A city guard near the cart shifted his weight, his gaze sweeping lazily down the street. It passed over the stack of barrels, lingered for a half-second too long.
Momen didn't wait to see if it was curiosity or just a bored man's wandering eye. He dropped from his crouch into a low crawl, slinking backward along the cooperage wall until he was around its corner and out of the line of sight. Then he was up and moving, not running but walking with a stiff, hurried stride that aimed for the nearest alley mouth across the street.
He forced himself not to look back. Looking back was what guilty people did. He kept his head down, shoulders hunched, playing the part of a servant or a laborer headed to an early shift, someone too insignificant to notice. The green ledger felt impossibly large and bright against his back, a beacon shouting his crime to anyone who glanced his way.
He hit the alley and broke into a run.
The sound of his own breathing was loud in the narrow passage. He took turns at random, choosing left then right then left again, guided only by the need to put walls and distance between himself and Tanner's Row. The pre-dawn gloom in these service alleys was deeper, pooled with shadows that hadn't yet been burned away by the rising sun. He used them, darting from one patch of darkness to the next.
His mind raced ahead of his feet, mapping not a destination but an exit strategy.
*They'll seal the district gates.*
The thought came from the part of him that understood how authority worked.
*Not yet, though.*
They were still raiding the Loom, still collecting evidence.
That gave him a window, maybe an hour, maybe less.
They'd want to search the immediate area first, the obvious bolt-holes.
So he needed to be outside the search radius before they even drew its boundaries.
Roofs. The streets would soon be crawling with guards asking questions. The roofs belonged to him.
He skidded to a stop in a dead-end courtyard cluttered with broken furniture and ash piles from winter braziers. The walls were high, but not seamless. A rusted drainpipe ran up one side of a bakery, its shutters still closed tight. He jumped, caught it, and began to climb. The iron was cold and slick with condensation. His sore muscles screamed in protest, but he shut the pain out, focusing on each handhold, each push with his feet.
He hauled himself onto a sloping roof of mossy tiles. The world opened up.
From here, he could see the hazy glow of lanterns still clustered around the Leaning Loom several blocks away, a tiny island of activity in the sleeping city. Further out, the silhouettes of guard towers along the inner wall cut into the lightening sky. He turned his back on them all and began to move east, away from the tanneries and the main thoroughfares.
Roof-hopping in the inner city was different than in the slums. The buildings were taller, made of stone and proper slate more often than thatch and stolen planks. The gaps between them were wider, cleaner. But the principles were the same: find the line where one roof met another, judge the distance, commit.
He crossed over on a shared chimney stack.
He edged along a narrow parapet.
He leaped a three-foot gap over a dizzying drop into a lightless alley below.
His body moved with an efficiency born of long practice, even through the deep fatigue that made every landing jar his bones.
The sky shifted from grey to a pale, watery blue at the horizon. Dawn was coming fast now. With light would come more people on the streets, more open windows, more eyes to spot a filthy figure scrambling across rooftops.
He needed to get down. Find a place to hole up and think.
He spotted what he needed two blocks later: a narrow lane between a chandler's shop and a tenement building that had partially collapsed long ago. The ruins had been fenced off with cheap wooden boards, but one section had sagged inward, creating a gap just wide enough to slip through. It led down into a pocket of shadow and rubble.
He lowered himself from the roof edge down onto a pile of broken masonry within the fenced area, disturbing a cloud of dust and the smell of old mortar and rot. He was in what was left of a cellar, open to the sky where the building had fallen in on itself years ago. The floor was littered with shattered roof tiles and splintered beams.
It was hidden from casual view by the fence and the surrounding buildings.
It would do for now.
He crouched behind a tilted slab of stone that might have once been a wall, listening.
No shouts.
No running boots.
Just the distant, waking sounds of a city: a door slamming somewhere, the clatter of a cart on a bigger street.
He was alone.
For now.
His breath came in ragged pulls that scraped at his throat.
The adrenaline that had carried him across half a district on sheer nerve began to recede like a tide, leaving behind a vast expanse of exhaustion.
His limbs trembled faintly.
The cold morning air bit through his sweat-damp rags.
And beneath it all was that familiar deep ache of Magic Sickness-the hollow fatigue that no amount of rest ever filled.
He was a fugitive.
He had nothing but stolen goods he couldn't read and enemies who wanted him erased.
The ledger was still there against his back.
He hadn't lost it.
Somehow that felt like both his only accomplishment and his biggest mistake
He couldn't stay in the open cellar. The gap in the fence was too obvious if anyone looked, and the growing daylight would make the whole ruin visible from the surrounding upper windows. He needed deeper shadow, a proper hole.
