"Later," he told it again, and the word tasted like a promise he intended to owe.
The Gallery of Weights accepted the promise the way iron accepts light—quietly, with edges. The pendulum swung through its long, polite arc. Lamps breathed milk. Names on the page—Iori Fen, Caro Fen, Sera Low, Tess Garrow—sat like unspectacular truth.
Voss stepped close enough for Rowan to count the wear on the Warden's cuff. "Appeal," he said. "The jury door admitted it. We put the page to sleep and consider whether your sentiment belongs in ledgers."
Blyth did not remove his palm from the cradle. "Appeal when the page sleeps," he repeated. "It isn't sleeping."
"It will," Voss said. He didn't raise his voice; he never does. "By ordinance the lampline drops at the First Pendulum—half-bell after hourfall. Darkness is how adults end arguments."
Rell smiled as if someone had offered her a dessert fork instead of a sword. "I do enjoy procedural bedtime. Comptroller, will you be tucking your Book in or allowing my Wardens to sing it something soothing and official?"
"Lampwatch," Blyth said. "Public custody under open light."
The jury seam breathed like pewter thinking. It did not object.
Mae leaned against a weight hook, balancing insolence and gravity. "We do lampwatch, we need anchors," she said. "These stones don't just count—they remember."
Edda's eyes went to the corners of the cradle. "Four weights, four corners, four short binds," she said. "No heat. No holiness. Costs small." Her gaze slid to Rowan's hands. "If you have small left."
"I have enough," Rowan said. He wasn't sure which part of that sentence lied.
Tarve arrived with the particular speed of men who know all the shortcuts and none of the songs. His apron wore oil in a long, honest stripe. "Half-stone, handstone, quarter-hand, and a child's ounce," he said, setting them on the black lip in a clean row. "The Gallery will like the old set better than the committee set. The old ones remember being believed."
Rowan lifted the half-stone. It had the temperature of a fair answer. He set it on the first corner, flattened his palm over iron, and spoke Bind with the tidiness he still had left. "Corner one holds witness steady while lamps breathe."
The fee came with painless exactness: the private joy of aligning ledger thread by shade slipped out of his fingers and didn't return. He wrote its departure down inside and did not mourn it.
Second weight, second corner. "Corner two counts breath, not rumor." The fee came smaller—his habit of turning cups to face the same direction vanished, leaving his hands indifferent to neat little sermons.
Third. "Corner three hears names and will not hear knives." The price was his reflex to lower his voice in rooms that smelled like wealth. The habit left. He felt taller by a lie.
Fourth. Rowan placed the child's ounce—bright, ridiculous on black stone. "Corner four keeps later waiting." The price arrived intimate: he realized he no longer cared whether ink blots were symmetrical. He breathed around the absence. The cradle warmed.
The pendulum noted this industry with a precise tick, as if the city had given up being coy.
"Lampwatch recorded," Blyth said.
Voss's mouth moved in a shape men confuse with generosity. "When your watch nods, we call it sleep," he said. "And we begin."
"Let us see who gets drowsy first," Rell murmured, bell rolling once on her palm without ringing.
The wardline, disliking being reduced to a wager, shifted half a tone toward trouble. Steam folded itself in the floor grates like a cat deciding to be upset. The nearest lamp practiced a flicker and then remembered politeness.
Mae tilted her head. "Bay Two is flirting louder," she said. "I smell toneplate breath where it shouldn't be."
Calder didn't look away from the pendulum. "Tarve, take someone honest and follow the flirt. Out of calendar anything that sings when it shouldn't."
Tarve tapped the weight hooks as if knocking on old friends. "Hollis," he called, and a custodian rose from the shadow of a pendulum beam. "Bring the cold key."
They moved out, Mae ghosting after them with the grin she used when she planned to make a hall admit what it had been up to.
Steam exhaled through the nearest grate, hotter, sharper. The air invented an edge. Lysa cocked the vial; a ring of cold wrote along the glass and held, sulky.
"Rowan," Edda said, no theater. "Edges. Small."
He set two fingertips to the cradle seam and slid Kint along the flagstones in a transparent plank, ankle-high—no shove, just instruction. "Down," he told heat, and heat obeyed because scale was modest. Balance moved under his feet: the world tipped half a thumbnail left. He lifted Steps behind his teeth—the door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift—and the tilt corrected. The invoice arrived in the cheap drawer again: his old bias for even-numbered steps on a stair lifted from his calves and went to live inside iron. He did not miss it. He noted it. Accounting is a way to keep grief from turning into theater.
