The egg ticked when it wanted to, not when the city told it to.
Down in the old granary's belly, in the corner they'd bullied into a shrine and then a nest, the shell made a sound that wasn't quite a heartbeat and wasn't quite a clock. Off-beat, off-bell, stubborn. Lindell's tower chimes tried every quarter-hour to drag it into line. The egg declined.
The air around it ran a degree colder than the rest of the house. Not a draft—drafts moved. This was a held chill, winter hoarded in porcelain, thin frost written on stone and then licked away by the warmth from upstairs before it could take.
Tamasin sat on the step above the little chamber, long legs folded, bare feet splayed on cold stone. Her knees ached the precise ache of a night spent kneeling on a roof that belonged to nobody officially and everyone in practice. Her palms still smelled faintly of moss and gutter slime and brick.
She leaned forward, laid her hand along the curve of the shell. It was thinner now; not fragile, exactly—there was nothing fragile about the thing inside—but more honest. When she focused, when she let the noise of the house and street blur, she could feel contours under her palm.
"Not today," she told it quietly. "Today is about making sure you get to choose your birthday."
The tick faltered, then steadied. A shiver went across the shell, the kind that wasn't movement so much as opinion.
"Good," she said. "Hold that thought."
Above her, Lindell woke up the way a large animal did: different parts at different times, everything out of sync until suddenly it wasn't. Somewhere next door a broom thumped against a doorframe; the neighbor with the three daughters and the aggressively judgmental laundry was already sweeping the stoop clean of yesterday. Two houses over a baby wailed with operatic sincerity. Up on the street, a bread seller whose voice carried better than the bells sang out the morning's inventory as he aimed himself toward Market Row.
Her body wanted to stay there, leaning into the egg's wrong-time heartbeat. But the city had thrown them an appointment with history and called it a festival, and someone had to go argue with it.
Tamasin pushed herself up, joints clicking, and climbed back up into the house that thought it was a barracks and was rapidly becoming a courthouse.
The night still clung to her shoulders as she went, and with it the roof.
She'd spent half the dark hours above the house, knees in damp moss, fingers sunk into the slime that clotted in gutter corners where rain and runoff collected gossip. The city was not subtle, but it was thorough. Roots under the cobbles had complained about weight and strain. Bricks muttered about the new survey pegs hammered into their flanks, the way brass inlays made them itch. Ratlines—those tense little ropes of path where feet and paws and claws wore shortcuts into existence—had hummed with anxiety.
From South Trellis they'd whispered: something heavy sitting where it never had before, a false nest for mirror-wasps that smelled more of ink than wax. From the square: old culverts sulking under the paving, remembering when they'd been trusted with more than runoff. From the direction of the Ward Tower: a tightness, the way a throat felt before a scream.
The wind had carried other voices up to her: a woman shouting about back rent two buildings over; someone quietly counting coins and then swearing when they didn't add up; distant laughter from the Stooped Giant tavern, gone ragged around the edges whenever someone remembered the funeral, the frost, the dragon.
Tamasin had asked the city a question in the only grammar it respected: hands on brick and root, breath on gutterwater.
Will you let us move the law?
The answer had not been no.
Now, as she reached the top of the stairs, the house's own noises folded around her. Chair legs complained in the main room. Merrow's kettle hissed judgement from the corner. Somewhere overhead, Riona's boots hit floorboards in a rhythm that meant she was thinking about trouble and fastening armor at the same time.
Through the window above the stairs, the street showed her a quick little prologue of the day. A human boy—fifteen, all elbows and bones—trotted past shouting headlines about yesterday's funeral and today's unveiling, voice cracking on "Civic Virtue Chronometer" like even his own throat didn't believe it. Behind him, up on a ladder, a kobold lamplighter named Rikka leaned out to snuff the last of the night lamps with a practiced twist. The pale glow died, leaving festival light and dawn to fight it out.
Rikka glanced toward their window and gave a small, absent nod. She didn't know what slept in their cellar, or what oaths were about to be spoken over their kitchen table. She just knew this house smelled like trouble and sanctuary in equal parts, and that was a combination her people had learned to recognize.
Tamasin took a breath that tasted of tea and ink and other people's nerves. Then she stepped into the room.
The table in the main room had given up on being furniture a while ago; today it looked like a crime scene altar.
Maps lay in layers, corners curling, edges weighted down with anything handy: a tiny brass cog etched with the Crown sigil that had no engineering purpose anyone could explain; a sugar cube with a single tiny fingerprint pressed into one melting side; a flake of plaster with survey-chalk still clinging to it. Notes piled in clumsy stacks around a central clear space, as if the paper itself recognized Riona's need for somewhere to slam her hand for emphasis.
Riona stood at the head of the table, armor half-fastened over the shirt she slept in. The movements of her hands as she checked her straps had the same careful assurance she used when checking other people's stories. The air around her felt charged, not with magic you could measure but with intent you could stub your moral compass on.
"Ground rules," she said, without looking up.
The room quieted. Lyra stopped fiddling with the bit of cloth in her hands. Merrow lifted the kettle off the flame. Skrik, perched on the mantle, froze mid-scribble in whatever invisible notebook he used when actual paper was too slow.
"No one goes anywhere alone," Riona said. "We touch nothing with a Crown stamp on it unless we're breaking it on purpose. If something needs breaking—"
She flicked her gaze to Branna, who sat to her right, already armoured to the teeth, hair braided back, expression set in the calm, terrifying neutrality she wore into battle.
"—Branna gets first swing."
Branna raised her mug in acknowledgement. "Some traditions deserve respect."
The air prickled, just slightly, at the word traditions. Not enough to make hair stand, but enough that Tamasin felt it along her teeth. Riona's words had weight these days; you could feel the city listening when she spoke in that tone, the way you could feel a courtroom settle when the judge sat.
Lyra was cross-legged on a chair, wrapping the Vesper Prism in a strip of soft dark cloth that used to be one of Isolde's shirtsleeves. The fabric still held the memory of ink and soap and the faint, indefinable scent of somebody who constantly leaned too close to strange light sources.
Lyra's legs wouldn't keep still. The extra stride Tamasin had laid into her last night with a careful, gritted-teeth ritual made her muscles itch. Even sitting, her body kept mapping sprint lines and exit routes through the room: door, window, staircase, the gap between Riona and Branna, the table you could slide under if you didn't mind a bruise.
The part of her brain that had once learned to time her movements between a dragon's breaths and falling masonry flinched in advance of whatever the Crown thought it was about to pull.
Merrow set a heavy ceramic teapot on a trivet, then another, plainer kettle beside it. The first held tea; the second was just hot water, because not everything needed seasoning. His face did that thing it did when he listened to three conversations and the lake at the same time: relaxed features, eyes half-lidded, something very awake and very sharp moving underneath.
"Half our list have twitched already," he said. "Hesta. Marta. Father Ivo. A few others. They know something's up today, even if they don't know what it is yet."
Sending left no paper trail and did not show up on Crown reports as "unauthorized assembly," which made it Merrow's method of choice.
Neris sat at the end of the table nearest the window, a stack of ledgers in front of him like a small, resentful fortress. He held one open with two fingers, the better to glare at the words "modernization initiative," which appeared six times in one paragraph without a single mention of who was paying for it.
Skrik had commandeered the mantelpiece and was using an imaginary quill to jot in imaginary margins, occasionally pausing to flick his tail in disapproval at some invisible annotation.
