The hour held. The knife waited. The saucer did not shake.
It shook on the inside first. The pewter seam drew a breath that tasted like old oil and oaths, then spoke in a voice an inch lower, as if the city had leaned closer to hear itself. "Witness concluding."
Rell's blue bell cast a small, obedient shadow across Blyth's desk. Voss's knuckles held their insult like a coin he hadn't decided to spend. Blyth's finger rested on the manners-bell, not ringing, making the room practice patience.
Footsteps slid back through the door without asking permission to be dramatic. Mae, quick as rumor, and beside her Lysa, hair damp with effort, a small corked vial between forefinger and thumb. She lifted the glass; the contents didn't shine so much as dare the air to take a bite.
"South assay," Lysa said, voice clean of apology. "It smells like a song you haven't finished writing yet." She pulled the cork a fraction. The room learned a note: hot iron and hospital and something that wanted to call itself orange and couldn't afford the word. Edda's eyelids flickered. Rell's mouth didn't.
"Quickglass with a living stutter," Edda said. "And ash that doesn't know it was a person."
Voss watched the vial as if it were an impertinent witness; Rell watched Blyth, because men who could be moved were always more valuable than proof.
The seam sighed a final time. "Shelter lapses. Doors resume opinions."
Rowan felt the sentence go through him like a new hinge tapped into place. He had the satchel strap across his chest, cedar oil drying to the honest smell of a ledger that intended to be believed. The Bind Blyth had laid on him sat comfortably mean; the small habits he had paid—chair-straightening, ink preference—stayed gone, the spaces they left converted to traction.
"Rowan," Blyth said without looking away from Rell. "Carry witness to the Public Book."
The Public Book sat two rooms away on a dais of black stone and older law. Getting there required leaving this room where doors had been told to behave. It required a hallway and a stair and the city's good will.
"Moving witness," Rowan said, because naming the act made his spine trust it. He stepped back from the desk, felt the satchel settle, and breathed his anchor once, not like a prayer, like a lever. The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift. He lifted, and the first hinge in the next room agreed to remember him.
Rell smiled as if someone had complimented her shoes. "Walk," she said to the room at large. "Let's see which parts of the city think they are literature."
"Interdict of Hinges holds until the Public Book is open," Blyth told the seam.
"Acknowledged," said the metal. "Hinges will remember the name you gave."
Voss set his jaw like a misread paragraph and gestured two Rattleboys forward. "Escort," he said. "Not seize." He invested the word with a very personal grammar.
"Don't teach my witness new verbs," Edda said, stepping to Rowan's shoulder.
Mae slid to the door and put her ear against the wood with the intimacy of a locksmith. "Hall's listening," she said. "Let it like you."
Rowan opened the door onto a corridor full of iron light. The first step was the first test: would the hinge open for his name? It did. It opened for him and then, very politely, considered being difficult for other people.
Rell's aides tried to drift through with the drift of men who think drift is a rank. The door learned they had no ledger on them and closed a finger-width faster than their habit liked. One yelped; the wood apologized by refusing to bruise.
"Cute," Rell said. "Your fairy is sentimental."
"Interdict isn't a fairy," Blyth said. "It's a budget that grew up."
They moved. Calder walked half a pace back and a thought to the left, where ambushes choose to stand. Edda kept to Rowan's right, wrist ink a quiet ladder under bad lamp-light. Lysa cradled the vial as if it were a word that would run if you set it down. Mae threaded the edges, fingerprints skipping the places where dust remembers.
The hallway's doors did exactly what doors do when their hour ends: they chose; they held grudges; they tried to be kind in the way old furniture is kind. A side-closet yielded to Tarve and shut itself politely in Rell's aide's face; a filing-room held its breath for Calder and then coughed disapproval when a Rattleboy tested the handle without introducing his palm properly.
"Left," Mae said, as if she were reading a map that refused to waste nouns. "Stairs learn you faster than they learn him." Her chin flicked at Voss.
Voss didn't push. He expected. He expected doors to decide that being courageous wasn't worth losing employment. He expected hallways to give way to rank. "You can convince wood to hesitate," he said mildly. "You cannot convince men."
"You've done that part," Edda said.
They took the stair. Each tread had a dip the width of someone who worked here; each riser smelled like old quill and cheap soap and not enough lunch. Rowan felt the Bind push a thumb between his ribs and his breath, aligning the sentence he was walking into. He spent a whisper of grain in his mouth—a pinhead of Bind drawn from the satchel's inside flap—and spoke one screw of phrase to the bannister itself. "Witness carries names."
The bannister warmed his palm, enough to blister a man who lied. Rowan didn't. The warmth passed through him and into the steps ahead, and the steps ahead decided to be arranged like a path rather than assorted stairs.
"Cost?" Edda asked quietly.
"Preference," Rowan said. "I've lost the one where I preferred quiet pens to loud ones." He meant nib noise, the small pleasure of a fine scratch. It had gone soft in his mouth and then gone away.
"Better than blood," she said.
