The Public Book turned the next page by itself, as if expecting more names.
Paper made the small confident sound of something that has learned its job. The watermark waited, pale as held breath. Blyth didn't touch the clasps. He watched Rowan the way bridges watch carts.
"Write," Blyth said.
Rowan set the transit slips square, the bad Rs climbing like a rash you could map. He pressed the rubbed press-circle—its human wobble—into the margin again, dry, so the page would carry a bruise instead of ink. He put people in plain hand a second time. The letters looked ungainly and honest.
Rell turned her blue-enamel bell slowly by its stem, as if considering how the room would react to a single delicate sound. "Comptroller," she said, using courtesy as a knife sheath. "You have your page. Let the refinery stop pretending to faint. My Wardens have patients who prefer breath to philosophy."
"Stasis only," Blyth said. "Until orders issue from this page or from my mouth."
"Then hurry," Rell said, almost warm.
The wardline coughed down in the stone—four notes at once, a chord that disapproved of compromise. Lysa braced the vial against her hip with two fingers; a cool ring feathered along the glass where quickglass wanted to make a point about mortality. Edda didn't look at the vial. She looked at Rowan's wrist on the Book's hinge, as if her stare alone might keep tendons from learning to regret.
Calder shifted half a pace so he and Rowan were misaligned in a way that made it harder to kill one of them without it becoming a public sermon. "Minutes won't hold still," he said softly. "We move the witness or we let the corridor invent a story."
Blyth nodded once. "Carry to the dais," he told Rowan. "Speak public custody."
Rowan swallowed the anchor, tasted its brass. The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift. He lifted Steps in the back of his throat, felt the Book's hinge agree to be stubborn for him and for nobody else.
Voss's knuckles flexed. He did not reach. The scratch the Book had given him showed as a clean line, drying like a thin opinion. "If the Wardens are not permitted to bleed the lines, the lines will choose drama."
"They already did," Mae said, appearing on Rowan's bad side with a grin sharp enough to hunt with. "They're practicing tragedy in the service stair."
Rell didn't flinch. "Go on, Clerk," she said. "Show us whether your names can walk."
Rowan lifted the folio, the cedar oil giving a last neat sigh. The Book's page accepted the weight of the index as a body accepts a vow—without fuss, with consequences.
The first door opened for Rowan and reconsidered for Rell's aides; it allowed Calder through as if he were a receipt and scolded a Rattleboy into moving his knife to the other pocket. The second door liked Lysa's vial better than Lysa; she swore at it under her breath in a language that had never hoped to be written down, and the hinge forgave her because it appreciated fluency.
"Left," Mae breathed. "The right corridor remembers Voss."
Voss did not 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 Bind—a pinhead 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 like a forgotten itch—his lifelong distaste for wearing mismatched socks gave up its lease and walked out. He almost smiled. He didn't like who would be pleased by that.
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.
People arrived not the way mobs do—in lumps and shouts—but the way sums do when a clerk stops resisting their truth. Porters standing like question marks. Two seamstresses with bone needles stuck through their sleeves like hairpins. A boy whose job was running minutes off one desk and onto another. A curate with the sunburst in his signature leaning the wrong way the last two weeks. They arranged themselves unconsciously in a shape that might become public if someone respected it.
Rell's smile became generous in the way merchants are generous when they want to be seen near an honest scale. "Citizens," she said, without raising her voice and without asking permission, "the Comptroller is giving you a page to admire. While you admire it, my Wardens will ensure your lamps continue to choose light."
"Stasis," Blyth said, and the word sat in the room like a bench someone had finally repaired.
Voss's eyes swept the growing listeners and subtracted anyone who would not become a problem by sunset. "Move aside," he told a porter who had allowed his feet to learn comfort. The porter did, because his wage preferred it.
Mae had vanished into the sideyard and now reappeared with a tide of whisper that reached the dais a heartbeat before her. "South assay holds pressure," she reported, too quick to perform. "Two valves threw a sulk. Your stasis made them ashamed. Falco says the wick at Bay Three said please to nobody and then remembered itself."
Rell's blue bell didn't ring. It tilted. "Exactly," she said. "All we need is discipline. Which is what I pay for."
"You pay to register men's discipline as your virtue," Calder told her, pleasantly. "Convenient bookkeeping."
"Everything is bookkeeping," Rell said. "I simply admit it."
The wardline surged. Voss turned his head a fraction. In the courtyard beyond the nave, a pipe coughed a gleam of vapor like a gentleman's disdain. Two Rattleboys ran without being told. Lysa's grip on the vial took a bruise-sized shape; her eyes cut to Rowan the way a sailor watches a rope that will decide whether the deck makes a mistake.
"Hold," Edda said again, because some orders get better if you let them be repeated by someone who loves you mean.