"Invoice?" Edda asked, lazy as an old blade.
"Stairs," Rowan said. "I'm done counting them in twos."
"Walk like a person," she said. "You'll scandalize the steps."
The steam settled, resentful but obedient. The pendulum ticked the way law likes to imagine it sounds in its sleep.
Voss set his knuckles against the cradle's lip—as near to affection as he gave furniture. "When this silliness ends," he said, polite as rope, "I will require a list of those names for safekeeping."
"You'll get them when I give them," Blyth said.
"You'll give them when I take them," Voss said, and the difference between those verbs was the size of a city.
The pendulum's nose pointed at the floor in the way large truths prefer; then it turned, dignified, toward the ceiling. The swing's edge found the quiet before the First Pendulum and stood there like a man waiting to be introduced to his mistake.
An appeal clerk materialized with the crispness of new paper, hair middle-parted into a future that trusted rules. "Notice of Night Ordinance," he said, not to anyone so much as to the air. "By statute, gallery lamps reduce output by—"
The jury seam opened a breath. "Appeal allowed when the page sleeps," it repeated, the way pewter repeats gossip without meaning to be cruel. "Sleep is measured by lamp and swing."
"Which is to say," Rell translated pleasantly, "dim the light and ruin the timing."
The appeal clerk flourished the ordinance toward the Book and got nothing for his effort except the quiet of a page that preferred responsibility to novelty.
Calder's voice went mild. "If the First Pendulum misses its beat, we call it drowsy. If it holds, we call it stubborn," he said. "I prefer stubborn."
Somewhere under their feet, Bay Two decided it had waited long enough to be dramatic. Steam flexed in the grate; the pendulum shivered; the lamps did a small terrifying practice of no.
Rowan moved before the room could teach him regret. He set his left palm on the cradle, lifted his right to the pendulum's chain—not to grasp, to aim—and spoke Bind in a sentence trimmed to bone. "Swing counts with my breath; my breath counts with the Book."
The chain warmed under his hand, patient heat. The price arrived not as a preference but as a rhythm being repossessed: the internal metronome by which he had once ordered his days—how he tapped pen to desk, how he cut bread in sensible strokes—tilted out of true. He felt it go, an axis choosing someone else's stars.
His next inhale was not his alone. It belonged to iron and to law. He took it anyway.
Edda's eyes shifted from the chain to his mouth. "Invoice?" she asked, and this time the word asked for a wound.
"My count," he said. "I won't keep time right after this."
"You keep truth," she said. "Let someone else clap."
The pendulum steadied into his chest. Lamplight held like a polite hand. The jury seam did not breathe; it had nothing helpful to say.
The appeal clerk blinked at a room that had decided he was accessory rather than principal. "If I may record—"
"You may watch," Blyth said, gentler than the sentence deserved.
Voss's patience set its elbows on the table and decided not to leave. He tipped his chin toward the grates. "If some citizen obstructed a valve," he said, tasting the word citizen as if it were a fishbone, "I will find them."
"You'll make one," Rell said, amused. "It's what you're good at."
Mae slid back through the oak door with Tarve at her shoulder and Hollis two paces behind, carrying a cold key the size of a book. "Found a toneplate tucked under Bay Two's throat and a boy too polite to say who paid him to be clever," she reported. "We have his name and his apology. We kept the apology; you can have the name later."
Tarve set the cold key into a slot that had missed being used. The wardline dropped a hiss as if embarrassed to have been caught flirting on duty. The lamp's milk settled. The pendulum breathed with Rowan and did not miss its beat.
The jury seam decided language again. "Awake," it said, and closed without drama.
"Awake," said the seam, which is to say not yours yet.
The appeal clerk folded his ordinance in half, then quarters, as if making it smaller would make it correct. "I will return," he said to no one in particular, which meant everyone.
"You will," Rell agreed. "Wear a warmer coat; the Gallery keeps a moral chill."
Voss inclined his head the width of his reputation. "Do not mistake delay for acquittal," he told Blyth. "Or for mercy."
"Delay is for facts," Blyth said. "Mercy is for later."
"Later," Rowan echoed, and the word in his mouth no longer tasted like promise; it tasted like rent.
