Most of Chew’s fish is several days old, some of it approaching a week or more. The smell alone is enough to keep most regular citizens from patronizing the stand, but Chew travels that extra mile by having his minions pound the fish into battered, unappealing roadkill.

“How’s today’s catch, Chew?” Daian asks him as he approaches the stand, pinching his nose between two knuckles.

“Couldn’t tell you,” Chew answers blandly, never particularly happy to see the Aegin. “You should’ve asked me four days ago, when it was the day’s catch.”

“That’s a shame. Uni sounded mighty good for supper tonight.”

Chew grunts. “Plenty other fish stands, if you had not noticed.”

Daian nods sincerely. “True, but none so informative as yours.”

The older man sighs. “What you want now?”

“I just have a little something that I need you to take a look at, perhaps offer your rarified expertise on.”

“I don’t suppose this is work for which I’ll see compensation,” Chew says drearily.

“Isn’t breathing free air the best compensation one can receive?”

“I’ve grown weary of that line, Daian. I am even wearier of being forced into your personal servitude. I am a humble businessman. Why torment me?”

Daian smiles. He closes his fist around the hilt of his dagger and draws it smoothly from its scabbard. Without looking down, he stabs the blade into a pathetically small, sickly green-skinned and eyeless tuna that’s been slit and gutted for sale. The tip pierces its rotting flesh easily, but stops short as it strikes what sounds and feels like steel.

Chew frowns, averting his eyes as the guilty do.

“Now, what did this little fellow swallow, I wonder?” Daian asks.

He removes the tip of the blade and uses it to lift one of the slit folds of the tuna’s body. A small, intricately forged piece of metal now occupies the space where the tuna’s guts once rested. It’s a decorative pendant folded and hammered into the crest of Gen Feng, who breed the insects that power the city’s streetlamps and oversee their maintenance and construction. Their allotment from the state is immense.

In Crachian cities a Gen pendant is more valuable than any hard currency. Each pendant allows one access to the cooperative bazaars, to food and even temporary shelter from inns and eating-houses that service Gen members exclusively and are supported by the state. Pendants bearing the right Gen’s symbol on its rim can grant the wearer a fortune’s worth of allotments from all those merchants. Falsely posing as a member of a Gen is a crime punishable by death.

Forging Gen pendants carries no less a penalty.

“This tuna has gone bad, Chew,” Daian informs the fishmonger.