Rowan pressed three fingertips to the Book's hinge and felt for a vector small enough not to tax the room. Bind again; a screw's quarter turn. "Keep the page unchanged." The hinge warmed. The price arrived like a forgotten itch—his lifelong distaste for wearing mismatched socks gave up its lease and walked out. He almost smiled. He didn't like who would be pleased by that.
"Why is he smiling?" Rell asked nobody.
"He's paying cheap first," Edda said. "Then he won't have cheap left."
The courtyard pipe chose spectacle. It struck an arrogant note; the wardline tried to harmonize and flinched. A hiss rolled into the nave, white and swift. Not flame; scald. A pregnant fog with a temper.
"Down," Calder said, already lowering. The crowd broke polite and became practical. Rell didn't crouch; she stepped to one side, trusting the physics of other people to work out for her.
Lysa moved with the glass; Edda grabbed her sleeve and leaned, changing the vial's angle by the thickness of a heartbeat. The bead in the neck didn't spill. It sulked itself safe.
Voss walked toward the trouble. He did not run; he never ran. Men who ran in front of him learned not to.
Rowan's mouth tasted copper. He could push with Kint—bully the fog aside, risk tumbling into the Book like an amateur. He could light Lumen and burn it into obedience, deepen the hole he already carried until warmth didn't remember his name.
"Bind again," Edda said. "Spend the small ones until there aren't any."
"Then what?" Rowan asked.
"Then you'll know who you are," she said.
He braced his left hand on the iron lip and moved his right in a figure you could mistake for impatience. "Witness holds and cools." He pushed the vector through the hinge into the seam where book met stand, where stand met stone, where stone met building. Bind is a patient liar; if you speak it like a promise, it learns to be loved. He felt three preferences flee his pockets at once: the way he sorted ledgers by thread color, the pleasure of symmetrical inkblots on blotting paper, the half-urge to correct a stranger's misuse of a comma. They slipped away cleanly, like coins handed across a counter to a polite thief.
The scalding fog hit the nave mouth and, meeting a cooling that did not exist in air but did exist in instruction, rolled itself downward like a dog told stay. The crowd watched steam choose the floor. The floor liked being chosen.
Rell's head tipped. "Neat trick," she said. "How long before your clerk forgets why he cares about commas and then forgets to care about people?"
"He put people in the Book," Mae said. "The Book remembers for him."
The fog thinned. The wardline grumbled, chastened for the space of a few breaths. The lamps found their milk again. Voss stepped through the curtain with a face that admitted nothing. A blister was growing like an idea on his left wrist. He ignored it.
"Stasis," Blyth told the air, the doors, the corridor. "Stasis holds."
"Not forever," Rell said.
"Long enough," Blyth said. "Public learns faster than the sea."
"Does it?" Rell asked, honestly curious.
Rowan placed the final slip—the Undeclared Mortuary Return that had walked disguised in respectable stacks—and pressed it flat with the side of his hand. He put the curate's tilted sunburst beside it and did not say the curate's name; the page would fetch it. He wrote the sentence the room kept asking him to say until it learned to stand on its own legs in his handwriting: people.
The watermark behind the word shivered once—less like water, more like a pulse—and then took the shape the page had wanted all along. No flourish. A ledger's ugly, useful line.
"Public," Blyth said. "Witness stands."
The Book answered. Not with a sound: with a weight. The iron spine took on a gravity that made every hinge in the nave arrange its manners. Doors half a corridor away aligned like soldiers pretending not to be listening. The crowd leaned without meaning to.
Rell's bell turned again and stopped. "There," she said softly. "You've taught paper to be righteous. Let's see if fire wants to be polite."
The wardline changed keys. Not a cough. A held note, low, sustained, as if the sea had decided to hum under its breath so nobody in the room could pretend not to hear. Somewhere beyond the lamp, a Wick answered with a word he had heard before and would hear again.
"Hello," it said from the threshold, voice polite as rope. "You are making the line interesting."
The Wick stood in the arch with light gathered around its shoulders like a coat stolen from a saint. Chains at its wrists, hymn at its throat, face crowded with three expressions trying not to argue. The crowd made space for it in the same involuntary way they make space for a falling plate. The vial in Lysa's hand wrote cold on the glass. Voss turned, not startled—offended.
"Back to your line," he said.
"Please," the Wick said, as if it understood rank and chose not to care. Its eyes—milk careful—found Rowan with the accuracy of things taught in the dark. "The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift."
Rowan's fingers tightened on the Book's iron. The hinge hummed a recognition only he felt.
"Useful endings require tidy beginnings," the Wick said, very seriously, to the page.
Rell's mouth made an almost-smile that wasn't for anyone here. "How fashionable," she murmured. "Even the candles are reading."
Blyth did not move his hand from the folio. "Public," he said. "Witness stands."
The wardline's new note got louder by the width of a heartbeat. Steam stitched itself along the nave's ceiling like a nervous seamstress. The Book did not close. The dais did not lower its head. Rowan held, and the hinge held with him, and the city inhaled as if about to pronounce itself.