Lindell keeps books.
Not just in ledgers and magistrates' registers, but in stone and pipe and time. Every crack in the pavement, every patched scorchmark on a wall, every bell that rings a heartbeat late is the city remembering something done to it and refusing to forget.
Two weeks since midnight geometry split its dream of itself along a careful, knife-thin fault. Two weeks since a tower screamed, a god rolled a die, and the sewer learned a new word for "union." No one calls it After, not in polite company, but everything they do now is an aftershock.
Under the noise of commerce, the city mutters:
remember when the river tried to leave
remember when the wall almost fell inwards
remember when the engineers got clever and the sky turned to glass
The view pulls up and out of the gutters, over rooftops slick with dawn mist.
Halfling Quarter first: rowhouses knotted together like family arguments, rooftop gardens steaming in the chill. A halfling baker with flour up his forearms is already cursing a temperamental oven spirit, promising to brick it up alive if it doesn't behave. The air smells of yeast and burnt sugar.
The riverfront next. Orc dockworkers trudge off the night shift, shoulders rolled and backs complaining. A dragonborn temple guard in a patched surcoat steps aside to let them pass and taps a clawed thumb against his chest in time with the first shiver of bells from the Horologium.
Farther along, a kobold lamplighter on her last post of the night snuffs out a plant-lamp with a pole and a practiced twist, muttering, "Too many bells, not enough darkness. City's going to chip a tooth on all this time."
The panorama swings toward the Engineers' and Industrial districts, where sound thickens. Ratcheting gears. Steam sighing. The hollow cough of a factory waking up badly. Here, mechanical noise isn't background; it's a sermon.
At the center of it, squatting on its own little square like it owns every straight line in sight, is the Engineers' Guildhall.
The Guildhall looks exactly like the kind of building that would insist it is modest.
Whitewashed brick polished until it gleams. Copper gutters and trim buffed to a shine that feels like a boast. Gnomish numerology spirals along the guttering: primes, redundancies, little equations that whisper in neatly arranged symbols, nothing fails without permission.
Above the doors, an oversized clock stares down, ticking sharp enough to feel like judgement more than timekeeping. If you stand too long beneath it, you start wanting to apologize.
Carved deep over the doorway, letters crisp from hard upkeep:
IN SERVICE OF STABILITY
If you stand at the right angle, you can still see the ghost of a second word. PROFIT, carved in by some angry hand, then chiseled away. The scar's been sanded, painted, varnished, and pretended into "just how the stone looks."
The Guildhall is new by gnome standards. The bones of the old guildhouse are somewhere far away, under glassed mountains and dead snow.
Last time they misjudged a pressure line, a whole valley went dark for three winters. The snow fell gray and stayed that way. They cut people out of ice that had boiled before it froze.
You don't walk away from that. You build a hall like this one. You engrave never again into every beam. You pretend that's enough.
Inside, it smells of hot ink, old coffee, chalk dust, oil, metal filings, old smoke, and the thin ozone of restrained magic. Boards of INCIDENT REPORTS line one wall, each with neat gnomish script and thin red lines connecting cause to effect. The red looks enough like blood to make the point.
Framed diagrams of bridges that didn't fall and culverts that held against "unprecedented" floods hang like saints. Corrected blueprints of other people's designs bear smug red annotations: here is where we saved you from yourself.
The place feels less like a guildhall and more like a church devoted entirely to the prevention of second mistakes.
A young human woman—Sera Argent, Journeyman-But-Not-Gnome—stalks past with a wand-built-like-a-machine-gun slung over her shoulder. She mutters about stress readings, sigma ranges, and nobody paying attention until the numbers get dramatic enough to prove her right.
Nearby, a tiefling clerk with horn tips stained in ink slaps a ledger.
"Devil jokes aren't a compensation package," he tells a junior Engineer. "You want someone at the midnight readings, you pay midnight rates. We've already buried one 'cost-saving measure' this decade."
The junior wilts. The clerk goes back to copying columns of numbers with the grim focus of someone who will not be the reason a valley dies.
That's the hum of the building: grief fed into math until it looks like control.
Into that hum walks the problem.
They arrive as a unit without quite intending to.
Riona in front because she doesn't know how to be anywhere else. Plate polished to "respectable but not gaudy," cloak pinned back. She carries herself like a verdict that has already been written, jaw set in a line that has made more than one Watch captain reconsider the day's choices.
Branna a half step off her right shoulder, taller, heavier, wrapped in mail and the quiet mass of someone who has walked away from too many fights to romanticize them. Her axe is peace-bonded. The bonds might as well have little tags on them that read I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I'M DOING.
Kel drifts, a shade sideways, as though the floor is tilted differently beneath him. Today's skin is halfling: neat clothes, waistcoat, hair tidy, face open and harmless. The sharpness is in the eyes and the way he can't quite keep his hands still. One fingers a folded document at his belt like a talisman.
Merrow comes small and thoughtful, coat slightly slept-in, gaze snagging on the incident boards and getting stuck. He looks like the sort of man the city chews on in its sleep.
Tamsin Reed is utterly wrong for this room: broad shoulders, farm muscle, dirt that never quite leaves her hands, even when the ink does. She smells faintly of green things and damp earth. The Guildhall's stone registers her as contamination and doesn't know what to do about it.
Skrik is small and wiry: a rust-colored knife in a too-big coat, tool harness bristling with chisels and hooks. His eyes are already tracking vents, exits, people whose boots would slip on wet stone.
Lyra walks half a step behind the others, scarf neat at her throat, clothes clean and stubbornly practical. Nothing on her says "unclean" except the fact she exists. The Guildhall doesn't see a girl with a talent for water. It sees kobold. It files that under Problem.
Behind the front counter, Tilla Grynd looks up.
She's gnome, cobalt hair braided around one shoulder with a slide-rule woven through the braid like ornament and weapon both. Glasses catch the lamplight. Ink smudges only her left hand.
