Chapter 9 — Minutes with Teeth
The bells measured out morning like a careful scribe: one stroke to wake the cooks, one for the men who pretend they are never late, one for the city that knows better. I wrapped my hands because Rook notices when I don't and because the day was already sharpening itself on our doorstep.
In the yard, Rook stood with two staffs and a length of chalk. He traced a small square on the flagstones—no bigger than a grave for a cat—and stepped into it. "Today you never leave the box," he said. "Anyone can look competent when there is room to apologize with their feet."
He handed me the second staff. We moved. He pressed; I answered, not with reach but with spine and breath. Twice I tried to buy space with a step and heard the soft scrape of my heel over chalk.
"Out," he said, not unkind.
"I corrected," I argued.
"You hoped," he replied. He touched the inside of my elbow with two fingers. "Narrow. Tell the world where to land its blows. Then let it regret obeying."
We worked until my shoulders complained and my breath had learned a new word for humility. When he finally lowered his staff, sweat ran from his jaw like punctuation. "You keep your guard better when you're tired," he said. "It means you stop trying to look clever and start being precise."
I almost smiled. He saw it and shook his head. "Don't enjoy it. Write it down so you can earn it again tomorrow."
Inside, Mother had already assembled the day into columns: Substitutions Proposed, Ratified, Pending, Sabotaged—that last heading newly inked in her careful hand.
"Sabotaged?" I asked.
She lifted a page with two holes chewed where numbers had been. "A clerk spilled lamp oil on a register. Then used a cloth. Now the ninth and tenth names are interpretive dance."
"Jast?" I said.
"Not Jast," she replied. "He likes to obstruct in ways he can take credit for fixing. This is sloppier. Oren's cousin's friend. We will teach them all the difference between a spill and a leak."
Father entered, sleeves rolled, a meeting already tight across his shoulders. He set a folded notice by my plate. "Council will hear public comment on the Safety Illumination Fund at fourth bell," he said. "Which is to say: men who hate the word fund will pretend the word safety is negotiable."
"Am I going?" I asked.
"You're sitting in the hallway," he said. "Your job is to listen to the parts they don't want written down. And to keep our numbers ready if a man who likes stories needs to be reminded that math exists."
He handed me a second folded sheet. Inside: Rell—ratified with a registry number and a terse note in Jast's precise hand: Processed without incident. The neatness irritated me; he had waited until the wind was already at our back to approve it and then expected to be praised for not resisting.
"Good," Mother said when she saw my face attempting to do unpleasant arithmetic with gratitude. "You will thank him like a neighbor who lent a bucket after the fire was out. Warmly; without forgetting who carried water."
I ate quickly, which earned me a perfectly aimed rebuke from the spoon in Mother's fingers. "Chew. If you arrive hungry to a meeting, everyone will think your ideas are thin."
I chewed.
Before fourth bell, I walked the quay, because the quay tells the truth without expecting you to applaud. Tamas had Marr on shorter seams again. The boy's hands were less bandage and more habit now. He didn't see me, which meant he was working. Suf gave me a nod dignified enough to belong to someone twice his size. Miri had three knots tied and a fourth waiting for the part of her hand that remembers more slowly. Hale ran past carrying sand at a speed that looked like an apology to the river for having to move it twice.
At the parapet, the watch captain had her palms on the stone like it was a stubborn animal she was training, not a wall she was supposed to command. I told her about the register with teeth marks in the numbers.
"We'll send a warden to watch with his eyes," she said. "Clerks forget honesty when an audience is paper. They behave better when watched by someone who might be bored."
She lifted a rolled canvas from a bench and handed it to me. "Your ugly lamps," she said, amusement stitched into the corners of her mouth. "I asked the wardens for distances that worked and distances that made the river sing. We'll make a map so we stop borrowing miracles from children."
I took the bundle like a priest takes a relic. "It wasn't a miracle," I said.
"No," she agreed. "It was observation and nerve. Try not to spend all of either before the council meeting."
The council hall always smells of ink that thinks too highly of itself. I sat in the corridor as instructed, back straight, ledger open, pen ready. Men with loud coats went in first, then men with quiet coats and firm hands. Father passed me without looking; his permission has always been the absence of prevention.
Outside, the corridor filled with the sound Mother calls politics rehearsing. A guild steward rehearsed his indignation about misallocated funds. A ferryman rehearsed gratitude in case someone needed his story later. A chandler's apprentice stood in a corner and rehearsed breathing in a chamber that hates apprentices.
I wrote their names, the order, two adjectives, one verb each. Writing things down helps me separate which anger will matter tomorrow from which wants to be believed today.
The door opened. The apprentice was not called. The steward was. He performed outrage the way men perform humor when they want to be praised for being dangerous without becoming so.
He claimed lanterns had always stood equidistant ("tradition"), that red tide had grown worse of late ("mysterious forces"), that children on docks lowered dignity ("optics"), that Clause Seventeen smelled of charity ("which invites laziness"). He neglected numbers except when they could arrange themselves into accusation.
