…and stepped into the throat.
The passage pinched like a gullet that had learned to swallow complaints. Edda shouldered the iron door back into its seat; the wrench-key clicked, a neat little lie closing over honest steel. Air moved in thin sheets. Metal sweated brine and old bone. The floor held a shallow dish as if the city did not trust liquids with decisions.
"Walk close," Edda said. "If your shoulder isn't almost brushing, you're leaving space for trouble to stand."
Calder obeyed and made it look like a choice. "Any name I shouldn't say if we meet a man who collects doors?"
"Don't say Sabine unless you mean to end the night fast," Edda said. "Don't say gift. Men who like orders think gifts are receipts waiting to happen."
Rowan let the satchel settle against his ribs and counted breaths against the slow thrum living in the brick. Warmth was still a ledger entry marked paid. He touched the words anyway, because touching was work and work behaved. The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift. The phrase made friction, and friction felt like ownership.
The passage kinked and offered a rib of metal bolted into the wall. Lysa scraped her knuckles along it—a sailor's recognition. Ahead, a pear-skin sheen hung in the air, too regular for fog, too patient for steam.
"Gate," Edda said. "Old style. It hums and it eats what hums back."
A wire lattice stretched across the throat, coins soldered in its mesh, each stamped with sigils that made language look like machinery. A side plaque offered help like a threat: Assay Signature Required.
"Payment," Calder said.
"Recognition," Edda corrected. "Built before signatures got lazy. It wants a purity profile from a year the city still liked itself. Give it anything else and it does a trick with heat and air that feels theological."
"Can we go around?" Rowan asked.
"If we go around, we arrive in a room with more hats than decisions," Lysa said. "Through is faster and angrier."
Edda rolled her shoulders. "I can tune it down, but the cost is for a bigger sin."
"I've got Ash-Glass," Lysa said. "Ring it soft. Enough to fool the lattice into thinking we're only tired."
"What's the invoice?" Rowan asked.
"Noise. Fingers forget they're a team. I can stand it."
Edda's gaze flicked to the ink ladder inside Lysa's wrist. "You'll smear. You'll hate me for an hour."
"I already hate you," Lysa said. "With affection."
Calder set his palm near the mesh, withdrew it before it taught him humility. "Will it taste quickglass if it gets close?"
"It can tell a story that moves too fast," Edda said. "Don't feed it anything brave."
Lysa palmed a thin vial; a shimmer refused to be water or brass. She warmed it in her fingers, snapped its neck, and a color that wasn't exactly a color spread across the mouth. "Two-stroke, polite," she murmured, sketching a tiny sideways glyph that married Kint's shove to Lumen's hush. No words. A pressed, private grammar.
The lattice trembled like a choir hearing its note from far down a nave. Coins shifted from suspicious to superior. The hum changed key, considered embarrassment. The pear-skin parted with the sigh of fabric giving up to better hands.
"Walk," Edda said. "Don't touch. It forgives nothing."
They went. As Rowan passed, the hairs on his arms rose and lay down in a sequence like someone reading a book in the wrong order. Lysa's breath stuttered; she steadied it on stone. When she wiggled her fingers, they belonged to different hands. "Fine," she told nobody. "We keep the big stupid for later."
On the far side, the gate re-knit itself, smug. Edda spared it one look. "Don't thank it," she said. "Old things learn vanity."
The vanity woke. A twist in the hum slid under Rowan's skin and sat behind his ears. Coins brightened—not with light, with attention. Air thinned by half a breath, the way corridors do when they prepare to owe nobody anything.
"Quickglass scent in the paper," Edda said, already moving. "It liked the rubbings."
"We didn't feed it the satchel," Lysa said.
"It doesn't eat satchels," Edda said. "It eats stories."
The mesh sang one sour note that made Rowan's jaw clench. The sheen drifted forward, curiosity sharpening into appetite.