Kel leaned in the doorway, arms folded, eyes flicking between people and objects, cataloging potential weapons, exits, and lies.
"Lysa's not going back to Nackle's kitchen," she said, like a piece of business folded in with the rest.
Riona nodded. "We'll need to talk to her on the way. If Ratchet Blythe's people are being used as cover for this mess, I want to know whose signature got them into it."
"Ratchet didn't sign it," Kel said. "You can see it in the math. His parents crawled out of Cinder Ward with half their neighborhood boiled off their skin. He builds 'never again' engines. The Crown copies his schematics and runs 'never like that in front of witnesses' through them."
Tamasin set the Lake Tablet on the table very gently, like a brick that held grudges. Then she reached to her belt, uncorked three vials of brine, and nicked her thumb.
Three drops fell: one into each vial. The liquid clouded, then cleared, leaving faint eddies like fingerprints on water.
"Say it," Riona told her.
Tamasin inhaled salt and cold stone and the faint copper of her own blood.
"No theft of bodies," she said. "No conscription of lives. Hospitality inside law. The egg hatches here as a guest, not a resource. Isolde comes back if she chooses, not because anyone has their hand on her spine."
The vials warmed in her fingers, then settled.
She didn't add, out loud, that the heavier work was already done. The downstairs warding was deeper than plaster and sigils; she'd woven grammar from old prayers and older curses over the room where Isolde's body lay, over the egg's nest. Nets of intent waiting for any finger of divinity or device that tried to reach in and tweak outcomes.
The kind of magic that caught claws reaching for a soul and snapped shut like a trap.
Riona put her hand over Tamasin's. Branna's hand went on top of Riona's, palm hard with years of sword and shield. Lyra's slipped in, ink-stained fingers cool. Kel's followed, knuckles scarred from too many walls and too few gloves. Merrow's was damp-cold, like lakewater in shade. Neris's smelled faintly of chalk and old paper. Skrik hopped down, hesitated, then set one clawed hand delicately on the back of Kel's.
"You are very warm," he informed them. "Union will note this in minutes."
The house held its breath. The city, outside, hissed and clanged and shouted about bread and funerals and bells, but under all of that something listened.
"Passages," Riona said. "No theft of bodies. No conscription of lives. Hospitality inside law."
The weight of the words settled on the table, sank into the maps, into the wood, into the stone beneath. The sugar cube with the tiny fingerprint glistened, catching a sliver of light; the brass cog looked, for the first time, slightly abashed.
They broke apart.
"Eat," Branna said. "Talk. Then we go see what kind of theater the Crown has built and whether it can withstand heckling."
They stepped out into a city that had dressed up as its best self and failed in the way only something old and proud could fail: beautifully, and a little desperately.
Festival banners cinched the avenues, bright fabric pulling old stone into temporary corsets. Loud-hailers wired to lampposts crackled with pre-recorded enthusiasm about "orderly delight," their volume just shy of threatening. Safety posters bloomed like a rash on walls and posts, dense with text and worrying diagrams of exits.
The smell coming off the streets was fried dough and cheap perfume overlaid on lake brine and too many bodies with somewhere they were supposed to be.
Just outside the gate of their little side street, Merrit Cole had found himself a temporary podium—a crate that used to hold apples, now repurposed to hold his ego. He wore his best city-issue blue and a sash that had seen better wash-lines.
"By decree of Her Majesty Queen Odelia," he bellowed, voice resonant enough to rival the bells, "the Civic Virtue Chronometer will be unveiled at the tenth bell for the edification and moral improvement of all citizens of Lindell—"
"Do we get to pick which citizens?" Kel muttered as they filed past.
"Shh," Lyra said. "He's almost to the part where virtue means not standing in the wrong place."
"—attendance is encouraged," Merrit thundered, "and all are reminded to follow the directions of authorized festival marshals for your own safety and convenience."
"Oh look," Merrow said mildly. "He learned a new word. Convenience. How ominous."
They left Merrit to his exclamations and curved into a wider street. Up ahead, two dwarven masons stood beneath a stretch of wall that was currently being strangled by new banner hooks. One dwarf, broad and gray-bearded, Dorim Stonecourt, glowered at the hooks as if they'd personally offended his ancestors.
"Those go straight into the stress line," he muttered in Dwarvish.
The younger dwarf beside him, Kazra Ember-Scale, answered in the same tongue, smirk bending her mouth. "Gnome overconfidence, Dorim. They say the new bracework can take it."
"Gnomes know stone," Dorim grumbled. "Clerks know paperwork. I do not recall paperwork ever holding up a ceiling."
A tabaxi bard lounged at the corner, fur mottled in city dust, lute balanced on her knee. Whisker-in-Chords picked out a tune that might have been the anthem if you squinted; the lyrics, however, wandered dangerously close to sedition.
"…and the Clock That Wants Your Soul,
it keeps ticking, never whole,
and it counts you, counts you,
but it never counts itself…"
A couple of Watch rookies hovered nearby, trying to decide if that was grounds for an arrest or just bad poetry. Whisker-in-Chords winked at them and shifted the tune into something officially approved. The rookies relaxed, embarrassed to have been suspicious of art.
"See?" Lyra said under her breath. "Culture. Lindell has it."
"Culture is what grows on corpses," Kel replied. "We're about to find out whose."
A boy with a satchel of sun-shaped pamphlets intercepted them like an eager projectile. He couldn't have been more than twelve, hair sticking up at the back like he'd lost an argument with sleep.
"Festival directives?" he chirped. "Free. One per citizen. Don't let 'em get wet; the ink runs and then the truth shows."
Behind him, his mother—Alia Fen, who Tamasin recognized from the laundries down by the Gut—watched with a laundrywoman's worry: that someone would spill something awful on her child. She clutched her own copy of the directives like it might spontaneously accuse her.
Riona took a pamphlet, because it was being offered and because refusing it would go in a report somewhere.
The sunburst on the front smiled a little too hard. Inside, tidy columns of text forbade and encouraged in equal measure.
SAFETY PRECAUTIONS.
APPROVED ROUTES.
AUTHORIZED GATHERING ZONES.
Under a section titled SUBTERRANEAN RISKS, the prose grew colder.
"Our city thanks those who maintain its vital under-works," Riona read aloud, voice flat. "However, certain unregistered subterranean populations may present unique hazards in crowded festival environments. Citizens are advised to report any suspicious underground activity—"
"Suspicious underground activity," Skrik echoed from Kel's shoulder, offended. "That's called living."
Two small kobolds—Tessik and Grol, if Tamasin remembered right from seeing them filch bread crusts near the granary—craned their necks to see the pamphlet. A clerk in Crown livery stepped in front of them, frown crisp.
"Not for you," he said, snapping the pamphlet shut. "Civic directives are for citizens."
"Then you should give them to us twice," Skrik said.
Kel's hand touched his back, warning. Riona filed the clerk's face away: long nose, ink on the cuffs, the particular smugness of somebody wielding borrowed authority.
Merrow stood slightly apart, eyes unfocused. Sending didn't require eye contact, but he'd found people respected your privacy more if you looked like you were having a small stroke.
Hesta, he told the tavern-keeper across town. The square's going to be wild. Don't let the Watch drink on shift.
He got back an image of a broom hitting an ankle and the sensation of someone saying absolutely not without words.
Marta, he pushed toward the lanternkeeper. That chain link you told Riona about—ready to be "forgotten"?
