Selith led him by a path the city had made for itself: not on any map; the sort of route learned by feet and gossip. They moved along a narrow lane where balconies leaned to argue across the air, where laundry wrote private weather between windows. The lane gave on to a small square, and there the shrines began—modest doors, bells hung on cords, bowls for offerings set on worn stone. The quarter smelled of ash, river damp, hot brass, and incense that could not decide which god it served.
"Shortcut," Selith said. "If you count prayers as steps."
"I count what is given," Kaelthar said.
The first door had a painted fish above it, faded to a whisper of scales. Within, a stone basin held river water gone brown with flower dye. An old woman dipped her fingers. She touched her brow, then the basin's rim, then the doorframe, then—hesitating—Kaelthar's sleeve as he passed. Her eyes went white around the dark.
"Forgive," she breathed, and withdrew her hand as if burned. "I thought you were… no. Forgive."
"There is nothing to forgive," Kaelthar said, and went on. The sleeve where she had touched felt briefly colder than the room around it. He flexed his fingers once. The chill left like a guest who remembers an appointment.
They crossed to the next threshold. Here the god had many eyes, all of them blue glass. A youth in patched robes shook a fan that smelled of cedar and salt. On the altar a bowl of coins sat beside a drawn eye painted in ash.
"For watchfulness," the youth said, offering a charm. "A thread around the wrist keeps the right eyes open."
"I have enough eyes upon me," Kaelthar said.
The youth laughed, polite and unsure if a joke had occurred. He tied the thread on Selith instead. "Then may the open ones blink in your favor," he told her. She tipped him a copper for the wish.
A bell spoke from somewhere else in the quarter: two notes too near to be a measure of time, a thought voiced aloud by mistake. The air settled, then went on pretending it had not paused.
Selith pointed with her chin. "If you want a proper quarrel, that's the place."
She meant a low hall whose doorposts were cut with the signs of a saw and a square; on its lintel someone had carved a hand with three fingers broken and mended again in iron. Workmen stood there, caps off, listening to a man speak about the virtue of stone.
"Stones remember names," the man said. "Stones tell the truth when men have done polishing it."
Kaelthar touched the hall's wall as they passed. The mortar was gritty as unfriendly bread. He listened. The wall said nothing intelligible. Not all truths were obliged to be in the same language.
They came to a court where steps ran down into a cool room lit by paper lamps. The lamps swayed without wind. The place smelled of chalk and ink and the paper itself, which held a quiet that had been taught to it by long use. Figures moved in the dim: scribes taking rubbings of reliefs, copying inscriptions, cataloguing the city's official memory the way a housekeeper lays away winter blankets.
"Silent Hall," Selith said softly. "Better to carry your noise somewhere else."
A scribe no older than twenty, hair bound with a thin strip of linen, looked up as Kaelthar entered the edge of the room. Her gaze skipped from his face to the clasp of his satchel and not back again. The clasp was a simple circle darkened by thumb and time, the metal worn to shallow grooves by a pattern no smith had set with a deliberate hand. Under the lamps it remembered something of light and shadow—a sun with the center eaten out—and for a fraction of a moment, the shapes in the metal arranged themselves so.
The scribe blinked. The lamp near her flickered sideways and then steadied. She rubbed her fingers on her apron, leaving a half‑moon smear of graphite. "Master," she said, not to him, to no one, a word misfiled under breath. She bent back to her work as if pulled.
Selith tugged Kaelthar's sleeve—a movement that wanted to be a bow and refused to be one. "Come," she breathed. "The Hall dislikes being reminded it has a voice."
They took air in the shadow of the steps. The street noise returned with the blunt kindness of an old door. Selith blew out a held lungful. "Those people can read a stone like bakers read dough," she said. "And if they lose a sheet, the whole city forgets what a thing is called until someone remembers it by accident."
"Names travel," Kaelthar said. "They find a way."
"And they charge rent," Selith said, pleased to have an echo of her earlier boast.
They worked a slow circuit of the quarter. In one shrine a ring of candles leaned very slightly toward him and only him, as if listening; as he passed on they righted themselves without apology. In another, a woman drew threads across a small frame to weave a prayer into cloth. She plucked one of the threads as he went by and frowned, the note wrong in her ear. On a tiny rooftop altar, a pie plate had been set out with two figs and a wedge of ash‑colored cheese; a boy reached for the fruit, looked at Kaelthar, and drew his hand back as though someone had cleared a throat just where he stood.