Calder's voice stepped into the space the air had abandoned—loud, conversational, a man reading orders out of the room. "Maintenance test," he told the plaque. "Defunded in a better decade. Brittle before brave." He pitched a hymnier register: "Assay Signature Required. Emergency convenience. Committee later. Panic is a draft; close it."
"He hymns now," Lysa muttered.
"He gives it what it recognizes," Edda said. "I'll give it what it remembers." She set two fingers on rust and spoke a word that had never wanted to be language. The sound was an absence that had learned to walk. "Still."
The hum folded inward like a muscle deciding not to shake. The pear-skin sank and sulked invisible. Winter stepped into Rowan's bones and decided to stay awhile.
"What did you pay?" he asked.
"Sepulchre takes fear, then disgust, then remorse," Edda said evenly. "I'm out of disgust. I'll miss remorse for an hour."
"That sounds useful," Calder said.
"It isn't beautiful," Edda replied. "Move."
They rounded a bend into a room pretending to be a corridor. Pipes webbed overhead, labeled by a hand that hadn't expected to be read. A ladder climbed the far wall into baked air. Edda caught its side and looked up. "Across there. South assay kisses the refinery's back tooth. If we're boring, boredom buys us a minute."
"Be the city's favorite saint," Lysa said. "And do not ring."
They climbed. Rowan felt the Lumen hole yawning politely, a teacup easy to ruin with the wrong pour. The rungs were greasy, but steel likes clerks; it tells you where to put weight. He counted—not for comfort, but to build a spine when you're short one.
The catwalk was a narrow thought bolted into bad air. Below, vats fretted like skin with a fever. Vents breathed; fans denied; a chain clacked the way an argument clacks when everyone agrees and nobody is right. The glow wasn't Lumen-clean. It had the sullen mood of glass taught a faster song.
"At the far end," Edda said with her chin. A funnel fed a steady thread of shine into ingot molds. The thread twitched—alive more than molten. Hair rehearsed standing.
"That's not your dead," Lysa said quietly.
"That's someone's living," Edda said. "Or was."
"If that's true," Calder said, breath smoothing itself, "no hymn in Karst will paper it."
"They printed new paper," Edda said. "They called it comfort."
Rowan forced himself to look without looking away. The satchel dug his ribs and made him a shape. He noted which valve sighed when the thread thickened, which lever stuttered before each mold filled, which worker looked away first. He would write it later until it named itself.
Edda knelt, unrolled oiled parchment, pressed it to the grate, and lifted an oily negative: valves like veins, mouths like small hunger, the thread's path like handwriting. She folded it, slid it away with the proprietary bruise of a woman quickened by theft.
Footsteps climbed a ladder that wasn't theirs. A foreman's brushed hat rose before his face. Two workers followed, eyes trained to avoid ownership.
Calder stepped into the foreman's future and filled it. He didn't raise his hands; he raised posture. "Inspection," he said in a tone two departments share when they want to be plausible to both. "Emergency clause. Committee later."
The foreman's mouth hovered between obedience and pride. Edda hated that moment even without remorse to soften it.
"Forms," the foreman said, but he made it sound like please.
"Filed," Calder answered. "Downstairs, where questions behave. Would you like this room to be a question?"
Lysa slid one step so any hand reaching for the satchel would find her first. Her fingers still didn't like one another; they had learned to pretend. The workers looked where workers look: the floor for help, the fan for lies, the hat for teeth.
"Assay before committee," Rowan said softly—to the bolts, to the welds. Rooms pick favorites.
"Who's the clerk?" the foreman asked everyone and no one.
"Ledger," Calder said. "And mortuary. And me. If you need a third word, use now."
"Now," the foreman repeated, and the word couldn't find a coat. He gazed past Calder at the thread and gave his eyes a day off. "Fine. Do what you came to do, but don't touch anything that bites back."
"Everything bites back," Edda said.
The wardline coughed.
Not a lamp-line shiver—bass knuckles inside and out, a double-hand on a city's chest. Vats jittered; the thread stuttered; the fan forgot its sentence and picked the next. Far off, something cathedral-sized said no and meant not yet.
