Morning found the Flagon counting in sixes and forgiving in ones. Mira arranged the Noon Account board by the door and set a clean sheet as if setting a table for a guest who might decline to eat. Rothgar scolded a carrot into sweetness. Elira tapped the doorframe twice—once for the house, once for the street—and let the day in.
Kaelthar walked the edge between market and shrine where stalls pretend to be temples and temples pretend to sell time. The city's breath went about its errands without showing its teeth. When he paused at Hadrik's stall, the potter lifted a bowl, considered its honest line, and put his mark beneath: not pride, only bookkeeping you can eat from.
"You bring luck or you bring a level," Hadrik said. "Today I prefer the second."
"Luck is a guest that stays for an argument," Kaelthar said. "Levels leave when the job is done."
"Then may our hours be level," Hadrik said. "Noon does what it wants."
A boy clattered past with a hoop made from barrel iron. The hoop sketched a perfect ring on the dusty stones and then forgot the center, as if minds were elsewhere. Pell followed with an armful of notices and outrage at his own importance. "Captain says the market must keep room for counting," he announced, though no one had told it otherwise.
Selith whistled him over. "You sound like a town crier who's been fed on sermons."
"I had bread," Pell said, affronted. "Mira bread. With law in it."
"Good," Selith said. "We like our law leavened."
They crossed to the shrine street where Deya swept soot in careful circles. The soot refused the center of the brass bowl again and pretended not to be deliberate about it. "If the world writes letters," Deya said, not quite to them, "we will at least hold out a clean page." She did not look up when Kaelthar passed. She kept her words where roofs cannot be offended by them.
Orren stood in the doorway of the faceless oratory with rope in his hands like a lesson. "I will not ring to test a god," he told no one in particular and therefore everyone. "If the bell wishes to learn, it may teach itself."
"Classrooms work better with windows," Selith said. "Yours are small."
"They are honest," Orren said, and left the door at a responsible angle.
By late morning the Watch had distributed itself like punctuation across the streets. Sergeant Mavren checked the Flagon's board, the Hall's steps, the baker's threshold. He nodded to Kaelthar the way men nod to weather they have chosen to believe.
"Any harm?" Kaelthar asked.
"Not to bone and blood," Mavren said. "To certainty, some. I'll file it under morale."
"Paper can carry that weight," Kaelthar said.
"Paper prefers numbers," Mavren said, but his mouth admitted to liking words when they behaved.
Inside the Silent Hall, Neris laid fresh sheets and weights as if setting bandages for ideas. She greeted Kaelthar with the courage of someone who had failed to keep her curiosity to herself and been forgiven by the work. "The rubbing is covered," she said. "But the cloth knows what it hides." She touched the fabric and showed how it had remembered a pale ring in the weave where nothing had been asked of it.
Kaelthar did not ask to see the panel. "Some doors should not be opened to prove they have hinges."
"I wrote that down," Neris said, pleased and scandalized.
"Write it in pencil," Selith suggested.
Noon gathered itself.
Bran's call came along the river with its own arithmetic. The market closed its hand around coin and then opened again. At the Flagon, Mira placed the witness board flat on the long table and stood a candle at the edge as if separating truth from shadow. The room's talk stood at attention without being ordered to.
The first toll arrived in the old manner—iron speaking through air. Second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh: obedient as apprentices. Eighth shrugged at its work and did it anyway. Ninth struck clean. Tenth followed, professional. Eleventh nodded to twelfth, and twelfth took the bow.
Silence came forward like a clerk with a ledger.
And nothing else happened.
No dust ring lifted from rafters or tabletops. The candle did not lean; it breathed. Bran's water ran in its customary direction. Neris's clean sheet remained clean in exactly the way clean means when it has nothing to prove. Selith's basket knots held as if they had never learned to have opinions.
Elira, who had been ready to write, wrote Nothing in a corner and dated it neatly and underlined it once. Mira let out a breath she had not been taking. Olin, who had chosen to be a witness rather than a ledger for the moment, looked as if all his numbers had been paid and he was slightly disappointed to be unemployed.
