidy, as ever." She gave Ersken and me a sheet of parchment each. "Flash District sent these over and Ahuda had them copied. We'll show them around. It's the cole passers they had, and lost."
    We looked at the drawings. They could have been anyone.
    "I know," Goodwin said. "Come on, you two. Let's have a late supper at the Mantel and Pullet. Lady Sabine is buying."
    As much as I wished to see my lady, and as much as it pained me to turn down a free meal, I was near asleep on my feet. I begged off. Walking home woke me enough to write in my journal. I've been thinking hard to see if there's aught I've forgotten, turning the fire opal stone I got as a Puppy over in my fingers. The bits of bright color my candle strikes from it spark my thinking.
    So is there a colesmithing ring in Port Caynn? Or just a lone colemonger like the Yamani or his river dodger mot?
    Time for bed.

 
     
    Saturday, September 8, 247
     
    Noon.
     
    Poxy, plaguey, sheep-biting Tunstall.
    The morning came on even hotter and more miserable than yesterday. The pigeons were pecking at my shutters. I was rolling over for another hour of sleep when someone hammered on my door, shaking dust loose from the