"Upstairs," Edda said. "Now means now."
They turned for the far ladder. The foreman edge-stepped, taking more space than the catwalk allowed. "There's a toll for walking past my wages," he tried. "Papers or the kind of forgetting that makes a week possible."
Calder almost spent Sabine and saved that coin. "I'll owe you," he said instead, flat as a stamp. "When minutes need a sentence shaped, bring your hands. I'll bring a pen."
The foreman disliked that he liked that. He didn't move and moved. "Mind the step," he said magnanimously as a puddle.
They passed. One worker watched boots. The other watched Edda's face and learned enough to become trouble someday. Lysa shouldered Rowan to the ladder, then deferred to gravity's superior claims. Calder came last, reading footsteps like ledgers.
Rowan put his foot on the first rung and felt the catwalk remember to hate weight. He touched his anchor harder. The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift. He lifted at Steps. The rung agreed.
From the south wall, in piping shadow, a voice spoke like a child wearing someone else's patience.
"Hello," it said, perfectly polite. "You are making the line untidy."
Men freeze when a story they don't tell wakes in their house. Lysa went very still. Calder's hat brim lifted not to see, but to be seen behaving.
"Don't look," Edda said, too late.
Rowan looked. Humans look. In a recess that failed to be an alcove stood a Wick, framed by iron and hymn. Chains ran from shoulders to a pylon whose light was not a light but the memory of one. Skin glowed like milk taught carefulness. Its face carried three expressions at once, none in charge. The voice came out as if a room had borrowed a child.
"Please return to your places," it said. "Useful endings require tidy beginnings."
"Hello," Rowan answered, hating his own politeness. "We'll be quick."
"Rowan," it said, correct as a ledger. "The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift."
The rung tapped his bones with agreement. Lysa didn't look at him. She looked at the pylon's base where light pooled like breath about to become a word.
"Candle," she whispered, and the Wick's braided voices answered: a child wanting to stir the batter; a clerk wanting to see the page; a mother saying the smoke alarm is a false prophet.
"Hello," the Wick said again, brighter. "Do you need help?"
Edda's hand came sideways on Rowan's arm, not gentle. "Don't let it pull a yes out of you. It hears the shape first, not the word. Move."
Calder did something new with his mouth—softened it. "We're all right," he told the Wick, and it sounded nearly true. "Hold steady for us."
"I will hold steady," the Wick said, and the pylon thrummed like kettles that believe. Vats smoothed. The thread's twitch learned a smaller radius. The fan remembered its sentence and spoke respectfully.
"Thank you," Rowan said before he could strangle the impulse. The word cost nothing and everything. The hole inside him stayed tidy and lonelier. He climbed.
They went up in a chain—Lysa first, the satchel slung under her rib as if grafted; Rowan counting rungs; Edda grim, preferring to pay with remorse and be done; Calder last, reading futures off heels.
The foreman inventoried losses against favors and decided he could live to regret both. Workers stared at light because the room had given permission. The Wick looked where Rowan's voice had been and held the pylon steady, rope and hymn and machine writing a sentence that wanted to be lullaby and had forgotten the rest.
At the landing, iron narrowed again to the color of reasons. Edda had the wrench-key out before the door knew it wanted to be itself. The lock recognized her the way old tools recognize a pair of hands. The door unmade its no and breathed them into a line not drawn on any map Rowan had ever held.
Behind them, the Wick's polite voice drifted up like steam. "Please go safely," it said. "Useful endings make tidy sleep."
Rowan's anchor hummed under his tongue and tried to learn a different ending. Calder leaned in without touching. "You see why later can't be never," he said for the hole inside Rowan that had started to want a shape. "When the city speaks like that, someone must answer on paper."
Rowan found his breath and put it in the right order. The hole stayed clean. The world did not. He preferred that truth.
"Keep moving," Edda said, and the iron door shut its reasons behind them.