Lindell woke up wrong.
The city was supposed to come online like a machine: shutters banging open, hawkers yelling, bread carts squeaking, bells gossiping from tower to tower. Instead, dawn slid in over roofs that stayed hunched, doors that opened the width of a suspicious eye and then shut again.
Down in Fish Lane, Hada the fishmonger unbarred her stall, tasted the air, and immediately reconsidered. She got as far as propping the shutter on its hook, saw that the street was empty of customers and full of a slow, greasy fog, and dropped it back down with a muttered, "Not today, saints. Not with that."
A cart piled with vegetables rattled past, its driver coughing wetly into his sleeve. The horse's hooves made a sticky sound where they hit last night's rain. "River's breathing funny," he told nobody in particular. "Smells like it chewed something it didn't like."
At the corner pump, a boy hauled on the handle and was rewarded with a gout of water the color of old tea. It sloshed into his bucket, thick and sluggish. He yelped, dropped the handle, slopped half the bucket on his feet.
"Mam! The pump's got the flux!"
Steam hissed out of a nearby culvert and hung low, refusing to rise, clinging to knees and ankles like a cloying hand. It carried a hint of fungus, of cold iron, of something metallic and sour riding the usual river stink. A dock porter slogging by, sack over one shoulder, veered around the worst of it and gave the culvert a side-eye.
"Smells like the river's got opinions," he grunted. "Never liked it when water started thinking."
Up the hill, the first watch patrol trudged their route. Hal Drenn, who had been a watchman long enough to know every cobblestone's gossip, paused mid-step. His stomach clenched. He tried to swallow it back down out of sheer stubborn professionalism. It didn't listen.
He bent double and retched a neat, miserable line into the gutter.
His partner, Mira, made a face and patted his back exactly twice, like she was afraid of catching it through sympathy.
"Told you not to drink from the dock taps," she said.
Hal spat bile, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and glared at the nearest Guild-stamped culvert grate. The Guild sigil—three nested circles bisected by a straight line—gleamed smugly through the rust.
"Wasn't the taps," he rasped. "Pipes are sick. I just… sympathize easy."
The bells started then. Not the usual call-to-worship pattern, not the quarter-hour tick. This was a shivering, urgent sequence that sent a ripple through the thin population in the street. People stopped, listened, frowned.
"Healer call," someone said. "In the grey hour? That's not good."
A clerk named Pallas shuffled down the lane with an armful of parchments, each one carefully lettered and already damp around the edges. He chose a patch of wall that hadn't yet been claimed by older notices, hammered a nail in with a practiced hand, and smoothed the proclamation flat.
"By Order of Crown & Guild," he read aloud to the uninterested air, because if you had to copy it twelve times you got to hear it at least once. "Report fever, delirium, or bleeding dreams to your local temple. Restricted streets will be marked. Avoid unnecessary gatherings, the sharing of cups, and panic."
He sighed.
"Someone in Temple really likes adjectives," he muttered, digging for the next nail.
Old Tera, who had been selling dyed baskets on this corner since before Pallas had figured out pens, squinted at the Guild seal on the bottom of the notice.
"If the Guild's on the paper," she said, balancing one of her baskets on a hip, "either something's broken, or about to be, or was never finished proper in the first place."
She spat delicately into the gutter beside Hal's contribution and shuffled on.
The city shifted around that scrap of parchment like a body turning over in uneasy sleep.
The granary smelled better than the streets, which was not the compliment it would have been in healthier times. Grain dust, sweat, and the ghost of last night's stew were losing ground to the sharp medicinal tang of Tamsin's morning brew.
Riona Vale sat at the long scarred table near the front doors, the one that had become the unofficial command desk. A half-dozen reports, watch scribbles, and temple notes were spread around her elbow in a paper halo. Her shield leaned against the table leg; every time she reached for another sheet, her fingers drifted up to the rim, tracing the new ward-runes she'd etched along its edge.
The sigils weren't fully woken yet, but they hummed faintly under her touch. A simple thing: redirect force, bend breath, tell hostile magic to take the long scenic route. It calmed her, the way some people calmed themselves by re-braiding their hair.
Branna Kestrel stood in the doorway to the storage bay, spear in hand, running through her morning routine. Step, thrust, twist, withdraw; pivot, step, sweep. The spear's butt thunked against the floor in a rhythm you could measure a march to. Every time someone wandered past the door she was shadowing, she planted the butt in the jamb without thinking, a living doorstop, measuring their width and weight with a glance. Her body remembered chokepoints now like it used to remember dance steps.
Tamsin Reed's kettle sat on a crate, chugging gently. They muttered under their breath in druidic as they stirred, and the surface of the thick, dark brew smoothed itself instead of boiling over. The air above it shimmered with the smell of roasted roots, bitter herbs, and the underside of old logs.
"That's illegal," Kel Joran said mildly from his place leaning against a beam, watching the steam. "That's a controlled substance in three districts."
"It's breakfast," Tamsin said. "For my nerves."
The hatch to the roof opened with a reluctant creak, and Lyra Fogstep dropped through it like rain, landing in a crouch that barely rattled the boards. Her hair was damp at the ends from fog, her cheeks flushed, but her breathing was even, clean.
"Whole north slope's wrong," she reported, straightening. "People up, but slow. Two pumps out. One priest vomiting into a barrel and pretending it's ritual. Three houses marked for quarantine already."
She walked as she talked, heading for the table at a pace that would have sent most people slightly off-balance. Her eyes flickered over the floor, the smear of mud near the door, the pattern of crumbs near someone's bedroll; she was reading sign without thinking about it now, city-scape as track and spoor.
At the roof hatch Skrik crouched, small claws gripping the edge, nose pointed outward. He tapped one foot against the frame in an exact, repeating pattern: cart rumble, bell ring, shouted curse, pause. Another cart, another ring, a change in tempo.
"Carts slower," he announced, mostly to himself. "Bells wrong. Nobody arguing price yet. Bad sign."
In the far corner Merrowe sat cross-legged on a folded blanket, hands resting lightly on his knees, eyes half-lidded. His mind was not entirely in the room. He'd sent a thin thread of attention drifting out through the district, just enough to brush against the loudest nodes of thought: panic spikes, dull background worry, the occasional flare of prayer.
