Morning kept its own count. Bread rose; doors unlatched; watchmen scuffed chalk from yesterday's notices and wrote today's neat as law. The crooked handle over the Golden Flagon caught the first thin noon‑thinking light and held it like a coin that had not yet chosen a pocket.
Mira wiped the bar plank with a cloth and a habit. "Two coppers if you want the stew before it thinks you're worth more," she told a carter, and added a mark to her ledger with the quiet of an oath.
Selith arrived with reed coiled at her hip. "Walk with me," she said to Kaelthar. "I owe baskets to a shrine that argues better than its priests."
"I will listen," Kaelthar said.
They went by a street that believed in corners. Laundry wrote weather between windows; pigeons counted rooftops. On a wall a watch notice hung beneath the city mark—a scale over an open hand—declaring extra patrols in the south market on account of "disturbances of hour and bell." Someone had crowned a drawn crow in the margin. Selith tapped the tiny crown with a fingernail as if to test whether jokes could carry weight.
"Artists," she said. "We are besieged."
"Art finds work," Kaelthar said.
The shrine quarter began without permission: low doors with bells on cords, bowls out for coins and figs, soot kept in jars like kindling for a different kind of fire. At the faceless oratory—blank oval where a god's face might live if faces could endure such work—a man in a plain blue sash stood at a small lectern, hands ink‑smudged. He watched them the way a mason watches a wall he has already trusted once today.
"Orren," Selith said, respectful without losing the right to jest. "I brought what the altar wouldn't carry itself." She set down two baskets that seemed to increase the room's willing order.
The bell‑warden's mouth softened; authority sat on him like a borrowed cloak that fit. "And did the bell carry itself as well, yesterday?" he asked, and the humor in it could not disguise the work in his eyes.
"It spoke," Selith said. "It miscounted."
Orren looked to Kaelthar. "And you?"
"I listened," Kaelthar said.
"That is a kind of witness," Orren allowed. He lifted a ledger the way a priest lifts a relic—careful, practiced, expecting the weight to be what it always was until it wasn't. "When the thirteenth sounded, this book took a line I did not write." He showed them a faint stroke along the margin, straight as measured string. "I closed it and opened it again. The line kept its manners."
"Ledgers show courtesy," Kaelthar said, as if remarking on weather.
Before Orren could answer, a man in river‑green pushed through the door as though the river itself always had right of way. His sash bore a god's eye in blue glass. "Bell‑warden," he said without greeting, "the Hall of the Silent Father claims precedence. Bells that ring without hands are ours to name."
Orren did not bow. "Bells belong to the city first. They are letters the stone writes when people cannot agree what to say."
"Measures of time," the river‑priest corrected. "Not letters."
"Both, when they are honest," said a new voice from the threshold.
Watch‑Captain Ysren stood there as if the door had learned to open to him. He took off his hat and kept the room held by the simple gravity of not putting it back on yet. "Jurisdiction follows harm," he said mildly. "So far we have a jar split on a clean line and a city that thinks more than is good for keeping roofs up. I'll hear who seeks what, and then I'll decide who speaks where."
"The Hall seeks the meaning," said the river‑priest, setting his jaw to a familiar argument. "Meaning is law."
"Meaning is weather," Orren said. "Law is how we dress for it."
Selith's grin flickered and died politely; the room had become a place for fewer jokes. Kaelthar let the talk move around him and watched the smaller craft: how Orren's fingers squared the ledger with the table's edge, how the candles that flanked the faceless oval leaned very slightly toward him and then pretended they hadn't.
Ysren noticed the lean and filed it under later. "Yesterday at noon," he said, "we counted thirteen. At the south lane a pot cracked along a string‑straight line. At the Flagon, the light forgot itself a breath. None of these are crimes, which makes my work either easier or more difficult depending on drink."
"Easier," Selith supplied.
"That depends on whether I drink.
"Orren, for the moment, keep your bells. River, keep your river. Hall, keep your ink. I'll keep the hours and decide how many they are when they're done being themselves. If another note comes wrong, I will begin to collect people instead of words." He let that settle like dust and did not apologize for it.
The river‑priest bristled, bowed too briefly, and left as if he were late to his own certainty. Orren released a breath that had been helping hold up the roof.
"Captain," he said, "if the bell is writing, what is it saying?"
Ysren looked to Kaelthar not quite directly. "Master?"
Kaelthar considered the oval where a face was not. "It says that ends begin where counting thinks it ends."
"That is a sermon," Ysren said. "I asked for a notice."
"Some notices are sermons in uniform," Kaelthar said.
Ysren's mouth found a fraction that was not yet a smile. "Very well. We will post both." He put his hat on. The room accepted the end of the conversation.
Outside, the lane felt narrower with the knowledge it now carried. A boy with two loaves—Pell, Selith named him with a nod—shot past and stopped when Kaelthar looked his way, as if caught by a thing he would later call good manners. "Captain says keep eyes open," the boy reported, "but not so open folk see you looking." He tore his crust, thought better of running, and walked fast instead.
They crossed the court toward the Silent Hall's steps. Lamps under paper breathed without wind. A junior scribe looked up—the same one whose fingers had worn graphite moons on her apron yesterday. Her gaze tracked to Kaelthar's satchel clasp and stayed there as the metal remembered eclipse for a heartbeat.
"You have a name," she blurted, then colored at the obviousness and tried again. "I mean—I am Neris."
"Kaelthar," he said.
"I know," she said, mortified by how quickly, then saved herself by adding, "By reputation, I mean. Not—by face." She swallowed. "We've begun taking rubbings of the tower's inscriptions, quietly, so as not to make a church of it. If the counting keeps wrong, the city will want a record of the days when it behaved."
"Records are how houses argue with storms," Selith said, approving.
Neris lowered her voice. "There's a mark in one carving. A circle with the center eaten. It isn't in all the bells—only one old panel we keep under cloth. I shouldn't say." She looked like a person standing too close to a ledge she had no memory of approaching.
"Then don't," Kaelthar said gently. She breathed as if given permission to keep a secret she had already kept poorly.
They left the Hall to its quiet. On the way back a small shrine door stuck, and when Selith put a hand to it, the hinge decided to remember its craft and opened as if apologizing. "Courtesy," she said, half to herself.
"Practice," Kaelthar said. "The world practices as we do."
At the Flagon, Rothgar argued onions into virtue while Mira counted mugs in sixes and pretended she did not watch the light. The hooded patron under the rescued beam had returned. His ledger lay open at an angle that could have been called polite if anyone wished to argue for it. As Kaelthar crossed the room, the man adjusted the book so its edge no longer pointed at him.
Selith noticed and stored the observation with the other small economies by which a day keeps itself true. "If ledgers have courtesy," she said, "I would like their colleagues to learn some."
The room remembered how to be human. Outside, a crow passed the window without the courtesy of a shadow. The bell did not speak that day.
That night a rope in a lesser chapel frayed along a perfect line as if it had been instructed by a geometry that did not belong to hands. Orren ran his thumb along the clean edge and did not say omen, because he liked his roof sound and his words earning their keep before they went to the trouble of carrying meaning.
He posted a notice instead.
The city slept with one ear open.