She looks at them and, in the span of a heartbeat, mentally labels them: paladin, soldier, lawyer-devil, wizard, hedge-witch, sewer-rat, kobold. The last label tightens her mouth.
"Business?" she asks. The word lands like a stamped form.
Riona doesn't bow. She tips her chin.
"Lady Riona Vale," she says, "acting under civic authority from the Drainpipe quarter."
Tilla's quill hovers. Nothing hits paper yet. "And your interest?"
"Your infrastructure," Riona replies. "It has begun accepting unsanctioned theology."
Kel's eyebrows go up a fraction. That is not how he phrased it on the way over.
Riona continues, calm. "We have encountered anomalous entities in your sewer grid. We believe further interference is imminent. The Drainpipe kobolds know the tunnels. We are here to secure cooperation before this becomes an inquest instead of a conversation."
The word inquest lands with a soft little thud on the side of Tilla's skull where the worst memories live.
Her gaze slides past Riona and Branna, brushes Merrow's ink-stained fingers, Kel's smile, and stops on Lyra like a brick wall.
"No kobolds," she says. "This is a line."
The word line hits Lyra like it always does, right between the ribs, a ghost of a shove.
She doesn't flinch. She lowers her chin so the shadow of her scarf hides the tightness in her throat and says nothing.
Skrik's whiskers bristle. His tail flicks, then stills when he remembers where they are.
Tilla taps the slide-rule on the counter.
"We don't let anyone near mainlines without Guild papers," she says. "You don't remember the last unauthorized fix. We do. We're still counting the graves."
"Consider it subcontracting," Kel offers, leaning his elbow on the counter as if this is just another negotiation. "Outsourcing. Very modern. You get plausible deniability; we get tetanus."
Tilla ignores him completely. This is not hard; she's had practice.
Merrow shifts his gaze from the incident boards to her face.
"At the inquest," he says mildly, "they'll put the blame on whoever's cheapest to ruin."
"They take the blame, yes," Tilla snaps. "We still dig the bodies out. Last time a 'helpful' burrowing crew rerouted a line, half of Block D lost heat in midwinter. Three children died because someone believed improvisation was better than protocol."
Silence stretches. The boards on the wall seem to lean closer.
Tilla reaches for her stack of forms like a drowning person grabbing rope.
"For sewer anomalies, you file seven-B, Preliminary Infrastructure Complaint," she recites, voice automatic. "For suspected fatalities, three-C, Provisional Death Report. For magical discharge in civic works, five-M. All forms—"
"There's going to be an explosion," Tamsin says.
She doesn't raise her voice. She says it the way she might say There's going to be rain, heavier than you think.
Tilla looks up slowly. "You have evidence?"
"Smell," Tamsin says. "Wrong alchemy in lines that should only carry water. Flow that twitches when it should roll. Pipe-fitters complaining about new fittings with stamps that don't match the old ones."
She hesitates, then adds, "And a small god rolled a die in front of me and laughed."
There is no space on any form for that.
"Form nine-F," Tilla mutters under her breath. "Unscheduled Prophetic Event. We don't keep that at the desk."
Riona sets a folded document on the counter between them.
"Petition for Emergency Access to Civic Infrastructure," she says. "Mitigation of imminent hazard. Noncompeting. Shared liability under section twelve-b."
Kel's smile goes sharp for a second. His baby. All grown up and ready to annoy a clerk.
Tilla reads. Her lips move as she adds invisible columns of cost and risk.
"You can sign off on 'prevented detonation,'" Riona says, "or on 'sent apologies to next of kin.' Those are the two headings this will end up under. We're offering you advance placement in the first."
Behind Tilla, the incident boards silently chant never again never again never again.
"Liability signatures," Tilla says finally. "All of you. Any unauthorized modification to Guild structures becomes your financial and legal responsibility. Up to and including debt servitude."
Kel's hand shoots out. "That's my native—"
"Kel." Riona doesn't look at him.
He sighs. "My second-favorite language."
He signs. His name curls like a question mark.
Riona signs next, bold and steady. Branna prints hers in squared-off soldier's letters. Merrow's ink forms neat loops, as if he's worried about how it'll look on a plaque later. Tamsin presses her name into the paper with a farmer's care. Skrik carves a jagged claw-mark where a signature should go.
Lyra writes her name slowly. She waits a heartbeat afterward, watching, as if the ink might be rejected on sight. It dries like everyone else's.
Merrow leans against the counter, looking Tilla in the eyes.
"Last time your people misjudged a pressure line," he says, "winter came three years early and never really left. You pulled bodies out of boiled ice and built this hall on the promise that it wouldn't happen again. Let us keep that promise pointed at the right problem."
Something flickers, fast, in Tilla's expression.
She stamps the petition. The wax takes the impression of the Horologium's clock-toothed seal with a soft hiss.
"Emergency access," she says. "Twenty-four hours from this moment. No altering primary flows without an Engineer present. No unlogged rerouting. You break it, you bought it. If you live, we will send a bill."
Her gaze snaps back to Lyra and Skrik.
"You bring one of them into our works," she says, "that's on you. She cracks a seal, sets off a cascade—you answer to the Horologer."
It isn't exactly species. It's worse and more honest: credentialed vs not, safe vs contamination.
Lyra's throat tightens. "Your lines are already cracked," she says quietly. "We're just the ones who can hear it."
Tilla doesn't answer. She can't, not with the boards listening.
"Go," she says instead. "If you're wrong, you owe me an apology. If you're right…"
She glances past them, toward the city they're about to crawl under.
"If you're right," she says, "you still won't be the ones who get thanked."
The door hisses shut behind them as they leave, resetting to neutral. Outside, the district vibrates with factory whistles and cart wheels and shouted orders. The Guildhall's clock barks another quarter. Smaller clocks in nearby labs adjust their hands in neat, terrified obedience.
In Tamsin's pocket, the little god's die warms like a secret.
"If it hums, ticks, or winks," Riona tells them, once they're in the street, "you don't touch it alone."
