Chapter 12 — Ledgers and Load-Bearing Lies
Morning came with the kind of light that makes even stone want to be honest. It poured through the window and told the dust to declare itself. I lay still long enough to decide I wasn't surprised by myself, then sat up and found the pen where I'd left it under the pillow. Old weight. Runes dull in daylight. Tools don't care about your sleep.
A slip of paper—official, inked with the Academy seal—waited inside the door. Aptitude Harmonization: proctors will begin pre-awakening assessments in three weeks. Beneath, a second line in a different hand: You will be measured against your listening as much as your will. I'd heard worse threats.
I ate fast enough to be anonymous and got to Ether Harmonics before the bell. Van had drawn three parallel lines across the board and left them labeled structure, weather, interference. "Today," he said, "you will separate ghosts from thieves." He set us to mapping the long hall's hum with the windows closed, then half-open, then with the south casement cracked just enough to let the breath of wind in. Small shifts. Small lies. The room was teaching us how easily a person could believe a story if it made their work easier.
"Prince," Van said, sliding the tuning rod along my wrist until the bones settled. "Do not fight to interpret. Attend to the plain song first. There is time to invent after you've heard."
Plain song: the braces' low vowel, a flutter at the third rib when the bell tower cooled, a faint roughness whenever footsteps crossed the northern gallery. I recorded the roughness last and drew a small box around it. It remained when the windows changed, when the weather altered, when Van tapped the casement to make it sing. Interference that didn't leave with the conditions that should have caused it.
Thief, not ghost.
At the end, Van dismissed us with the usual lack of ceremony. On his desk sat a tray of mixing sticks, resin samples labeled by hand—the careful fussiness of a man who didn't trust what shipments said. I let my eyes slide across the labels and did not stop on the two from the new vendor. They were darker and they lay in the dish as if remembering a shape they shouldn't.
Between bells I cut through the east colonnade and almost ran into a bursar closing a cabinet too quickly. He flinched when he saw my seal, then made his face pleasant in a way that hadn't practiced much.
"Apologies, Your Highness. Records day. Order everywhere," he said, which is what people say when they've just put the mess in a drawer.
"Procurement receipts for brace ink," I said, polite as an invoice. "I requested copies from Records, but I'd like to match signatures."
He smiled with his mouth and nothing else. "Certainly. If you file a formal request, we can have them ready within—"
"—three to five business days," I finished for him. "I'd prefer this afternoon."
He tilted his head, weighing how far he could push the word prefer. "We keep our promises," he said.
"That's what I'm checking," I said, and let the moment stretch until the part of him that liked the sound of his job more than the work of it got uncomfortable. He relented and wrote a slip for Records authorizing what I had already taken. Government runs on the fear of being caught promising two different things in ink.
Ethics and Administration offered the usual arena, the lens on Hale's face ticking light across my row as she considered targets. Today's chalked topic: Public Safety vs. Private Competence. She pointed the lens at a dwarf apprentice near the back, his beard braided tight with copper pins.
"Guild perspective," Hale said.
"Public safety without tools is a sermon," he said. "Private competence without oversight is a tragedy waiting for day off. If you want cheap, you get collapse. If you want perfect, you get bankrupt. We build for the weight people lie about and the weather they forget, then pray over the rest."
Hale's mouth twitched. "And if someone is quietly buying cheap on a project stamped public?"
"You check the load-bearing. The lies show there first," he said. "They always do."
I wrote: Load-bearing lies. Some phrases earn their place on the page.
After Ethics I let the current pull me toward Field Logistics. Elias sat at the end of a row with his satchel planted as if it were his last piece of land. He didn't wave me over. He didn't have to. The lecturer spread a map of the Academy like a patient on a table and said, "The Old Library restoration is behind schedule and over budget. Tell me something I don't know."
Elias drew three lines fast—supply depot to south face, cart path around the herb garden, second cart path around the herb garden after the first one flooded last week. He scratched numbers down his wrist, cursed softly, erased, wrote again.