Rell came on their heels, not crowding. She didn't crowd; she arrived. One of the Rattleboys tried to move past Calder. Calder turned a shoulder, found a syllable. "Stasis only," he said. "You touch a witness, I touch your week."
The boy touched his visor instead, the way superstitions masquerade as obeying orders.
They reached a landing where the wall held a frame without a painting. Behind the empty rectangle, the masonry breathed differently: colder, as if the city stored old weather in there for special occasions. Mae pressed her cheek to the frame. "Shortcut," she said. "If it remembers you."
Rowan put his satchel to the wood. The cedar kissed, a polite clerk's peck. The frame let go like a tired argument losing interest. Brick turned into a door because someone had told it what it had once been. Edda went through without bowing. Rowan followed, one palm steady on the satchel, the other on a memory of a bannister.
"Witchery," hissed one aide, thoughtfully.
"Accounts," Calder corrected.
On the far side of the short throat, the corridor broadened to a nave of sorts: black stone laid to receive footsteps that wanted to feel important. At its end, under a bald lamp and a clause no one had successfully repealed, stood the Public Book—iron spine, leather cover, pages the color of laws that remember being trees.
"Open," Blyth said, behind Rowan. It was not request.
The Book did not obey Blyth. It obeyed the smell of legitimacy. Tarve's tray-oil had dried into Rowan's satchel, and the Book liked it. Its clasps unclenched with the theatricality of old powers forced to dignify new ones. The first blank page had a watermark no eye could have refused if it had been human.
Rowan set the folio's index down on the lip of the Book and felt the grain of decision move from paper into stone. He slid the oily negative beside it. Lysa came up on his left, the tiny vial between two fingers like a sin being offered a ritual.
"Show them the smell first," Edda said. "Language arrives late; noses come on time."
Rowan uncorked a careful fraction. The air discovered it had a throat. Vellum breathed; iron tried not to show interest and failed. The scent climbed: hot wire and antiseptic and a heartbeat in glass. Voss's eyelids flickered, not with guilt—he cultures a better shame than that—with recognition.
Rell kept her face on the polite setting she wore for hearings. "You've identified a contamination," she said. "Write contamination in a fat hand so all the frightened men can point at the word and go home."
"Living contamination," Edda said. "I could write you a chart about ratios across burns if you'd like to play at loving science."
Blyth gestured. "Write," he told Rowan.
Rowan laid the transit slips in a run and set the wrong Rs climbing across the page like a boy who'd learned to forge faster than to grow. He pressed the blue press codes, their circle with the human wobble, into the margin without ink so the page would carry the bruise. He wrote people with no flourish—plain, black, unhandsome, legible from the back bench.
"Wardline pressure up," Calder said softly, eyes tracking nothing and everything at once.
The lamps agreed; their milk wobbled, then stayed. The Book did something Rowan had never seen: the fiber of the page brightened along the wet lines of his letters. The paper was accepting a word it had not expected to hold today. It remembered, and the remembering made it a new thing while staying itself.
Voss stepped so near Rowan could count the weave in the Warden's cuff. "You do not know what your nouns purchase," he said.
"I do," Rowan said. "Later."
Voss blinked and found himself briefly in a mirror he had not meant to approach. He straightened without knowing why he had leaned.
Rell lifted her blue bell a finger-length and set it back down. She liked to teach a room to anticipate her and then disappoint it. "Comptroller," she said. "In the spirit of being gracious in public, let me—assist—your witness. Order my Wardens to hold pressure at the south assay and give me a name I can dismiss cleanly by noon. We will not need to teach the city a new word this morning."
"'People' isn't new," Mae said. "You've just refused to let it in your mouth when it mattered."
The wardline pressed a knuckle up through the floor. The Book's cover twitched. The clasps had been open; they felt underdressed and tried to apologize by clinking.
"Hold," Blyth told the room, the doors, himself.
Rowan signed the chain-of-custody line—Rowan Mire, sworn tally—and felt the Bind seat deeper, domestic as furniture. Another small preference sloughed away, painless and intimate: the old insistence that bread not be heel-slice. He could eat the heel now and not register complaint. He saved the noticing for later, if later existed.
"Public," Blyth said, voice flattened to legal. "This Book now holds names, routes, and proof. The refinery acts only in stasis until orders arrive from this page or from my mouth."
Rell smiled, glass-sincere. "You'll be hungry after that speech," she said. "Shall I have tea brought?"
"Boil it on your own stove," Edda said.
"Gladly," said Rell.
The Book's page finished drinking the words. The watermark behind people shivered, then set. The clasps considered whether they were allowed to be proud. Around them, the hallway's doors adjusted their hinges the way horses adjust feet before a turn.
"Done," Rowan said—not as triumph, as inventory.
"Not done," Voss said, and reached—not for Rowan, not for the vial—for the oily negative with that left-handed habit the panel had memorized. Habit isn't crime until it is.
The Book's iron lip jerked the space of a breath toward Voss's fingers. No man had moved it; doors had remembered. Voss's knuckle took a thin, smarting line of correction. He did not bleed. He disliked being edited.