Through the crack of the door, I watched Father listen like a man letting a storm finish yelling at him before he carries his boat outside.
When Father spoke, it was to ask for totals. Copper out, copper saved. Wages paid, wages not wasted on hospital beds. He used the chair's phrase about proud planks—borrowed, attributed, returned—and added a line about proud streets, which was his own.
"Dull," the council head said after three minutes.
"Survivable," Father answered.
A fisherwoman spoke next, and her voice braided gratitude with the pragmatic rage of someone who has more work than time and is suspicious of both men and miracles. She described the lamps that learned to be ugly and the way the river's hip felt different beneath the boat when it stopped being admired.
The steward attempted a joke. The room attempted politeness. The joke failed to find a hospitable face.
Then a man I did not recognize—coat modest, ring old, voice warmed by habit—stood and told the council that his cousin had tripped on a poorly placed bucket near the parapet and might sue, and that perhaps too much activity at the walls invited accidents, and that nothing had been so broken a month ago as to need this much motion.
"Name?" I whispered to a clerk at my side.
"Braelen," he mouthed. "Salt broker. Old money. Hates change because he can't price it."
I wrote: Braelen—salt—lawsuit—prefers stillness.
Father did not argue the bucket. He did not explain that a lie can be mailed to ten houses in the time it takes a truth to put on its shoes. He asked the watch captain, who had been waiting in the hall out of courtesy, to enter. She did. She told the council—flat, spare—that she had moved two sand sledges and fifteen ladders and a town's worth of fear in three days, and that if a bucket had been left in a place a boot resented, she would walk the wall herself and discipline the bucket.
A man laughed. Then saw her face. Then apologized to his mouth.
The council head tapped the table twice, the meeting's version of a sigh. "Numbers," he said. "And: complaints in writing. We will entertain a motion to continue the fund one season if the ledger reads dull. The city prefers boredom to drama. So do I."
The steward opened his mouth the way men do when their rhetoric has run out of furniture to sit on. Father closed his ledger and made it impossible for the man to find more words by offering him the silence of conclusion.
Outside in the corridor, the apprentice finally exhaled. "They didn't call me," he said, shoulders slumping.
"You were ready," I said. "That mattered."
He half-smiled, half-winced. "Ready doesn't pay for boots."
"No," I agreed. "But if you wear readiness often enough, someone mistakes it for authority and starts obeying it."
He looked at me as if I were someone who had learned to lie beautifully over a bowl of soup. I did not try to look older than my years. The corridor will eventually teach you whether I am right.
On the steps, a small procession waited: Rell and the Chain Sigil girl, and a new worry on the woman's face.
"His legs," she said, not greeting. "They are worse today."
I knelt so the boy didn't have to crane his neck like a supplicant at a window. "Can you point and count?" I asked him. "We need both at the cushion table."
He held up three fingers, then added a fourth like a secret he was willing to share. "Four," he said.
"Good," I said. "You'll count buttons and we'll pretend it's coin. You'll tell me if anyone cheats. People cheat at buttons more than they do at copper."
Rell laughed despite herself, which is a victory I am always willing to claim.
We walked them to the healing hall and left the boy under the eye of a matron with hands like bread crusts and a voice that never had to raise itself to be obeyed. When we turned back, the Chain Sigil girl lingered at the door.
"Is it true," she asked in a rush, "that if I work at the dock and at the hall, my mark will learn to be useful faster?"
I considered the answer I wanted to give—yes, everything strengthens if you ask it to do more than one kind of thing—and the answer the world allows—sometimes.
"Bring your hands to both," I said. "We will teach you to tie knots and to not be tied by them."
She nodded with enormous seriousness and ran to catch her mother. I added her name to a margin that had begun to feel like a prayer book I pretended not to own.
On my way down the dye row, I passed the Indenture Office deliberately and stopped in front of the door long enough to be seen. The clerk who had wiped the oil across numbers yesterday looked up and blanched the color of old paper. I held his gaze. I did not enter. It is important for men who destroy small things to worry about when the boy with the ledger will choose to become a man with an office.
At the scriptorium, Jast stood with an expression that wanted to be a compliment and settled for being a truce. "Your numbers," he said, tapping a copy of our morning tallies. "Acceptable."
"Dull," I corrected. "And accurate."
He inclined his head. "We should all aspire to be as boring as this." He hesitated, then added: "The council will renew the fund one season. The head told the clerk to prepare the language."
"How did you hear it?" I asked.
He smiled a smile I recognized from Father's face on rare days: I asked the room to think I was furniture.
I left with the copies I needed and the desire to dislike Jast slightly less, which I wrote down so I would not forget to behave accordingly.
By late afternoon, the wind went jealous of our confidence and took it upon itself to rattle shutters that had done nothing wrong. A still-scent—the faint narcotic tone that sometimes leaks from a calm gate—was reported near the grain warehouses, accompanied by a field of rats asleep in the sun like critics in a warm theater.