When the room began offering solutions, nobles proposed committees. The scholarship cohort proposed ropes, levers, and moving the scaffolding anchors two spans inward to correct a load that had shifted when the west wind found a new path. The lecturer stopped on Elias.
"Why inward?" he asked.
"Because the replacement pins are softer than spec," Elias said. "They've deformed in the sockets. You bring the anchor in, you reduce torque. You also pretend you meant to do it and save the bursar's face."
"Expensive," the lecturer said.
"Less expensive than funerals," Elias said.
We were dismissed with a warning not to die of standing under the wrong story. At the door, Elias paused. "Records Annex at second bell," he said without turning. "We'll see what they give us when two signatures show up instead of one."
"Yours isn't worth less," I said.
"It is to them," he said, not bitter, just cataloging. "Which is why we bring yours."
We went. The clerk who'd helped me last night raised an eyebrow and got out a second ledger without being asked. Two signatures change people's posture; you can feel the way the counter becomes a table. We matched purchase orders to delivery manifests, crossed names with donation ledgers, played the old game of tracing money until it blushed.
"Vendor swap approved by—" the clerk began.
"—Deputy Bursar Ilvine," Elias finished with me. He tapped the page. "The same Ilvine whose cousin sits on the board of North Resin Cooperative."
"Coincidence," the clerk said dryly.
"Coincidences are fine until they hold weight," Elias said. "Then they break."
I folded the copies into my ledger and felt the pen heavy on top like a hand. "We file a request for inspection of the south scaffolding load," I said. "We cite safety and logistics training. We don't mention resin. We let the denial turn into a record."
The clerk smiled without showing teeth. "Ah," she said. "You are a Lunaris boy."
We filed. The clerk stamped. The stamp thudded down like a mallet putting a peg home.
Physical Forms in the afternoon was an exercise in how many times a person can step forward without looking like they're flinching. The instructor corrected me twice without using my name. On my left, the beastkin student repeated the posture until his tail stopped telling on him. On our break he shared his water with a human boy who had run his flask dry and was pretending he preferred thirst. Small treaties. They count.
After drills the notice board by the practice yard had a new posting: Restoration Crew Short Call — two shifts, south face. Credit toward Logistics practical. I signed and saw two other names already etched in damp ink: E. Vale and I. Tarr. Elias, and the dwarf apprentice with copper pins. Good company if something went wrong. Good company if things went right and we wanted them to stay that way.
The south face smelled like wet wood and pride. Scaffolding rose like a mistake someone had spent money on. Tarr checked the anchor sockets with a probe tool that looked older than the building. He grunted in a language that did most of its talking through the nose.
"Soft," he said. "Not failure-soft. Regret-soft. She'll hold, then she'll pretend she was always meant to lean."
"Wind's west," Elias said. "We bring the anchors in two spans. We add a cross-lash there and there. We send anyone who isn't being paid to stand under this away."
The crew boss, a woman with rope burns for jewelry, looked us up and down the way a door judges whether you deserve to enter. She nodded once. "Do it. If the bursar squeals, I will teach him the noise he's capable of."
We set lines. Students ferried planks and pegs in careful relays. The scaffolding creaked like a throat clearing. I hauled and set and hauled again until my hands remembered old calluses they'd lost since the life before this one.
Wind shifted. West carried through the gap between Records and Library, caught a loose board, and made a sound like a drum someone didn't mean to hit. Tarr swore. Elias snapped, "Down and clear!" in a voice without time in it and three kids moved because they liked living. The board skated, the new lash took, the anchor settled with a groan that said it preferred this story.
When it was steady again, my bones ached from the effort of not making a mistake. I climbed down to breathe where the air wasn't so sure of its job. At the lowest tier a drainhead gleamed with moisture. The mouth of the pipe had been scored where a wrench had kissed it too often. Behind the grate, back against the curve, lay another slip of oiled paper.
I crouched, rested my hand on the stone, and felt the resin's tack where it shouldn't be—on the joint where no one honest would put it. I didn't reach in. Not with twenty people looking busy enough to not be watching. "Elias," I said softly.