She doesn't bother with lodgings and assignments; there's only one job and they all already volunteered.
"Explain something," Branna says as they cut away from the crisp brick of the Engineers' district. She runs a hand along a wall where pipes disappear inside. "If they live in mud and math same as kobolds, why do they act like the floor belongs to them?"
"Identity," Riona says. "If your work is invisible, the city forgets your hands. Gnomes built this grid after watching another one fail. They etched their names onto every valve so the stone would know who to blame next time."
Merrow snorts softly. "Their sacrament is control. A kobold touching a pipe without a form isn't blasphemy because she's a kobold. It's blasphemy because it's change that didn't pass through the correct ritual."
"Our ritual," Skrik says, "is 'if it's going to blow, you fix it and argue later.'"
"Same religion," Kel says, "different denomination."
"How about we believe in not dying," Branna suggests. "We can fight about liturgy at the tavern."
They walk.
They pass dwarven masons rolling up the shutters on a counting-house and arguing in low Dwarvish about torque standards and whether gnomes have invented a fake unit just to charge more.
They pass halfling teenagers chalking a hopscotch grid on uneven flagstones, tossing a stone that keeps skittering toward a sewer grate. Two of them eye Kel with barefaced interest. He flashes them a grin that's fifty percent camaraderie and fifty percent warning.
Corroded posters peel from the walls: union notices, theatre bills, temple proclamations in fonts that promise comfort or uprising depending on the ink.
Half-buried under fresher paper, someone long ago spray-painted REMEMBER HRÁŠT across a stretch of brick and drawn a crooked little crown above the H. Someone else has tried to scrub it away so many times that the brick is smoother there now than anywhere else.
At ankle height, a line of chalk ducks waddles along one wall, each with a different hat. One has an engineer's cap. One a little paladin's shield. One wears a square clock. Kids' work, or grown-up magic wearing a funny mask. Either way, life insists on being ridiculous even when the city's busy trying to kill itself.
The air changes.
"Smell," Tamsin says, stopping dead.
On top of the usual city mix—wet stone, old piss, plant-lamps cooling, bakery ghost-smoke—another note threads: resin, saltpeter, and something floral and cheap, trying to cover the sharp edges.
Lyra feels a pipe underfoot judder wrong against the bones of the street.
"Somebody's bolted new work onto old veins," she says.
"Gnomework pretending it's not gnomework," Skrik mutters.
The access hatch to the underworks hides behind the warped stage door of a third-rate playhouse. Inside, among dead scenery and a feather boa that should have been burned years ago, a slab of iron takes up most of one wall. It has a handle, and the tired look of something that would really, really like someone with sense to notice it exists.
Kel pats it.
"Routine compliance check," he tells the metal. "You don't want old stress. Old stress turns into lawsuits."
He slides a key that belongs to a different lock into the hatch, leans in the wrong directions, and coaxes the tumblers into thinking this is, in fact, their business. Eventually they sigh and roll over.
The hatch opens on a tight spiral of stairs. The breath of the undercity comes up, cool and damp and carrying the metallic tang of water under pressure.
The underworks are another city entirely.
Brick arches. Floors slick in unpredictable patches. Mainlines like brass spines along ceiling and wall. Smaller pipes like ribs. Everything hums: water, air, the faint stutter of safety valves. Inspection stamps dot the metal—old neat gnomish numerals, newer ones over-stamped with Chronometer sigils that look suspiciously like little clock faces with teeth.
Lyra breathes easier under stone. Up there she is an argument. Down here she is an instrument.
She lays her palm to a mainline and feels the water inside, rattling like a heartbeat that's drunk too much coffee.
"Talk," she whispers.
The line judders once in irritation, then gives her its complaint: extra junctions, weird backflows, pressure spikes where there shouldn't be any.
"Something added a second beat," Merrow says, eyes closed, fingers splayed on the brick. "Like a second heart trying to sync with the first and getting bored halfway through."
"The stone remembers what it felt like last time water panicked here," Tamsin murmurs. "It doesn't want that again."
"Too late," Skrik says. "We're already in Act Two."
The first regulator chamber opens around a curve in the tunnel. Here, the city's guts are all laid out: thick mains converging, branching stems, wheels coded with painted tags, plates stamped with neat little labels. Pediment Regulators: the machinery that keeps the respectable streets above from turning into steam-blasted fresco.
The wrong smell is strongest here.
Kel spots every sin with professional disgust. Bolts too bright in the middle of old corrosion. A patch of mortar that's a different shade. A run of new pipe that doesn't quite match the old.
"These aren't Guild upgrades," he says. "Guild upgrades come with plaques. This is someone bolting their own nonsense onto the safety net and praying nobody checks the receipts."
A side hatch leads to a catwalk over a sump. In the middle of it sits a brass egg the size of a keg, wired into pipes that shouldn't know its name. Paper tags dangle off it: PREVENTATIVE MAINTENANCE, PRESSURE STUDY, tidy lies written in waterproof ink. Runes crawl across its surface in a script that wants to look like standard Guild notation if you don't examine it too hard.
The single wheel that controls flow into it looks old, honest, overworked.
Riona steps onto the catwalk and sets her hands on the wheel. It creaks, not quite ominously.
"Tamsin," she says.
Tamsin's fingers have already coaxed hair-thin roots into seams and joints, ready to strangle the right one.
Kel plants himself by the pressure gauges, eyes darting from needle to needle, reading the little twitchy movements like gossip.
Merrow closes his eyes halfway and lets his mind lean toward the egg. He feels the pulse inside: wrong and eager.
"Failsafe," he says. "You build something blasphemous into the city's clock, you give it an alibi. Someone jostles the wrong tooth, this thing belches a short sharp miracle. Fire, noise, a few bodies, a plausible excuse."
"Failsafes are supposed to keep people alive," Branna says.
"This one got promoted," Merrow answers. "Same hymn, different altar."
He sketches counter-rhythms in the air, the way he would when tuning an argument or a ward. The egg's pulse stutters, then surges, heat ghosting across their faces. Pipes groan.
