The light steadied and held, remembering its work. The soot that had sunk in Kaelthar's cup kept its small, dark counsel. The Golden Flagon did what good houses do near dusk—it learned the shape of the people inside it and made space where space wasn't. Rothgar moved in the doorframe like a hinge that had decided long ago not to creak.
Captain Ysren kept his corner as if corners paid him rent. He had taken off his hat and set it crown‑down, and that small reversal made people treat the table like a place where talk should sit up straight. Cups found hands. Selith's laughter threaded and unthreaded the room. Mira's ledger lay open under her palm like a quiet oath. Elira drifted between tables with bowls balanced on the line of her arm, her eye quick to the places that could fail and her hand quicker.
Ysren performed his ancient work without hurry. He asked five questions that were one question and accepted five answers that were one answer and four decorations. The bell had spoken once, off the hour. No rope had moved. No arm had pulled. And yet the sound had come through stone as if stone were only another kind of air.
When he began again, he altered the order of the questions as if shuffling a deck might change the cards. "Did the light change before the note?" he asked a carter.
"It thinned," the man said. "Like a woman drawing a thread through cloth."
"To you?" Ysren asked Mira.
"It forgot itself," Mira said. "Only a breath."
Elira passed with fresh loaves and set one down at Kaelthar's table without looking at him, which is one way to look. "Eat," she said. "You listen better when your mouth remembers it's not the only tool it has."
Kaelthar tore the bread. Steam rose and folded back into itself. The crumb had the patient strength of a thing that had been allowed to become what it was in its own time.
"Master Kaelthar," Ysren said at last, turning the wheel toward him as one turns toward weather. "Did you hear more than we heard?"
Kaelthar considered the question as if it were a cup he might drink or not. "The city counted wrong," he said. "Or right, and we are the ones who have been mistaken a long time."
Around the room, a few mouths made shapes of amusement and then closed, because amusement is hard to hold when the thing being spoken about is sound that should not be.
Ysren's gaze did not blink. "And before it counted, did you sense a hand?"
"A hand? No." Kaelthar glanced toward the wall—as if one might see a note where it had passed through. "A decision."
Rothgar scratched his beard. "Whose?"
Kaelthar's mouth almost smiled. "That would be a kind of answer I do not have."
Ysren let the room reclaim its noise a little. He lifted his cup, tasted, and set it down with the care of a man who understood that small sounds are also part of an investigation. "There was a report at the south market," he said to Rothgar, and to the room because rooms serve as witnesses when people insist on being human first. "A jar of oil cracked along a clean line, as if marked with string. The seller swears he'd just blessed it at the Hall of the Silent Father. Priests argue jurisdiction."
"Priests argue as an occupation," Mira said, marking a sum.
"True," Ysren agreed. "I prefer facts. Here are mine: the bell spoke once. The jar split once. No hands. No hour. So I will watch the hours. At noon tomorrow the bell is due to count as agreed. If it does not, I will have a line to pull. If it does, then we will call today a gust through a cracked door and go on."
Selith, who had listened without pretending otherwise, glanced at Kaelthar. "Will you be listening tomorrow?"
"I will," he said.
The hooded patron under the rescued beam turned a page in his ledger that did not need turning. He did not look up. He had not looked up all night. Which is a kind of looking up.
Later, when the din settled into the good weight that holds roofs in place, Elira led Kaelthar up the narrow stair to a room that had forgotten most travelers and remembered the rest kindly. She set a clay basin on the table and a folded towel at its side, then checked the shutter latch and the hinge in the same breath.
"If you need anything not on the list," she said, repeating herself because repetition is how houses survive, "we sometimes have it anyway."
"What is not on the list?" Kaelthar asked.
"Time," she said, and then smiled as if surprised by her own answer. "Da keeps it in his jokes; Mira keeps it in her ledger; the city keeps it in bells. But here, we have blankets."
He inclined his head. "Blankets will do."
She paused in the doorway. "When the note came, did you feel cold?"
"I felt a door stand where there was usually a wall," he said.
Elira thought about that as if considering whether a stool could bear one more bowl. "If it stands there again," she said, "please do not let it in without knocking."
"When I can help it," Kaelthar said.
Night in Orathis has its inventory. Dogs speak to alleys. Wine argues itself into sleep. Far along the river, a boatman counts the same moorings twice to be sure the boat will still be there in the morning. Somewhere, a prayer is whispered in the wrong direction and arrives anyway. Kaelthar let the city make its notes around him and lay down fully clothed. Sleep came not as a mercy but as a colleague.
He dreamed no pictures. He dreamt a weight on the world like a finger on a scale. Somewhere, a bell argued with silence. It lost, as bells do, and the loss made a sound that only the dream remembered.
At first light the Flagon resumed the workhouses of morning. Rothgar dragged open the door, swore kindly at the stubborn hinge, and declared the day edible. Selith arrived with a coil of new basket reed and a grin she owed to nothing. The hooded patron was gone, his ledger leaving no dust mark on the table where it had sat; absence has its housekeeping.
Captain Ysren did not come for breakfast. The watch has rules about being seen at the same table twice in one day. Mira's ledger had new columns. She entered them like a person cutting cloth; waste was sin, but so was false economy.
"What will you do until noon?" Selith asked Kaelthar when she brought him a plate she had no right to carry and every right to deliver.
"Listen," he said.
"To what?"
"To people pretending not to be worried."
She laughed and then didn't. "You make worry sound like a craft."
"It is," Kaelthar said. "It admires skilled hands."
