They gave him a bowl and a bench and a narrow slice of day. They gave him a guard whose hands smelled of iron and old songs and a door that opened when duty required and stayed shut when it did not. They put the child in his care like a stone into a pocket and told him to keep his silence.
Kael learned quickly that the Harmonium's mercies were made for sound. They padded their feet on songwood and spoke in measured cadences and used the wrong words to disguise the right ones. They fed him broth in porcelain and watched his hands as if they might sprout a voice. The guard—Coran was his name, if names matter when voices do not—sat across from him with a pipe in his teeth and watched the boy sleep more than he watched Kael.
"Eat," Coran said finally, the word heavy as a meal and twice as obvious. He pushed the bowl close enough that the steam fogged Kael's vision.
Kael ate because the broth tasted like survival and because the boy's fingers were curled on the bench and he had woken to a world shaped wrong. He wrapped the boy's small hand around the bowl's edge and let him drink. The boy watched Kael with new eyes—eyes that stored gratitude as if it were a currency—and when his throat moved Kael imagined sound like a little ship crossing a lake: impossible and lovely and always out of reach.
The east wing of the west cloister smelled of old prayers and yeast; the light through the slit windows was a ribbon of dust. When Coran finally spoke again it was because someone knocked—soft, careful—at the outer door. The guard's face pinched with duty. "You can sleep," he told the boy, and the child leaned against Kael's shoulder with the trust of one who had nowhere else to go.
Kael rose to his feet. The knock came again, firmer. Coran let the latch sigh. The door opened on the priest and two men wearing the same white as the cultist in the hall—the Silent Cult, but not the preacher types who knelt on streetstones. These were quieter rods in a long fold of robes, and their faces carried the patient arrogance of those who have decided they are long overdue.
"You called for him?" one of them asked the priest, voice as flat as a drum.
"We did." Her throat-plate glinted. "He contained a breach at the north gate."
The tall man's eyes—thin, precise—slept on Kael and did not ask for permission to wake. "We heard something different," he said. "A binding without hymn. The cult has interest in anomalies."
Kael's pulse fumbled. He had spent his life being invisible as an unstruck bell; to be seen now felt like being laid bare. He kept his shoulders small and let his hands rest on his knees. The priest watched him like someone comparing coins for authenticity.
"You will walk with us," the tall man said to the priest. "There will be questions. There will be a weighing. We prefer the quiet places."
The priest's mouth set into a thin line. "Not now. Not the Harmonium's space."
The man shrugged as if the city were a fabric you could smooth out. "The Harmonium will make one decision. We will make another. We are collectors of relics and omissions. It is in our charter."
Coran stepped forward, boots thudding. "You cannot just—"
"We can," the man interrupted, with the casual lift of someone who has already determined the path. He looked at Kael again. "Boy. Come."
There was no tone of kindness. It was an invitation and a command rolled into one, as if he offered Kael a place at a table where knives lived under the plates.
Kael thought of the child asleep against his shoulder. He thought of the baker who would no longer knead dough or the warders coughing blood into hymnwood. He thought of the way his own hands trembled when he held the staff. He remembered the shape of the chains that had answered him—how they had been heavy and clean and not his, like someone else's memory of being bound. And, faintly, he remembered gray eyes in a cell that had called him mine.
He stood.
Coran's hand closed around his shoulder the way a man who has done what he must does—brief, efficient. The guard's eyes flicked to the priest for permission, and the priest gave it with a mouth that tasted like old salt.
Outside, the street smelled of singed rope and the faint copper of something passed through a throat and not returned. The city had not stopped humming, but the harmony around them was a thin thing, polite and brittle. People clustered on the far side of roofs, watching like swallows watch storms. Kael walked between the two white robed men and the priest, the child's small hand still slipped under his sleeve because he would not have let the boy go.
They took him to a room that did not belong either to the Harmonium or the cult—an in-between place, staged with oak and shadow and a long table whose grain was rubbed by the hands of many who had carved their names into the rules of survival. The men seated themselves across from him like judges who expect to be entertained. The priest remained behind, hands folded as if in prayer but with her fingers poised to argue.
"You are the one who binds without song?" the taller man began. He did not so much ask a question as prove it.
Kael made the sign for no and then the sign for bind. The man watched the motion and smiled without warmth.
"You are clever. We like clever things." He leaned forward. "Tell us how you do it."
Kael opened his mouth and closed it. Words were rocks in a pocket. A name would have been a gift and a doorway, and he did not know if he wanted to open that door. He bowed his head instead and let the silence speak for him.
The smaller robed man folded his hands on the table. "You were born voiceless?" he asked.
"Yes." The priest's short confirmation carried the weight of the settled dead.
They spoke around him as if he were a rune in a ledger. "If you are bound to silence, one must ask: do the chains come from you, or do you draw them from the world?" the tall man asked, lips thin.
The question had teeth. If the chains were his, he was a weapon—someone to be trained, used, worshipped. If he drew them from the world, he was a conduit—someone to be feared, cut out, and buried.
Kael felt the shapes of both like a bruise he could not scratch. He thought of the hollow he had pulled from—the place under the ribs where sound is kept—and how the chains had felt like something that had always been waiting, like the city's old, patient sorrow. He did not know how to tell them that the answer was both and neither. He could only show them: the curl of his fingers, the memory of the net closing.
"Demonstrate," the taller man said suddenly, with the bluntness of someone who wants proof more than poetry.