Rell's aides shifted, a smooth professional ripple. They would like to have been helpful without being named. Calder's voice laid paper on their knives. "Stasis. Touch nothing that sings. Look for budget with your eyes."
The nearest aide's hand twitched; the knife in it reconsidered whether it belonged to kitchens.
The wardline coughed, then cleared its throat, a new, deeper thing. Somewhere in the south of the building a bell tried to begin a sentence and lost its first word. Lysa tightened her grip on the vial; a thin rim of cold bloomed along the glass where the quickglass wanted to teach it sorrow.
"Rowan," Edda said, not quite urgent. "If it pitches again, you will have to hold."
"Bind?" he asked.
"Or Lumen," she said. "Pick the invoice you want."
Warmth had already been taken from him; Lumen would carve more and call the hole virtue. Bind would shave another small choice and plant the shavings in the page. He preferred to be a ledger over a lamp.
"Bind," he said. He touched two fingers to the Book's inner hinge, tasted a grain, and moved his wrist the width of a syllable. "Witness holds while names cross."
The hinge heated under his fingers, not to wound, to warn. The cost arrived clean: a small, ridiculous habit—his ancient dislike of buttons that weren't matched to their holes by color. He felt it leaving. He waved it goodbye with a humor that wasn't warmth.
The Book hummed. It learned obstinacy.
Rell's smile sharpened. "I am no longer charmed," she said, which meant she had been. "All right. We try it your way." She tilted her chin at her aides without looking. "Stand down. Let the city trip over its conscience."
Voss did not move. He looked at the page as if it had tried to have a personal life in front of him. "You are teaching boys with candles to forget what the sea does to mercy," he said.
"Teach me," said a voice from the doorway.
The room turned. Calder didn't; he had already turned and decided not to draw attention to it. The ward-clerk from Blyth's stair stood there with his rod in hand and a face rearranged by the kind of curiosity men usually hide until they are older. Tarve had sent him, likely; or the doors had, which came to the same thing.
Voss weighed whether to speak to a stool.
Rell didn't. She spoke to Rowan, because the page would carry whatever she made him answer. "Clerk Mire," she said, syrup thin. "Do you understand that if you keep walking in the sentence you began, you will not be able to stop without leaving pieces of yourself in the hallway?"
"Yes," Rowan said. He felt the lost chair-straightening, the missing ink-snobbery, the absent bread preference, the apology he'd given furniture. He lined the empty spaces up and found they made a path. "I like the direction."
Rell nodded, once. "At least don't lie to yourself. That I can respect."
Her gaze flicked to Lysa. "Is the smell going to stain my day?"
"It already did," Lysa said.
The wardline struck four notes at once. The lamps leaned and then stood up straighter than comfort would ask. From the far end of the nave, two Rattleboys appeared with a device between them—portable toneplate, cheap and eager—and the way it hummed said panic bought in the street.
"Don't," Calder said, not to them, to the device. He spoke a clause in the voice that minutes use to discipline toys. "Out of calendar."
The plate tried to thrash into usefulness and failed. The doors didn't let its note learn to be a sentence.
Voss decided bored. "Enough," he said for the third time, and this time he aimed the word at the Book. He reached for it as if it belonged to him.
Rowan didn't step back. He didn't step forward. He did the smallest necessary thing. He slid his left wrist under Voss's palm, set his right palm on the Book's margin, and said, very quietly and very exactly: "The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift."
The hinge under his touch remembered being wood before it was law. It stuck. Voss's hand met a stillness that would not be bullied into the next line.
The Public Book chose.
The hallway doors murmured like pews at bad liturgy and then fell silent because even wood knows when to be moved and when to listen. Rell's mouth tipped half a degree, not down, not up: we have entered the interesting part, it said. Blyth's finger left the manners-bell; he didn't need it. The room had learned how to police itself.
"Rowan," Edda said again, a chisel behind his name. "Hold."
He held. The Bind sat like a weight in his palm and asked if he really wanted to lift. He lifted, and the hinge didn't.
Behind Voss's eyes, an old arithmetic retracted a promise it had made to him when he was twenty and certain. He let go of the Book's edge and took his hand back as if he were saving it for later.
"Public," Blyth said to the room, to the Book, to the city. "Witness stands. Stasis holds. Names cross."
The wardline breathed out one long, angry chord and then—just for a breath—listened.
Rell tilted her head at Mae. "Courier," she said, as if she were ordering tea, "run a message for me."
"Depends," Mae said.
"Tell the south assay the city has decided to practice being moral," Rell said. "Ask it very sweetly not to die of boredom while we applaud ourselves."
Mae threw her a grin that liked knives. "Done," she said, and was gone at a sprint no bell could time.
Voss rolled his shoulders as if the hour had set in them wrong and he might shake it free. "This is not the room," he repeated, because repetition is how you bully weaker nouns.
"It is now," Rowan said.
The Public Book turned the next page by itself, as if expecting more names.