Marta's mental reply came as a clear picture of the hollow link, plus the comfortable satisfaction of a job badly done for good reasons.
Father Ivo, Merrow tried. We're going to need you loud and wrong about a plaque.
I have always been loud and right about plaques, the old priest's voice snapped in his head. But I will see what I can do.
They moved on. The city, forced into its festival drag, smiled in too many places at once.
At a corner where three streets met, a tiefling was standing on a crate, one cloven hoof pressed to the wood, one hand slicing the air as if carving his words into it.
Korin Ashveil's horns were wrapped in red cloth that had seen better days. His tail flicked, not with nervousness but emphasis.
"A clock is a mouth," he was saying, while three Watch rookies lurked uncertainly at the edges. "Don't let anyone tell you different. It eats. It will eat hours first, sure. But hours are lives stacked on their side. A god of law that only counts signatures and not bodies is doing bad math."
"Is he allowed to say that?" one rookie whispered to the other.
"If he stops before 'down with the Crown' I think it's just philosophy," the other replied.
Korin's eyes brushed the party as they passed. There was recognition there, and worry, and reluctant admiration, as if he saw how much trouble was walking by on two legs and wished them luck attempting to out-argue a machine.
"See?" Merrow murmured. "Annoyingly accurate, if theatrical."
"You and he can fight over footnotes later," Riona said. "For now, we walk."
They headed toward Market Row, where the city pretended it had never seen blood.
Market Row had scrubbed itself up for the festival. Someone had washed the worst of the grime off the main cobbles, or at least moved it to the edges. Ribbons hung from awnings, trying to convince the buildings that they were festive rather than tired. The stalls were fuller than usual: bread and skewers and little sugar clocks, cheap toys shaped like giant bones and skeletons.
Benat Gregor, whose bakery smelled like comfort and trauma in equal measure, stood outside his shop with his arms folded and flour on his chest.
"You call that a roll?" he barked at his apprentice, Dalla, a freckled girl with her hair tied up in a bandana. "If they're coming to gawk at the Queen's toy, they're going to need bread that can outlast a speech. Double the rise, half the price. We're not feeding them air with ideas above its station."
Dalla rolled her eyes but took the tray back inside.
A little further down, two orc dockworkers—Mara Ungh and Tovin—leaned against a crate, sharing one of Benat's dense loaves, tearing it with hands callused from ropes and salt.
"Rik didn't come home after the last 'safety drill,'" Mara muttered in Orcish. "Now they want us to clap for a new drill you can't hit with a wrench."
"Rik'll turn up," Tovin lied. "They said—"
"They say a lot of things," Mara cut in. "Their mouths have more arms than an octopus."
"Festive," Lyra said, as they threaded through.
At the junction before the square, a man in a too-bright sash flailed at the crowd like a one-man tidewall.
"Left lane for square, right lane for Market overflow, middle lane for dignitaries and— no, madam, I swear to you I've always worked crowd control, this is absolutely my life," he insisted.
Just Robert had a way of appearing in whatever job the city needed filled badly and convincingly. Today he was a festival marshal, which meant he had a stick, a sash, and absolutely no authority.
"Robert," Riona called as they passed. "Who drafted you?"
"Volunteered," he said confidently. "Or was pressed. Same thing when you're useful."
"Try not to redirect anyone into a holding pen by mistake," Kel told him.
"Never have," Robert said, which was probably technically true and entirely unconvincing.
At the third lantern from the edge of the square, Marta Vellin stood on a ladder, wiping a perfectly clean glass panel with exaggerated care.
"Terrible business," she said loudly, as they approached. "Faulty hardware this close to a royal unveiling. Why, if I were a responsible Guild tech, I'd file a report and expect it to be ignored until it was politically useful."
She jabbed her rag at a particular link in the chain.
When Kel flicked it with a knuckle, it rang wrong. Hollow instead of solid, the note just off enough to be unsettling.
Below, a gnome with a clipboard—Berrit, cousin to Nackle—checked boxes on a form, lips moving.
"Mirror-wasp integrity, check," he murmured. "Agglomerated reflection compliance, check. Crown seal affixed, check…"
He didn't see the old Guild stamp ground off the metal under his nose, or pretended not to. The new Crown crest gleamed over the scarred place.
Near him, two Watch rookies leaned on spears, exchanging looks.
"See?" Marta continued, voice for their benefit as much as the party's. "If someone doesn't clean these things properly, we could have a tragic incident. People tripping over cordons. Getting evacuated into cells. Nobody wants that. Certainly not honest folk."
The rookies shuffled. One coughed something that might have been "ma'am" and might have been "sorry." Berrit's quill paused, then scribbled faster.
Across the street, an elderly woman with a face like crumpled parchment—Granny Ro Hemsley—sat on a crate peeling apples with a small, sharp knife. The peel came off in one long spiral, as if she refused waste on principle.
"Gnomes build a clever lock to stop the world from exploding," she muttered, mostly to the apple. "Crown takes the lock and uses it to keep the wrong people outside. Told 'em that'd happen. Nobody listens to old bones."
A kobold with a broom—Vrek—slowed his sweeping at the word gnome. His ears pricked toward Lysa, who was leaning in a doorway nearby, apron folded over her arm like a surrender flag.
"You're out early," Lyra said to Lysa.
"I'm out," Lysa replied.
She jerked her chin toward a metal box bolted under the adjacent lamppost. Its mirrored facets were angled to catch every glint and movement on the street.
"Nackle calls them safety recorders," she said. "Crowd-density monitors. Says they saved half a district once. His parents were in Cinder Ward when the pipes went. Says the first mirror-wasp arrays screamed about heat and pressure, gave people enough time to run. That's what they're for."
Her voice wobbled on for.
"And the Crown?" Kel asked.
Lysa's mouth twisted. "Their clerk never asks how to keep people alive. Only how to keep people elsewhere. 'How far can a crowd move in sixty seconds?' 'Where are your chokepoints?' 'What do you need to seal to prevent contagion?' They don't mean sickness."
Vrek swept the same patch of cobbles three times, head angled so his ears could catch every word.
Skrik hopped down to the lamppost's base, tapping the box with one claw.
"They say mirror-wasps once swarmed a whole district," he said. "Crawled into every reflective surface. Ate faces. That's why they aren't allowed above certain streets."
"Story's wrong," Lysa said sharply.
She took the roll Dalla had just pressed into her hand and snapped it in half, more savagely than the bread deserved.
"Nackle says the swarm saved people. Picked up heat and motion before the pipes blew. His family runs because of those 'wasps.' Crown posters leave that part out. They like their monsters simple."
Dalla hovered, tray now lightened by one breadroll, eyes wide.
"Posters don't tell the whole story," she said softly, as if testing the shape of the thought in her mouth.
"No," Lysa said. "They don't."
They'd reached the part of Market Row where missing posters clung like barnacles under the fresh coat of festival paint.
Faces stared from cheap ink: boys, girls, grown folk. "Unaccounted for" stamped across lives that had once been noisy and in the way.
Riona stopped in front of one she recognized. The boy's hair lay crushed under a cap, his smile wrong for a notice like that—too confident, not yet practiced at fear.
Tomas Kellis, the text beneath read. Last seen near Ward Tower. Reported missing by his uncle.
"Another one," she said quietly.
At a nearby stall Jorin Kellis, the uncle in question, pretended to fix a hinge that had been fixed three times already. His eyes never fully left the poster. His hand tightened on the hinge when he saw Riona looking, but he didn't speak.