He walked the square outside the Flagon, letting the stones say what they'd been saying all his life. Merchants shaved coins thin with their eyes. A child pushed a hoop and pretended not to look at the bell tower, because pretending is sometimes how one keeps from doing a thing. Above, a crow rode the warm air and made no comment.
He passed a shrine whose god had been weathered smooth until the face was only a place where offerings gathered. Figs lay in a dish, and someone had tucked a strip of blue cloth beneath the bowl for the Hollow Voice to find and be pleased with. He thought of a hundred prayers dressed in a hundred costumes and one silence behind them all.
Near the south lane a potter set out bowls that had learned patience in the kiln. One had a hairline running clean from lip to base—the sort of flaw that makes an honest vessel more honest by declaring itself. The potter touched it and frowned as if feeling a draft with his fingers. "Strange weather," he muttered to Kaelthar as if to the air. "Not cold. Not heat. Something that minds lines."
"Mind your lines, then," Kaelthar said, and the man snorted at the advice and took it anyway.
By the time sun climbed to count, the square had developed the particular quiet of a crowd that has agreed not to admit it is gathered. Doors remained open longer than needed. The smith paused with his hammer poised not out of deference but to keep from ringing steel against steel at the wrong time. Even dogs can count when taught by humans long enough; they lay down.
Mira stepped to the threshold and wiped her hands on a cloth she had already cleaned. Elira stood one pace behind her, eyes narrowed as if she were holding a bowl whose contents might decide to leap. Rothgar came to the door and did not jest. Selith found the edge of the sign's shadow with the tip of her shoe and kept it there as if it were a leash.
Kaelthar did not look at them. He looked at the bell tower the way one looks at an old friend—by noticing what has not changed and forgiving what has. The light folded along the louvres into twelve neat pieces as it had yesterday and in a thousand yesterdays.
Noon opened its mouth.
The first strike came, bright and dutiful. The sound ran its practiced path down the tower, across the square, through the wood of the Flagon's door, and into ribs and cups. People breathed when they remembered to.
The second arrived slightly larger, like a guest finding his seat. The third settled the table. By the fourth, the city had remembered how to be counted.
On the fifth, Kaelthar felt the same strange pressure as before, not heat, not cold—a hand would have been easier to name. It was a straightening in the air, a correction. He did not move.
Six. Seven. Eight. He watched the ropes in the tower's shadow, saw them move as they should. Nine. Ten. He heard Elira whisper, "Don't," and could not tell whether she meant the bell or the world or herself.
Eleven. The city leaned forward, greedy for the end of a thing because ends are easier than middles.
Twelve—
—and another, soft as a swallowed word.
It did not come through the tower. It did not come through air. It simply was, the way truth is before anyone agrees on it.
No one in the square spoke. They did not gasp. Humans make more silence than surprise when the thing that happens has no door.
The thirteenth sound passed like a finger across a map and left a line where no road had been. Somewhere, a cup cracked and held anyway. A dog lifted its head and then, embarrassed at believing in something it couldn't see, put it down and pretended to scratch.
Captain Ysren was suddenly there, or had always been, which in the work of the watch is sometimes the same. He did not bark orders. He watched the watching.
"Again," someone whispered, not sure if they meant the bell or their own memory being rung. No sound obeyed.
Mira drew breath for the room. "Back to your work," she said levelly, and the instruction gave people a way to become themselves again. Doors closed without slamming. The smith struck metal because a smith must. Selith let the sign's shadow go and clapped her hands once as if concluding a game she would not describe.
Ysren stepped to Kaelthar's shoulder without taking his eyes from the tower. "Decision?" he asked softly.
"Yes."
"Whose?"
Kaelthar's mouth found that almost‑smile. "Ask me again when I have an answer you should not prefer to ignorance."
"You're not a generous witness," Ysren said.
"I am an honest one," Kaelthar said.
Ysren's jaw worked a moment. Then he turned to the business of keeping a city from believing too much all at once. He spoke to a pair of apprentices, calm as cutting bread; he told a priest's runner that the bell‑warders would post a notice and meant it whether they would or not; he asked Rothgar for water and drank it as if it were proof that some things behaved.
Selith came to Kaelthar with her reed coiled at her hip. "If I were to sell baskets with thirteen ribs today," she said, trying lightness like a new dye, "would they hold better or tear sooner?"
"They would be argued about," Kaelthar said.
She nodded, pleased by the usefulness of that answer. "Then I will weave twelve and a whisper."
Elira joined them, eyes still on the tower. "If the city is counting wrong on purpose," she said, "someone should tell it what it is counting for."
"Someone will," Kaelthar said. He did not say who. He did not know. But the line had been drawn again. He could feel it underfoot like a seam in stone.
Mira wiped her hands one last time and looked at Kaelthar in the way of a woman who took note of who entered her house and who did not, and why. "You'll be lodging another night," she said. It wasn't a question. "We don't sell omens. We serve stew. If you intend to bring company that isn't hungry, leave it outside."
"I will do what I can," Kaelthar said.
"Do better," she said, and went to see about bowls.
Rothgar leaned his shoulder to the doorframe. "If the bell means trouble, it picked a fine house to drink in first," he said, half‑cheer, half‑pride.
Kaelthar looked up at the dark mouth of the louvres, then at the line of sky above the rooftops. He listened for the sound beneath the sound, the one that had been pursuing him from city to road to ruin to city again. It did not speak. It did not need to. Some truths are patient. Some endings start like a miscount.
He turned back to the work of the day. Slow work. Human work. The kind that keeps roofs up until roofs are no longer what the world requires.