The wardline held its breath, just for the width of a heartbeat that wanted never to end. The city leaned as if about to pronounce itself.
It didn't exhale; it waited to be told what its mouth was for. Iori's palm rested on the page as if learning to be a paperweight. The Public Book held its new field open, watermark faint as rain in a tea cup.
"One more," Rowan said, because the promise had already climbed into his mouth and made itself a chair. "Read only. Hands stay."
"Small," Edda said, reminding him of the slope he was on.
"Small," he echoed.
Rell turned her blue bell by the stem and watched him with academic affection. "Two makes a pattern," she said. "Patterns make budgets."
Voss allowed himself the version of patience that looks like hunger with its hands behind its back. "I advise against teaching a city to roll names like marbles, Comptroller. You will slip."
Blyth didn't remove his palm from the folio. "The city already slipped," he said. "We're naming the floor."
Iori bent his head as if listening to steps he remembered. "Please," he said—not begging; making room. "A little girl with a green ribbon and a tooth that whistles. Her name is—"
Lysa took the smallest kiss of Echo on her tongue—black enough to make a priest cough—and leaned that memory into the breath between page and light. "Give me the letters," she said. "I'll hold them while they sit down."
"Tess," Iori said. "Tess Garrow."
The wardline shoved. It did not roar; it disapproved. Steam shouldered in through the nave mouth as if asked to testify and insulted at being made to queue. Rowan set two fingers to the pedestal seam and pushed a Kint shelf over the stone—thin, discourteous. The fog felt the instruction and chose down. The room slid half a thumbnail left. He corrected with the anchor—The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift—lifting the word in his throat until the tilt ended.
"Invoice?" Edda asked without glancing.
"My habit of licking my thumb before turning pages," Rowan said. "Gone." He didn't know whether that meant anything about who he was. He wrote the lack down in himself anyway, a sum against a more expensive day.
The paper brightened under nothing, and the new name arrived faint as politeness: Tess Garrow.
A breath left the crowd that had been held too long. Somewhere behind the porters, a woman covered her mouth the way women do when relief is louder than grief. Mae didn't turn; she doesn't award her gaze cheaply. Rell's bell didn't ring; it rotated one degree like a coin pretending to be modest.
"Two," Calder said, quiet as a receipt. "Now the room believes in precedent."
Voss's eyes counted weaknesses and found fewer than he'd quoted himself. "Stop," he said, because habits must eat.
The Book didn't flinch; it basked. The watermark under the names made a delicate lattice, the way lead makes stained glass make sense.
A dozen breaths in the nave tried to synchronize. The wardline held its note like a stubborn vowel. Iori's light stilled, shoulders a calm coat on borrowed bones. He looked down at Tess Garrow as if novels had taught him how to be very careful with girls.
"Enough," Voss said again, not louder, older.
"Rate limit," Calder murmured toward the pedestal, because he believed doors liked jargon. "One per minute; witness holds; stasis continues. That's how you please engineers and priests in one letter."
Rell tilted her head. "I adore it when minutes learn to flirt."
Blyth took his palm from the folio by one finger-width, not more. "Rowan," he said, not looking at Voss, "can you bind the Book to pace without teaching it to refuse?"
Rowan tasted brass. Bind is polite if you ask small. He pressed two fingers to the hinge and shaped the phrase as if threading a needle. "One name each time the lamp blinks," he told the Book, low. "Read only; no lift without my palm."
The invoice slid under his skin, precise and unromantic: a small preference—the suspicion he had always nursed about chipped mugs—left his hands and didn't look back. He breathed around the absence and found his fingers didn't seek pristine rims anymore.
The nearest lamp, feeling important, blinked and then held. The page didn't brighten. The Book had listened.
Rell's smile turned practical. "There," she said. "The clerk learns governance."
"The clerk learns the cost," Edda corrected. "Governance is just a tidy word for appetite."
Lysa's vial wrote a ring of cold down, up, down again. She had color in her mouth like someone who had eaten ink. "He can't keep paying with cheap," she said. "He'll run out of tidies and start spending furniture."
"Furniture?" Mae asked.
"The chairs inside him," Lysa said, and didn't smile.
"Let the chairs learn to stand," Blyth said, and if he had meant courage it didn't come out of his mouth that way; it came out like accounting.
