Rowan swallowed, found his anchor, and stepped toward the bite.
Mae's arm slid through the hatch first, then her grin, then the rest of her, quick and folded like a letter shoved under a door. "Hands and knees," she whispered. "Vein's shy. It only likes the unimportant parts of you."
"It'll hate me," Calder said softly. "I think I'm important."
"It'll love taking that from you," Mae replied, not unkind, and slipped into the black.
Heat pressed close, the kind that wants to be a conversation. The tunnel rose no higher than Rowan's shoulders; its brick had been rounded by people who decided to be smaller for a living. He tucked the satchel high along his ribs and followed Mae's shuffle. Behind him came Lysa, one hand wedged under her belt to keep the fingers honest; Edda's breath was precise and unhurried; Calder's hat came last, in his hand, as if dignity were for different rooms.
The first tooth was a ring of old copper set into brick, a halo left behind by a century of service. It hummed without sound. Mae tapped it with her middle knuckle—once, twice—and paused long enough for time to remember itself. "This one likes pattern," she murmured. "Four and a lift."
Rowan felt the tunnel's attention graze his throat, gathering the shape of his voice before he made it. He kept his mouth closed and counted bricks instead. The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift. He lifted the word under his tongue. The tooth eased. Mae slid through; the rest followed one by one, breath passing over breath like papers through careful hands.
Half a body-length on, the air thinned. The second tooth wasn't a ring but a net—fine threads stretched across the dark, each holding a drop of oil that had decided to be a mirror. Lysa halted; her knuckles brushed glass by accident. The droplets quivered and made faces. Not hers. Not anyone's. Faces that looked like permissions.
"Echo weave," Edda breathed. "Old security. It trades you recognition for recognizable."
"If I burn through, it'll take a name," Lysa said, her throat clicking.
"It will," Edda said.
"I'll go," Rowan whispered, surprising himself. "I'm already a ledger boiled to the columns."
"Slow," Edda told him. "And leave it nothing you can't function without."
Rowan pressed his lips to cool brick and breathed through his teeth. The weave tasted like a room waiting for confession. He thought about the small habits that made his face his: a certain frown for sloppy sums; the way he crouched to read without admitting he should sit; the polite apology he gave to furniture. Then, with a care reserved for lifting blot from a page, he let the apology go.
The threads stirred. The oil drops blinked once, twice, and let him pass as if he had always belonged. He felt lighter by the half-ounce of a habit he had worn since boyhood. He did not miss it. He disliked that he did not miss it.
Lysa came after, her inked wrist angled inward to catch her own lattice at the corner of her eye and hold herself in place. Calder followed, almost smiling. "It didn't like me," he said softly. "But it recognized the shape of my job."
"It recognizes excuses," Mae said. "And you're a portable one."
They crawled until the vein remembered how to bend. Behind them, bells put questions into stone: not the watchman's polite thrum, a hunting tone learning turns by touch.
"Dara?" Lysa breathed.
"Dara's ahead," Mae said. "If you're hearing that, it's because she taught them to be proud of the wrong door."
"Good," Edda said. "We need pride. Pride stands still when courage runs."
The third tooth hung across the path in a flap of leather nailed to a hinge that had rusted into philosophy. It carried more authority than anything that tattered should. Calder reached to lift it; the leather slapped his fingers with intimate disdain.
"Bind flap," Edda said. "It wants a phrase to marry."
Rowan had words to spare and small preferences to lose. He set his palm under the flap's cold edge and spoke, careful as screws: "Assay before committee. Committee later. Bind to passage under Article Nine."
The leather warmed against his hand and let go, remembering it had been a door once and would consent to be one again. The pull at the shabby corners of him increased—what tea he would take with sugar next month, which pen he called the good pen, whether he straightened chairs when nobody watched. He let those go into the flap like tax.
"Still with us?" Lysa asked.
"I'm developing cheaper tastes," Rowan said.
"I'll teach you worse," Calder murmured, crawling past with a courtesy you could spend.
"Save flirting for rooms that care," Mae said. "This one will eat it and leave you salt."
The floor dipped into a pool that hadn't decided whether it was water or air compressed into a worse shape. The surface showed them as they would look if they had been braver earlier. Rowan kept his eyes on Mae's heels and followed the line of her patience along right-hand bricks where ancient handholds had been worn into confession.
"Short breaths," Edda said, taking none. "There's a sepulchral pull in the middle; it eats remorse first."
"You said you'd spent yours," Calder whispered.
"I said I would miss it for an hour," Edda answered. "We're not done with the hour."
The pull reached up his arms when Rowan's chest was halfway over the pool. It sought the part of him that would later say I should have, tried to salt it into silence. He thought of the unbadged man's hat beading rain, of Lysa's ink ladder, of the Wick's polite hello. Remorse hovered, hand over latch. He kept it. He stepped. The pull let him keep it because it was busy with Edda.