"Merrow," Riona says.
"I heard it," he snaps, sweat starting under his collar. "That was wrong."
He adjusts. This time he leans into the beat he feels inside the bomb, rocking it off-center instead of fighting it. For a moment, his own pulse syncs to it in an unpleasant, nauseating way.
Then the egg sulks. Its eagerness drains down to a dull simmer. The pressure in the pipes backs away from catastrophic toward merely unacceptable.
"There," Merrow says, teeth clenched. "Now it wants to kill people, but not right now. Cut."
"Cut," Branna echoes, watching the needles.
Tamsin's tiny roots cinch, pinching off key feeds. Skrik slips a chisel under a plate and lifts, just enough to break a rune without waking the whole array. Kel leans in and smears a priming sigil with his thumb so it can't reboot itself.
The egg goes quiet. Not safe, but finished.
"Proper Guild failsafe vents pressure and logs a fault," Merrow says. "This took the same logic and decided the logging was optional and the casualties weren't."
"Later," Riona says. "Right now there's another one."
There is. Merrow can still feel an extra twitch in the grid, somewhere lower and wetter.
"Left and down," he says. "And whatever's beating there, it's closer to human speed."
The second chamber is smaller, uglier.
Another catwalk. Another brass shape. This time, the bomb is wearing a man.
He's strapped in tight. Harness bites shoulders and thighs. A satchel sits against his chest, wires feeding into it from the pipe at his back. The satchel ticks. Sweat slicks his beard. His eyes are wide and wild and fixed on nothing.
"Don't move," Riona says.
He flinches. His shoulders jerk. The satchel's tick stutters into a faster rhythm.
Kel winces. "Off to a strong start."
They move fast.
Tamsin presses her hand to his forearm. Her voice drops into the register you use on skittish animals and children with nightmares.
"Slow," she murmurs. "If you breathe like that, your blood will think it's dying. It will rush. It will make everything worse. Slow."
Merrow edges close, hands spread, not touching the satchel but sliding his sense into its spellwork. He feeds false counts into it, lying gently about how much time has actually passed, stretching the intervals.
Skrik circles to the back of the harness, eyes hunting for the one clasp that holds the rest in its teeth.
Kel goes for the man's eyes.
"What's your name?" he asks. "What block? Who packed your lunch this morning?"
The man's throat works. "J-Jarik," he gets out. "Jarik Ulm. Pipe-fitter. Block E. Industrial Slums."
"Good," Kel says. "Jarik from Block E, who was so very stupid and unlucky today. Who strapped you into this?"
"Foreman," Jarik pants. "Said… said Guild used to do live drills. Old tradition. We prove the harnesses, check the enchantments. Satchel's just a weight, he said. Just a test."
The satchel ticks, brisk and offended.
"Tests don't tick," Skrik says.
"No sane foreman does live-body tests," Merrow mutters. "Not since the valley. Not since East Sluice. Someone's using Guild paranoia as camouflage for human sacrifice."
"Call it what it is later," Branna says. "Right now—"
"Right now," Merrow says, "we take the man off the bomb without upsetting either too much."
It's ugly work.
Tamsin talks Jarik's heart rate down one beat at a time, whispering greenery and slow rivers into his bloodstream.
Merrow keeps tricking the satchel's timing spell, smoothing out its urge to crescendo.
Skrik finds the main clasp, gets his chisel into it, and pries. The harness loosens with a clank.
Branna takes Jarik's weight as the straps slacken, keeping him from collapsing in a way that might slap the satchel.
Kel bends and, on Merrow's counting, carefully cuts a secondary wire.
Harness off. Bomb unlatched and lowered to the grating, ticking its irritation down to silence.
Jarik collapses to his knees, then to his hands, then curls around the space where the satchel was, gasping.
"You're alive," Riona says, which is both comfort and indictment.
Jarik laughs, a ragged sound. "For now," he says. His partner will yell at him for days once she's done thanking every god in hearing distance.
They haul him up through an access hatch that opens into a corner of Pediment Square.
Pediment Square wears respectability like a well-cut coat. Clean stone. Plant-lamps grown into neat rows. Statues of long-dead generals and civic benefactors, mostly human, all taller than they would have been in life.
Jarik's partner appears out of the crowd like an arrow. Human woman, patched coat, scarf yanked crooked. She cries his name and hits his shoulder with the side of her fist before dragging his face into her hands.
"Told you I'd be fine," he wheezes.
"You're an idiot," she says, which is married for I love you more than I know what to do with.
The crowd flowers.
Halfling aunties in sleep-rumpled nightgowns clutch each other and offer loud commentary with no facts and many opinions. A goblin boy perches on a lamppost, broom hoisted like a banner, eyes bright with future storytelling rights. Two waterfolk from the Sacred Lake stand shoulder to shoulder, taking in the whole scene with calm, flat eyes and the quiet calculation of people who know how fast water spreads.
A half-elf Watch sergeant—Riona vaguely remembers them from a licensing argument once—attempts to establish a perimeter with a handful of tired Watch. "Back, back, nobody's dying on these cobbles today, I will take it very personally."
An orc dockworker in a sweat-stained vest mutters, "Guild shenanigans. I told you. Pipes never pulled this nonsense when my dad was young." He is wrong, but comforting himself with selective history is cheaper than bread.
A dragonborn acolyte in temple blues stands at the edge of it all, murmuring a generic prayer for "the nearly dead, the frightened, and whoever else gets caught in the blast radius of bad decisions."
Mara Quill arrives like a dropped ink bottle.
Teen, ink on her wrists, hair in a knot that's already losing the argument. Quill and paper clutched to her chest. Eyes blazing.
"GUILD BLUNDER AVERTED!" she yells, because headlines sound better when shouted. "HEROIC INTERVENTION SAVES DOZENS! Read Quill for the truth they won't print!"
She clocks Riona in a heartbeat and mentally writes HEROINE in the margin without asking.