It was still effort, but it was cleaner effort than it had been a few weeks ago. He could maintain a half-dozen such threads now without making himself sick. Progress, he thought dryly, meant you could be overwhelmed more efficiently.
Riona cleared her throat. The room listened.
"Reports from last night and early bells," she said. "We've got at least four cases of sudden fever in Hillnorth, two in the Docks, one over by Temple Square. Symptoms are fever, delirium, nosebleeds in some cases. No rash, no boils, no obvious divine branding. Temple is calling it 'a matter of concern.'"
"That's their polite phrase for 'we've already lost somebody,'" Kel said, flipping through one of the pages upside-down. "See? Lots of words, very few numbers. Classic cover-your-ass geometry."
Riona gave him a look and tapped the cluster of notes nearer the top of the pile.
"They're not random," she went on. "Look at the marks. This house sits over a main. That pump pulls from the same line as the temple cistern. That tenement's built against an old culvert wall."
She drew a finger in a rough arcs-and-crosshatch across the table, connecting the inked dots.
"Whatever this is, it's riding something the Engineers' Guild has its hands on."
Lyra leaned over her shoulder, tracking the pattern.
"Pipes," she said. "Not streets. They're too neat for streets."
"Pipes don't catch fevers on their own," Tamsin objected. "People do. Plagues happen."
Kel raised an eyebrow. "So do sabotage, curses, and the occasional 'oops, we built the city on an unquiet graveyard.'"
"We already did that last season," Lyra said. "Feels gauche to repeat ourselves."
"We wanted to make a splash in the city," Kel added, flipping a sheet back over and pretending to read it. "This is not what I meant."
Skrik, still at the hatch, flicked his tail and said without turning around, "You splash, we mop."
It got a weak ripple of amusement and a shared look: their brand of humor, strained and thin over the worry, but still functioning. For now.
The door at the base of the old grain elevator slammed open without warning, swinging hard enough to rattle the grain dust loose in a soft brown halo. Rillik staggered in under the weight of a sack of tools and a coil of rope, each step sounding like it hurt more than the last.
"Hazard pay," he announced, loud enough for everyone to hear. "You lot promised hazard pay. Tunnels smell like when a cube goes bad. That's not flavor, that's a warning taste."
He dropped the coil and the sack in a clank and scrape, straightened up, and pressed clawed fingers to his temples.
"Pipes sang all night," he said. "No rhythm. Like babies crying out of unmarked pipes. Tried to sleep, kept dreaming of leaks."
"Join the club," Kel muttered.
Riona pushed her chair back and stood, already measuring him for injuries. "Any actual exposure?" she asked. "Standing water, spores, bitey things?"
"I avoid bitey things on principle," Rillik said, then took a step toward the table.
He didn't make the second one.
His knees folded in like someone had cut the strings. The world tilted, the grain sacks he'd already dodged on the way in became a soft, unforgiving cliff. For one stretched, pendulum-slow heartbeat, he hung there, eyes wide and confused.
Branna moved.
Her spear was already leaning against the wall; she left it there. She covered the space between them in two long strides, catching Rillik under the arms before his head could meet the edge of the table. Grain sacks slid, thumped, but she kept her footing, the new solidity in her stance turning chaos into a controlled fall. She eased him down gently.
"Got you," she said. There was no drama in it. Just fact.
Tamsin was beside them before Riona could reach for her holy symbol. They skidded on their knees, hands going steadier than they felt. A dim green-gold shimmer limned their fingertips, not yet a spell, but the suggestion of one.
"Rillik," they said. "Hey. Stay present. I am not dragging you to Temple as a corpse, that's heavy and undignified."
They pressed fingers to his neck, counting pulse. Too fast, then stuttering. Breath hot. Sweat already pearling at his hairline. Tamsin leaned close to his mouth, sniffed the exhale.
"Smells wrong," they said for the room. "Like rot and solder. Not just bad food."
Merrow, who had risen from his blanket with a slowness that was half caution and half "you really want me to do this again?", knelt on the other side. He placed two fingers lightly against Rillik's temple and let his mind slip sideways.
Noise hit him first. It always did. The surface snow of thought—panic, fear, the usual morning grumble of a city waking up. Under that, one very loud fever, spiking and collapsing in waves.
And under that, something else.
Merrow pushed past the fever the way you might push past a drunk singing in your face to listen to the band in the back room. The whisper-channels were clearer than the last time he'd tried this on someone in distress. His expanded range helped; his recent brush with the mind chorus of something older and worse had scarred a new pathway into his head.
He caught fragments. A chorus of tiny, distant voices speaking in unison. Not words, exactly. Pulses. On-off patterns that hummed along the inside of Rillik's skull, almost but not quite matching the spacing of his heartbeat.
And behind them, a colder rhythm. A pattern that did not care about Rillik, or about flesh at all. It tracked in measures of pressure and volume and what happened when those things went sideways.
"There's a pattern hitching a ride on his fever," Merrow said, voice flat. "This isn't just his body being angry. Something's using him like a bit of pipe."
He felt a trickle of blood start at his nose. Reflexively, he shifted focus away, easing back out of Rillik's mind before it became a full-on bleed-and-vomit incident like the last time. Improvement, he thought sourly, dabbed the blood away with his sleeve, and accepted the cold cloth Kel tossed him without comment.
Skrik had vanished from the hatch and reappeared at Rillik's other arm, his movements so quick and low they hardly registered as motion. He planted one hand protectively on Rillik's shoulder, claws just barely pricking through the cloth.
"Rillik's tough," Skrik said. His voice had gone smaller, but not weaker. "Pipes can't have him."
Riona's jaw set.
"Temple," she said. "Now."
They left the granary in a knot of urgency, not quite a run, not quite a march. Branna carried Rillik, cradled across her arms like cargo she would kill to protect. His head lolled against her shoulder, eyes flickering under the lids.
Skrik paced at her side, light and quick, the exact distance ahead that would let him spot trouble but still keep a hand on Branna's elbow if she stumbled.
Kel walked a few strides in front, not so much leading as scouting possibilities. His gaze ticked across alley mouths, doorways, windows: exits, sightlines, places where someone could watch or impede them. He was already half in tomorrow's heist in his head. Today's crisis was just a dress rehearsal in street geometry.