He crouched beside me, eyes already mapping where this sat in his ledger of indignities. "We'll take it for the ward," he said. "Not to keep. To catalogue."
"Good," I said.
We didn't touch it then. We finished the shift because finishing is its own kind of argument. At the last, the crew boss clapped Elias on the shoulder like he was a tool that passed inspection. She nodded at me, a smaller acknowledgment for the boy with the seal who hadn't gotten in the way.
As the crew dispersed, I doubled back, slid my fingers in past the grate, and took the oiled paper out with as little ceremony as possible. It smelled like pine sap and bad choices. The circle was there again—gear teeth notched around the edge, a central dot, the compass tics. A hand had written a number at the bottom corner this time: 3.
Counting. Someone was counting.
I didn't put it in my room. I took it straight to Ward Office Three and laid it on the desk. The warden with the jaw scar looked at it, looked at me, and did not change expression.
"Found it in a drain at the south face," I said. "Scores on the pipe head. Wrong resin in the wrong place."
He slid a paper envelope over it like a sheet drawn over a body. "Good," he said. He marked a tag, wrote catalogue, not evidence in a hand that had never won awards and didn't need to. "No heroics."
"If I were interested in heroics," I said, "I'd stand under a leaning wall and tell it to respect me."
He almost smiled. "Some walls listen," he said. "Most don't."
On the way out a student I didn't know shouldered past me, head down, the ghost of a dye stain around his wrist where gloves had failed him. Not ink. Dye. The ring like a collar trying to remember being a circle. He smelled of resin that had been mixed by someone who thought patience was optional.
"Friend," I said, as if I were choosing to be generous. "Where did you get that stink?"
He flinched, mumbled something about maintenance, and slid away into a hall he should not have had keys for. The warden watched him go with the same expression people wear for passing storms—aware, not awed.
Evening washed the Academy into softer edges. The dining hall was a boat full of noise. I ate at the edge the way you watch a play from the wing—close enough to see spit catch the light, far enough to move if a prop fell. The noble girl performed for her friends and they rewarded her with attention. Tarr ate like the fork had wronged him. The beastkin boy counted bites as if a meal were a task. Elias wasn't in the hall.
He knocked on my door later without knocking—three raps that said I will knock, but only because we live where doors mean something. I let him in. He stood with his satchel against his leg and his wrist ink smeared into honest maps.
"They denied the inspection," he said, not disappointed, not surprised. "Said the crew boss reported the site stable."
"She isn't wrong," I said. "She made it stable."
"Temporarily," he said. He set three slips on my desk, each with a circle drawn small in the corner and a number—1, 2, 7. "Ward Office Three let me see the catalogue. They filed the one you brought as 3. There are at least seven."
"Seven marks," I said. "Seven what?"
"Drains. Corners. Load points. Places where a failure would look like age, not sabotage." He scrubbed a hand over his face. "If you push too soon, you spook the person placing them. If you wait, you risk one going critical before we map the set."
"So we do both," I said. "We make noise in the right places and silence in the others. We move anchors. We file forms. We watch drains."
He looked at the pen on my desk like it had proposed to him. "Why not just take it to the Rector? Or your father? Why not say this will kill someone and make them care?"
"Because evidence that only a prince brings can be framed as a prince's tantrum," I said. "Because if I shout first, whoever's doing this burns the paper and starts again smarter. Because we need a shape, not a rumor."
He nodded, reluctantly, as if he wanted to argue and had already lost to his better self. "It would be easier if you were wrong," he said.
"It usually is," I said.
He stared at the wall above my desk where the lantern threw steady light. "What's your plan, then?"
"I like habits better than faces," I said. "Faces can be convinced to leave. Habits stay. We build a habit of looking exactly where someone hopes no one will. We learn the hum of drains. We convince a wall to tell us when it intends to lie."
Elias huffed a laugh that had no joy and all agreement. "You know that's not a plan," he said.
"It's a beginning," I said.