She made a sound then, not a cry, more like a hinge that finally learned it would be asked to move every day. Lysa turned under her breath. "Edda?"
"It took what it could find," Edda said, steady. "We will talk about what it found after we are alive."
Calder slid between them and the pool as if he could hide their wrists behind his hat. "Administrative cover," he said, shaping his voice into precedent with no heat. "Emergency Directive Thirty-Seven B: non-laminar conditions; protective passage to fresh assay; any gate that refuses is off calendar and off budget."
Mae snorted, delighted. The pull sulked; the water showed them as they were—dirtier, more useful. They climbed out with the gracelessness of men who hadn't earned grace.
Next came honest teeth: a rat grid that had never heard of rats and had developed political ambitions. Its points were dull but many, turning of their own will as if the tunnel tasted the moments that passed.
"I can jam that," Mae said, weighing her knife.
"You can," Edda said. "And every gate downstream will ask you why. Answer once and they all hear."
Lysa's jaw set. "I'll whisper to it." The words cost enough that everyone heard the invoice before the act. She drew a pinch of black powder from the pocket near her ink and dabbed it under her tongue. Echo. Not heat, but a portion of faces traded for obedience.
"Lysa," Rowan said.
She read him and answered without kindness. "I can lose a small name. Pick which."
He was born to choose without wanting. He glanced at her hands—the faint tremor still arguing—at the ladder the ink made along her wrist, anchors carved into herself to hold through other losses. "Take the smell of last winter's soap," he said. "Not the word. The scent."
A real, mean smile loved him for picking well. "Done."
She leaned to the turning teeth and breathed in the powdered dark. When she spoke, she spoke in someone's father's voice, then someone's son's, then her own, then a shadow of her own that made Rowan's skin learn cold. "Let me through," the three of them said. "We belong to the hand that oils you."
The grid shuddered as if memory had torn and needed mending. It opened a mouth the size of a shoulder and then a little wider because some doors respect style. Lysa slipped through and stood on the far side with eyes bright and mouth oddly set.
"What did you lose?" Edda asked.
Lysa shut her eyes and tilted her head like a dog trying to remember a doorbell. "Soap," she said. A laugh sat under the word and did not come out. "My aunt boiled it with salt and orange peel in winter. And now—" She opened her eyes. "Now it's a word without a handle."
"I'll remember it," Rowan said. "If you want me to."
"I want you to," she said, and slid her palm along brick until it read her skin like a signature. "Go."
They went. The teeth spun behind Calder as if to close on what he might yet owe. He laid the flattest part of his voice across them. "Off budget," he told the turning metal. "Out of calendar." The teeth slowed, convinced. It is astonishing what doors will believe if you say it as minutes.
The vein's last bend climbed into stone so chill it had learned to taste copper. Mae shouldered a slab from beneath, and a square of honest light spilled into the low world. Dust motes took their turn as clergy. Silence up here had a ledger's politeness and a drawer's scent.
Rowan eased his head out first and found himself beneath a lattice of shelving that made lanes out of history. The Ledger Cold Room wore its chill like a custom. Stacks carried tins and boxes tagged with the small bureaucratic poetry of dates and initials. Against the far wall, a glass-fronted cabinet glowed milk-faint where salt-lamps liked to sleep.
A woman stood with a ledger half open on her palm, her thumb tucked into the page like someone refusing to lose a place. She had shoulders of patience and a mouth that knew each flavor of No. Her gaze took them in without raising alarm or lowering respect. "You found a creative entrance," she observed.
"Emergency Directive Thirty-Seven B," Calder said, too bright and too fast.
"Mm," she said, not to him. Her eyes went to the seal pressed in oil on Rowan's satchel—a clean kiss from a Ledger tray. She nodded once. "Cold room permits the bearer of the proper smell."
"Rowan Mire," he said. "Ledger Office, reconciliation. Papers for deposit and custody under Blyth's hand."
"Tarve," she said. "Custodian. Hand me the custody log. Not your satchel. Your satchel belongs to the city. It will not be reassured by my fingers."
Rowan set the leather book on the counter. Tarve looked at the date and the space left for Blyth's signature and did not smile; her eyes softened a fraction. "You left room for a refusal. Good clerks do."
"City taught me to expect it," Rowan said.
"City also taught you what to do next," she answered. "Show me the index page and the summary."
He did. She read the words the way a mechanic listens to an engine. At comfort and convenience, her thumb tapped once, as if on a bell. At double-press wax, a tiny muscle in her jaw worked and settled.
"Which one is the copy?" she asked.
"The copy is a lie built for bells," Edda said, stepping into the light as if she owned it. "It's walking the wrong corridor to make the right one quiet."
"Good," Tarve said. "Put the real one where it belongs and let me decide how long it is safe to belong there." She turned to the cabinet. "Calder. Stop trying to be the loudest person in this quiet room."