They passed a house with a strip of red cloth tied around the latch. The cloth flapped in the thin breeze like a tongue. A girl peered out from behind it, clutching a wooden toy shaped like a city wall giant. Her mother's hand clamped on her shoulder, ready to yank her back, but curiosity outran caution.
"Is the city sick too?" the girl whispered as Branna strode by.
Branna didn't break stride. "We're getting it medicine," she said. "You stay inside and bully anyone who coughs wrong."
The girl's eyes went round. "I'm good at bullying," she said, before her mother dragged her back inside and slammed the door.
On the next corner, a tiefling preacher had claimed a barrel as a pulpit. He wore three mismatched holy symbols around his neck like he couldn't decide which god he disliked least. His name—if anyone asked, which they didn't often—was Sallos.
"The gods are mathematicians!" he proclaimed to a cluster of passersby trying very hard to be in a different street. "Every sin is an equation! Every injustice adds a term! And now—now—they show us the sum in the pipes! The civic calculus of rot!"
"Bet he's fun at parties," Lyra muttered.
Sallos spotted Riona's armor and latched on like an enthusiastic burr.
"Captain! Captain of the Watch! Do you not see the proof?" he cried. "The Crown fails to balance the ledger! The water carries the remainder! This sickness is not random; it is remainders spilling over the dam of divine patience!"
"People are dying," Riona said. "Argue theology with the gods."
She pushed past. Sallos, undeterred, turned his attention to a very uncomfortable cat merchant and started explaining how tithe evasion affected divine long division.
Above them, at the top of a narrow stair, an administrator in a neat—but sweat-stained—doublet drew a chalk line across a wall. Gerren, his colleagues called him, mostly because the alternative was "you there" and that got confusing when the room was full. He had a map in one hand and a piece of red chalk in the other.
"Metric radius of contagion," he murmured, consulting the map, marking a clean arc. "Two streets from the source pump, three dwelling-layers deep. No further. No less."
The line stopped exactly at the mouth of a steep alley that dropped down between two old brick buildings. The air spilling up from there was cooler, damper, and carried the tang of moss and old stone.
Gerren looked at the alley. Then at his map. The alley was not on the map.
He hesitated. Then he drew the line a neat right angle across the alley mouth, on the upper wall, as if the alley itself were an abstract concept, best ignored.
"Paper city stops here," Skrik said softly, looking down the steps toward the familiar darkness. "Real city keeps going."
The temple infirmary had started its day at "busy" and was now straining toward "we will be telling stories about this later, none of them funny."
Cots filled the main hall and overflowed into the side chapels. The over-sweet reek of incense wrestled with the sour smell of sweat, vomit, and fever. The air was thick with the low moans of the sick and the harried murmur of the half-trained.
A dockhand with skin like damp parchment lay on one cot, shirt thrown open, protesting hoarsely that he could still lift if someone would just hire him. An old dwarf mason on another kept insisting, in between coughs, that the sickness was a conspiracy to keep him off the new wall project. A halfling woman sat on the edge of a third cot, her baby listless against her shoulder, tiny chest rising and falling too fast.
A novice priestess named Pera clutched a leather-bound book of protocols so tightly her knuckles were white. She flipped pages with the desperation of someone trying to find a spell labeled "fix everything" and finding instead a lot of fine print. In her other hand she held a handful of little wooden tags with triage symbols scratched onto them.
She hesitated between the dockhand and the mason, uncertain, then reached toward the dwarf with the "urgent" tag.
Father Irlan, the senior cleric on duty, walked by, sighed, and gently plucked the tag from her hand, swapping it with the one intended for the halfling's baby. He did it with the smooth efficiency of someone who could do triage in his sleep and had, on several occasions.
"Breath first," he reminded her quietly. "Then bleeding. Then broken bones. Nobility of birth is not a category."
Pera flushed. "Yes, Father. I just… the book says—"
"The book was written by someone who never met a fever," Irlan said. "You're meeting one now. Learn."
Riona, Branna, and the others threaded through the cots like an odd, heavily armed procession. Father Irlan spotted them, took in Rillik in Branna's arms, and changed direction.
"What have you brought me?" he asked.
"Rillik," Tamsin said. "Kobold, male, adult, healthy baseline. Developed sudden fever, delirium. Reports auditory hallucinations—pipes singing. Collapse, pulse irregular, breath hot but steady."
It came out clipped, efficient. Irlan's eyebrows climbed a millimeter in approval.
"Over here," he said, leading them to a row of cots near the wall. "Put him down. We'll see where he sits in the queue."
They laid Rillik on a thin mattress. He curled instinctively to one side, tail wrapping around his legs, claws flexing at nothing.
When Irlan heard the phrase "pipes singing," he paused with a hand halfway to Rillik's forehead.
"That sounds like a Guild problem," he said. "We don't have a liturgy for 'infrastructure is haunted.'"
"Work on one," Kel suggested. "You'll get a congregation."
While they talked, Riona drifted toward a large board hung on the wall opposite the door. It was covered in a carefully inked diagram of the surrounding district: neat rectangles for blocks, straight lines for streets, the river sketched in a polite, tame curve.
Colored washes shaded sections in red, yellow, or green, each labeled: HOT, WATCH, CLEAR. A key in the corner explained the criteria in a beautiful, practically unreadable script.
Beside the board stood a clerk with ink-smudged fingers and a smudge of chalk on her cheek. Her name, according to the badge pinned crookedly to her collar, was Sanna.
Riona studied the map for a long moment.
"Where are the tunnels?" she asked.
Sanna blinked. "The… excuse me?"
"The tunnels," Riona repeated. "Sewer runs. Under-stairs. Crawlspaces. Places where people live without rent contracts or Crown recognition. Where are they on your map?"
Sanna's cheeks colored. She shifted her weight, eyes flicking between Riona and the board.
"The forms don't…" she began, then stopped, tried again. "The forms we use for quarantine mapping don't have a field for 'improvised subterranean occupancy.' We're instructed to map households by registered address."
"Where are Griksha's nests?" Skrik asked from Rillik's bedside. His voice carried farther than his size. "Where do Tikka and Durram sleep? They are households."
