Bram Möller's Arc

Chapter 28 of 63

The dockhand came back down the stairs with a woman behind him in a wool robe pulled over a nightdress. She held a lamp. Bram tried to straighten at the counter and his knees folded a half inch before he caught the ledge. His teeth cracked together. He could not shape the consignee's name. "Sit him down," the woman said. "He's blue." "No." Bram got the word out. He pushed the package flat on the desk with a hand he could not feel. "Sign. In front of me." The harbormaster came out of the back room in shirtsleeves. He saw Bram shaking against the counter and reached for a bell. "Cot in the back. Get the doctor up from the inn." "No," Bram said again. His jaw locked. He forced it open. "Route number. Check it. My seal." The harbormaster paused with his hand on the bell rope. He looked at the package. He looked at the ledger already open on the desk, where a line had been closed out earlier under Bram's seal by a runner named Kesh. "That's signed off," the harbormaster said. "Two hours back." "Not by me." Bram put his weight on both hands. The scorched print on his chest woke up and he almost went down. He held. "Consignee signs for the hand that brought it. That's the rule. Or it's not delivered." The woman in the wool robe set her lamp on the desk. She looked at the package, then at Bram's face, then at the harbormaster. "He's right," she said. "Open it in front of him or the seal means nothing to me." The harbormaster's mouth went tight. He drew a line through Kesh's entry with a ruler and a pen. He wrote a new line under it. He turned the ledger toward Bram. Bram could not close his fingers on the pen. The dockhand wrapped Bram's hand around it and held it there. Bram dragged his mark across the line. The consignee signed under his mark in a clean, awake hand. "Received," she said. "By me. From him." Bram let go of the pen. The counter came up fast. Two men caught him again. He heard the harbormaster shout for the cot and for blankets and for the doctor from the inn. On the desk the mechanical owl sat cooling, its firebox black, one wing tipped open where the coal had burned through. The dented brass compass lay beside it with its lid still open, the needle steady on north. Bram was out before they got him to the back room. The delivery was his. On paper, in front of the hand that received it, in his own mark. The rest of the route, and the name he had walked down a mountain to earn, would have to wait for him to wake up.