The lamp blinked, a ceremonious wink. Iori didn't change expression. He stood in the hinge Rowan had given him and tried the new rule on his tongue. "One," he said. "All right."
From the corridor, a toneplate tried to pick a fight with the air. Calder spoke at the same volume as his heartbeat: "Out of calendar." The plate apologized by losing interest.
Rell's aides shifted, their weapons making the metallic whisper of men who had learned to hide applause. Voss ignored them and set his thumb on the rim of the pedestal as if testing the quality of iron. He did not press. He waited to dislike the materials.
The Book felt the waiting. A ripple touched its paper—the faintest urge to raise a hundred names at once the way a spring tide lifts boats that forgot to tie good knots. The watermark shivered with appetite.
"Clamp," Edda said, and she didn't raise her voice because she never asks panic to stand when a sentence will do.
Rowan flattened his palm, spent a crumb of Bind and a sliver of Kint together—brace and redirect, the combination that carpenters use when polite beams decide to remember gravity. "One at a time; rest in the margin," he told the page.
Cost arrived like a drawer closing on habits stacked too tidy to live. He felt three go at once: his bias for even numbers in a column, his impulse to sort ledgers by thread color, the tiny satisfaction of shaking sand from his cuffs before he crossed a threshold. They slid into the hinge and became a firmness that wasn't his anymore.
The pressure ebbed. A dozen almost-names sank back into the watermark like turtles refusing a bad beach.
The crowd didn't see the flood that hadn't happened; they saw Rowan's shoulder lose a half-inch of future. Edda did see. Her mouth set in a new angle—admiration that had been taught not to flatter.
"Price?" she asked.
"Tidies," Rowan said. "I'm running out."
"Good," she said. "Then we'll find out whether you want this because it makes you neat or because it makes you necessary."
Rell watched his face as if it might confess childhood. "I have men who do this without becoming holes," she said, almost kindly.
"You have men who never become anything else," Lysa said.
Voss considered the faint lattice under the names and found in it a mesh too fine for his fingers. "You're building a net for ghosts," he said.
"People," Rowan said, because repetition trains doors and men.
The lamp blinked again. The rate-limited permission opened like a slot and waited for a coin.
Iori lifted his eyes to the crowd for the first time. He did not smile; candles rarely do. His gaze passed over faces that refused to be metaphors. He found a seamstress with bone needles through her sleeve, a porter with a borrowed shirt, a boy clutching minutes like kindling, and then a man at the back with hands clasped hard around a cap that had known rain.
"You," Iori said, very gently.
The man swallowed. "I'm not burning," he said, like an apology.
"You kept a name for someone who did," Iori said. "Say it if it can sit on paper. Or keep it if it would break in your mouth."
The man took off his cap because church had taught him one good thing. "Sera Low," he said, and the way the a trembled called three rooms to mind none of them would mention here.
Rowan didn't move. The Book brightened. Sera Low arrived, faint as a new seam. The man shut his eyes the way men shut doors they are not supposed to cry behind.
Voss's mouth thinned. "Enough."
"Not yet," the Book didn't say, and still the field held.
The lamp blinked; another slot of permission opened with the crispness of a cut page. The wardline breathed in, not louder—closer. Steam stitched its seam and fled it again as if remembering discipline.
Mae came in at a tilt with her grin dampened for once. "South assay's holding like a mule," she reported. "But Bay Two says someone taught the valve to flirt."
"Translation," Calder said, civil. "A human hand is asking the machine to sing. Voss?"
Voss did not take the bait. "If my Wardens are touching valves, they're touching stasis."
"And if they're not Wardens?" Edda asked.
"Then I am more interested," Rell said, because her honesty always arrived when it made other people uncomfortable. "Rowan, did you want one more before the sermon breaks for fire?"
Rowan looked at the hinge. It didn't know sermon. It knew now and names. He could feel the next cost queuing: the private indulgence of sorting spices by brightness, the way he liked to cut bread the long way, the reflex to lower his voice in rooms that smelled like money. Small—still small.
"One," he said.
Iori didn't look at the crowd now. He looked inward, to the place in the wardline where men keep rooms and call them dreams. His light trembled the way heat trembling looks shy. "A boy with ink on his knuckle and a cough he never admitted to," he said. "He called me—" He frowned. "Brother. He called me brother." He looked at the page and then at Rowan as if asking permission to say the thing that would hurt.
"Caro Fen," he said.
