"Later," he told it, and found the word still belonged to him.
The Book stopped humming like a held breath and settled into the kind of quiet that makes other objects check their posture. Steam unstitched itself from the ceiling and retreated, ashamed of its theatrics. The crowd felt allowed to have spines again.
Rell rolled her blue bell on her palm and didn't ring it. "Lovely sermon," she said. "Now—beds. Where does your witness sleep, Comptroller? On a dais does poor things to a city's nerves."
"Public custody sleeps in the Gallery of Weights," Blyth said. He did not look at Voss. "Under open lamps. Under eyes."
"Under mine," Voss said.
"Under witness," Edda said.
A clerk in Warden gray shouldered through with a satchel full of courage and paper. "Writ of Stay," he announced, finding a tone he thought men respected. "Provisional jurisdiction to Warden oversight for dangerous instruments and associated anomalies."
Calder accepted the paper with the polite hunger of a man who collects knives by misnaming them. He read without moving his lips. "Thirty-Seven C," he said. "An afterthought somebody sharpened in a corridor. It yields to Public Book when the Book is awake."
"It looks awake," Mae said, cheerful and damp.
Voss did not read the writ; he read Rowan's hands. "Walk," he said. Not to order; to schedule. "If I were the sort of man who liked accidents, I would ask you to stop here."
"I don't believe in accidents," Rell said, mild as tea. "I believe in corridors with opinions. Let's ask a few."
Blyth looked at Rowan the way bridges look at carts. "Carry," he said.
Rowan set his palm to the hinge, his other hand under the folio's weight, and spoke small. "Witness moves; names hold; read only." Bind took a sliver—his tidy habit of nesting envelopes by size loosened from his fingers and went to live in iron. He swallowed the absence like an adult.
"Iori," he said.
The Wick kept his palm on the page because leaving it felt rude. "I can walk," he said, light arranging itself like a proper coat. Chains chimed once, agreeing to be civil.
They turned from the dais. The nave's doors listened like old men who had set out their best chairs for a story. The city watched its own hinge open.
The first door went easy on Rowan and lectured Rell's aides by shutting a finger-width faster than their boots liked. The second decided Mae belonged, because she made it laugh. The third tried to be brave in front of Voss and managed dignity instead.
"Left," Mae breathed. "Right staircase remembers tariffs and will tax your ankles."
Rowan set two fingers on the bannister and spent a whisper of Bind. "Witness carries names." The wood warmed—not affection, warning—and took the smallest fee he had left in the cheap drawer: his itch to align ledgers by thread-color slid from his skin. He didn't reach for it as it went.
"Invoice?" Edda asked, a fond knife.
"Color-coding," he said.
"Monstrous vice," she said. "Good riddance."
Lysa walked with the vial cocked like a listening ear. "If the quickglass sulks, I'll kiss it with Echo," she said. "It will take a memory and leave me worse."
"Then don't kiss it," Edda said.
"I never learned that trick," Lysa said, almost smiling.
A Warden opened a side door ahead, a calculated shortcut to a passage that liked uniforms. Calder eased in front of Rowan with a posture that pretended to be manners. "Stasis only," he said to the door, gentle as a threat. "We're on the Book's clock."
The door liked his confidence and disliked the badge trying to sneak in behind it. It opened for Rowan and then closed quick enough to brush a Rattleboy's knuckles polite.
Voss paid the hall no compliments. He expected.
Rell drifted beside Rowan like an aunt who owns the house and allows the guests to think she's visiting. "You've learned not to underline," she said, amused. "Next you'll learn to lie."
"I already did," Rowan said. "Every time I wrote loss where I meant people."
Rell's eyes softened a degree. "Of all the boys to turn into a ledger," she said, "I'm glad the city picked one that knows when to be cruel to the right nouns."
The stair ahead dropped two flights into the gallery—stone worn to honesty by men who had learned to make weight talk. The wardline underfoot hummed a complacent baritone. It would become a judge if asked.
On the landing a boy with a portable toneplate materialized from the bureaucratic ether—hat askew, guilt already applied. "I was told to—" he began.
"Out of calendar," Calder said without turning.
The plate sulked and stopped trying to harmonize with the walls. The boy blinked at his own survival and fled into safer paperwork.
Steam rolled once from a grate like a threatening cough and remembered its manners at the sight of the Public Book. Still, it moved too proud for Rowan's taste. He slid two fingers along the pedestal seam, exhaled Kint in a thin plank at ankle height. "Down," he told the heat, not paternal—accounting.
It obeyed. He paid in balance, a wobble of the world half a thumbnail to the left. He corrected with the anchor: The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift. He lifted the word behind his teeth and felt the tilt relax like a seat learning it had been sat upon properly.
"Invoice?" Edda said.
"Mugs," Rowan said. "I cease to resent chips."
"Grow up faster," she said. "There are saints to disappoint."
At the bottom of the stair a door made of oak and stubbornness waited with the particular patience of institutions that collect dust and minutes. Its lintel carried a blunt brass word: WEIGHTS.
"Home," Blyth said under his breath.
Rell's bell spun once, catching lamplight. "Weigh it, then," she murmured. "Weight is just the most honest fraud."