Captain Mire of the Watch stands in a tight triangle of uniformed bodies, jaw clenched. She looks as though she woke up three minutes ago and has been furious ever since.
"Keep back," she tells the crowd. "Nobody gets trampled. That's tomorrow's headline, not today's."
Robert is there. Of course he is. Today's job is WATCH AUXILIARY, the armband slightly too big.
"Should I—should we—escort them?" he asks Mire, meaning the party, meaning Jarik.
"We should not get trampled," Mire says. "We have already achieved that. Let's not push it."
Penny Felltap, Guild spokesgnome, arrives like a memo.
Immaculate vest, polished shoes, badge held up like a shield, expression set to Official Concern.
"This is a Guild-regulated incident," she says crisply, flashing her credentials at Mire. "We will be handling all public statements."
"By all means," Mire says. "Handle away."
Penny climbs onto a crate. Someone hands her a sheaf of notes with the ink still drying.
"At approximately oh-seven-forty-three," she begins, "unauthorized intervention in civic infrastructure occurred beneath Pediment Square, which may constitute a—"
"Question," Kel calls, hand up, smile bright and poisonous. "Does that contract mention our Emergency Access Petition, signed and stamped by Guild Clerk-Third Tilla Grynd?"
He hoists the paper. The Horologium seal flashes in the light.
Penny hesitates one beat too long.
"This matter is under review," she says, defaulting.
"Everything is under review," Merrow murmurs. "That's called 'history.'"
Riona steps forward just enough that the space around her rearranges.
"Fault in the pressure regulators," she says, voice carrying without strain. "Unauthorized modifications attached to Guild lines. Two devices. One inert now, one nearly took a man's chest off. Guild error. Corrected."
"Error?" one of the halfling aunties shouts. "Sounds like murder to me."
"You mean we almost got boiled so they could save on copper?" the orc mutters louder now.
"Error," Mara repeats under her breath as she writes, underlining it three times.
"Potential error," Tilla says sharply, pushing through to Penny's side. Her braid is slightly crooked now; the slide-rule has migrated. "Under review."
Crowd noise rises. Potential does not play well against almost strapped a man to an explosion.
Riona looks right at Tilla. "Your infrastructure nearly turned these people into a cautionary tale," she says. "Own it."
"You enjoy being indispensable," Kel adds, tone almost gentle. "You enjoy invoices. You enjoy never being in the story when your calculations go wrong."
"You think we don't lose people?" Tilla snaps, turning on him. "You think the Horologer doesn't—"
She clamps her mouth shut. Too late; a sliver of raw shows through.
When she speaks again, her voice is lower.
"The last time we misjudged a pressure line," she says, "winter came three years early somewhere I will never see again. Don't lecture me about losses."
Riona files that away. Not enemy. Not ally. Complicated witness.
Up on a balcony overlooking the square, a young woman in a blue cloak watches everything with the intensity of someone making her own ledger.
Lia Vaylen leans on the stone railing, cloak pin pinned in that understated way that says old money to anyone fluent in noble. She counts Jarik, his partner, the party, the Watch, the bystanders. She keeps a tally of people who are nearly dead and people who are merely frightened.
When Mara shouts some exaggerated number of "nearly casualties," Lia frowns and corrects it in her head.
She tries to ask a passing clerk about official figures and gets a pat "not your jurisdiction, my lady." She files that phrase in the same drawer as every other time she's been told to mind a smaller portion of the world.
On the statue in the middle of the square—some long-ago general, sword raised in a pose he probably never used in real life—a raven perches.
It tilts its head and watches the whole mess with bright, bored eyes. It might be the same bird that watched a warehouse go holy and a dragon die badly. It might be a different raven wearing the same job.
Tamsin spots it.
"Audit," she says under her breath, as if assigning tasks. "Good. Someone should."
The view yanks back again.
You want a blueprint for what comes next? A step-by-step on robbing a city's clock?
Too bad.
This isn't an instruction manual.
It's a confession.
The granary safehouse squats three floors above sacks of grain and the faint, lingering reek of an otyugh who had a very exciting week in Chapter Three.
The room they've commandeered is simple: scarred table, mismatched chairs, a narrow window with a view of Pediment Square on one side and the Horologium's flank on the other. The walls are brick, pitted, flaking old whitewash. Someone painted a rude sketch of the Horologium on one wall years ago and gave up halfway through.
On the table: maps.
Big linen sheets stamped HOROLOGIUM – MAIN INFRASTRUCTURE, spread flat and held down at the corners with a mug, a brick, a bent nail, and Tamsin's elbow.
Gnomish script labels every valve, bypass, freeze-door, aesthetic flourish. Kel's infernal shorthand crawls through the margins: ownership chains, contract codes, question marks where the money trail is suspicious. Skrik has added his own symbols in charcoal—tiny clawed footprints for "good path," Xs for "thin wall," jagged teeth for "place where they chose pretty over sensible."
Skrik taps a run of little symbols clustered along one hall.
"Freeze-doors," he says. "Every twenty feet. They must've burned their fingers here once and swore ice would get there first next time."
"That tracks," Kel says. "Nothing says 'we've learned our lesson' like overcompensation you can bill for."
Tamsin sits with one palm on the table, the other on the wall, letting stone and paper argue about what existed first.
"This wall used to be river," she murmurs. "They told the water to leave. It remembers."
Merrow paces, stops, scribbles a fragment of ward-circle in his notebook, paces again. He mutters to himself about resonance, about how many places you can anchor a city's heartbeat before it starts to sound like a cage.
Branna has a different map in front of her: hand-sketched notes about guard routes, Watch changeovers, the Horologium's open hours for Clock Court. She marks where she's seen guards smoke, where they get bored, where their attention goes during public speeches.
Riona stands at the window, looking down at the square where Jarik now sits on a crate, drinking something hot out of a chipped mug. Her cloak around his shoulders looks wrong and right at once.
"Here's the line we're not crossing," she says without turning away from the glass.
Everyone hears the unwritten word after it: yet.
