The Brine-Cellars

A collapsed Imperial sea-customs station drowned into the south headland, its vaulted stone cellars half-full of standing brine, where the empire once weighed and bonded everything moving through the Narrows.

The Imperium built this to tax the whole mere's trade, and the mere answered by sinking it. What remains is three vaulted cellars of chalky stone in which brine-dark water stands waist-deep and tide-reavers have made their nests in the old bonding-cages. The Bonding-Ledger sits in its iron box on the upper shelf, just dry enough to read — a complete accounting of what the empire confiscated through this gate and where it claimed to send it.