It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. The name made a small, obedient sound and all at once a great deal of the room belonged to it.
Rell's bell tilted and stopped on the tooth between music and manners. Blyth's fingers slid on the folio the width of a confession. Lysa went colorless around the mouth. Voss's face didn't change, which counts as flinching in men like him.
The wardline surged. Not a cough. A held note that tried to pull them all into a vowel nobody came here to sing. Steam thickened. The scald put its hands on the threshold and leaned.
"Hold, small," Edda breathed, and there was kindness in the order but the kind that doesn't change price.
Rowan set his palm and gave the page the instruction it craved. "Read only. One name. Hands stay." Bind bit—clean, unquestioning. He paid with something he didn't want to love: the small comfort of lining knives in the drawer so their handles agreed with each other. It left. The hinge got stronger. He did not.
The paper brightened, then dimmed, then decided. Caro Fen arrived—faint, not shy, exactly the weight of a boy who coughed when he laughed because factories taught lungs the dumbest hymns.
Iori closed his eyes. His light leaned left, then disciplined itself into center. The chain at his wrist made one blunt, domestic sound.
"Brother," he said, and the word unfastened something in the crowd that had not expected to be invited.
Voss's patience hit the end of a ledger line. "This stops now," he said, and moved his hand from the pedestal rim to the lower corner of the page with the casual certainty of a man who has learned to win even when he is too late.
"Don't," Edda said, not a shout—a geometry.
Rell didn't say anything at all. Her eyes shone with what might have been pity if you believed she kept any in stock.
The wardline put its shoulder in the wall. The lamp blinked blind for half a beat. The toneplate in the side hall forgot it was out of calendar and tried to be brave. Calder forced it back into time with a sentence that had more accounting than magic in it.
Rowan felt his anchor rise and knew it would not be enough for what came next. The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift—he lifted, and the hinge held, but the pressure was larger than the word.
He could spend Lumen now, burn a clean hole through this moment and let the heat call itself virtue. He could keep to Bind and Kint, risk losing so many small chairs inside him that one day there wouldn't be a room left.
He looked at Caro Fen, faint on the page, as if the ink had been ashamed to steal more paper.
He kept his left palm on iron.
He set his right hand over Voss's, not to stop it, to guide it into stillness.
He said, very precisely, each word set like a screw the room had to swallow, "The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift. You will lift when I say."
The hinge answered with a heat that wasn't heat. The invoice arrived: a tiny, ridiculous superstition—his preference for even-numbered steps when taking stairs—unhooked from his calves and drifted away into law. He didn't miss it. He wrote it down inside anyway, because reckoning requires witnesses too.
Voss's fingers met a page that chose to be flat as water under frost.
The scald halted at the threshold as if embarrassed by how loud it had been.
The lamp blinked obediently and stayed lit.
Rell let out a breath anyone else would have called a laugh. "Do you have another one in you?" she asked Rowan, conversational as bread.
Rowan didn't answer her. He looked at the grid that had learned to crave, at Iori Fen and Caro Fen and Sera Low and Tess Garrow in faint inks that made the law reconsider its posture.
"No," he told the page. "Not now."
The Book accepted the sentence the way good furniture accepts weight.
Iori kept his palm where it was, not because he needed to—because leaving it there gave the names a polite roof. He looked at Rowan with a gratitude that refused to be a performance.
"Thank you," he said. "I can stand still better now."
The wardline's hum dropped into a register a man could live through. Across the nave, a wick in a doorway put its head down like a tired dog and went back to being light.
Voss withdrew his hand a half inch—the amount of courtesy you give a chair when you don't want to admit you were about to sit in it.
Blyth lifted his palm from the folio, finally, the way surgeons lift their hands from a body when they remember they, too, require blood to keep arguing. "Public," he said. "Witness holds. Stasis continues. Names will move when the Book is ready to count again."
Rell rolled her bell on her palm until it glinted and then didn't ring. "And after you finish this little poetry reading," she said, "I will still need bodies to keep the line sweet. Will your names volunteer?"
"They already did," Mae said, and her grin came back sharpened. "They volunteered not to be rendered."
The lamp blinked once, not as a permission—as applause.
Rowan took his hand from the hinge a fraction, not enough to make the Book feel abandoned. The quiet inside him—where tidies had been—felt very large and very bright and very dangerous.
"Later," he told it, and found the word still belonged to him.