Sanna looked stricken. "If they're not on the tax rolls," she said, "they're… not in the system."
Riona's jaw tightened. "So the people closest to the pipes don't exist unless they pay taxes," she said. "That seems like a flaw."
"Captain," Father Irlan said from behind her, with the weary patience of someone being asked to justify a system he did not design, "we don't have the staff to chase ghosts in the walls. We barely keep up with the streets we can sweep. I don't like it. I can't fix it."
He glanced at Rillik, then at the line of cots beyond.
"But I can keep this one breathing if the sickness lets me," he added. "Do your part. Find out why the pipes are singing."
Tamsin stood over Rillik, one hand hovering above his forehead. They let their druid-sense unfurl just enough to taste what was in him. For a heartbeat, faint patterns glowed under his skin, like a network of spores trying to draw a map on flesh: branching filaments, tiny circles.
They pulled back before it could become more than an echo.
"We'll be back before your next fever spike," Tamsin told him softly. "Don't let them drown you in incense."
"Incense is… union-busting… gas…" Rillik muttered, eyes half-open, and then he smiled, small and feral, before sliding under again.
Skrik smoothed the thin blanket over him, claws careful.
"Stay," he told Rillik, in the tone he used for pipes he was repairing. "Do not leak."
Benat Gregor's bakery had always been a kind of unofficial weather-vane for the neighborhood. If the line outside was short and loud, things were fine. If the line was long and quiet, something had gone wrong.
This morning, the line wrapped around the corner and hummed with the low, constant sound of people trying to out-gloom one another.
Two lines, in fact. One for paying customers, restless and annoyed. The other for those clutching temple tickets, ration cards, or I-know-Benat favor tokens. They all smelled of sweat, worry, and the soothing lie of fresh bread.
The air wafting out from the open door carried roasted grain and woodsmoke, fighting a losing battle against the sourness that clung to the rest of the street.
Benat stepped out carrying a tray like a shield. He was a big man in every direction, shoulders like flour sacks stacked sideways, forearms dusted white. His apron bore a sigil in crude paint that translated roughly to DON'T PANIC, IT'S ORGANIC, if you were fluent in Lindell street-cant and graffiti.
"Bad news," he called out in a voice that carried to the back of the line. "Loaves are smaller. Good news: so are my expectations."
There was a ripple of tense laughter. People needed something to do with their mouths besides gossip and complain.
He started down the line, passing out bread, eyeing faces as much as coins. He knew his customers the way a priest knew parishioners: by the flavor of their desperation.
He spotted Lyra and Tamsin halfway back.
"You two look like you've seen worse than a fever line," he said, eyebrow arched. "That's not permission to skip the queue."
Someone near the front piped up, "They fought a dragon!"
Benat snorted. "They can definitely wait like everyone else, then," he said. "Dragon-getters don't get to complain about lines. It's in the job description."
Lyra rolled her shoulders. "We're not trying to skip," she said. "We're trying to surveil and buy carbs at the same time."
"Well, you're smashing the second one," Benat said. "What's the surveillance say?"
Tamsin glanced at the line, then back at him. "People are getting sick in clusters," they said. "House here, three houses over there. One side of a street, not the other. No pattern we can see that makes sense."
A clayworker named Honra, two places ahead, turned her head just enough to eavesdrop more efficiently.
"My cousin on Red Lane's down with it," she said. "Used the same pump as us, same work, same stew. No one else in the house caught it. Gods must be throwing darts."
"Gods don't throw darts," Benat said. "They hire the Guild to install dart dispensers."
He tapped his temple with a floury finger.
"It's not the people," he said. "It's the pipes. Whoever drew up the quarantine is thinking in streets, not veins."
Old Fen, whose occupation had, for as long as anyone could remember, been "standing near things grumbling," snorted from his place at the back.
"Sewerfolk'll catch it first, like always," he said. "Pipes cough in their faces. City doesn't count 'em till their bodies float up in Dock Three."
A kobold somewhere in the rations line—Tikka, if Lyra's quick sideways glance and recognition were right—muttered, "If we float, somebody still tries to charge us dock fees."
That got an actual laugh, a jagged thing that threatened to break into hysteria and then settled for solidarity.
When Lyra and Tamsin finally reached the front, Benat looked them up and down, weighing something other than coin.
He placed a regular loaf in Lyra's hands and, with a sleight-of-hand a street magician would envy, slid a slightly larger one into Tamsin's.
The crust of the second loaf was marked with a simple glyph, baked in with sesame seeds and salt. It warmed Tamsin's palms as they held it, warmth that had nothing to do with oven heat and everything to do with small, stubborn blessings.
"For your sick one," Benat said. "It won't cure, but it will make them remember being hungry for one more day. Sometimes that's enough."
Tamsin studied the glyph, recognized the structure of a fertility charm retooled to cling to appetite rather than lust, and nodded.
"I'll make sure he shares," they said.
"Good," Benat said. "We're in the business of keeping people wanting to live, not just making them chew."
They stepped away from the window. As they did, Lyra's eyes kept moving—not because she decided to, but because they just did now. The city wrote itself under her gaze in scuffs and crumbs and damp footprints.
That door had opened once this morning, that one four times; that bucket had been dragged from the direction of a side pump, that one from the main. The alley three houses down stank of stagnant water and old beer, but the gutters there were dry. Something had diverted flow in the night.
"You don't even stop to look anymore," Tamsin observed, watching her head swivel.
"City's just a different kind of trail," Lyra said. "Everything leaves sign. Most folks just don't know how to read cobblestone."
On the wall across from the bakery, a junior clerk hammered up a new notice: WATER USE RESTRICTIONS, in tight official script. The Guild seal was big enough to serve as a target.
Someone in the line squinted at it.
"If the Guild's on it," they sighed, "either the water's dangerous, or the fines are."
"Or both," Old Fen said.
They went back to the temple because there was nowhere else to test their growing theory. The city's sickness flowed along the Guild's veins. If you wanted to understand a vein, you watched the blood moving through it.
Rillik had not gotten dramatically worse in the interim, which counted as a win on the kind of day they were having. He lay on his side, blanket still pulled tight around him, breathing shallow but regular. The heat coming off him was still wrong, still wire-taut instead of the slow boil of normal fever.