The Gallery of Weights breathed cool. Iron slugs slept on their hooks, each with a number that pretended to be indifferent. On the far wall, a pendulum as long as good memory counted seconds the city could afford. The cradle for the Public Book waited at the center, a trough of black stone polished by centuries of hands wanting to be honest.
Rowan lowered the Book into the cradle with the reverence a sober man gives the first glass of water after a mistake. He kept his palm on the inner hinge. Iori kept his palm on the margin, light steady, chain discreet.
"Public custody entered," Blyth said.
The cradle warmed: pleasure, duty, something that liked the feel of paper declaring itself. The watermark under the field flexed like the back of a sleeping animal.
The Warden clerk with the writ found courage again in the new room. "Thirty-Seven C," he repeated, shoving parchment at the air. "Dangerous instruments to Warden oversight."
"Show the Book," Calder said.
The clerk put the writ where his orders told him: on the Book's lip.
The Book tasted ink the way a cat tastes rain. It didn't spit. It accepted the paper and then performed the smallest disobedience: it copied the writ's header in faint shadow on its own page, then wrote beside it—no flourish—yields to witness in progress.
The clerk's lips moved around the word yields as if it might taste of demotion. Voss did not blink. He hadn't come for paper. He had come for habit and found it out of stock.
Rell's eyes shone, not with victory—with entertainment. "This room writes like you, Rowan," she said. "Unhandsome, legible, and too expensive."
"Good handwriting is for invoices," Edda said. "This is a receipt."
Blyth placed his palm on the cradle and let the iron know his pulse. "Public," he said. "Witness holds. Stasis continues."
The pendulum ticked twice, an indulgent aunt approving a well-behaved child who will become a problem later.
On the gallery's east wall, between weights in polite rows, a narrow seam showed itself the way a secret admits it has been paid for: a jury door, pewter, unhappily fashionable. It had been sleeping since the last time the city pretended to be better than it had needed to be.
It inhaled a small careful breath. "Who keeps the book?" it asked, voice metal, tired of adjectives.
"Public," Blyth said.
"Wardens," Voss said.
"Me," Rell said, serenely dishonest.
The seam did not answer men. It looked at the page where faint names had learned to remain. It looked at Iori Fen. It looked at Rowan's palm like a scale listening to someone step on it with their dignity intact.
"Name a keeper," it said. "A person."
Iori turned his head with the slow correctness of a candle requesting an adult. He looked at Rowan as if counting his fingers in a very quiet room. "Rowan Mire," he said.
Silence opened like a palm, showing you it held nothing and perhaps never would.
Rell's bell turned but did not ring. Blyth didn't smile. Voss's mouth remembered the line it used when widows asked for allowances.
The seam breathed again. "Witness may name a keeper if the public breathes with him," it said. "Breath is counted by open mouths."
Mae's grin unsheathed itself. "Finally," she said. "A sensible metric."
The gallery filled with the peculiar rustle of a city preparing to vote the only way it trusts: with the lungs it can afford. Porters' mouths opened; seamstresses' mouths opened; the clerk from the stair put his paper down and opened his mouth because he'd been taught shame and preferred to be done with it.
Rowan kept his palm on the hinge. Bind would make the count honest; Lumen would make it holy and ruin him. He picked his tax. "Breath counts in the open; names hold steady; witness keeps his hand," he said.
The fee came tiny and intimate: the little pleasure of turning knives in a drawer so all the handles agreed slipped away from him like a gentleman leaving early. He let it go.
The seam listened. Mouths breathed. The pendulum ticked. The Book glowed faint—no vanity; census.
"Keeper named: Rowan Mire," the jury door said, and metal made a sound like a gate that hates to be fair. "Appeal allowed when the page sleeps."
Voss did not move. He filed the word appeal away in a place that would be useful later. Rell's smile balanced amusement and hunger. Blyth bowed to the door because he is the kind of man who thinks showing manners to metal keeps him human.
Rowan did not bow. He eased his palm a fraction, kept it there. Iori kept his.
"Rowan," Edda said, a warning made of fondness. "If they pull you, you tell the Book what you told the stairs."
"I will," he said.
"And what was that?" Rell asked, inviting theft.
"The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift," Rowan said, and for the first time it sounded like something more than a clerk's trick—it sounded like a clause you could live inside if the rent didn't kill you.
The pendulum ticked once more. The weight of the city redistributed along nerves, valves, chairs. In the courtyard, a Wick bowed to nobody and went back to being a light.
"Business resumes," Voss said. "Stasis is not a personality; it is a grace period."
"Then be graceful," Calder said.
Rell at last rang her bell—soft, a gloved knuckle on porcelain. "Gentlemen, ladies, clerks," she said, as if naming flavors in a wine. "The Gallery is open. The Book is not the only ledger in town. If you want your corners done neatly, my office is hiring."
"Bring your own soul," Mae added. "They don't stock spares."
The jury door's seam relaxed into steel again, satisfied for now. The names on the page—Iori Fen, Caro Fen, Sera Low, Tess Garrow—sat like unspectacular truth.
Rowan felt the quiet inside him stretch, a bright room with fewer chairs and better light. "Later," he told it again, and the word tasted like a promise he intended to owe.