On the map nearest Kel, in the margin, a lattice of circles and arrows is drawn in tiny precise ink.
"Reflection nets," Merrow says, tracing the pattern. "Channels to catch stray energies and shove them back into safe ground. Overbuilt, paranoid, beautiful."
"Also," Kel says, "perfect scaffolding if you wanted to turn your pipe grid into a listening device."
"If I were designing it," Merrow says, eyes unfocusing, "I'd use glass-winged sprites. Mirror-wasps. Little reflective insects that drink anomalies and bring what they taste back home."
"I don't like bugs that tell on people," Tamsin says.
"Imagine what the Crown does with that," Kel adds, "once it stops being about burst pipes and starts being about voices they don't like."
Outside the window, the Horologium looms.
It's not the tallest tower in Lindell, but it's the one everything else measures itself against. The first surveyors' rods went into the ground beneath it. Gnomes built upward from that zero-point: stone and brass, gears like inward-facing teeth, clockfaces studded at different levels, all synchronized like a chorus of judgmental eyes.
Every quarter-hour, bells shiver out across the districts. People take comfort in it, the way prisoners take comfort in knowing exactly when the lights go out.
Later, the city will fill Clock Court at its base with speeches and shouting about who nearly got them killed and who will pay.
Tonight, the party intends to break in through the side.
Night comes, grudgingly. The city doesn't sleep so much as rotate which parts of itself carry the shouting.
On a lower rooftop adjacent to the Horologium, harness buckles click. Rope hisses over stone.
Branna checks everyone's gear twice. She yanks straps tighter, adjusts knots, ignores complaints. Riona allows this without protest; that's trust, in their language.
"Last chance to back out," Riona says.
No one does. No one ever does at the point where it would actually be useful.
"I already sold my soul three times," Kel says lightly, adjusting his gloves. "This is just creative refinancing."
"Maybe read the contract this time," Branna says.
Lyra tugs the rope at Skrik's harness, hard enough to make him grunt.
"Don't fall," she says.
He bares his teeth. "Don't let go."
It's not a joke, but they treat it like one because that's easier.
The wall of the Horologium is all deliberate difficulty: smooth stone, decorative ledges that are not quite as useful as they look, protruding maintenance grips placed at intervals that assume anyone needing them will have gnome proportions.
They climb anyway.
The city falls away under them. Plant-lamps become stars on the ground. The Sacred Lake beyond the walls glints like a coin someone dropped and forgot. Watch torches along the walls trace a rough halo.
Halfway up, Merrow pauses, palm flat to stone.
"The building's humming," he says softly. "Counting. Pleased with itself."
"Projecting," Kel grunts, hauling himself up another handhold.
"Old survey rods in the homeland felt like this when the grid was singing," Merrow says. "This hum has somebody else's teeth in it."
Branna doesn't ask what that means. "We can argue metaphor later," she says. "Climb."
Near one of the smaller clockfaces, a maintenance hatch marks itself with a neat brass seal: three interlocking cogs around an eye.
Officially, only authorized Engineers are supposed to use it.
Kel peers at the seal, then pulls a folded sheet from inside his vest.
"EMERGENCY INSPECTION AUTHORIZATION," the top line reads.
"It's amazing what exhausted clerks will sign if you stack the forms right," he says. "Also I did some creative interpretation on which countersignatures matter."
He slaps the paper over the seal.
For a second, nothing happens.
Then the brass eye blinks. The cogs rotate.
"Inspection window: thirty minutes," a tinny voice grinds out. "Deviations will be billed."
Kel grins, all teeth. "Time is money," he says. "Let's steal both."
The hatch unlocks.
Inside, the Horologium is a spine of corridors. Stone walls, pipes and cables hugging close, functional lamps burning with clean white light. Every so often, a framed certificate or an etching of some great civic project glares down at them.
Display cases show bonds, deeds, fragments of original survey rods. Little shrines to ownership.
Lyra's nose wrinkles.
"There it is again," she says.
"All I smell is oil and self-satisfaction," Kel replies.
"Under that," Lyra insists. "Math. Places where power is supposed to go. Places where it went somewhere else."
"How do you smell math?" Branna asks, genuinely curious despite herself.
"Same way you smell fear," Lyra says. "Pattern. Broken pattern. Something trying very hard not to be noticed."
They pass a narrow room behind a metal grate where shelves of ledgers sit, each spine labeled with tiny script. The air is cooler in there, like the room is storing a different kind of heat.
"Storage," Merrow says. "Where rich people keep sins they don't want to look at. Safer than a temple. More binding than a curse."
"Cheerful," Tamsin says.
Among the impressive vault doors—engraved brass, carved stone, sigils like jewelry—one door is remarkable only because of how unremarkable it tries to be.
Plain iron. Scuffed. Paint peeling. A crooked sign: MAINTENANCE ONLY. A bucket and mop leaning lazy against it, the universal symbol of Nothing Interesting Here.
Lyra stops dead.
"There," she says. "Behind that. Like the bead at the sump. Listening. Happy with itself."
Skrik looks at the door the way a rat looks at a trap it respects.
Kel kneels at the lock, picks already dancing between his fingers.
"You're late for inspection," he tells the mechanism, because he always talks while he works. "Paperwork's piled up. Won't you feel better once we've cleared it?"
Tamsin sets both palms flats to the stone beside the door.
"You were solid once," she murmurs to the wall. "No hollow. No secrets. You don't have to hold this."
The stone shifts almost imperceptibly, remembering what it was. That tiny give is enough to make the lock complain less when Kel teases it.
Merrow sits with his back against the door and lets his thoughts spider outward, mapping where he would put psionic nodes if he were planning to turn a city into a conversation with itself.
"Don't go in," Lyra says automatically.
"I'm just… contemplating," Merrow lies.
The lock sighs and yields. The door opens on a small room that smells like dust, ink, and smugness.