Branna stepped up beside Riona, jaw working.
"We fix the clock," she said, "maybe boys like that stop disappearing into its gears."
"Or at least the gears stop pretending not to know they're chewing," Kel said.
As Riona smoothed the curling corner of the poster back against the post, a halfling boy hopped down from the crossbeam above, quick as a thought. Perrin Quickstep stuck a scrap of folded paper behind the poster with the sly efficiency of someone who'd been leaving notes where adults wouldn't see since he could climb.
He caught Riona's eye, tapped the side of his nose, and scuttled back up a drainpipe.
She slid the scrap into her pocket without unfolding it.
On the edge of the square, Marella Vint walked past, tiefling horns polished, Horologium livery spotlessly pressed. Ink stained the cuffs of her sleeves, a badge of the scribes.
Her gaze snagged on Tomas's poster for a heartbeat too long. Her jaw clenched, then she moved on, spine stiff.
Neris saw it. He knew that kind of flinch intimately: the recognition of a name you'd once written down as "transferred" or "relocated," only to see it under MISSING a week later.
He didn't say anything. There would be time later, if they all survived whatever the day was winding itself into.
"Come on," Riona said. "We need to talk to an old river and a cranky priest."
Old Mouth sat where the river met the city like a scar someone had decided to frame.
Once, it had just been a big, ugly hole where everything Lindell didn't know what to do with—the shit, the runoff, the occasional inconvenient corpse—poured out into the water. The old names for the system reflected that honesty. Throat. Gut. Under-Courts.
Now the Throat was dressed up. An iron grille, scrubbed and painted. A carved stone arch wrapped the opening, complete with an earnest plaque.
Riona read it aloud in the bored tone of someone doing a tour for drunks.
"Here the city first disciplined its waters," she said. "Discipline. That's a word that's never been involved in any relationship I've had with sewage."
"Discipline your language," a voice creaked. "Plaques are watching."
Father Ivo emerged from the side like a heron stepping out of reeds. His robe resembled drowned curtains someone had decided were still salvageable. His hair was wispy white foam around his skull. His staff was carved up and down with wave-marks, each groove worn smooth by fingers.
"Used to be they called this stretch the Throat," he said. "Downstream was the Gut. Under the square, that was the Under-Courts. That's where you went if you didn't trust men in wigs to tell you what justice was. You asked the water. It was blunt, but fair. Until it drowned you."
Nearby, a merfolk waterworker leaned on the quay wall, tail drifting lazily in the flow. Sel Inlet hauled a net up with a grunt and squinted at the contents.
"New drains piss in the wrong direction," she complained. "Used to be we knew what came from where. Now it all just spews wherever the Crown's little levers tell it to."
A skinny dock kid, Len Barrow, hung over the railing, wide-eyed, soaking up Father Ivo's rant like a bedtime story.
"The Under-Courts," he whispered, tasting the word. "That's where the river decides if you're guilty?"
"If you're foolish enough to ask," Ivo said. "And stubborn enough to listen."
Two water genasi apprentices, Pava and Jem, chalked safe-depth marks along the edge of the quay, feet leaving faint wet prints on the stone. They nodded respectfully as they passed Neris, who gave them a tight smile.
The plaque glowed smugly in the morning light.
"'Disciplined its waters,'" Father Ivo snorted. "They've replaced the honest names with this nonsense. The river remembers what it's called, even if the stone tries not to."
Neris stepped forward, laid a hand on the arch. Under the polished stone, under the chisel marks sanded smooth to impress tourists, there was a pliant seam. The faint give of old work that had been pressured into a new shape.
He inhaled. Brine. Moss. Something else, metallic and thin—the smell of mirrored metal humming under strain.
"The draft's wrong," he said. "Not sewer. Something deeper. And there's brine where there shouldn't be."
"You and your brine," Lyra muttered with affection.
Tamasin pressed her palm beside his. The brickwork under her touch told a different story: joints meeting joints, pressure redistributed, channels rerouted.
"They've tied the old channels into something under the square," she said. "This arch is part of its throat. Whatever the Chronometer is, it's drinking from here."
On the underside of the arch, a decorative rainchain hung, water tracing down its links in the dainty way someone in an office thought water ought to behave.
Skrik scrambled up the chain with the easy arrogance of someone who had never believed in decorative anything. He tapped each link with a claw. Solid. Solid. Hollow.
"This one," he said.
The hollow link chimed when he hit it, a note just off enough to be unpleasant.
"Good place to hide a message," Skrik said. "Or a line. Or someone's fingers. Trel says the union does not approve of hollow things on principle. They tend to be full of teeth."
Vrek had followed them from Market Row, broom over his shoulder, expression carefully neutral. Now he stood ten paces off, pretending to be very interested in some litter while his ears tracked every word.
Skrik caught his eye and flicked a small, precise hand gesture. Vrek mirrored it: acknowledgment, solidarity, we see this too.
"Your people keeping an eye from below?" Tamasin asked quietly.
"Always," Skrik said. "Kobolds are like leaks. If the city doesn't want us there, it should stop leaving gaps."
On the path above, a drow woman in a precise dark coat hurried past, arms full of scrolls bound in different colors. Seren Lareth's mouth was set in a line that meant I have already had three arguments before breakfast.
"Do you know how much ink it takes just to get the word person written next to kobold in case law?" she grumbled to nobody in particular.
Lyra answered anyway. "More than it should."
Seren glanced over, took in Lyra's face, Riona's armor, the motley around them. Something like recognition flashed, but she kept moving, late for a meeting with someone who would try to pretend the Under-Courts didn't exist.
"Ask your river nicely," Father Ivo told Tamasin. "It remembers being a judge. It might be persuaded to take up the job again."
"I plan to," she said. "But first, we're going to talk to some people who think they own gravity."
"Ah," Ivo said. "The gnomes. Don't blame them for what the Crown does with their hammers. They build to keep us from drowning. The state builds to keep from being seen drowning us."
He shuffled off, muttering about plaques and correct spelling.
"Come on," Riona said. "We have an appointment with a tavern. After that, with a clock."
The Stooped Giant wore its years like a badge and its secrets like a second roof.
Inside, the air was thick with yeast, smoke, and the low-grade hum of people trying not to think about the festival too hard. Hesta Brundle moved behind the bar like she owned every molecule of it and rented out the rest at a markup.
At a corner table, two ogres—Harn and Mila—hunched over a card game. Their hands were comically delicate against the tiny stiff rectangles. They lifted their cups as the party came in, a silent toast given automatically to anyone wearing too much armor this early.
Whisker-in-Chords sat near the hearth, cat-ears twitching as they tuned their lute. The song they were coaxing out had the bones of a war ballad and the skin of a love song, which was about right for Lindell.
Just Robert had acquired an apron and a tray. He dropped a mug halfway between table and customer, caught it with a flashy flourish that spilled only half the contents, and announced, "First day? Me? Never. I've always worked hospitality."
"Not today you don't," Hesta said, rescuing the mug and swatting him away with the towel. She looked up as Branna approached, eyes softening in that particular way Hesta reserved for people who had bled on her floor and then helped clean it.
"If this is about shelves again, the answer's still no," she said. "Last time you reinforced my cellar, the ale developed opinions."
"We're not here about shelves," Branna said. "This time."
Hesta snorted, reached under the bar, and hauled out a bottle that only came out for wakes and disasters you wished were wakes. She poured two fingers for Branna and two for the man at the far end of the bar.