"Write it," Ysren said from the doorway, as if nothing were a statement that deserved its frame. "On the board and in the Hall. Noon counted twelve. Add: citizens kept windows latched."
"Yours?" Mira asked, nodding at his hat.
"I kept it on," Ysren said. "I do not believe in tempting metaphors."
Orren appeared at the end of the bar with the respect due to a room that has kept itself together. "Sometimes the best sermon is the one you were ready to preach and did not need." He accepted water like a vow.
Mavren arrived with dust on his boots and the look of a man who considers dust an honest witness. "Baker's threshold reports nothing," he said. "Shrine soot: behaved. Watch badge: wore yesterday's ring; did not renew."
"Good," Ysren said, and then, because policy must feed on something, "Better. We will hold the meeting tomorrow regardless. Five crafts. Five accounts. We do not require catastrophe to learn civics."
He rested a palm on the witness board as if swearing honesty to the wood itself. "Put today on the same line as the others. The city performs both kinds of truth."
Afternoon went about being afternoon. The market returned to haggling, which is a kind of theology. Hadrik sold a mended bowl to a woman who confessed it would live under a bed holding dried oranges and letters. "A bowl wants work," he warned. "If you treat it like a box, it will get ideas."
"Let it," she said. "It can teach the letters to be bowls."
At the Flagon, a minor squall of laughter announced a dice game Mira did not allow. She allowed it anyway until it finished and then looked stern enough to cover both permission and prohibition. Olin wrote a line in his ledger, hesitated, and added a second line labeled futures with no numbers attached to it. He closed the book with a small, private nod that might have been affection or resignation.
Selith brought Kaelthar to the workmen's hall where the sign shows a three‑finger hand, broken and mended in iron. Men argued about scaffolds with the care of people who prefer to keep their bones on the inside. A foreman said, "The tower stairs are sound," and a mason said, "Sound does not mean kind," and everyone agreed without admitting to agreement.
"Do you think the city grows tired?" Selith asked as they stepped back into the light.
"Tired is a word for flesh," Kaelthar said. "Stone prefers patience."
"Then what is this?" She gestured at the quiet noon thrown backward across the day.
"A breath," Kaelthar said. "Practicing silence between notes."
Toward evening, the Hall's lamps kept to their shapes, declining to lean. Neris wrote Nothing Observed on a line that felt like a line and not a dare. She added in small letters only she would remember: afraid less than yesterday. She placed the day's sheet under the stack labeled Thirteenth because file systems must make choices and this one chose cause over result.
At the faceless oratory, Deya hummed a pitch that wanted to be a bell and then was not. Orren closed the doors with what could only be called tenderness for wood. "Tomorrow," he said to the air, "we'll talk."
Mira closed the Flagon's board for night and left today's Nothing visible. "Some truths prefer the window," she told Elira. "Let them look out and remember not to be shy."
Rothgar set a mug in front of Ysren and one in front of Mavren and one—after a pause that honored both profession and appetite—in front of Olin. "To tomorrow's arguments," he said. "May they keep the roof up."
"Arguments are scaffolding," Mavren agreed. "Temporary, necessary, and best when no one falls."
Kaelthar took his place by the window where hinges pretend not to listen. The clasp on his satchel remembered eclipse just long enough to be believed and then remembered to be a simple piece of metal. He let the moment pass without pursuing it like a man who knows some animals return if you don't.
Outside, the crooked handle caught a thin blade of light and sharpened it into evening. A crow crossed that blade and did not steal its heat. Somewhere, a child laughed because hoops do what hoops do.
Before he slept, Kaelthar walked the short block to the notice under the Watch badge. Someone had added a small drawing at the bottom—a circle with a dot not in the center but just off it, as if the city had begun to practice where a center might live. He looked at it and did not touch it. He did not say saved for later. He allowed the words to stand without being spoken.
The city settled its tools. Tomorrow, it would speak in five crafts. Tonight, it practiced holding a straight line without witnesses.