Father Irlan met them halfway, rubbing his eyes.
"It comes in waves," he said, before Tamsin could ask. "Like something's pulsing. He's not the only one."
He gestured to another cot where a woman in a baker's apron tossed and murmured, and to a third where an apprentice engineer stared at the ceiling, lips moving silently.
Tamsin brushed Rillik's hair back and found fine dust at the roots. They pinched some between their fingers, brought it to their nose.
Spore, yes. Old cellar, wet stone. But under that, a tang of cold iron and something almost electrical, like the smell before a lightning strike. It scraped across nerves in a way that tugged on sense memories from the undercity—places where the wild seeped through brick in more than moss.
"Smelled this deep," they murmured, more to themselves than anyone. "Where the old roots push up under the stones. Never topside. Not like this."
Merrow knelt again, because apparently his life was now an endless series of conscious, terrible choices. He touched Rillik's forehead and let his mind slide in once more.
This time, he didn't go alone.
"Just for a moment," he told Riona quietly. "So you'll believe me. Brace."
She nodded without hesitation. That was the thing about Riona: she didn't hesitate in the direction of pain, only in the direction of compromise.
He touched her wrist with his free hand and opened a tiny bridge. The connection was not full telepathic bond; it was a glimpse, a window held open on a chain.
Together, they heard it.
Beneath the ragged, personal chaos of Rillik's fever dreams—memories of tunnels, the taste of pipe water, the echo of Griksha's voice yelling at him to wear a scarf—there was a humming.
It was regular in the way gears were regular, in the way heartbeats tried to be. Short-long-long-short. Long-short-short-long. A pattern, shifting and sliding, but always within a defined range, like someone trying to send a message with limited vocabulary.
Riona flinched, hand clenching on Merrow's wrist. He let go, snapped the connection closed before the hum could dig deeper.
"That's not a curse," she said. "That's… something using the body's wiring to sing to itself."
"It's riding the pipes under him too," Merrow said. "You feel that? The way it doesn't care about where skin ends and brick begins? It's not a plague from nowhere. It's riding the undercity like a stolen horse."
"And that horse is the Guild's pipes," Tamsin added, still rubbing the spore-smear between their fingers until it flaked away.
Riona looked down at Rillik, then at the crowded hall, then at the neat district map on the wall where all the wrong things weren't drawn.
"If the mains under the clock go bad," she said, "we don't get a local outbreak. We get Lindell rolled."
"Rolled how?" Father Irlan asked.
"Like a bad die," Kel said from the doorway. "One that only turns up skulls."
The watch office smelled like ink, damp wool, and the faint, persistent aroma of bad coffee left on a brazier too long. It looked like chaos with a filing system.
Wanted posters for bandits and smugglers layered the walls in curling strata. Newer public health notices were tacked over them at odd angles. A confused clerk in the corner was trying to staple a "Beware of Mimics" warning over last month's "Beware of Bandits" without removing either. The result was a kind of paper hydra: B E W A R E O F M I N D I T S.
"On brand," Kel murmured.
Captain Dorran sat behind a desk that had lost the war with paperwork some time in the last decade. His armor was unbuckled at the neck, tunic sleeves rolled up, hair plastered to his forehead. He looked like the kind of man who'd been yelled at from above and below so consistently he'd forgotten there was any angle that wasn't yelling.
Beside him, Clerk Meli held a quill like a weapon. Ink stained three fingers and the side of her nose, where she'd pushed hair back at least once without noticing.
Riona planted both hands on the desk.
"We need to know where this water goes," she said. "Specific mains. Flows. Junctions."
Kel added, in his best campaign-poster voice, "We'd also accept knowing where it's not allowed to go, if that's easier bureaucratically."
Meli snorted. "Nothing is easier bureaucratically," she said. "That's how you know it's official."
Dorran shoved a stack of reports aside, revealing a corner of a rolled-up schematic with the Engineers' Guild seal on the back.
"If you want pipe maps," he said, "you talk to the Guild. But they don't like sharing their toys with the likes of us. We get… summaries."
He unrolled the schematic. It was a dense, dizzying tangle of lines and numbers, more like an occult diagram than anything as mundane as plumbing.
Meli tapped the center of the mess with the end of her quill.
"Here," she said. "Horologium. They call it the throat. Don't ask why. Engineers get poetic when they're tired."
The knot of lines at that point was thicker than anywhere else, like veins converging on a heart.
Dorran stabbed a finger at it.
"Foreman Hob Trindle's got that stretch sealed so tight his own mother would need a stamped form to sneeze in there," he said. "You don't get within a stone's throw of the under-clock without his sign-off."
"Sounds like someone I'll get along with terribly," Kel said.
Sergeant Lysa, stationed by the door with a stack of halberds and a look that said she'd like to be anywhere else, bristled.
"Trindle's parents were there when the sky burned," she said. "In the gnome homeland. He grew up on stories of cities cooking themselves from the inside. You'd count leaks too, if your baby photos were ash."
It killed the jokes for a moment.
Meli recovered first. "He once shut down the East Mains for a week because a gauge jittered," she said. "We had nobles coming in here with buckets and threats."
"Guild Council nearly sacked him," Dorran added.
"Then the same gauge in the sister junction blew two days later," Lysa said. "No one complains about that week now."
Riona traced the lines on the schematic with a finger, connecting the districts where sickness had shown up. They all hooked, one way or another, into the thick line that fed the Horologium throat.
"If this sickness is riding these mains," she said, "we need to look that throat in the teeth."
Kel's eyes flicked across the map in a different pattern. Where Riona saw risk and responsibility, he saw climbing routes, blind corners, good places for an Ambush spell, good places to stick an Alarm.
He tapped a blank bit of wall on the office plan.
"This," he said, "is where paperwork ends and problems start."
Sera Argent had always liked maps.
Not street maps, though she could read those fine. Not battle maps, though she'd moved pieces over them in war rooms more than once. Sera liked maps of things that moved.
Today, that meant pipe maps.
She stood in a Guild sub-office that looked like someone had tried to build a library inside a boiler. Chalkboards lined the walls, each one covered in looping diagrams of mains and branches. Numbers and symbols clustered around junction points like annotations on a spell.