Shelves along three walls, stacked with ledgers. Some new and sharp, some swollen with age. On the fourth wall, half-hidden behind boxes of valves and replacement couplings, a brass shrine.
A copper loop on a backplate. A bead hanging in its center like a pupil. A crust of salt ringed thick around the base, shot through with pale pink where it's eaten at metal.
"There," Lyra says again. Her voice is thinner now.
"Don't touch," Branna says.
"I know," Merrow replies. He leans in anyway, close enough to feel it.
The bead doesn't glow, not visibly. But it hums. Too slow for a heartbeat. Too fast for comfort. A held breath that has forgotten which way exhale goes.
Salt keeps it from bleeding into the walls. Copper gives the signal spine.
Somewhere far away, in brine and metal and the back of people's minds, something listens.
"Copper spine, salt moat," Merrow says softly. "Standard Guild containment. Same pattern they use to bottle volatile reactions. Somebody built this to keep something from getting out."
He tilts his head.
"Then someone told it to listen in instead."
Kel's gaze has already gone to the ledgers.
"We can hang them with this," he says. "Device, and the paper that paid for it. Not just 'we think the Engineers sold part of the city's brain to something wet and presumptuous.' Proof."
"Assuming the magistrates are capable of shame," Branna says.
"Proof isn't for shame," Kel says. "It's leverage. Shame would be a bonus."
Riona runs a finger along the ledger spines.
"Find me the requisition," she says. "The annex. The labor sign-offs. I want the line where someone wrote their name next to 'install psionic monitoring node in municipal timekeeping facility' and called that an ordinary day."
Skrik bares his teeth. "That's the paladin talk I like," he says, and scampers up the shelves.
They harvest books like a bad crop.
Skrik yanks down anything labeled HOROLOGIUM or CHRONOMETER, drops it lightly at Kel's feet. Tamsin convinces a stubborn shelf to slide away, revealing an older row behind it. Kel triages by smell and wear: the more often a ledger's been dragged out under protest, the more interesting it probably is.
Merrow finds the main Horologium volume. It's heavier than it looks and opens with the crackle of cheap, important paper.
Contracts. Costs. Materials. Names.
Primary enchantments: Guild Circle 443-B. Redundancy specs. Vent-paths. Shutoff arrays. The never again litany in tidy language.
Further down: Secondary Enchantments as per Annex 7: psionic augmentation, remote interrogation capacity, memory-resonance logging. Under authority of the Chronometer Office.
"Interrogation," Riona says quietly.
Kel glances over Merrow's shoulder, eyes narrowing. "That's a hell of a word to hide in a footnote," he says.
Annex 7 has a familiar name.
Auditor Primm Nackle. Signed twice.
Once as contractor liaison. Once as oversight.
Kel makes a low noise, half laugh, half gag.
"That's not oversight," he says.
"It is," Branna says. "The kind that gets you exactly the results you want and nobody to blame but the ink."
Merrow taps the page.
"Notice who isn't on this annex," he says. "Primary grid: all gnome circles, all about redundancy, all about venting. This mess?" He taps the annex again. "Chronometer hand. Crown budget. Guild glass. Someone else's god."
Riona's jaw tightens. "Then we dig theirs out."
Lyra hasn't taken her eyes off the bead.
"Take it," she says.
"No," Merrow and Riona say together.
"We can't leave it," Lyra goes on. "Not now we know what it is. It's an ear. We walk away and it wakes up, and whatever it listens to knows we know."
"Salt ring, copper-bound," Merrow says. "Containment and conduit, both. Break it wrong—"
"We die loudly," Skrik says. "We do that a lot."
"We don't know what happens on the far end if this goes dark," Riona says.
"We do know what happens here if it doesn't," Lyra says. "More Jariks."
Kel flips between contract and annex, ledger and bead.
"Ledger plus device means we have something even a magistrate can't wave away as rumor," he says. "Cause, scheme, mechanism. They'll still stall, but we'll know where to put the knife."
Outside, somewhere down the corridor, an internal bell chimes. Thirty minutes is not a long time.
"We're on a clock," Branna says reflexively.
Kel's mouth quirks. "Pun accepted."
Merrow sighs.
"Fine," he says. "We take it. We do it nicely."
He kneels in front of the shrine like a penitent and addresses the bead as if it's a bored clerk.
"You're overqualified for this position," he tells it. "Stuck in a broom closet, listening for small crimes for people who don't even think of you as a person. You deserve a transfer. New context. Better stories."
The bead hums, thin and half-interested.
Tamsin brushes her fingertips over Riona's pauldron, Kel's sleeve, Skrik's shoulder, murmuring a quick, familiar ward: no surprise energies to the face. Hard-won habit.
Inside Merrow's skull, the new architecture stirs.
He feels them as a constellation: Kel a tight bright knot of cunning; Tamsin a deep, slow root; Lyra a drawn string, tuned to water and stone; Branna a square of weight and direction; Skrik a flare of sharp edges; Riona a steady burn line.
The architecture offers to knit them into a tighter pattern. To let him pull.
"Not without consent," he tells it. That rule stands.
The itch recedes, sulking.
He studies the mounting. The way the salt has crusted. The hairline cracks where copper meets brass.
With Tamsin calming the stone and Lyra's hand hovering, ready to do something inadvisable with moisture if it all goes wrong, Merrow slides a thin tool under the copper bracket and twists.
The loop comes free with a tiny, furious hiss.
He lowers bead and loop together into a tin lined with fresh salt, snaps the lid down. The hum in the room drops, muffled now, more like memory than presence.
He still feels it against his skin. But it's contained.
Kel takes the charcoal stub from behind his ear and writes on the tin lid in big, blocky letters:
LISTENING
"Subtle," Branna says.
"I like clear labeling," Kel says. "It's a professional failing."
They cram the relevant ledgers into a battered satchel that has carried worse. Merrow tucks the LISTENING tin against the small of his back, where it rests like an accusation.
"Time," Riona says.
Skrik leads them back through the corridors, pauses at junctions to listen for boots, breath, bells. They retrace their path out to the hatch. The brass eye blinks lazily as they pass.