"To the ones the frost took," she said.
Branna lifted her glass. So did Deren Halloran, whose uniform jacket looked like it had lost several arguments with fire, sleeplessness, and grief.
They drank without ceremony. The silence afterward was the kind that held other names.
"Back room," Hesta said gruffly. "If you're going to plot anything that might get my windows broken, do it where the walls already know how to keep secrets."
"The walls know how to leak too," Kel said.
"Not my walls," Hesta replied. "I picked them myself."
The back room of the Giant had started life as storage, and never quite forgiven anyone for upgrading it. Old shelves lined the walls, weighed down with bottles and crates and the occasional object that wasn't sure how it got there. Someone had draped re-dyed campaign banners over the worst of the water stains. Hooks with nothing hanging from them lined one wall, like a memory of weapons.
On a side shelf, Branna's chalk notes from an earlier expedition rested on a handful of giant-bone fragments, the white of them dull under dust. Measurements, calculations, questions about leverage and vertebrae were scrawled in her blunt hand.
A crooked hand-written sign declared:
HOUSE RULES:
No swords on the table.
Pay your tab.
No starting revolutions without buying a round.
Halloran sat at the head of the scarred table, collar open, sleeves rolled. Outside, someone laughed too loudly. Someone else cried too quietly.
"I don't like rooms with heroes," he said by way of greeting. "They make my paperwork difficult."
"Good thing we're only idiots," Lyra said, dropping into a chair.
He huffed a laugh that didn't quite get past his teeth.
"Sit," he said. "Look."
He unfolded a map stamped with the Crown crest. Streets spiderwebbed across it: Market Row, South Trellis, the riverfront. Over those lines, in a different ink, a triangle had been drawn, lopsided but intentional. Little crown symbols marked each point: one at Market Row, one on South Trellis, one at the Old Mouth.
On top of that, he laid another sheet—this one covered in clerk-hand annotations.
"Temporary stage structures," he read. "Load-bearing recalculations. Reinforced foundations for Prince Rowan's modernization initiative. Safety corridor in case of mirror-wasp infestation."
He tapped that last phrase with his finger. The nail clicked against the parchment.
"Last equinox," he said. "South Trellis. 'Emergency maintenance due to mirror-wasp nest.' Do you remember?"
Branna's jaw clenched. "I remember cordons. I remember the only people 'evacuated' into holding cells were the ones without the right ink on their papers."
"And the posters blamed gnome traps," Halloran said. "Every bruised rib, every broken wrist—it all landed on 'overzealous safety protocol.' Funny thing: the Engineering Guild's own memos don't mention mirror-wasps once before the Chamberlain's office scribbled them in the margins."
At the doorway, Hesta leaned in with a tray of fresh glasses, pretending she'd just come to drop them off. Her eyes took in the triangle, the little crowns.
"Those are where people keep going missing," she remarked. "If anyone's counting."
"We're trying to," Halloran said.
"I own a tavern, Captain," she replied. "That's already more politics than I wanted."
She retreated, though Tamasin had the sense she remained at the other side of the door, listening.
At a table in the front room, a small gnome with spectacles slid down her nose—Sera Argent—scribbled on scrap paper, doing her own calculations. The word "mirror" floated past, and her pencil paused just long enough to make a future.
"Horologium's specs," Halloran said, tapping a separate packet, "are ten pages of risk mitigation and fault tolerance. They're written by people who had Cinder Ward's fire singed onto their bones. Their machines are built to shout when the pipes are about to go, to give you time to run."
He tossed another sheet down, this one on thick, smug paper.
"Then the Crown's clerks staple on four pages about crowd flow, protest dispersal, and 'undesirable congregation risk.' They take the same hardware and run a different story through it."
"Same machine," Kel said. "Different god inside."
He pointed to the little crowns on the triangle's points.
"They've hammered survey pegs with brass inlays into these three spots," he said. "You've seen them. They itch. You don't lay brass in like that for fun. You lay it to anchor something."
"To anchor what?" Lyra asked.
Halloran's smile was quick and bitter. "You tell me. You people are on speaking terms with things my training manual does not cover."
Lyra traced the triangle with a fingertip, connecting Market Row, South Trellis, and Old Mouth. Her mental map of the under-city slotted under it like a second layer.
"You run channels between these," she said slowly, "and you don't just get good acoustics. You get a geometric figure that feeds into the square. The Chronometer sits on the center of it like a spider on a web."
"Counting flies," Branna said.
Tamasin closed her eyes for a second, feeling the faint echo of last night's Commune—the way the old culverts under the square had twisted when the new lines were cut in, resentful.
"The old Under-Courts ran under the square," she said. "People used to go there to let the water judge them when they didn't trust the wigged courts. Now the Crown is routing pressure and light and sound and movement down there instead, into whatever engine they've built. They're trying to make a new court in the image of a clock."
"And they used our manuals to do it," Neris said. "Our diagrams. Our safety nets."
Halloran slumped back in his chair. For a moment he looked every hour of however long he'd been captain, every loss weighed and filed.
"I've seen the pit they dug under the square," he said. "I've seen the brass rings and the mirrored housings and the cables running up into the dais. They call it a cold room. It's where the Chronometer's heart lives. They say it will keep people safe. I believe it will keep someone safe. I don't think it's us."
"Can we break it without breaking Lindell?" Branna asked.
"Can we turn it into what the gnomes thought they were building?" Tamasin added. "A warning system, not a sorting hat for souls?"
"Sabotage," Lyra said, "is just maintenance with different priorities."
Halloran gave her a look that, in another life, might have been affection.
"I do not want another Cinder Ward," he said. "I do not want another frost dragon. I am tired of signing my name under the phrase 'acceptable losses.' If there is a way to make their shiny toy fail in a way that looks like a mechanical quirk instead of a revolution, I am listening."
"Then let's get eyes on it from underneath," Riona said.
"And hands," Branna said.
"And brine," Tamasin said.
Halloran nodded, folded the map back up, and tucked it away.
"Tonight," he said. "We go below. Before that, you have a city to walk and a river to charm."
They left the Stooped Giant to its regulars and its grief and stepped back into a day getting closer to the point where it would try to break.
By the time they got back to the house, the light had shifted toward afternoon. The sugar cube on the table had sagged slightly, the tiny fingerprint on it blurring. A second, smaller ridge had pressed in beside it, as if someone else with a small hand had come by while they were out, testing the texture.
"Perrin," Kel murmured, brushing the edge of the cube with a knuckle and feeling the faint grit of sugar. The boy had a sugar habit and sticky cuffs to prove it.
The table looked less like chaos now and more like evidence. Chalk dust from survey pegs had been brushed carefully into little piles on one corner. The brass cog sat in the middle like a coin on a tongue. Rusk Vell's elegant signature, from a scrap of festival decree someone had brought in, curled like smoke at the bottom of one particularly pompous paragraph.
"Three rings," Tamasin said, tapping three spots on the haphazard map they'd scrawled.
"Under-square," Branna said, tapping the first. "The old Under-Courts."
"Cold room," Lyra said, tapping the second. "The Chronometer's actual heart, not the pretty face they'll unveil."
"And here," Riona said, pressing her palm down on a rough sketch of their own house, the egg's room marked with a little circle. "Our ring."
"Ours has to be stronger," Kel said.
Tamasin uncorked one of the brine vials she'd prepared earlier. The liquid shimmered with a faint opalescence now, catching the lamplight as if considering it instead of simply reflecting.
