The town council lived in a room that tried to be important: planked table, three chairs that had inherited authority by outlasting the men sitting in them, a ledger whose lines were straight even when the numbers were crooked. I stood where smoke from a wall lamp forgot which way was up.
"Your name?" asked the man with the ledger. He had the pen-grip of someone who had learned to write late and never forgave the letters for it.
"Ren," I said. "I can read tides."
A woman with salt-gray hair and eyes that paid attention but never paid twice folded her hands. "We already have a tide clock. It says: 'when Vara comes, hide your children.'"
"That clock keeps time," I said. "I keep patterns."
Murmurs. The third councilor, a thin priest with a voice sanded smooth by repetition, smiled that particular priest-smile made to comfort numbers. "Patterns don't stop knives."
"No," I said. "They tell you where the knife will be before someone decides to lift it."
The ledger man tapped the paper. "Price?"
"Lodging. Two watchmen at my discretion when the bell speaks. And whatever coin you lose to guesswork, I will try to return to arithmetic."
The gray-haired woman watched me the way a cat watches an empty doorway. "And if you're wrong?"
"Then I'll leave before your anger learns my face."
The room breathed out, then in, the way a tide does when a storm is still a rumor. The priest set the pen down carefully, as if it might break on contact with agreement. "Saint-Hollow spoke last night," he said. "If your arithmetic can count fog, it had better count quickly."
"Then we begin now," I said. "I want a rope ladder on the old watch-stack, and the keys to the bell-room for an hour at dusk."
"The bell?" The ledger man flinched. "We don't touch it. The rock decides."
"All clocks can be wound if you understand what they think time is," I said.
The gray-haired woman's mouth tilted, not quite a smile. "Give him the keys. If he's a liar, we'll know by morning. If he's not…" Her eyes moved past me, out through the narrow window where fog was practicing being a wall. "Then we've finally bought something worth its price."
Outside, the market went on pretending to be a market. Arin leaned against a piling, arms folded, watching the town the way a boulder watches a stream—accepting, but ready to break water if it forgot its manners.
"You like rooms with tables," he said as I passed.
"I like rooms where people think a table makes them safe," I said. "They listen harder."
He fell into step without being invited. "You plan to ring the rock?"
"I plan to see if it already rings us," I said.
He laughed, then sobered. "They'll come soon."
"I know," I said.
"Do you?" He looked at me sideways. "Knowing isn't the same as being there when it happens."
"That's the only kind of knowing I respect."
We reached the bell-room as dusk chewed the edges of the town into softer shapes. The bell was a metal throat bolted into stone and seamed with repairs that had all failed differently. I set my palm against it and felt for the memory of its last note.
Arin watched. "You're listening to a bell."
"I'm listening to the rock through a bell," I said. "The sea speaks to stone; stone answers slowly."
"And?"
"And it's bored," I murmured. "Until fog thickens. Then it hums. It's a metronome for thieves."
He leaned out the slit window, looking to sea, eyes narrowed. "You're strange."
"Useful," I said.
"Sometimes those are the same," he muttered.
We left a rope ladder on the watch-stack and a man with reliable legs beside it. I asked for three lanterns with shutters. The foreman of the wharf brought four, because he was the kind of man who made a habit of one extra.
When night arrived, it did so politely, knocking first. Somewhere far out, Saint-Hollow cleared its throat. The note slid through fog and into bone.
I counted the seconds between echoes. The intervals lengthened, then shortened, then settled—like oars finding their cadence. Arin felt it too; I saw his jaw set, then loosen.
"Position?" he asked.
"Left slit," I said. "Two boats wide, men rowing light. They'll shadow the reef until they can run the shallows under the wharf."
"How sure?"
"As sure as a bell that pretends not to be a map," I said.
He grinned, and this time it reached his eyes. "Then let's write on their map."
We moved, quietly, the way men move when noise would cost more than breath. The rope ladder waited on the watch-stack like a promise.
Below the fog, the sea kept time.
I raised my hand to the lantern keeper and held up two fingers. He nodded, shuttered one, opened another, then swung them in the slow arc we had agreed meant Nothing yet, but soon.
The bell spoke again.
And the water answered.