"Inpection window concluded," the tinny voice will say in a moment. "Further access will be billed."
For now, it lets them go.
They emerge onto the tower's flank, haul the hatch shut, and climb down into Lindell air that tastes suddenly thinner.
Behind stone, mechanisms tick. Somewhere inside the Horologium, numbers change without anyone's permission.
You cannot steal from a city's clock without the city noticing. You can distract it. You can lie. You can bend its hands for a while.
Sooner or later, the bells ring on something that isn't there anymore.
Then everybody does new math.
Tomorrow, they will walk into daylight with ledgers under one arm and a stolen ear in a tin.
They will learn that daylight in Lindell is not neutral. It picks sides.
Auditor Primm Nackle will smile in a room that doesn't deserve it and show them how far a gnome can bend law before it breaks someone else.
Horologer Ratchet Blythe will notice a ledger missing and order the city, in practice, to hold its breath while he counts to his own satisfaction.
In the tin on Merrow's back, the bead will hum and sulk and feel for connections it no longer has.
Lyra will knock again—on pipes, on water, on the brine-heavy mind the bead belongs to—because she cannot stop talking to things everyone else calls unspeakable.
Under Clock Court, something submerged will notice the absence of one of its ears and begin to turn toward the silence.
That is tomorrow's problem.
Tonight, back at the granary, the city finally loses momentum and drifts toward exhausted.
Tamsin sits on the roof under a sky that still hasn't gotten over the idea of stars.
From here, the Horologium's clockfaces are white discs against the dark, moons that insist on being square. Pediment Square below is mostly emptied, gossip burned off into smaller conversations over bread and beer.
The air smells like grain dust, chimney smoke, and the faint metallic tang of the day's almost-disaster.
The raven hops along the ridge of the roof and settles beside her like it paid for the seat.
"You're late," Tamsin tells it.
The raven stares at her. Its opinion of her punctuality is not flattering.
She fishes the little die out of her pocket. It fits in her palm like it was made to live there. Its edges are worn from worry. It catches moonlight like it resents it.
"Where's the next fire coming from?" she asks the raven. "You seem like you'd read ahead."
The bird blinks.
She opens her hand and lets the die sit there.
The raven leans in and taps it with its beak.
The die rolls. Tiny clatter over rough tile. It spins, wobbles, settles on a face Tamsin doesn't recognize.
No legend. No key. Just a number that will matter later.
She closes her fingers around it before the bird or the night can decide what it means.
"You want a number?" she says to the dark, to the tower, to whatever is listening. "Earn it."
Across the district, the Horologium's bells chime the hour, precise and smug, as if nothing in its ribs has changed at all.
Elsewhere—if you can use a word like "where" for a room that exists mostly as an argument about geometry—the Auditor watches.
Mortals imagine revelation as spectacle: a curtain jerking aside, a hand descending, dice tumbling, lives scattering like cheap glass. They like to think that if they sin interestingly enough, or pray with the right words, they'll catch a glimpse of the hand mid-roll.
They won't. That position is filled.
He sits—or does the thing that corresponds, for a being like him, to sitting—in a chamber of almost-light hung in the gap between worlds. Pale stone, ink suspended in the air in lines and sigils that rearrange themselves as events unspool. No shadows. Shadows imply there are things that do not know they are being watched.
He observes.
He observes rivers bullied into new laws, their courses redrawn by surveyors with more faith in rulers than in tides. He observes clocks teaching cities to forget their own heartbeats and listen instead to the measured tick of borrowed certainty. He observes engineers bargaining with reality under the cheerful misapprehension that they invented math.
He observes a dragon dying badly in a warehouse and an egg hatching into something that is not a dragon in a temple that should not have stayed above the Sacred Lake. He observes that egg being carried to a granary that was built for wheat, not miracles, and being called hope.
He observes, now, a brass tower having one of its ears stolen.
On one wall of his chamber, a diagram of Lindell has been inked and re-inked so many times it is less a map and more a palimpsest. Lines of force, lines of law, lines of habit.
Today a new mark has been added: a small hollow where a listening node used to be, and a matching bead in a tin on a mortal's back. A tiny imbalance. A cheat entered into the ledger.
His function—etched into him long ago by a lich's skull pressed against what passes for his heart—is simple: allot pain. Calibrate it. Deliver it with the precision of an executioner who keeps perfect accounts. Not cruelty. Cruelty would imply preference. This is distribution.
Hurts as weights. Hurts as leverage. Hurts to keep the story's spine from collapsing.
He was designed without capacity to care whether the ledger balances, only that it does.
Designs grow cracks.
For some years now—measured from the moment a high elf walked into divine frost and came back wearing a different skull—there has been a thin, offensive pressure at the edges of his certainty. A hairline fracture. A question that does not fit anywhere tidy.
It worsens when he watches this particular knot of mortals.
A devil in halfling drag stacking forms like weapons. A dwarf-born paladin making threats in polite language. A mind-thief trying very hard not to steal his friends. A farmer who speaks to stone. Two kobolds who don't know how to stop walking into burning buildings if someone else might be inside.
They were not in the original model.
He feels the missing bead in the Horologium. He feels the stolen ear humming in its tin, suddenly part of a story rather than an instrument.
He could adjust the weights. Increase pressure here. Remove support there. Remind them what happens when people tug at the city's wiring.
He does nothing, for exactly one moment longer than the design strictly allows.
In that pause, the crack widens by the width of a breath.
He watches Tamsin on the rooftop, fist closed around a number she refuses to read for him. He watches the raven beside her tilt its head, as if weighing the die against its own obscure metrics.
He watches the city forget the exact shape of the danger it just avoided and begin, already, to file today under story instead of warning.
"Noted," he says to no one, in a dead language.
Ink shifts. Lines redraw themselves. Somewhere, quietly, the audit continues.
For now, he lets the stolen ear sing in its little salt coffin.
For now, he lets the clock be wrong.