He stayed long enough to copy numbers from my receipts packet onto his own paper, then left the way he came—three soft knocks from the inside when he pulled the door shut, as if he were reminding the room it had been visited by someone with intentions.
Midnight came. The harmonic walk gathered smaller tonight—weather dry, curiosity drying with it. The warden with the jaw scar handed us slates and cords, the ritual steadying the way rituals do. We walked the north cloister, the steps setting the chords of the corridor going. The chalk plumb hung straight at the first corner and listed ten degrees to sorrow at the second.
At the third, near the arch that made whispering into sermons, something moved where maintenance should have moved, but wrong. A figure in the half-dark with a tool roll hugged tight. Not the slow confidence of staff that belongs where they are. Not the loud ignorance of students pretending to.
"Evening," I said, friendly. "We're mapping. You?"
He turned his head enough for the lantern to catch his jaw. Young. Non-descript in the way some criminals hope to be and some clerks are forced to be. "Inspection," he said. His voice reached for bored and missed, landing on careful.
"Ward Office Two?" I asked, using the wrong number on purpose.
"Three," he said, too quickly. The warden with the jaw scar was behind us, silent, and made no move to correct him. The boy's tool roll slipped in his grip. A pellet of resin fell out, bounced once. Darker than it should be. Pine-sweet and solvent-sour.
"Let me see your work order," I said pleasantly, as if this were a formality we both regretted.
He ran.
He took the wrong route for someone who knew the campus and the right route for someone who thought shadows are safer than open stone. He cut under the east arch. His feet changed the note of the flagstones. The arch magnified breath and panic into a single tone. If you listen, the world warns you the shape of mistakes.
"Left and then under," I said without raising my voice, and the warden moved, not running, not needing to. I went right, which is a good way to be in the wrong place when the right place collapses. Elias—who had shown up at the last moment with a slate and no patience—took the middle path and didn't bother looking like he wasn't planning to grab someone by the back of the shirt.
The boy slid on the last step, caught himself, lost his tool roll. A coil of stencil film spilled out, slick and oiled, edges notched like teeth. He kept going, lighter now, and disappeared through a service door with a key he should not have had. The door shut on the word why and kept it.
We gathered the roll. The warden picked up the resin pellet with the care of a man holding a snake by the idea of it. "Catalogue," he said. To me: "No heroics."
"Not tonight," I said.
We finished the walk like we hadn't been shown what it was for. At the ward office the warden filed the stencil under the label pattern, unknown, and signed his name harder than he needed to. He didn't ask us to keep quiet. He didn't have to; quiet had become part of the work.
Back in my room the ledger waited. I drew the circle as we'd found it—notches clean, dot centered, tics at the compass points. I wrote 1–7 at the edge and left space for more. I copied numbers from the receipts until they made a tired kind of sense and then stopped before sense turned to conspiracy. My hand ached. My shoulders held the ghost of ropes.
Under the circle I wrote, in the small letters I use when I'm talking to myself without wanting to be caught: A city can be saved by a face or by a habit. Faces get tired. Habits breed. I did not write anything about masks. I did not need to yet.
I blew the lamp out. The room entered its other self—shapes, promise, the window deciding whether to be a mirror. I had almost fallen under when something slid under the door without sound. I sat up, stood on cold stone, and picked it up.
Oiled paper. The same smell. The same quick hand. The same circle. A different addition this time: a tiny slash through the central dot, like an eye blinking. And a line written in neat, unpanicked script: You hear. Good.
I held the paper by its corner until the oil left my fingers shiny. Then I put it in the envelope I had taken from Ward Office Three earlier, sealed it, and wrote on the outside: For catalogue. Not for keeping. I set it by the door where the morning would find it.
Sleep returned slow, like a cat deciding whether to trust the bed again. When it came, it was full of drains and braces and walls leaning the way people lean when they want to seem closer than they are. Somewhere in the space where dreams are paperwork I heard the campus breathing. It sounded like a ledger being opened by a hand that meant to write the same names until they learned.
Three weeks to the assessment. Long enough to learn the building's song. Not long at all.