At a crossroads a man in a cracked red sash shouted the names of gods like the steps of an argument. "River‑Mother! Stone‑Father! Nine Eyes! Wolf‑Under‑Moon! The Bitten Light!" He stabbed the air with his palm on each name as though it owed him money. "Choose, choose, and the choosing is counted to you as wisdom. Choose and be known. Choose and be carried. Choose and be spared."
Kaelthar listened the way one listens to rain measuring itself against a roof. Selith folded her arms, amused. "He sells certainty by the pint," she said. "Cheaper than beer, worse for the head."
A veiled supplicant brushed past them carrying a jar of soot. She dipped two fingers and marked her brow, then the doorframe of a narrow oratory whose god had no face—only a blank oval cut by a single vertical line. As Kaelthar stepped near, she turned as if to make room and stilled as he came into her shadow. Her breath drew; the soot on her fingers darkened as if wet.
"Bearer," she said softly through the veil.
Selith's head snapped toward Kaelthar.
He inclined his head to the supplicant as though she had said nothing unusual.
The woman seemed to wake from a moment her body had had without her consent. She backed a step and lifted the jar to her brow in apology. "Forgive," she said, voice rough. "My mouth walked without me."
"No harm," Kaelthar said. He looked once into the oratory. It offered no image, only the outline of a place that would hold a face if faces were what the world could endure. He put a coin where coins lay and left nothing of himself there that could be named.
They ate bread from a stall that had burned its crusts into a fine argument with the teeth. Selith traded gossip for a slice of pickled apple. After, they stood in the lee of a warehouse whose boards had learned the language of wind and now told it back in soft knocks.
"You didn't startle," Selith said finally, without looking at him. "When she called you that."
"I have been called things," Kaelthar said.
"Does that one belong to you?"
"To someone," he said, and left it there.
A mule brayed somewhere, then decided against its own opinion. A pair of apprentices ran with lengths of chain looped over their shoulders and made noise for the joy of making noise. Overhead, a torn cloud crossed the sun and the light thinned for the space of three heartbeats. Men glanced at the sky and found reasons to be busy with the work already in their hands.
Selith shook out the rag she used to wipe dye and folded it along a seam that only she could see. "You collect the city better than most," she said. "Like you've had to put one back together from parts before."
"I have," Kaelthar said.
"Did it stay put?"
"Long enough," he said.
They angled toward the riverward streets where the city cooled itself with the industry of water. A cooper hammered a hoop tight; a ferryman shouted times; someone dumped a pan of fish scales into a barrel and the scales lifted like coins learning to fly and then remembering they could not. The day leaned. The bright of noon softened until it no longer picked fights with the edges of things.
"Rothgar's wife will have the stew done," Selith said. "She times it to the light. Says it tastes of the hour you eat it."
"An honest superstition," Kaelthar said.
"She'd call it a law." Selith nodded at an alley. "This way."
They passed under a line of washing where a sheet blown by the river wind wrapped Kaelthar's shoulder and slid off with the patient insistence of a glacier in miniature. He stepped free and looked up. A cluster of pigeons sat along a parapet like notes on a string; one hopped sideways until it was just above him, then made a small and thoughtful sound and stayed where it was.
"Almost there," Selith said.
The crooked‑handled sign hung over the door of a tavern that had been sanded by a century of conversation. Beneath the sign the door stood open, a line of light across the step. Laughter came out in a puff and cooled at the threshold as though the room were a mouth breathing. The smells were fat and rosemary and wood smoke and beer that had learned to keep its own counsel.
A handbill was nailed to the post by the door. A watchman's mark had been stamped over its text: a date, a time, a notice of extra patrols near the southern market because of "disturbances of hour and bell." Someone had drawn a crow on the margin and given it a crown.
Selith tapped the crown with a fingernail. "We're getting artists," she said.
"Art finds work," Kaelthar said.
Selith half‑bowed toward the door. "Welcome to the Golden Flagon. Rothgar will talk until you think you've eaten twice."
Kaelthar stood a moment, listening. Inside, a chair scraped; a low voice rose and fell against the hum; somewhere far across the city a bell thought about speaking and chose not to. He touched the edge of the door with two fingers as though it were a page he was about to turn.
"I will listen," he said, and stepped over the line.