"We've already said the words," she said. "Let's say them again, with intent."
She poured a few drops onto the table. They spread in lines that followed the grain of the wood, soaking into the maps underneath.
"Passages for six," she said. "No theft of bodies. No conscription of lives. Hospitality inside law."
Riona let something inside herself loosen, just a little. The new part of her that had grown around vows and oaths and the weight of other people's lives stirred, stretched.
The air in the room thickened. The words didn't turn into glowing runes or swirl dramatically; they simply sank, the way statements did in a court when they were written down.
Anyone planning to lie here, to coerce, to steal a life… found their throat growing dry and their tongue reluctant.
Skrik cleared his throat, experimentally. "Union notes that this room has acquired… expectations," he said. "We approve."
Tamasin's mind flicked downstairs, to the room where Isolde's body lay and the egg sat in its nest. The Death Wards she'd woven there—not one spell, but a lattice of old taboos and new promises—held firm. Any attempt to rewrite those fates would have to go through her, through this house, through the street they were binding.
Kel stood over a scrap of paper where she'd written, and rewritten, and underlined the words clock-bailiff and Horologium sync until the page thinned.
"Surveillance doesn't have to see me," she said. "It just has to think it already has."
"Congratulations," Lyra said dryly. "You're aiming to become a clerical error."
"It's the safest place to be in this city," Kel replied.
Merrow leaned over the map, tracing the distance between their house, the Stooped Giant, and the square with one long finger.
"It's short enough to tear," he said. "Not quietly, not with the lake asleep. But if all else fails and someone needs to be somewhere faster than stairs allow, there are… options."
Lyra, who had flown through a dragon's breath and survived a sewer implosion by pure spite and half a spell, sketched idly on the margin: a dragon looped through a ring, its tail biting its own neck, the circle labeled SANCTUARY?.
"Dragon union," Skrik observed, peering over her shoulder. "Trel wants to know if there will be dues. He's asking for several hundred kobolds."
"We'll worry about dues when we're not in danger of being sorted," Riona said. "For now, we build the place we'd want to stand if someone tried to sort us."
She looked at the names scattered around the map. Tomas Kellis. Mara Ungh. Lysa. Hesh. Vrek. Jorin. Hesta. Korin. Marella. Nackle. Ratchet. So many lives, most of whom would never see the inside of the palace except as an accusation.
"When Jorin stands in that square," she said quietly, "when Mara and Lysa and Hesh and the rest of the people the Crown calls background are there… I want them standing somewhere that recognizes they exist. Not just as numbers on a dial."
"That's a tall order for some cobblestones," Branna said.
"The stone remembers more justice than the people currently standing on it," Tamasin replied. "We're just coaxing it into a relapse."
They talked until the light outside went from afternoon to the bruised half-dark of early evening. Plans layered: routes, contingencies, what to do if the Chronometer refused to be rewritten, what to do if it shattered, what to do if it did nothing at all.
Finally, when the maps started to blur and the lamplight made everyone's faces look like they'd already been through tomorrow, Merrow stood.
"I'll check on the egg," he said.
No one argued. Some tasks were obvious.
Downstairs, the air felt different. Not heavier, exactly. More attentive.
The egg sat in its nest of blankets and sand and spellwork, ticking in its own private rhythm. The walls around it bore faint chalk traces from Tamasin's wards, lines and sigils that made the room feel like the inside of a promise.
Merrow settled onto the step opposite it, arms draped over his knees.
"They're building a machine," he told it. "To tell you what kind of future you're allowed. How much time you get. What you're for."
The egg did not reply. It didn't have to. The tick inside it sped up for a handful of beats, then slowed again.
"We're trying to build something else," Merrow said. "A crack in the order of things big enough for you to slip through without being tagged, categorized, or weaponized. For Isolde, if she wants it. For you, if you want it. For us, if we're very, very lucky."
He thought of Isolde in the lake—her mind unmoored from her body, ragged and vast and not yet itself. He thought of the way Tamasin's vows had brushed the water and it had almost, almost answered.
"If she comes back," he said, using her name aloud and feeling the way it made the wards hum, "it's because she chooses to. Not because some clock decides it's time for a hero and goes fishing in the lake."
The air tasted faintly of frost and chlorine and old grief.
The egg ticked, obstinate.
"Good," Merrow said. "Keep disagreeing. It's the only reason we're doing this."
He sat a while longer, listening to a shell argue with the concept of schedule, and then went back upstairs.
Night came fully, though the city tried to pretend otherwise with lanterns and loud voices.
Under the square, in a tunnel that used to serve as a respectable bit of infrastructure and now was treated like a suspicious rumor, Hob Trindle stood by a support pillar.
He was young for a Watchman, old for the expression on his face. His uniform fitted like someone else's better idea of who he should be. In his hands, he held a brass hemisphere the size of a cabbage, studded with tiny dials and little hands, ticking with the self-importance of minor authority.
"You're late," he said as the party's lantern rounded the bend.
"You're early," Riona replied. "We can file a complaint or we can get on with it."
Hob shifted the portable clock-bailiff uncertainly.
"New directive," he said. "All under-square access has to be supervised by a bailiff. Mirror-wasp protocol, subsection three. Reckon it logs what it needs to log."
"That's exactly what I'm afraid of," Riona said.
From the shadows behind Hob, Halloran stepped out, like an afterthought that had been waiting for the right time.
"Good evening," he said. "Or awful one. Depends how long you've been listening to memos today."
"Captain," Hob said. "Sir. I thought you were—"
"On administrative leave," Halloran said. "For disruptive tendencies. You heard the clerks. Which means I am, officially, not here. Nor are you. This is a hallucination brought on by prolonged exposure to Crown stationery."
The bailiff's tiny hands twitched, sensing rank and narrative both.
It clicked its jaw in Halloran's direction, the sound of a hundred little reports being filed at once.
Tamasin felt the prickle on her skin she'd come to associate with being recorded. Under that, she felt the steady pulse of the Lake Tablet in her satchel and the threads of brine-grammar she'd woven around Kel and the others.
Kel stepped closer to the device. The prickle intensified, then… slipped. The little hands flailed a moment, reaching for something to categorize, and closed on air.
Kel smiled without humor.
"Good," she said, too softly for the men to hear. "Keep forgetting me."
"Put that thing down," Halloran told Hob. "It's not invited."
Hob hesitated. The bailiff's ticking sounded louder in the confined space, echoing off stone.
"Procedure says—"
"Procedure," Halloran said, "is the story the Crown tells the city about itself. We're telling a different story tonight."
Hob swallowed, then set the device on a ledge just at the edge of the lantern light. Its little feet gripped stone with horrible daintiness.
Tamasin stepped forward and unwrapped the Lake Tablet. The tunnel air stepped back like a polite host suddenly realizing a more important guest had arrived. Then it leaned in, curious.
She laid her palm on the stone, felt cool depth meet skin.
"Passage for six," she said. "No theft of bodies. No conscription of lives. Hospitality inside law. Destination: under-square, cold room with too many locks. Toll paid in intention and maintenance."
The Tablet drank the words. Under their feet, something shifted. Old channels shrugged off silt and neglect. Brine trickled through places it hadn't been allowed in years.
The bailiff's ticking stuttered. The tiny hands froze, then slowly re-aligned, matching a rhythm that did not come from springs and gears but from rock and water.