No one reached for their throat-plates. The room held its breath like an audience about to be punished for laughter. Kael felt each eye as if it were a hand on his skin, prodding for a reaction.
He thought of the child and the smell of the cistern and the way the baker had died with his hymn half-formed on his lips. He thought of the way the warders had fallen and the sound-thing had tasted them. He thought of being a boy who had always learned to make himself small and how the chains had uncoiled with a hunger he did not command.
He closed his hands into fists.
The air trembled. Not the broad, communal shimmer of a choir but a small, private hush that tugged at the edges of hearing. It was the sound of a room inhaling at the same time—an almost-not sound, a gap. The taller man's eyebrows lifted. The small man's nostrils flared.
Kael unclenched his fingers.
A black braid of nothing spilled across the table like smoke that remembered iron. It smelled faintly of damp soil and the inside of a closed mouth. The men flinched as if the thing had spat at them. The braid looped once around the candles and dropped, weighty though it had no real weight, like a river that had decided to hold its water tight.
The smaller man's hand moved with the reflex of someone who remembers oath-gestures, and for a heartbeat Kael feared a throat-plate would meet a throat and a hymn would be flung like a net. Instead the man only watched, enthralled and afraid.
"You bind," the tall man said slowly. "You call absence into form."
Kael nodded. It was the only answer he could give.
"Why?" the other asked. Not accusatory, not curious—just the old human hunger for explanation. "Why spare some and not others? Why protect a child and not the warders?"
Kael looked at his hands, at the faded scar where the staff had bitten him. "Because I could," he signed. He tapped his chest for because, then pointed at the small sleeping boy and spread his fingers outward like a net. The priest's jaw moved. The tall man's face folded with the complexity of someone who has measured power against politics. The small man, who smelled faintly of old books and incense, began to murmur—which he only ever did when thinking aloud.
"He is an anomaly," the small man said. "Useful, dangerous. If he is taught, he could be…a tool. If not, he will be a torn thing that eats cities."
Coran, who had been silent in the corner like a shadow with a pipe, stepped forward. The guard's voice, rough as rope, surprised the room. "He's not a thing," Coran said. "He's a man who kept a child from dying."
The tall man smiled a thin smile. "All things become things in time, Captain. Cities make choices."
Kael felt the word choice like a coin that did not fit his palm. He wanted to ask: Will you teach me? Will you let me stay? But the verb for ask was a mouth he did not have.
The small man folded his hands again. "We will take him," he said. "Not yet into the cult—not into the open arms of worship—but to a place where we can learn what he is without the Harmonium's hammer falling on him. He will not be harmed if he complies. He will be studied. If he proves unstable—if the chains eat him—then we will make the decision the city cannot."
The priest's face crumpled. "You would remove a citizen from our care?"
"We would keep the city from killing itself in fear," the tall man said. "If he is trained, if he can be understood, the city may have a tool of preservation. If he is dangerous, we will counsel removal."
"Removal," the priest repeated, the word worse than the image. She looked at Kael then—really looked—and something like tenderness slid under her sternness. "No. Not removal, not while I'm left a voice to argue."
"He will come under our protection," the small man said. "You may speak for him in council. We will leave a warder to oversee him until—" His eyes flicked to Coran briefly. Coran inclined his head as if the arrangement balanced something in his chest.
Kael's throat tightened with an impossible longing to say yes. He pressed his palms to his knees until the nails bit into skin. He nodded.
They prepared a straw pallet for the boy in a nearby room the cult had claimed as neutral. The priest tied a knot under her chin as if it made her braver. The two white-robed men left with a promise of return and a weight like a contract. Coran walked with him to the outer gate and did not let go of his arm until the city's ward shimmer smeared between them.
At sunset the priest returned, jaw set. "The decision stands," she told him. "Dawn. Second expedition. The cult may attach an observer, nothing more." The white-robes agreed like men accepting interest on a debt.
Outside the gate, the market smelled like frying oil and stale bread and a new kind of worry. Men in choir-blue stared at Kael like he might unravel them. Women clutched their scarves as if to choke back music. A child spat at his boots and missed.
Kael kept his head down. The chains inside him coiled like a sleeping thing. He had a strange, thin sense that his life had been divided into two counts now: before the white-robed men, after them. The shepherds of absence had touched him and left a mark like a lit ember.
When Coran dropped his hand from Kael's arm, the guard said, quiet as a ledger, "Watch your step, throatless. They'll want to teach you to make them sing your chains. Don't let them teach you to forget how to keep your mouth closed."
Kael swallowed. He did not have a throat to clear. He did have hands to learn new knots.
That night, before sleep could make him small again, he walked the cloister's outer wall and found the cistern moon-cold. The child was safe and breathing and small and imperfect and alive. Kael pressed his palm to the stone and felt the wet and the cold and something deep under it—a pulse like the city's sleeping hymn.
The chains inside him tightened in a way that could have been warning. He imagined them like black ropes stretching to a tether point in the dark, tested by the tug of the day. He had pulled a thread from the air and tied it into a knot. Tomorrow would be trial. Tomorrow they would ask him to make a living thing out of silence again, but this time for a purpose he did not own. And tomorrow, before the sun finished rising, the expedition would claim him.
He did not know if he wanted to be taught, used, loved, or simply buried. He only knew the truth he had been living all his life: power takes a weight. Chains bear weight. He would learn which of them he was, and which would break first.