A knock that knew the rhythm of his name patted the cold room door above as Rowan slid fully into the hatch. The dark took his shoulders, then his hips, then his knees, heat close and patient, brick polished by other backs that had decided to be smaller. Mae's boots whispered ahead; Edda's breath stacked exactly, one on another, like plates put away in the right cupboard.
"Keep left until you taste metal," Mae said, soft as dust. "When it tastes like pennies, you're near his ribs."
"Whose ribs?" Rowan asked.
"The city's," Mae said. "Blyth just lives between them."
The crawl twisted until direction became a rumor. Rowan dragged the satchel tighter to his ribs. The Ledger oil along the seams gave up its cedar hush; he held to it because it behaved. Behind, the cold room's latch argued once and went quiet. Tarve's No traveled through wood like a note folded well.
They reached a narrow breech plate that looked like someone had taught a wall to keep secrets. A wire ran through its lip and into brick. When Mae set her ear to it, the wire told her a story; she nodded. "This is one of his old doors," she said. "It wants a truth more than a signature."
"What kind of truth?" Edda asked, suspicion liking the shape of her mouth.
"The kind you can't funhouse with politeness," Mae said. "One sentence. It learns your breath while you say it. If it wants you, it will keep it."
Rowan pressed his palms to the plate. Cold pawed at his bones. He held the anchor on his tongue and didn't spend it yet. "You?" he asked Edda.
"I'm short on remorse," she said. "This one likes men who can be pried. Let it pry you."
"What happens if I am less interesting than I think?" Rowan said.
"Then for once the world will be kind," Edda said.
He exhaled and spoke before his good sense petitioned for another committee. "I am carrying the city's signature against itself."
The plate listened. He felt the Bind slide a narrow blade between the fibers of his habits, testing for threads worth stealing. It took a cheap one—a small itch to straighten any chair left cocked in an empty room. The loss made silence in him where a fidget had lived. He felt taller by that absence and hated that it felt like height.
The plate released. Mae's grin flashed, quick and unhelpful. "You can keep the city's chair crooked now," she said. "We're nearly to the rib."
They crabbed on to a junction where the crawl yawned into a vertical shaft, iron-runged and very sure of its age. A thread of faint air licked upward; it tasted like chalk and old ink. Mae slotted her foot on the first rung and climbed. Rowan followed; the satchel thudded once against his spine and then learned better manners. Edda came last, the wrench-key riding her hip like a tame sin.
Halfway up, the wardline coughed—bass and distant—and the rungs hummed their answer into Rowan's fingers. He counted himself steady. The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift. He lifted the word and his knees together. The shaft narrowed; the ancient iron learned their weight and decided not to make a scene.
At the top, a trap let go with the reluctance of a bureaucrat leaving a party. Mae eased it up. A cone of dim fell in, pewter and polite. Beyond, a stair waited: narrow, stone, the treads dipped at the edge by one man's habit of pausing.
"Blyth's," Mae said. "His feet made those hollows. He thinks with his heels."
"And with minutes," Edda said. "Go."
They stepped out into the Comptroller's private stair, and the undercity's heat forgot them with relief.
The air here had the clean sour of limestone that had been taught to keep counsel. Somewhere above, a shoe scuffed, then stopped apologizing. The stair rose into a throat of shadow and deliberate architecture.
A ward-clerk dozed on a stool like a punctuation mark misplaced on purpose. He had a ledger on his knees and a quill asleep in his fist. A metal rod leaned against the wall near his ankle, the polite cousin of a baton. He woke into a blink and a correction when Mae tapped the rod with her boot.
"Lost?" he asked, as if he'd been hired to make the word kind.
"Found," Edda said, stepping where the light could find her. "Custody for Blyth."
The clerk's gaze went to the satchel with automatic training and to the oil-seal with something like relief. He inhaled the cedar and put his mouth around the taste of proper. "Smells like it belongs here," he said.
"It does," Rowan said, and felt the sentence square inside him. He had worn a lot of words that tried to be clothes; this one fit like a spine.
"Name?" the clerk asked.
"Rowan Mire," he said. "Ledger, reconciliation."
The clerk nodded as if the name had been on a list he kept folded behind his tongue for such minutes. "You've been angry at our numbers in public," he said, without malice. "I envied you the clarity."
"Envy me later," Rowan said. "Let us through now."
The clerk's mouth considered insubordination and preferred self-preservation. He stood, set the metal rod aside with respect rather than affection, and knocked on the inner door in a pattern that meant don't be startled, but do be ready to be. A voice answered through the wood, dry and exact.
"Who uses my stair?"
"Tarve's perfumed boy," the clerk called. "And Edda Crane. And someone who smiles with knives."
