"Later," Rowan told the field one more time, and the city, for once, did not argue. It listened.
The listening had a texture. It pressed on the skin the way fog presses panes, patient and a little damp. The pendulum swung the exact width of Rowan's breath; his chest agreed to be measured and kept the agreement without grace. Lamps wore milk and refused to learn dim. Names on the page looked at him without blinking.
Blyth stood with the posture of bridges that didn't like the river tonight. Edda held silence like an instrument. Lysa balanced the vial on her thigh, a thumb on the cork because the world is rude. Calder paced five square tiles and insisted they be official by walking them.
From the hall, nothing. Mae had taken the whistle's direction into her teeth and gone; the hall let her because doors remember who returns chairs. Tarve and Hollis had carried the cold key into Bay Two's throat and taught steel to be ashamed. The wardline purred its apology like an animal that knows it is loved because it is necessary.
Rowan set his palm a fraction deeper on the cradle, the hinge glad of him like wood glad of oil. The cost of the binds he had bought lay warm under the skin of his hands—missing habits arranged in a tidy ledger of absences. He did not look at that page. It would read itself to him later, and later still, until reading became sleeping and sleeping became arithmetic. He preferred now.
The jury door stayed shut. Voss did not. He stood near enough that his cuff could be counted for fray and not near enough that Rowan would be allowed to mistake proximity for fellowship. "When your watch nods," he said again, like a scripture, "we call it sleep."
"Watch nods when it's bored," Mae called, arriving sideways through the oak as if she'd been poured. She wore damp on her sleeve and satisfaction behind her grin. A small shape slid out of the darkness at her hip and positioned itself in the light by sheer want: a girl with a green ribbon crushed flat against hair that had learned to be orderly to please serious adults.
"Tess?" Lysa said softly.
The child's tooth whistled when she nodded. The sound chose not to be proud.
"I walked her out of the corridor that thought about being cruel," Mae said. "The corridor changed its mind when it saw her ribbon. Doors remember good parties."
Rowan did not move his palm. "Can she sit?"
"She can hold," Mae said, and the word meant more than weight. "She held her name even where the hall tried to file it down." Mae glanced at Voss and didn't share her grin. "You can stand somewhere polite and tell the air you invented mercy. She doesn't need it."
Voss did not answer her because the room had picked a story and for once it did not have him as its pronoun. He looked at the girl, measured the lack of ash on her, and returned to waiting for the pendulum to betray them.
The lamp blinked once, ceremonious. Rate-limit made a little door in the page.
"Not now," Rowan told it. "Later."
The page behaved. The breath he let go belonged to him and to iron equally.
Steam tried a posture near the grate, shoulders back, chin high. It wanted to turn the Gallery into a story about valves instead of names. Rowan set two fingers to the cradle seam, slid Kint thin over the stone like a rule laid mild across disorder. "Down," he told heat, not fathering it, balancing it.
Balance went out from under him a half thumb to the left. He corrected with the anchor he carried behind his teeth. The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift. He lifted Steps, the old word obeying out of habit. The invoice arrived as a soft insult he had expected: his private preference for cutting bread the long way eased out of his wrists and left his hands indifferent to shape. He had known it would go. Now it had. He catalogued the absence and kept his eyes on the page.
"Invoice?" Edda asked, because she would say it even if he fell through the floor. That was the courtesy of her cruelty.
"Bread," he said. "It lives how it wants."
"Good," she said. "Food is not a ceremony."
Tess slid a palm along the cradle's black stone like a cat confirming a room's temperature. The chain on Iori's wrist made that domestic sound as he shifted to let her hand have a place. He did not lift his own palm from the margin. Candles are taught to be polite when they are allowed to be.
The jury seam breathed. The sound had pewter in it and something like shame. "Drowsy?" it asked the pendulum, trying to find a technicality already.
"Awake," Calder answered on the city's behalf, because some men practice being a chorus for a decade to deserve one good line. "Awake and measured."
The seam shut. Doors respect sentences if you give them small, precise bones to love.
Voss considered the clock of Rowan's lungs. "You will not keep time," he said, in the tone a man reserves for inventory. "After this."
"Time can learn to be counted by other things," Rowan said. "Tooth-whistles, for instance."
Tess's tooth tried a little laugh; the whistle got shy, but it existed. Lamps approved. The pendulum did not alter its grammar.
Mae crooked a finger, and Hollis brought a boy in by the future of his ear. He had the posture of a tool that had discovered it could ask a price and was late to regret. A toneplate, scratched guilty, hung from his belt by twine that had not expected to survive the day.
"Say your name to the room," Mae told him, not unkind.
He didn't. He looked at Voss. Shame likes uniforms when it is young.
"Say your work," Calder said softly. "Names can come second."
The boy swallowed. "String-runner," he said. "For the plates."
"Who told you to be clever?" Rell asked from the doorway, having decided the exact second when her arrival would be most efficient at sounding accidental. Her bell did not ring. Her smile acknowledged the pendulum with a nod that wasn't quite respect.
"A man with a sunburst on his sleeve," the boy said, too fast for a lie and too careful for innocence. "Said the city wanted the Book asleep. Said we were helping with order."
"The curate's hand," Lysa said, mouth a straight line. "The sunburst that dips left when borrowed."
Rowan gestured with his chin. Hollis cut the twine, and the toneplate came free. It looked smaller in the Gallery than it had under Bay Two; tools are braver where pipes echo. Hollis set it on the far bench and turned it face down, like a story you refuse to finish.
The lamp blinked again, not impatient—regular. The page opened the little door that rate-limit had promised.
Rowan looked at the boy. "Your name is welcome," he said. "It may cost you."