In the center of the room a table held the master map: a sprawling sheet of parchment weighted at the corners by bits of scrap metal. Red lines snaked over it, stark and uncompromising. They marked the "never exceed" zones. The places where, if the indicator stones hit a certain color, you shut the valves and started praying you were wrong.
One thick red ring circled a point marked HOROLOGIUM INTAKE – PRIMARY THROAT.
Sera planted both hands on the table and glared at it, as if she could bully the pipes into behaving.
Harven, the junior clerk assigned to her today, hovered with a slate in one hand and the expression of a man perpetually three steps behind the disaster.
"Foreman Trindle can't just shut the under-clock," Harven said for the fifth time. "The Crown says commerce can't stop. The markets—"
"The pipes don't read proclamations," Sera said. "They read pressure."
She jabbed a finger at a series of tiny numbers near the Horologium mark.
"See that?" she asked. "Flow spike. Minor, but persistent. See this?" Another jab, another series of figures near a poor district they both knew flooded when it rained too hard. "Backwash. The city is breathing shallow and wrong. Foreman Trindle is, if anything, under-panicking."
Harven swallowed. "The Council—"
"Would prefer we do 'non-disruptive' fixes," Sera said, her voice taking on the flat sarcasm of someone quoting nonsense. "I have yet to design a non-disruptive solution to a city trying to drown itself."
On the wall behind her, a memo was pinned:
IF IN DOUBT: SEAL FIRST, ARGUE LATER.
– Fmn. Trindle
She glanced at it, a small, grim smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. She'd been junior once, under a foreman like that. They'd saved more lives than they'd cost.
She turned back to the map, picked up a stick of charcoal, and began sketching lines around the throat.
"Fine," she said. "If they don't want a full shutdown, they get a door. An emergency gate we can slam if the throat starts vomiting. Something we can build in pieces while they argue about whose schedule is more important."
Harven watched the idea take shape in charcoal: a pair of heavy valves, a bypass route, a relief vent.
"You can do that?" he asked.
"I can imagine it," Sera said. "That's the dangerous part. Once you can imagine a fix, the city starts insisting you build it."
Later that afternoon a city hall courier arrived, out of breath, with a scroll bearing too much wax and not enough sense.
"Directive from Crown," he said, handing it over with the relief of someone offloading something a little cursed. "In light of recent… ah… concerns."
Sera broke the seal, skimmed.
"Minimize disruption," she read aloud. "Maintain water to key districts. Reassure merchant community. Provide regular updates. Avoid alarming public."
She repeated the first phrase under her breath, as if tasting a bad spell.
"Minimize disruption," she said. "Yes. Let's ask the water nicely to behave."
In the margin of the directive, she doodled a tiny stick figure with its arms up, waves over its head, a little speech bubble that read: THIS IS FINE.
Then she set the scroll aside and picked up her charcoal again.
"We'll do what we can from here," she told Harven. "You tell your Crown friends this: if they don't let us close the throat when it starts screaming, they're going to be mopping bits of their 'key districts' off the ceilings."
Harven made a note on his slate: TELL CROWN: CEILINGS, BITS OF. He underlined it twice, unsure how he was going to phrase that in neutral bureaucratic language.
Back in the temple, Rillik's sickness found a new trick.
The next wave hit like a chord resolving wrong. One moment he lay still, sweat-soaked and muttering. The next his body tensed, claws digging into the thin mattress, tail lashing.
His lips moved. The words that came out were not entirely his.
"Flow rate… gnomeregans… acceptable loss… venting protocol twelve…"
The language was Guild jargon, technical terms that had no business in Rillik's mouth. They rolled out in a monotone that made the hairs on the back of Riona's neck stand up.
Then it shifted, mid-breath, into gutter kobold: inventive curses about pipes, boots, and the reproductive habits of steam leaks.
Merrow caught the whole mess in his mind's net and felt something cold and amused watching the jumble of terms go by.
Riona, standing at the foot of the bed, pulled her holy symbol free and laid her palm flat over it.
"Patron of oaths," she murmured. "Ward of the wronged. If this is a curse, let it break on me instead."
A soft light, no brighter than a candle, spread from under her hand and flowed down her arm into Rillik's chest. Remove Disease, third-circle, conservative casting. She let it spread, but not too much; she'd seen what happened when you over-applied holy antibiotics.
The light pushed against the pattern humming inside him, and for a moment, the hum faltered.
Rillik's breathing eased. His claws unclenched. The Guild jargon stopped. The kobold curses returned, then faded into normal fever muttering.
The pattern, however, did not shatter. It recoiled, regrouped, and began humming again, slightly lower, like someone shifting to a different key.
Riona grimaced.
"I can knock it back," she said. "I can't erase it. Not when it's braided into whatever the pipes are doing."
"Then stop trying to cure the symptom," Tamsin said. "Let's go argue with the disease."
On the way back from the temple, the city had grown more boundaries.
Watch teams hammered planks across alley mouths and nailed fresh notices onto poles. Red cordon lines stretched across streets like someone had spilled thread over the map and then decided to staple it to the ground.
One such line bisected a small square where yesterday kids had played catch between laundry lines. Today the game was gone. A posted map on a makeshift board showed a neat, red-edged shape labelled RESTRICTED.
It had no notches for alleys, no allowances for the rabbit-warren of low entries and half-cellars that pockmarked the district like burrows.
Behind a rusted grate near the base of a wall, two kobold voices argued in low tones.
Griksha—Skrik's mother, union radical, matriarch of a warren that had seen more than one ill-advised uprising—clicked her tongue.
"Tallfolk say stay in holes," she said. "Tallfolk map doesn't even draw our holes."
Durram, whose natural state was "tired of this" regardless of topic, replied, "Maps are for things they think are worth losing."
Skrik, hearing them, slowed for a heartbeat, then kept moving. He didn't need to argue. They all knew how the city worked, which was to say, for whom it didn't.
Riona intercepted a tired-looking watch sergeant overseeing the cordon. He had the slumped posture of a man who had been issuing orders for too many hours and expected to receive none of the thanks if they worked.
"The protocols were written for streets and houses," he told her, rubbing a thumb along the edge of his baton. "Nobody paid us to think about people between the walls. We do what the parchment says."
