Servants · Arcane working · Artifice
Platform Porter
Carrier of Loads
Railway platforms, packet quays and bonded warehouses
A squat, broad-chested carrier with massive arms and short legs, made to lift trunks, crates and bales at stations and quays. It carries more than three men and asks for nothing but a charge and a docket.
A platform porter carries whatever is put on its back frame or lifted in its arms to wherever its docket says, and sets it down square. It works the packet quays at Dover and the great stations of London, lifting passengers' trunks onto carts and freight off lighters, and it is the commonest device most travellers will ever see. It cannot be bribed to hurry and cannot be persuaded to take a thing without a docket, which makes it more honest than the men around it and less useful to the men behind them.
The quay men do not resent them as the halls resent the coal sisters, because a porter does the lifting that breaks backs and leaves the rest of the work alone. The company that owns them keeps a licensed man on every quay that uses them. A porter that has run low on charge slows, then stops where it stands with its load still on its back, and the quay men have a word for that which is not printed.
As witnesses describe it
A very squat, heavy figure with a broad iron chest, massive four-fingered arms, short stabilising legs and twin round lenses in a small head. A cargo harness and back frame are strapped over its body. Its lenses and the seams of its chest glow amber when charged, dimming as the charge runs low.
