Morning found the Silent Hall willing to be a library again. Lamps breathed behind paper; dust behaved like law. On the front steps a boy in an oversized tunic—Pell—pinwheeled his arms until he convinced his balance to be loyal.
"Message," he said when Kaelthar and Selith reached him. "Captain says the Hall should keep its inks where its mouths are." He handed over a folded notice stamped with the city mark: a scale over an open hand.
Selith read aloud, because words like to be worked: "By order of the Watch: should bells count wrong, citizens will count right. Keep your hours honest and your windows latched. Jurisdiction follows harm; rumors pay no tax." She tucked it into her sleeve and shook her head, amused. "He courts the public like a miller courts the river—firm hand, no romance."
Inside, the hall was all stone memory and cataloged whispers. Neris sat at a table already full of today. She rose halfway, sat again, then rose properly. "You came."
"We were invited," Selith said, as if invitations were a raw material.
Neris lifted a cloth from a wooden panel. The rubbing beneath showed a slice of the tower's inscriptions: rings within rings of old words worn down to their work. At the lowest edge, a small circle had been scraped to a faintness and then to a nothing where the center should be.
"We keep this one covered," Neris said. "Because the others behave better when it is not looking." She placed a weight on the page as a person places a hand on a child's shoulder before the lesson.
Kaelthar studied the absence. "Not erased," he said. "Saved for later."
Neris blinked. "Saved?"
"Some blanknesses are a promise," Kaelthar said.
A draft reconsidered its path and chose to pass behind Kaelthar's chair. The lamp nearest the panel leaned, a degree only its wick would boast about. Selith noticed and smiled into her sleeve.
Bootsteps arrived already owning the room. Watch‑Captain Ysren reached the table, shed his hat onto a hook that accepted the work without comment, and looked at the rubbing as if it had applied for residency. "So this is the panel you do not admit exists."
"We admit it exists," Neris said, offended on behalf of accuracy. "We do not admit it to company."
"Company is exactly what you have," Ysren said. He placed a slip of paper on the table. "There will be a copy posted at the Flagon as well. If the city must learn a new arithmetic, we will at least agree on our numerals."
"Your notice is a sermon in uniform," Selith said cheerfully.
"Then it is in fashion," Ysren returned, and allowed himself the smallest smile.
A figure in a gray hood appeared at a scholarly distance, ledger in hand—Olin, the counting‑house man who arranged his books to avoid pointing at people. He pretended to read a spine.
"We do not sell rubbings," Neris said to no one in particular and precisely to him.
"Counting‑houses prefer widows and rubbings," Selith murmured. "Both are eager sellers, in rumor."
Olin accepted the gravity of being seen. "I record exchanges," he said mildly. "Knowledge among them. Paper prefers to earn its keep."
"Some paper is a door," Neris said. "We prop it open only for people we would invite into a room we cannot replace."
Kaelthar traced the air over the eaten circle without touching. The skin along his wrist felt the small attention a room gives a guest of honor who refuses a chair. He said, to the rubbing more than the company, "When it rang, did anyone stand here?"
"We do not staff the tower at noon," Neris said. "Pragmatism. Bells are loud about what they are sure of. We write after."
"Today," Ysren said, "we write during."
He set his jaw into a look that notices for a living. "At noon, we climb."
Selith clicked her tongue in approval. "Finally, a field trip."
The tower stairs wound up in an argument between leg and breath. The city spread itself in maps of labor: the market's moving arithmetic; the river's straight answer; the Flagon's crooked handle catching a coin of light; the shrine roofs counting their own shadows.
At the belfry, stone remembered the work of supporting bells and chose to continue. A rope hung clean where Orren had cut fray along a perfect line the night before. The bells themselves were quiet; quiet has a shape when you stand inside it.
"Before noon," Ysren said, checking the watch he did not wear. "Truth accepts witnesses or it learns to live without them."
Selith found a carpenter's pencil on the sill. She licked the tip because some habits arrive built and need be taught better later. "What are we counting?"
"Dust," Kaelthar said, looking at the lip of the largest bell where a century of hours had settled into the gentlest slope. "Dust and decisions."
Neris opened her satchel, produced paper, weights, graphite, a small bronze square to keep edges honest—tools that made the world believe in itself.
Noon approached on foot. It did not hurry. Outside, Bran called the hour into the river as if the water could be relied upon to remember. Below, a child laughed exactly on time and exactly because he was not measuring.
The first toll landed well and sound. The second followed. Third, fourth. The fifth carried a breath too long, like a man finishing a story he had not meant to begin. Six, seven, eight—the city's windows deciding whether to be open or careful. Nine, ten—Selith wrote small marks because writing makes you a witness even if you have no badge for it. Eleven.
Twelve.
A hush thought about pulling tight.
Then the thirteenth arrived without crossing air. It occurred inside the stone, not as sound but as a correction. Dust lifted from the lip of the bell in a neat ring, then reconsidered the center and sat down around it. Graphite on Neris's page found its own thin circle without dragging under her hand. On the sill, a crumb of mortar drew a line against itself and stopped where a center would have been.
Selith exhaled laughter that had agreed to be reverent this once. "Letters," she whispered. "Orren is right. The city writes."
Ysren did not speak until he was sure all the witnesses had finished listening. "A count of thirteen," he said to his memory. "No strike, one correction. Jurisdiction: pending."
Neris held up her page. The ring she hadn't drawn regarded her with the impolite interest of a fact that intends to remain so. "Saved for later," she repeated, softly, testing the words for weight.
Kaelthar nodded once. The clasp on his satchel remembered eclipse and showed it for the time it takes a thought to stand up.
Olin had not climbed all the way. He stood three turns down, ledger closed, head tipped as if listening to a story the floor had decided to tell. When they descended, he looked to Kaelthar. "If the city is writing, someone will try to read it aloud before they learn the letters."
"Then they will mispronounce a roof into falling," Selith said. "Let them practice on their own houses."
"Some houses are connected," Olin said evenly. "Ink spreads."
Ysren gathered the room with the single‑use kindness of a man who must be believed at least until dusk. "No copies of that rubbing leave the Hall," he said to Neris, who was relieved to be ordered what she had already decided. "Orren posts no sermons without my sermon in front of it. The Flagon serves until last bell, and then keeps an ear for what is not a bell."
"And you, Master?" he asked Kaelthar, as if asking the weather for a schedule.
"I will walk," Kaelthar said. "Streets say what bells are shy to."
Afternoon wore the light down to the grain. On the shrine street, Deya, the veiled cantor, swept soot from a brass bowl. It would not collect at the center. She watched it behave and pretended the behavior met her expectations.
At the Flagon, Mira's ledger refused to accept a correction that would have made a column more beautiful and less true. She closed the book the way a door closes itself against drafts.
By evening, the notice Ysren had ordered hung beside the crooked handle. Someone had drawn a small crowned crow at the bottom margin already. Rothgar left it. "Some graffiti pay their rent," he told Mira, who did not dignify that with arithmetic.
In his room, Kaelthar traced the hinge‑lines of the window where iron had learned patience. Outside, the tower kept the shape of a bell even when it did not ring. The city performed the small politenesses that say: we will not panic if panic promises to come dressed properly.
When he blew out his candle, it leaned toward him first, then toward the eaten center of the dark, and then let the night be what night is.