The watch captain found me on the parapet because she always finds me when the day tries to complicate itself. "Don't bring a crowd," she said.
"I won't," I said.
We walked with one warden and a broom. The still-scent was thinner than rumor and thicker than courtesy. I tasted it at the back of my throat and wrote down the word lavender because it was wrong, then crossed it out because it was unhelpful. The rats looked content in a way that made me distrust contentment.
"Ugly lamps won't help," I said. "It wants quiet."
"Noise?" the captain asked.
"Noise makes men," I said. "I think this wants air."
We opened the warehouse doors on both sides and waited. Wind negotiated with dust. The scent thinned the way guilt does when you start cleaning. The rats woke one at a time, each pretending it had chosen to nap rather than been fooled into it. I had the warden sweep lazily, not to accomplish anything but to teach the room disinterest.
"Write it down," the captain said. "Doors on both ends. No spectators. Broom optional."
"Optional?" I asked.
"Let them argue with it," she said. "People like to feel superior to a tool."
Back home, I wrote Still-scent protocol as dull as winter: Vent both ends. Wait for wakefulness. Do not gather a crowd. Broom if necessary to remind air of its work. I brought the page to the watch. She read it once and nodded. "Approved," she said, then added in a smaller voice, "You make me generous to paper."
"Paper is our least dangerous weapon," I said.
"Not in the wrong hands," she replied, and smiled without humor.
When the house finally exhaled the day, I was ready to be useless in a chair. Instead, Father put a bundle of thin, stiff cards on the table. Each had a mark at the top and a set of lines: Name, Ward, Work taught, Hours, Observation. On the back: Notes for next season.
"What are these?" I asked.
"Memory," he said. "In case the city decides to forget the sound of this week."
We filled them together. Marr: Short seams competent; proud in the right places. Miri: Knots honest; checks own work without being told. Suf: Blisters acknowledged; hands learned instead of lied. Hale: Runs too fast with heavy things; trustworthy with light. Chain Sigil girl—Rell's daughter, I finally wrote her name Kera in careful letters because not knowing it had begun to feel like theft: Strength control class recommended; teach 'release' before 'hold'.
Mother took the stack, sorted it the way you sort letters by the dead still living inside them, and slid them under a length of ribbon. "We will need them in a month when the council asks whether the city learned anything," she said.
Rook knocked once on the doorframe. He never enters a room as if he owns it. "Your guard in the yard was narrow," he said, which is love spoken in his dialect. "We'll make your feet honest tomorrow."
He started to leave, then turned back. "Listen," he said. "Not to the river. To your own appetite."
"I'm twelve," I said.
"You're almost thirteen," he allowed. "And boys that age who taste usefulness for the first time often want to drown in it. Eat. Sleep. Learn slowly. You cannot save a city by sprinting. You'll teach it to expect you to sprint. Then it will die on a day you are only a man."
He left me with that discomfort like a coin in my shoe. I put the Codex on the table and rested my palm on the cover. The leather was cool, indifferent. No light. No whisper. Nothing except the fact of itself. The absence felt like a grace.
A messenger knocked at sunset and left a folded card with Father's seal on the thread. Inside, in the tight hand of the council clerk: Fund renewed one season. Report weekly. Indenture Office to deliver youth bond ratios by ward. Beneath that, in a different ink and a quicker script: Tell the boy: lamps ugly is approved language. The watch captain had found her way into someone else's pen.
I laughed once, quietly, like a man who has almost tripped but did not. Mother kissed my hair without standing up. Father allowed himself one deep breath that smelled like victory and caution.
I took my notebook to my room and wrote:
— Men with loud coats performed outrage. The room preferred dullness.
— A bucket nearly became a law; the watch captain prevented a personality from turning into policy.
— Still-scent wants air, not attention. Broom optional.
— We are making a city that rewards boredom. This is harder than heroics.
Then, smaller, because it embarrassed me:
— I wanted to run today. Rook is right. I must learn to walk where sprinting would be noticed and therefore punished by the world.
I lay back and listened to the house talk to itself: Mother closing the ribbon over cards that were not yet history; Father setting the seal press where morning would find it; the cat in the alley reaffirming a border only it respected; the far-off chime of the cathedral teaching the moon to behave.
When sleep did not arrive, I took the bundle of ugly-lamp distances from the watch captain and spread it on the floor. I traced with my finger the gaps we had forced between lights so the river would lose its rhythm. It felt like cheating at music, and perhaps it was. But music has always been a poor master for walls.
The bells arranged the last note of the day and then dismissed us. I closed my eyes and rehearsed the square Rook had chalked this morning—the box I was not allowed to leave. I saw myself again in it, learning to be precise inside a boundary someone else had drawn. I promised the stone I would try again tomorrow without stepping over the chalk to quietly excuse my mistakes.
Outside, the river practiced restraint. Inside, the minutes we had written today sharpened themselves into teeth and lay down in the ledger to sleep. Tomorrow they would need them.