Halloran muttered a quick, ugly charm in the little ritual dialect bureaucrats used like a swear: the one you used to cleanse a schedule of bad entries or exorcise particularly haunted paperwork.
The bailiff rocked back. Its jaw unhinged and then closed again with a resigned little clack. It filed, very neatly, an impression of nothing happening here tonight.
A seam in the wall to their right darkened, the mortar lines going from merely old to suggestive. Stone remembered a shape it had once held—a doorway—and decided to try it on again.
The crack widened into an opening just wide enough for a person in armor to squeeze through if she exhaled.
Cool air breathed out, carrying with it the smell of metal, oil, and the faint, brittle tang of devices that believed in objectivity.
"After you," Kel said to the Tablet, because she'd learned the hierarchy by now.
Tamasin went first, hand on the stone. The others followed, into the city's hidden throat.
The under-square vault had been built for counting. You could feel it in the way the arches met, in the way each alcove seemed to expect a stack of something: coins, grain, names.
Now it housed something that wanted to count more than it had any right to.
In the center of the chamber, nested brass rings rose three men high, polished to an unpleasant sheen. Cables ran from them up through the ceiling, veins leading to the velvet-draped bulk above and the mirror-boxes on the streets. Mirror housings punctured the framework at intervals, glass dark for now.
The Chronometer's heart looked less like a weapon and more like an equation given too much metal.
Kel stepped halfway around it, keeping just out of the obvious alignment lines.
The hairs on her arms stood up.
"It's not looking at us," she said. "It's… sorting us."
Her reflection in one of the polished surfaces was half a heartbeat off—her mouth finishing a sentence her brain hadn't sent yet, the tilt of her head a fraction of a second behind her actual movement. Anyone else would have blamed the light.
Lyra, Prism in hand, felt every angle in the room as potential ambush.
"This is what happens when you build a god out of ratios," she said. "It only knows how to ask 'what's the most likely?' It doesn't know how to ask 'what's right?'"
Tamasin approached one of the rings. Sigils had been engraved along its edge in the sharp, efficient strokes of Horologium's best. Virtue. Productivity. Risk. Efficiency.
Underneath, faintly, she felt older notches: the imprint of gnome hands that had meant something else. Pressure. Release. Burst. Warning.
She uncorked a brine vial and poured, slow, over the nearest cluster of signs.
The liquid hissed faintly where it met the metal, as if both were offended. Then it sank in, following the carved lines, filling them, changing what they meant.
"You don't get to count us," she told the machine. "You work for the city. Not the Crown. Not the prince. The city. The bodies you're sitting on."
She leaned, without saying it aloud, on last night's conversations: roots and brick and water all giving her grudging permission.
In the corners of the room, stone shifted its weight. Whatever passed for the under-square's memory stirred, pleased to be consulted.
Kel unwrapped the Prism. The glass orb caught the lantern light, bent it, and sent it skimming along the brass and glass like a stone on a pond.
"Where they wrote obedience," she said, "we write upkeep."
She turned her wrist. The light slid, carrying new instructions.
"Where they wrote virtue, we write hospitality."
The reflections inside the mirror housings flickered. For a second, each glass surface showed not a neat graph of expected virtue but a person they'd seen that day: Lysa's tight mouth, Korin's flaring hands, Tomas's wrong smile.
"Where they wrote risk factor," Kel said, voice low, "we write guest."
The machine shuddered, infinitesimally.
Neris watched the rings move, charting their tiny corrections as if they were a new kind of star chart.
"We're not destroying it," he said. "We're changing its calibration."
"Good," Branna said. "Destroying it would just give them an excuse to build a worse one."
"Sabotage is just maintenance with different priorities," Lyra said again, and this time, the room seemed to agree.
Somewhere far above, the faint thud of rehearsals in the square vibrated down through the pillars. The Chronometer's cables carried that tremor, tasting the weight of people gathering before it had even shown its face.
"You'll still count," Tamasin told the rings. "You can't help it. It's what you were built to do. But when someone asks you tomorrow who belongs in that square, you're going to hesitate. You're going to think about under-city water law and hospitality and un-theft. You're going to miscount, in our favor."
The brass sighed.
"We should go before it decides to file a complaint," Kel said.
They backed out, Tamasin coaxing the stone to remember being whole again. The doorway seam faded, leaving nothing but an old wall that looked like it had never been anything else.
At the tunnel mouth, where the older dark met the newer kind that came with uniforms, Chamberlain Rusk Vell waited with a small procession of clerks and two palace guards trying very hard to look ornamental.
Rusk's cloak fell in perfect, mathematical folds. His smile had been practiced in mirrors until it could walk on its own.
"The under-square," he said, "is a restricted zone."
His gaze flicked over the group, found Halloran, and settled there like a weight.
"I was under the impression the Watch had received the memo," he continued. "Mirror-wasp safety protocol, subsection three."
"Must have gotten misfiled under 'putting out fires started by other people,'" Riona said, stepping smoothly in front of Halloran.
Marella Vint stood among the clerks, ink smudges on her cuffs. She looked like she'd rather be anywhere else. One of the guards, a half-orc with a scar along his jaw—Dane Varro—recognized Halloran and Branna and made the executive decision to look at the wall instead.
"We're ensuring the infrastructure doesn't embarrass you, Chamberlain," Riona said. "No one wants a ceremony interrupted by a faulty drain. Or a misfiled safety report."
One of the junior clerks dutifully wrote that down. Rusk's smile tightened by a hair.
"Do mind," he said, "that the narrative remains consistent with festival values."
The word narrative scraped along Riona's nerves like someone dragging a chair across stone. The oath-shaped part of her, the one that was slowly rewiring her from "mercenary with a conscience" to "something dangerously close to a judge," stirred.
She filed his tone away. Noted jurisdiction. Defendant: Rusk Vell. Charge: using story as weapon.
"Of course," she said. "We'd hate for the story to get away from you."
Rusk's eyes skated past her to the wall they'd just closed. For a second, he frowned, as if something didn't quite line up with the map he kept in his head. Then he smoothed his features, turned, and swept away, his little court of clerks flowing after him like punctuation.
As he went, he tossed a careless glance toward a kobold in maintenance blues standing further down the tunnel with a toolbox clutched to his chest.
"Ensure all unlicensed subterranean elements are cleared from the area before the tenth bell," he said to nobody in particular.
Hesh flinched as if he'd been struck, gaze dropping to the floor.
Riona's jaw tightened. She watched the line of his shoulders, the way he made himself small.
When Tomas's uncle stands in that square, she thought. When Hesh does. When Vrek and Lysa and Mara and all the others they call hazards breathe the same air as princes and clerks. The street is going to answer to someone who knows their names.
Halloran watched Rusk go with the bleak satisfaction of a man who'd just seen exhibit A in his mental trial.
"He writes people as footnotes," he said.
"He's about to find out what happens when the footnotes file a countersuit," Kel replied.
They ended the day where they'd started it: around the table.
The chalk dust had spread. The brine lines Tamasin had poured earlier had dried invisible, but you could feel them if you ran your fingers over the wood. The sugar cube now bore two tiny fingerprints and a smear where a third had started and been wiped away.
Kel turned the cube between her fingers thoughtfully.
"Perrin's been here," she said. "Again. Either he's practicing breaking in, or we've acquired a halfling audit department."
"Better quality than what the Crown has," Lyra said.
Merrow sank into a chair with the careful grace of someone whose joints had opinions about stairs.
