The Three Nails

The Three Nails are one of the five or six gangs that matter in Sarrum beyond a few streets, and their ground is the Candlewick edge, at the eastern end of Wick Lane where the small masters' workshops give out. Their beginnings are not written down. Candlewick itself grew as coal-town housing from about 4460, and the gang's money comes from what the district knows best, tools and scrap, with the city's unlawful arms trade on top. Its defining years were the Candlewick War of 4608 to 4610, fought chiefly against the Ash Dogs for control of the scrap routes, the brokering of labour and the yards where stolen works material was bought and sold, with twenty-one dead in local memory and seven proved at the assize. No side won it; the other gangs simply withdrew enough services to make fighting unprofitable.

Sarrum allows no making or selling of arms or armour within its bounds, and carrying them without a licence is in theory a hanging matter, yet every company, hall band and council mercenary unit goes armed. Marten Kells lives in that gap. His is the name tied to the unlawful trade in guns, armour and powder, which comes in disguised as parts, tools or scrap and is put together below ground, and no man in the city is more often reported hanged and then seen about again. The Nails are chased when a theft of arms becomes public knowledge, and quietly employed when a foreman wants something replaced with no requisition on the books. They also keep a kind of court: quarrels over tools, scrap, pawned apparatus and goods of awkward ownership are heard in a public house's back room, where Kells, or one of a pair of older brokers, hears each party and names a payment, a return or an apology. It has no force in law, but a man who ignores it soon finds no smith or pawnbroker will deal with him.

At the edge of the district stands the Hob and Hammer, Licensee Owen Garbutt's tools-and-scrap house, which keeps a back room for such hearings, and Kells is sometimes at its back table; behind it the Rat Yard runs a rat pit and dog matches for small stakes and large debts. Under the streets the Black Room, which moves whenever it is threatened, trades in pistols, blades, powder and stolen seals, and is Kells's business. In the music halls the gang backs instrument menders and rough comic turns.

The wise leave Kells's back table alone. A company with a pawned instrument to recover or a disputed tool may get a quicker answer from the Nails than from any bench, but it should come through somebody known and abide by what is decided. Arms bought on the Candlewick edge will hang their owner or pass unremarked depending on who finds them, and most of the green coal sold below is painted.