"Let them up," said the voice. "I'm bored of hearing other people's summaries."
The clerk lifted the latch. The stair yielded the rest of its shadow.
"Good man," Edda told him as they passed.
"Sometimes," he said. "The rest is accident."
They climbed. Each step bit their heels, then spat them up one higher. Rowan felt the satchel's weight argue his shoulder back into honesty. He measured the space between his breath and panic and found it pleasingly small.
When the door at the top opened, it wasn't on grandeur but on a room that had taught dignity to sit down: narrow windows, three lamps, two tables stacked with opinions. Comptroller Blyth stood with his hips at the edge of a desk like a man who'd wear furniture if that's what the city needed. He had the face of someone who had spent his life telling storms where to be and accepting that storms would pretend not to hear.
"Ah," Blyth said, taking them in as a column takes sums: left, right, total. "The city's worst intentions arrive smelling correct."
Rowan set the satchel on the desk's corner, carefully, like a hand you rehearse shaking before touching someone you intend to disappoint. Blyth's fingers found the Ledger seal; he pressed the corner, and the oil answered with its cedar amen. The Comptroller nodded once. He didn't smile. He let his mouth do math.
"Show me the part you think I will deny," Blyth said.
Edda slid the index and the summary into reach, then, after a heartbeat, slid the oily negative from the catwalk grate as if it were a card she might have used somewhere else and chose to spend here. Rowan passed the transit slip with the wrong R and the double-press wax. Blyth let paper turn him into a metronome. His thumb tightened at comfort; it didn't twitch at convenience. His jaw clicked once at double-press and then remembered dignity.
"You say the unit is wrong," Blyth said. "You refuse to write the word."
"People," Rowan said. The word landed in the room as if the floor had been waiting to learn how to hold it.
Blyth's eyes lifted the way lamplight does when someone opens a door in winter. He looked at Rowan the way men look at a map they suddenly trust. "Good," he said. "Say it again."
"People," Rowan said.
"Now say mine," Blyth said.
Rowan's mouth wanted to say the city's. He closed it and then opened it on the edge of a different honesty. "Yours," he said, heavy and clean. "Under your ledger."
Blyth's gaze clicked into a new frame. "Better," he said. "If I take this into my ledger, it becomes an argument between me and the sea. The sea usually wins. Tonight we will ask it to work for me."
Mae's grin leaked around the corner of the door; she had planted herself half in, half out, as if the room had been built to be eavesdropped. Edda folded her arms; she had a truth ready and wondered whether the room deserved it.
Blyth drew a small bell from a drawer—not the watchman's, not the church's. This bell had been taught manners. He put it down without ringing it. "Emergency Directive Thirty-Seven B is mine to renew," he said. "I have withheld it three times without apology. If I renew it again under fresh assay, I require a sworn tally to stand in rooms I cannot fit into."
"What cost?" Edda asked, practical as a ledger page.
"Bind," Blyth said, not unkind. "Lumen if you like noise; I would prefer Bind. It will take small choices from the man who carries it. It makes him useful and later very sad."
"Later," Rowan said.
"Do you know how to tell when a clerk is brave?" Blyth asked the room without moving his eyes from Rowan. "He uses later like a stone and not a promise." He placed his palm flat on the folio. "Who else knows?"
"Rell's people," Edda said. "Stormward hands. Calder knows the size of the stair to stand in. Tarve knows the smell of his future letter. The Wick knows the shape of Rowan's voice."
Blyth's mouth tightened at Wick. "We will speak of the Wardens with candles when the sea chooses not to listen," he said. "For now: we are fresh assay. We act."
He drew the bell closer, didn't ring it. "I will call a Jury of Doors," he said. "It gives you shelter for one hour—the time it takes the city to decide who it is. After that, the doors choose their favorites again."
"We need the hour," Edda said.
"You need more than that," Blyth said. "You need the habit of being believed. I cannot legislate that in an afternoon." He looked at Rowan again. "Will you stand as sworn tally?"
Rowan looked at the satchel, at the oil sheen dignifying its seams, at Edda's ink ladder, at Mae making a coin toss of her own patience. He felt the clean hole where warmth had been. He measured the chair-straightening itch that was gone and found himself not missing it. He considered how many small preferences he could afford to spend before he became a Wick who wore a necktie.
"Yes," he said.
"Anchor?" Blyth asked.
"The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift," Rowan said, and the Comptroller looked briefly like a man who remembered a particular piece of wood and a particular winter.
"Good," Blyth said. "Then listen."