"I'm terrible at it," he admitted, and actually dropped a notch. "Thank you."
Tarve unlatched the cabinet with the automatic devotion of someone who loves small things done right. Cold breathed out like a rumor planning to be news. "Two boxes," she said. "One for the parts you would show your mother. One for the parts you would not show your priest."
"I have neither," Rowan said.
"Then show me what you don't want to explain to your future self," Tarve said. "He will be a harsher judge than either."
Edda's approval was so small it could have been an itch. Rowan moved the rubbings, blue press codes, onion-skins into the second box. The summary and index he placed in the first. Tarve watched his hands without liking or disliking them.
"Chain-of-custody," she said, setting her book on the counter. "Your signature. Mine. Blyth's when he arrives to find out why the world thinks it can make him late."
Rowan took the pen she offered. For a breath the lack of warmth in his fingertips tried to become clumsiness; he met it with muscle memory and pride. His name went on the line without tremor. It felt like writing inside stone.
A ripple moved through the cabinet glass—air remembering bells. Tarve didn't look up. "They'll come score our silence in a moment," she said. "Put your hat back on, Calder."
"I'm not wearing it," he said.
"Exactly."
The bell that touched the cold room wasn't a tone so much as a permission: we are allowed to enter; therefore the door will enjoy letting us. Tarve slid a metal bar into place with the gentle certainty of a woman tucking a child. "This bar has never stopped anything," she said. "It reminds the door what it's for."
Bells worked the latch from the far side. A polite rattle. Then a less polite one. Calder cleared his throat and activated a voice he should only use with supervision. "Directive Thirty-Seven B, renewal off calendar pending fresh assay. Anyone opening this door before the custodian says you may will write a paragraph about budget in front of Blyth."
Silence poured through the wood. Bitter, like men doubting paragraphs can hurt. Rowan could almost hear the debate: We could break the door; we could also break our week. A softer knock followed, the kind that wants to know if a room will embarrass it.
Tarve did not move. "If you must sing, sing somewhere else," she said conversationally. "This room has receipts."
Lysa stood with her back to a shelf, the ink in her wrist ladder gone quiet as if listening to itself. Her mouth held the ghost of orange and salt—the soap she had chosen to lose. She kept her eyes on Rowan's satchel in Tarve's hands and Edda's profile where bones kept their opinions.
The latch tried again. "Custodian Tarve?" a voice asked, doing its best polite.
"Present," Tarve said.
"Consular escort, by Stormward convenience," the voice said. "We've had a report of an unlogged transfer from a mortuary annex."
"Report your verbs to someone who collects them," Tarve said. "This room does not keep convenience on the shelf."
"Open, please."
"No."
A hissed consultation beyond the door—the kind men have when one of them discovers policy has teeth. Calder lifted his eyebrows at Rowan, asking if this counted as entertainment. Rowan answered with none of his face and most of his posture.
Tarve leaned across the counter with the ease of a woman who knows where she looks good. "Listen very carefully," she said, low enough for the door to carry without the corridor pretending she'd shouted. "If you try to put a bell in this room, I will write a letter that makes your children's children smell of budget cuts. If you try to put a boot in this room, I will teach the boot to be a paperweight. If you try to put your face in this room, you will learn my name and hate having learned it. Do we understand one another?"
The door decided to be impressed and was afraid to show it. Footsteps retreated a measured yard. Somewhere above, a different bell—lighter, less official—laughed once and stopped as if slapped.
"Dara," Mae breathed from the hatch grate, where she'd stayed half below to listen. "She's painting a circle round them."
"Good," Edda said. "Buy us the minute."
Tarve slid the second box—the one for priests—deep into the cabinet and turned the key with a click that wrote itself into the air. "Your minute," she told Rowan. "Use it like a thief."
He glanced at Lysa. She nodded toward the corridor and then toward the hatch. "Split," she mouthed. "I'll keep the door's attention while you crawl. Mae takes you to a stair Blyth uses when he pretends to be surprised by news."
Calder tipped an invisible brim. "I'll walk with the attention. We know each other's bad habits."
Edda looked at Tarve. "You are owed," she said simply.
"I am counting," Tarve answered, and for the first time her mouth smiled a fraction. "Bring me something that makes my shelves angrier. I like to hear them gossip."
Lysa moved first, casual as a janitor. Calder fell in step, the exact measure of a man who belongs to rooms instead of people. Tarve drifted to meet the door like a friend and not a barricade. Mae lifted the hatch. Heat breathed up, patient, expecting.
Rowan swung the satchel to his back and put his palms to the floor. The hatch lip kissed his knuckles. "The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift," he whispered, because the phrase had carried him through teeth and would not mind carrying him through this. He lowered into the dark.
Behind him, three knuckles rapped the cold room door—not a bellman's, not a watchman's. A knock that knew the rhythm of his name.