"The city's blood runs through those holes," Lyra snapped. "If your map doesn't include them, it's wrong."
"Then maybe tell the people who write the maps," the sergeant said. "I'm just here to nail wood to other wood."
He didn't say he agreed, but his eyes did.
The Stooped Giant had seen Lindell through riots, celebrations, siege scares, and that one week when the river froze wrong and everyone decided to be pirates on the ice. It had never been this quiet on an evening with no curfew.
Maera and Galen, who owned the place and argued about whose idea that had been so often they'd forgotten the truth, moved around each other behind the bar in the choreography of long practice. Maera was watering down ale with a guilt that showed in her shoulders but not her face. Galen was counting coins, re-counting them, and occasionally putting one back in the wrong pile.
Their daughter Lin wove between tables with bowls of stew, doing a passable impression of someone who wasn't terrified.
A new notice hung by the door: REDUCED OCCUPANCY BY ORDER OF CROWN & GUILD. It was slightly crooked. Robert, perched on a stool and hammering in the last nail, leaned back to judge his handiwork.
Maera squinted at him.
"Weren't you a dock-porter last month?" she asked.
Robert blinked. "No," he said. "No, I've always been in public health. I'm very passionate about… uh… occupancy."
He cleared his throat and consulted the notice to see what, exactly, he was supposed to be passionate about.
"Ventilation," he added confidently. "And… capacities."
"Congratulations," Galen said. "You've found the only job where you can get yelled at by nobles for saving their lives."
At a corner table, Rowan Delmare sat hunched over a stack of tribunal records. A red candle burned low beside him, wax dripping in an orderly, precise pattern. His quill scratched as he copied names into a neat ledger.
"Old Man Jarrett from the tannery," someone at the next table said. "He went out quick."
The candle guttered sideways, flame flickering toward Rowan as if pulled. Rowan's hand jerked; he scribbled Jarrett's name a fraction too hard, ink blotting the edge.
Lin arrived with a bowl of stew he hadn't ordered.
"Thought you might need it," she said.
He looked at the bowl, at the steam, at the hunks of meat floating in the thin broth.
"I… appreciate the thought," he said carefully. "But I've taken certain vows regarding… flesh."
"Religious?" Lin asked.
Rowan paused. "Administrative," he said, after a moment. "It's complicated."
Nigel the traveler had somehow found the one chair too small for him and folded himself onto it like a spider pretending to be a man. He had a mug in one hand and the attention of most of the room in the other.
"Perfectly safe road, they said," he was saying. "Take the marsh way, they said. All paved. Easy walk. And the road was paved. With the roots of vines that try to throttle your ankles and puddles that wait until you step in them to be ten feet deep."
He took a swallow, made a face.
"So I drag myself out of the third puddle that tried to adopt me," he went on. "Coughing up swamp and leeches. Healer looks me over, says, 'You've just got a touch of the swamp.' And then he steps outside, slips, and vanishes. Never comes back up. So anyway, roads are clear enough if you walk."
One drunk at the bar laughed too hard, nearly falling off his stool.
Another squinted at Nigel. "That's not even a story," he said. "That's just trauma."
"Most good stories are," Nigel said cheerfully.
Around them, the patrons traded rumors like cards. The sickness was a curse on the Crown. It was the work of sewerfolk saboteurs. It was gnome experiments gone wrong, or divine boredom, or all three.
Maera slammed a mug down hard enough to make the foam leap.
"It's people not washing their hands and coughing into the stew," she said. "Drink up, tip your bards, and go home. You can panic more efficiently there."
Outside, Minnow wrestled with a lamppost and a too-heavy oil can. The lamppost won, as it always did; Minnow eventually coaxed the lamp open, sloshed oil in, and lit the wick with a practiced flick.
"Lamp first, fear later," he muttered. "Pipes complain to those who listen. Bells complain to those who don't."
The ward-bells in the distance tolled again, that new, unsettling pattern. Minnow flinched and glanced down at a nearby grate as if expecting it to answer back.
Upstairs, a tabaxi bard sat in a half-open window, tail flicking in time with a melody that refused to resolve. His fingers picked out a tune that kept almost landing on something bright, then slid sideways into a crooked minor instead. Below, a drunk hummed along in the wrong key. The bard listened, adjusted, and folded the wrong note into the song like a wrinkle in cloth.
The Stooped Giant's sign creaked on its chains. The reduced occupancy notice flapped beside it.
Lindell felt smaller for a moment, like a creature trying to curl around a wound.
Somewhere, out of sight, a pipe hissed, a thin, high sound like a kettle reaching boil.
The city was not shrinking. It was compressing, pressure building.
Night pushed its way through the granary windows, gentle at first, then more insistent. The light that spilled across the table shifted from grey to amber to the flat, smoked tone of candleflame.
They gathered around the maps like gamblers around a game they didn't understand but had to win.
Pieces of the city lay in front of them: crude street plans, temple notes, a pilfered copy of a Guild summary, chalk lines drawn directly onto the table's scarred surface. Lyra kept reaching out to rearrange things, not by neighborhood or social class—those were Riona's categories—but by flow.
"These houses," she said, nudging one cluster into alignment with another. "Same pump. Different streets. All on this main." She drew a line with the edge of her hand, connecting dots like points on a track.
Skrik, standing on a crate to see properly, pulled a bit of chalk from his pocket. It was the same Guild-issue variety Sera used, stolen, borrowed, or gifted—it didn't matter. Chalk was chalk.
He scrawled additional lines under Lyra's, representing tunnels, runoff channels, forgotten access ducts. Where the official maps showed blank space, his lines ran thick.
"Here, here, here," he said. "Hot spots. That's where breathing places for pipes are. That's where spores ride."
Kel leaned over and casually reached toward the door, murmuring under his breath. A faint shimmer ran across the threshold, gone as soon as it appeared.
"Alarm on the main entrance," he said. "I'd put one on every window, but then we'd never sleep from the false positives. No one argues anymore when I do that, I notice."
"Consider it personal growth," Tamsin said. "Or communal paranoia."
Merrow stood with his hands behind his back, staring at the map as if it might stare back.