He spoke a Bind in a tone that had taught budgets where to kneel. The words felt like screws and threads and the back of the hand that had slapped the city awake so many mornings it thought it had learned punctuality. Rowan felt the command take the edges of his cheap self—the way he ranked pen nibs when none were needed, the way he chose routes around puddles so his cuffs stayed correct—and file them down. The satchel grew heavier in a way he trusted.
"Your small habits will return when I say so," Blyth said. "Or they won't. Apologies are not in my department."
"Accepted," Rowan said, though he wasn't sure that was the verb.
The wardline coughed again—louder, nearer, annoyed by being ignored. One of the lamps flinched. Paper on the desk's edge lifted and set itself down like an old man changing a song.
"Fresh assay," Blyth said to the room, to the desk, to the bell, to the sea. "We require the truth to move faster than convenience."
Blyth lifted the manners-bell, and for a breath Rowan saw the room choose its posture. The windows straightened. The lamps found their lampshades. The door unlearned the last three hands that had insulted it. Blyth rang the bell once.
It wasn't a sound; it was an agreement. Somewhere beneath the floor, old hinges woke remembering oaths. In the stone behind Blyth's desk, a hairline seam admitted it had been a seam all along. The stair behind Rowan corrected its spiral by a degree. Even Mae's grin flattened into something like respect.
"The Jury of Doors recognizes the emergency," Blyth said, voice even. "One hour of witness without interruption, for the bearer of the Ledger and for those who walk with him. On my signature, under my risk."
The seam in the stone widened to a panel the color of unlit pewter. It tasted the air, scented the Ledger oil, and sighed a permission that had not been spoken since before Rowan had learned to write neat. "Proceed," it said, the s in its voice rough with disuse.
Edda placed the oily negative onto Blyth's desk as if an altar had been hurried into being. "This shows a thread that remembers a heartbeat," she said. "This room will learn that it prefers not to."
"I prefer many things," Blyth said, measuring the hour against the city. "I choose very few."
Footsteps took the last of the stair in a sequence that meant someone had calculated how much to weigh. Lysa shouldered through the door first, hand under her belt still disciplining its fingers. Calder followed with his hat not on his head and his mouth already choosing a sentence.
"Bought you nine minutes," Lysa said. "Tarve made the door fall in love with her handwriting."
"Dara?" Mae asked.
"Playing saints and liars," Lysa said. "She's better at both than anyone I hate."
Calder set his palms out like a man offering to let a dog smell whether he is worth being bitten. "Consular escort en route with the wrong courage," he said. "Rell will spend an hour trying not to look personally interested and then will decide she cannot bear it."
"Then we use the hour before she learns boredom," Blyth said. He looked at Rowan, not to flatter him but to identify the hinge around which the next minutes would swing. "Sworn tally, speak: what must this city carry across itself before the bell is done?"
Rowan looked past him at the pewter panel's patient seam, at the lamp that had gathered itself to be brave, at the satchel that had decided to be a weight he would sharpen into use. He heard the Wick's polite hello in the brick behind memory. He felt Edda's lack of remorse turning her steadier and meaner. He measured Lysa's lost soap and how she didn't let the loss own her mouth. He saw Calder calculating how to keep his hands clean and find that the math did not balance.
"Names," Rowan said. "Routes. Presses. And the sentence that pulls the rug out from the word comfort."
"Good," Blyth said. "Then we will call the routes first, the names second, and let the sentence sit like a knife on a saucer until someone tries to pick it up."
The door to the stair gave one polite rattle, then two less polite, then a practiced attempt at being inevitable. The manners-bell on Blyth's desk looked at Blyth as if to ask whether it might go from witness to weapon. Blyth rested one finger on its rim and told it not yet without words.
"Proceed," said the pewter seam again, a little hungrier now. "Make the truth move."
Rowan opened the satchel. The cedar breathed out. Paper made its quiet, clean sounds. He felt the Bind sit down in his habits and take off its shoes. He placed the wrong R, the double-press, the parish sunburst that leaned the wrong way on the weeks that mattered. He put the oily negative where Blyth could see it without seeing everything.
The latch on the stair jumped once, then twice. Calder tilted his head like a man taking dictation from footsteps. "That is Rell's personal patience," he said. "We are about to be improved upon."
"Let her," Edda said. "I like a villain who arrives on time."
The wardline coughed, enormous, annoyed, as if the sea had stood up in a small room and banged its knee on a table. The lamps dipped and caught themselves. The jury seam widened another hair.
"Speak," it said.
Rowan did. "People," he said again, because the room was listening, and because repetition is how you train doors. "The city is rendering people."
The door on the stair stopped pretending to knock and chose to arrive. The latch rolled. Metal spoke the grammar of intrusion. Blyth's finger lifted from the bell. The hour looked at itself in a mirror and decided whether to be long or short.