Rell dared the bell to ring and found a knuckle's fraction of patience instead. "Comptroller, I repeat my generous offer," she said. "Medical custody through the night. Ward-doctors to keep your candle from learning bad words while your clerk practices being a hinge."
Edda's smile showed one more tooth than necessary. "He is a hinge tonight."
"So hire him," Rell said, almost kind. "I am prepared to make a man with fewer chairs inside him very, very wealthy."
"Bring your own soul," Mae said. "They don't stock spares."
Lysa checked the vial's neck; the bead stayed shy. "He can hold," she said, and it wasn't bragging. It was faith of the sour, old kind.
"Watch roster," Calder said. "Not in the Book, in bodies." He looked to the crowd that had refused to become a mob. "You there, and you—you look like you've been patient before. Chairs along the wall. Mouths open when you're told to breathe. You keep the room public."
Porters dragged benches like courteous thunder. Seamstresses sat with needles orphaned in their sleeves. The boy with minutes arranged his knees as if they were paragraphs and he meant to read them out loud when asked.
Rowan eased his palm on the cradle's inner hinge but didn't lift it. The Bind sat under his skin like a weight placed on purpose. The swing of the pendulum measured his chest and forgave him only when he forgave it.
Iori looked at the faint names and then at Rowan. "I can stand all night," he said. "Candles like proving it."
"You will rest your light between blinks," Edda said. "If your flame gutters we will not buy you back with poetry. You lean. He breathes. The Book stays awake."
"Understood," Iori said, and the chain at his wrist made that domestic sound again—the one that admits houses are made by hands.
Voss drifted toward the door with his men, every step an invoice he planned to collect later. "When he slips," he told the room, "I will be the one who catches him. Remember that when you applaud yourselves for people."
Rell lingered, because hunger lingers. "If they sleep you've lost your door trick," she said to Rowan, almost tender. "Practice keeping them awake without losing yourself."
"I'm practicing," Rowan said. He didn't add on the hour that tried to make me clever instead of necessary. Some words belong on the page or nowhere.
Rell's bell finally rang, soft as a glove. She took her leave with a smile that had already bought its own absolution.
The Gallery settled into the long awake. A Warden posted at the far door pretended to prefer reading to watching. The appeal clerk sat on a bench and tried out the posture of patience. The pendulum wrote law in the air with its strict handwriting. Lamps held. Weights did what weights do: they remembered.
Rowan counted breaths with the Book. It did not take him long to learn he would never count right again. The rhythm in his throat had been edited into usefulness. He missed it like a song he didn't like, which is a complicated way to miss something.
Edda stood at his left shoulder and didn't touch him. Lysa sat on the cradle step, back straight, eyes on the vial, the word Echo waiting on her tongue like a pen refusing to skip. Calder paced a small square that made the floor feel official. Blyth watched the room the way bridges watch carts.
Names rustled in the field that wasn't yet a list. They wanted to be called. He heard them the way a clerk hears a ledger in the next room, not words, just want. He put his mouth close to the paper and said, without writing, "Later." The field accepted the promise the way hungry children behave when told dinner is a sure thing and the kitchen knows what a fire is for.
From the hallway beyond the oak door came the smallest sound: a tooth-whistle trying not to be proud. It wavered a note that had once belonged to a girl with a green ribbon. The sound stopped as if embarrassed to have been brave. Mae turned her head without moving her body. "I'll fetch that," she said. "Nobody gets lost between a whistle and a ledger in my hallway."
"Take Hollis," Calder said.
"Take nobody," Mae answered, already gone.
Rowan breathed. The pendulum swung inside his chest and outside it, and the difference between those two places was a coin he would account for if he survived the audit.
He looked at Iori. The Wick's light had discovered discipline. His chain smiled a little on stone. His eyes sat steady as milk.
"You all right?" Rowan asked.
"Useful," Iori said, and made the word sound like a prayer that respected work.
Rowan nodded. He felt the small chairs inside him—the ones he had surrendered and the ones that remained—arrange themselves around the bright room he was becoming. Some would go. Some would stay. All of them, for now, faced the page.
The pendulum passed the First, then the Second—measured law pretending to be music. The lamps refused to learn dim. The jury door kept its opinions to itself. The wardline, chastened, worked.
"Later," Rowan told the field one more time, and the city, for once, did not argue. It listened.