"We can treat the symptom all week," he said. "Tamsin can brew better and better teas. Riona can burn more and more spell slots into individuals. Or we can go to where the pattern anchors."
"The throat under the Horologium," Riona said. She tapped the rough circle they'd drawn around the center of the city. "Where every main we care about runs. Where the Guild already thinks something's wrong."
"And where a gnome with a trauma complex and a fondness for safety protocols has locked everything down," Kel said. "Foreman Hob Trindle, patron saint of 'no, you can't do that, you'll die and take the neighborhood with you.'"
"He'd rather starve people seven days than drown them in seven minutes," Lyra said, remembering Meli's anecdote.
"Sounds like a bastard," she added.
"Sounds like someone who's seen what happens when you blink," Riona said.
Branna, who had been quiet, jabbed the butt of her spear into the floorboards just at the edge of the chalk city.
"Line's here," she said. "Either we hold it, or we pretend we never saw it and hope the water is merciful. Water isn't."
Skrik's ears flicked.
"When Guild shuts pipes," he said, "tunnels go dry first. Then nice streets complain." He rattled his claws against the table edge. "If we close throat, my people feel it before yours."
"We won't close it blindly," Tamsin said. "We'll go see. Talk. Plan. That's the job, isn't it? Stick our heads in the lion's mouth and then argue with its gums."
Kel picked up a piece of charcoal and drew three numbers on the table beside the Horologium circle.
"One," he said, tapping the first. "Trace. We find the exact path from our hot spots to the throat. Sewer and pipe both."
"Two." He tapped the second. "Argue. We talk to Hob Trindle. Convince him to let us in, or at least not to call down every Guild sanction when we jimmy his locks."
"Three." Tap. "Build a door. Sera Argent's working on one already, probably. We help. Or we improvise something that does the job for ten minutes and prays it doesn't rupture."
"You make it sound simple," Merrow said.
"It is," Kel said. "Simple things are often fatal. That's what makes them interesting."
Riona looked around the table. The faces staring back were tired, smudged, and more capable than they'd been when they walked into this city. Lyra's reflexes humming, Tamsin's control sharpened, Merrow's mind-bond tricks less likely to knock him flat, Skrik's movements threaded with battle-ready rhythm, Kel's new spells hiding in the corners of his grin, Branna's body a wall where walls tended to fail.
"Tomorrow," Kel said, summing it up with the fatal cheerfulness of someone writing their own epitaph, "we trace the throat under the clock, argue with Foreman Hob Trindle about the price of mercy, and attempt to build a door…"
The words hung over the table like a forecast.
Lyra snorted.
"That's three ways to die in one sentence," she said.
"Four," Tamsin said, "if the door works. Successful civic intervention can be extremely unhealthy."
For a moment, they were all quiet, each of them following that line into their own private worst-case.
Branna saw herself waist-deep in foul water, back braced against a valve that wanted to spin open, arms shaking as the pressure screamed to be released.
Lyra saw close walls, no sky, not enough room to move. Arrows fired at point-blank range, ricocheting off stone.
Skrik saw tunnels he knew filling up with something that was not water, not entirely, rising fast enough that even a small, quick body couldn't outrun it.
Tamsin saw spores and sickness finding each other in the warm, damp dark and deciding to collaborate.
Merrow saw minds packed into close quarters, panic radiating, his own head filling with overlapping screams.
Riona saw a city on its knees and a choice between closing a door and listening to people pound on the other side of it.
They all saw, in different ways, water as executioner and reprieve.
Then Riona shook herself and began issuing practical orders. It was either that or let the fear sediment.
"Branna, make sure armor's ready for close quarters. Nothing that'll snag in a pipe. Lyra, prep arrows for bad visibility. Tamsin, masks. Filters. Anything that will make air less murderous. Merrow, whatever you need to keep a small mental channel open without frying yourself. Skrik, maps. Every shortcut you've ever regretted using. Kel, traps we can set and un-set quickly. And some kind of… I don't know. Polite way to say 'we're about to break your toys' to a traumatized gnome."
Kel saluted.
"I'm excellent at polite," he said. "It terrifies people."
They dispersed into motion. Armor straps tightened, blades honed, powders measured, chalk sharpened. The granary filled with the low, purposeful noise of people preparing to do something stupid on purpose.
Later, when the grain shadows had stretched to swallow the corners and the last mug of Tamsin's horrible brew had gone cold, the noise ebbed.
Bedrolls were unrolled. Cots claimed. Someone snored almost instantly, because human bodies didn't care that the city was sick; they obeyed their own dumb cycles.
Riona went up to the granary's narrow window and looked toward the temple district. The bells were silent now, but she knew sick people were still breathing in there, and some weren't.
"We either fix this," she said quietly, to the dark, "or we write a lot of names on stones."
No one answered. The city didn't speak that plainly.
Deep under the Horologium, where the city kept some of its oldest, most reluctant secrets, a lantern moved along a narrow catwalk.
Foreman Hob Trindle walked like a man who trusted the floor only because he'd personally inspected every bolt in it. His boots were scuffed, his coveralls stained with old rust and newer chalk. His beard was trimmed short in the practical gnome fashion. The lines around his eyes were carved deep by years of squinting at gauges, not smiling at jokes.
He stopped every few meters to lay a hand on a pipe, feeling for vibration with the bone-deep sensitivity of someone who had grown up with disaster stories told as lullabies. He knew what pipes felt like when they were content, when they were straining, when they were lying.
The indicator stones set into the wall beside him glowed in various shades between blue and angry orange. They were not yet red. Yet.
Sera Argent watched from the end of the catwalk, arms folded, lamp trimmed low. She'd finished her shift hours ago. She was still here.
"Foreman sleeps in his boots," whispered a young engineer beside her. "Says pipes don't wait for you to lace up. Says where he's from, you don't get second chances with leaks."
Sera nodded, eyes on the small hunched figure walking the line.
Somewhere up those pipes, people coughed and sweated and dreamed of water. Somewhere further up, someone nailed another notice to another wall.
Down here, the pipes hummed. In their hum was the memory of every story they'd carried: flood, drought, waste, miracle.
Tomorrow, people would argue about pressure: water, time, mercy, money.
Tonight, the pipes just remembered, and waited.