"Korin Ashveil," he said, "is delivering sermons on clocks as false gods. Brumda Deep-Scroll is writing furious notes about 'non-standard structural modifications' she can't account for. Pava and Jem are complaining that the river keeps twitching under their feet. Even the dwarves can tell the city's being rewritten under them."
"The Crown wants the Chronometer," Kel said. "As a pretty toy and a control engine."
"The Guild wants it to work," Neris added. "To prove their post-Cinder Ward safety tech can save lives, not just cook them slower."
"The city," Tamasin said, "wants not to be eaten by either. It wants not to be turned into a schedule."
"And we," Riona said, "want to tie it to Sanctuary."
Lyra doodled, the dragon-union biting its own tail. Skrik peered at it and snickered.
"Trel wants to know if your dragon union will have dues," he said. "He is asking for several hundred kobolds."
"He can pay in gossip," Lyra said. "We run on information, not coin."
Riona leaned both hands on the table and looked at each of them in turn.
"Tomorrow," she said, "the Crown will stand on a dais and pretend to show the city a clock. We will stand on the ground and show the city a court. We've told the stone what we expect. We've told the water. We've told the egg. Now we tell ourselves: no theft of bodies. No conscription of lives. Hospitality inside law."
"Do courts normally talk to eggs?" Merrow asked.
"They do now," Riona said.
Later, when the plans had been reheated three times and eaten twice, when the maps had been stacked and the cogs and sugar cubes placed in a bowl that was becoming an accidental reliquary, the house went quiet.
Outside, Lindell tossed in its sleep. The lake shifted, uneasy.
Somewhere out on that dark water, something that had been Isolde once—mind flayed and stretched, bound to old, cold power—twitched.
In the room below, the egg ticked, obstinate, dreaming of seconds that belonged to no one.
Morning dragged itself over the walls of the city, and the city pretended it had always been awake.
The square had sprouted a dais in front of the palace, stacked with speeches waiting to pretend they were truth. Velvet draped an angular bulk in the center: the Chronometer's visible body, hiding its ugly precision under cloth.
Palace aides fussed over ribbons. A noble contingent gathered on a balcony, mourning black and smug silk. Among them stood Lady Teraline, her face thin and brittle, whispering to a companion about how the Chronometer would finally give them "objective assessments" of loyalty and virtue.
On another balcony, Brumda Deep-Scroll stood with a slate, taking notes. From the expression on her face, the report she would send back to whatever dwarven council had funded her trip was not going to be flattering.
Down on the cobbles, Nigel the Normal leaned against a lamppost in travel-stained clothes, mid-story.
"Walked from the south road," he was saying to a bewildered peddler. "Straight shot. Took the path through the bit of forest that sometimes isn't there. Terrible shortcuts, those. Anyway, I hear there's a clock."
"Of course you got here first," Lyra muttered when she spotted him. "Reality can't keep up with whatever routefinding you're using."
The Ward Tower bell loomed over it all, bolted between roofs like an accusation. High up, an air genasi technician in a harness—Tavi Gale—checked the tension on the ropes and gears, hair blown back by a wind nobody else could feel.
She looked down at the crowd, then up at the bell. If it stuck, she was prepared to kick it.
Near the east entrance to the square, Jorin Kellis held a fresh missing poster in hands that trembled around the edges. He smoothed it over the wood over an older copy of the same boy's face, refusing to tear the weathered one down.
At his feet sat a small basket of bread. Benat had sent it, and Jorin had not yet remembered that he was meant to eat.
Korin Ashveil had been pushed to the fringes of the square, where the sound bent; his crate was now half in shadow. His audience was smaller and angrier, which he seemed to consider an improvement.
"…and when the bell rings," he was saying, "ask yourself whether it's calling you to justice or to scheduling."
Riona and Branna walked the perimeter, as if patrolling a battlefield. In a way, they were.
At each lamppost, at each corner stone, Riona laid her fingers along the base and whispered the same phrases she'd spoken over the Tablet.
"No theft of bodies," she breathed into the metal. "No conscription of lives. Hospitality inside law."
Branna followed, ostensibly checking for cracks and rot, actually pressing those words deeper with calloused hands.
An elderly halfling grandmother—Maera Thimble—watched them, puzzled, then shuffled over when they moved on. She laid her own hand on a stone Riona had just touched.
"Just in case," Maera murmured. "Never hurts to have extra hands on a prayer."
Vrek the street-sweeper "accidentally" lingered wherever Riona and Branna went, sweeping the same patch of cobbles three times. His ears tracked every whisper. The broom's bristles traced circles around the bases of the lampposts, as if underlining invisible text.
Near the front of the crowd, Just Robert had once again been given responsibility he should not have.
"Left cluster for citizens, right for dignitaries, middle lane for… uh… actually, everyone just breathe," he flapped. "If you could stand evenly spaced, that'd be great. Yes, ma'am, perfectly symmetrical. I've always worked crowd geometry. It's fine."
Every time he managed to coax a group into a particularly neat formation, the Chronometer's hidden heart seemed to fuzz, the faint hum from under the cobbles going just enough out of step that Kel grinned.
Whisker-in-Chords had found a perch atop a fountain, legs dangling, tail twitching. Their tune had shifted to match the new, slightly off-kilter rhythm of the Chronometer rings below; they didn't know that, but the music did.
Lyra slipped the Prism out from under her jacket for a second, just enough to catch the morning light. She held it above the bulge of the Lake Tablet under Riona's belt, letting the two magics bleed into each other.
On the velvet covering the Chronometer, faint, ghosted images of brass rings flickered and blurred, as if the device were looking at itself in a mirror that refused to stay still.
Kel scanned the lamppost mirror-boxes. The light they reflected back into the crowd had gone slantwise; angles had changed by degrees too small to see and too big to ignore. Somewhere in the cold room, a set of ratios woke up to find that their purpose had been edited.
At one edge of the square, Father Ivo stood by a brand-new "heritage" banner and glared at it as if he could set it on fire with his eyes.
"That used to say Throat," he told anyone who came within range. "You can polish a name, but the river knows what it's called."
Marta Vellin stood by a lamppost, hand resting on the pole like it was a spear, eyes on the hollow link she'd decided not to report.
Tamasin closed her eyes for a moment, in the middle of it all. Under her feet, three courts hummed.
One: the old Under-Courts, dormant under the square, stirred by her brine and Father Ivo's muttering. It remembered judging people who came to it with bare feet and desperate hearts.
Two: the Chronometer's cold heart, miscalibrated now, rattling between its orders and the new instructions burned into its sigils. It wanted to count, but it no longer knew what deserved counting.
Three: the ring she and Riona and the others had drawn with vows and footsteps and hands on stone. Not a circle drawn in chalk; one drawn in attention. Sanctuary written into cobblestone and rusty iron.
If this works, she thought, this street will stop being a route to the court and start being the court.
On the lake, Pava and Jem paused in their work and looked at each other, feeling the water tense as if a large creature had rolled over in its sleep. Sel Inlet's tail flicked under the surface. Far out, where the city's reflected lights smudged into broken constellations, something that had once been a woman and a wizard stirred at the misalignment of bell and clock and law.
Back in the house, the egg turned in its nest, the tick of its private timepiece stuttering and then resuming, defiantly out of sync with everything.
The square rehearsed justice. The Crown rehearsed control. The Chronometer waited to tell everyone what time it was.
The street, for the first time in a long while, began to remember that it could answer back.