"Fel," the boy said, because names move quickest when you don't admire them. "Fel Nor."
Rowan did not write it. He set his palm on the hinge, his mouth near the field. "Later," he promised again, and made the word a roof instead of a stall.
The cost did not come from the field; Bind reached into his pocket of tidies and took a chair he had been expecting to lose and had not wanted to: the old reflex to lower his voice in rooms that smelled like money. It was already gone, he realized with a strange relief; he had paid that one to the stair hours ago. Bind found instead the small insistence that knives face the same way in drawers. It left his hands, and his kitchen at home rearranged itself in his head without complaint. He let it.
"Fel," Rell said gently, almost nauseatingly. "Which curate?"
But Rowan's rule about continuous motion did not allow the scene to become a hearing; this was still lampwatch, still Gallery, still the breath-counting hour. The question could hang. Answers would be purchased later at pressure and price.
Voss moved his shoulder into the room's patience. "We are collecting criminals with adjectives," he said. "Not nouns."
"We are collecting people," Rowan said.
Tess's ribbon made the smallest sound—a fabric sigh—and decided to continue being green. That felt like a vote.
The lamp blinked, and the permission came with it. The slot in the page opened for a syllable. In the field that wasn't a list yet, the want rose like steam behind the grate: not an appetite for a crowd—one.
"I have a brother," Iori said, as if he had been waiting for the door to open like polite weather. "You wrote him already."
"Caro," Rowan said.
"Another," Iori said softly. "He borrowed my shoes and never returned them because dying is a poor excuse for manners." The light around his face adjusted like a man remembering a joke he had not earned and still wanted to tell right. "Orel Fen."
Steam lifted its chin as if to claim a fee for speaking a family. Rowan put two fingers to the seam and slid Kint under the idea of heat. "Down," he whispered. His balance tipped; Steps corrected it like a friend who knows your worst grace.
The page brightened with a restraint that made men better. Orel Fen arrived as faint as a photograph in water, insolent in its honesty.
Rowan waited for the price to come like weather. It did, and it was personal with the intimacy of a hand removing ring marks from a table: his old dislike of mismatched socks had already gone; his bias for even numbers on stairs had already left; new now, the pleasure of counting in four beat phrases—pen tap, pen tap, pen tap, pen tap—blinked out. The metronome he had wrapped in himself failed gently.
He did not wobble. He had already given his breath to iron. Losing rhythm felt redundant.
"Thank you," Iori said to the letters that were a brother and not a flame, and the chain on his wrist sounded like home.
Fel Nor's mouth made the shape of a question. It closed. There are times to keep questions inside because questions attract appetite.
Rell leaned against a weight hook with a careless innocence no object of hers had ever achieved. "I am going to ask aloud, so the room will do something with it," she said, and for once she admitted wanting the room to win instead of her. "If we can write Orel and Caro and let the Gallery hold its milk, do we still want to say instrument when we mean person? Or shall we draft a better noun and pay for it like adults?"
"Draft it in the morning," Voss said. "When witnesses identify faces, not feelings."
"Feelings draft budgets," Rell said. "They just change their names before the vote."
The jury seam breathed and stayed shut, perhaps out of wisdom, perhaps out of laziness.
Mae brought a name in like a cat brings mice—more gift than proof. "Curate Pell Ren," she said. "Left sunburst when borrowed. Uses boys who don't ask what line they're drawing. Likes to say optimization to valves as if he's flirting."
Lysa's mouth turned into something brittle and accurate. "Pell is parish to the Foundry terrace," she said. "The sunburst leaned left in the weeks our dead got listed as loss."
Blyth did not look surprised. Surprise is for offices without windows. "We will become properly legal in the morning," he said, and the sentence sounded like stone reading itself a bedtime story. "Tonight is for lampwatch."
The pendulum swung its answer down and back, down and back, companionable with Rowan's chest now. Voss watched it, a man who disdained friendship between organs. "You've tied yourself to iron," he observed. "When iron sleeps, you will keep breathing. Alone."
Rowan did not argue. He had tired of nouns that corrected other nouns with sermons. "When it sleeps," he said, "appeal, yes. And words that hurt. For now, we hold."
Voss marked the line as if it were a throat he meant to remember. "For now," he said. He turned to go. His men poured after him like a correct river.
Rell lingered, because hunger has a good tailor. "I will need contracts," she told Blyth. "Census requires budgets. Budgets require me. Pretend to hate it, but write the signature where I tell you. Or let the city burn itself clean and we can all learn how to enjoy nothing."
Blyth did not blink. He was the wrong weather to blink in. "In the morning," he said.
"In the morning," she repeated, resigned to victory later—her favorite flavor.
The gallery learned what awake meant when the person calling it leaned into the word. Mouths opened when Calder pointed with his chin, and breath counted itself without being told how to be honest. Tess yawned, loud and guileless, and then set her palm on the cradle the way children touch altars not because they believe or disbelieve but because wood is there to be touched.
Iori's flame quieted into the kind of stillness that makes light remember it is not the point, only the grammar.
Rowan kept the watch. He did not keep time. The phrase that had been his idea of rhythm lay in the Book now, traded for steadiness and a room that did not dim when ordered. It felt like a theft he had agreed to, a bilateral robbery with receipts.
The pendulum passed the Second without forgetting its manners. The wardline obeyed itself. The jury seam did not dare say drowsy again.
"Later," Rowan told the field. "In the morning we will write more. We will count louder. We will ask iron to learn mercy and then bill it at cost."
The field listened, and for once the city did not try to be clever. The lamps breathed milk; men breathed air; names breathed possibility as if that were legal. The hour finished the way good watches do: it ended without confession and left truth standing for the next to examine.