Pushing himself up, he picked his way across the debris field. At the back of the collapsed space, where the remaining wall met the ground, a darker patch hinted at an opening. It was a low archway, partially choked with fallen brick and dirt, but beyond it lay a deeper blackness that smelled of wet earth and long stillness.
A cellar beneath the cellar.
He got on his hands and knees and began to clear the opening, pulling away loose chunks of mortar and rotten wood. The hole was just wide enough for him to squeeze through if he went headfirst. He shoved his metal sheet through first, then wriggled into the gap.
The drop was short. He landed in soft, cool dirt. The air down here was thick and still, heavy with the scent of damp stone and decay. It was utterly dark, a blackness so complete it pressed against his eyes. But it was quiet. The sounds of the waking city were muffled to nothing, replaced by the faint, steady drip of water somewhere in the depths.
He felt his way along a rough stone wall until he found a corner that felt relatively dry and clear of debris. He sank down there, his back against the cold stone, and finally allowed himself to stop moving.
For a long time, he just sat in the dark, listening to his own heartbeat slow. The silence was a physical thing, wrapping around him. It was different from the tense quiet of hiding behind the barrels. This was empty. Absorbent. It swallowed his fear and gave nothing back.
This was what he had now. A hole in the ground. Again.
He'd traded a rooftop for a room inside the walls, then traded that room for this buried pocket of ruin. Each trade felt like a step down, not up. He was digging himself deeper into the city's forgotten places, not climbing out of them.
The ledger.
It was still there, a hard rectangle of consequence. He'd almost died for it. He'd certainly killed his only chance at a legal identity for it. He might still die because of it. He untucked it from his belt and pulled it free from his rags. In the absolute dark, it was just a weight in his hands, its green leather smooth and cool.
A sliver of greyish light seeped from the hole he'd crawled through, faint but enough for his dark-adapted eyes to use after a few minutes. He shifted, angling the book toward that meager glow.
The cover was plain, just dyed leather worn soft at the edges. The brass corners were tarnished but solid. He ran a thumb over the surface, feeling the grain. Then he opened it.
The pages were thick, expensive paper. They didn't rustle like cheap scrap; they turned with a soft, substantial whisper. The writing inside was meticulous, lines of ink so precise and even they looked like they'd been printed by a machine, not a human hand. It filled every page from margin to margin-rows of symbols, columns of more symbols, some grouped in patterns, others standing alone.
Words. Numbers.
He stared at them.
He knew they meant something. The sergeant had called it "specified." Halvor's man had said it contained something worth sending private guards and city guards on a joint raid to recover. Kaelen had wanted it enough to trade forged papers for its theft. It was obviously important. Dangerous.
To Momen, it was just shapes.
He traced a line with a filthy finger, following the elegant curl of a letter he didn't recognize. The ink didn't smudge. It was good ink. He turned a page. More of the same. A different arrangement of shapes, some repeated, some unique. He saw patterns-the same symbol appearing in multiple entries, clusters of symbols that looked like they belonged together. It was a code, a language, a whole system of meaning laid out in perfect order.
And it told him nothing.
A sudden, hot frustration boiled up in his chest, so sharp it made his eyes sting. He'd risked everything for this. He'd climbed walls and crawled through filth and triggered magical alarms for these pages. He held proof of something-debts, secrets, crimes-that could maybe protect him or buy him passage or at least explain why everyone wanted him dead.
But he couldn't read it.
The knowledge was locked behind a door he didn't have the key for. He was illiterate. A slum rat. All those years surviving on instinct and scraps had never included someone sitting him down and teaching him which squiggle meant "water" or which one meant "danger." Why would they? He was supposed to die ignorant in an alley, not steal ledgers from guild masters.
He slammed the book shut.
The sound was flat and final in the quiet cellar.
He sat there in the gloom, the closed ledger heavy on his lap. The damp chill of the earth seeped into his legs. The drip-drip-drip of water marked time in a place where time didn't matter.
He was utterly alone.
Kaelen was in chains.
The room at the Loom was gone.
His last coins were gone.
His vow to become a knight felt like a stupid story told by someone else, a fantasy that belonged to the boy who saw a shiny knight in the sun, not to the fugitive hiding in a hole with a book he couldn't read.
He had the prize both powerful factions wanted.
But the prize was useless to him.
And wanting it made him a target.
He had nothing to trade.
No one to turn to.
No plan.
Just this book full of silent secrets and the crushing weight of his own ignorance.
He leaned his head back against the cold stone wall and closed his eyes, not to sleep but because there was nothing left in the darkness to look at anyway. The green ledger sat on his legs, a monument to a transaction that had failed, to a path that had dead-ended in the dirt beneath a ruined building.
For now, this was sanctuary.
A temporary pause in the hunt.
He had nowhere else to go