The Tower breathes like a sleeping animal—slow, heavy, possessive. I leave before dawn can make a choice about me.
Cas is waiting in the shadow of the gatehouse, hands in his coat pockets, a grin he hasn't earned yet tugging at one corner of his mouth. "Tour?" he asks.
"Lead," I say.
We slip into a city rubbing sleep from its eyes. A baker throws open shutters and lets out the first hot breath of bread. Fishmongers hunch against the river wind, knives flashing silver as they shave breakfast into buckets. Street-sweepers drag straw brooms and gossip like they're being paid for it. Bastion feels less like stone and more like a lung.
Cas walks half a step ahead, the distance he prefers between trusting and tempting fate. "You want to see the spine or the belly first?" he asks.
"Both."
He laughs softly. "Good answer."
The Dawn Market unspools before us in a long ribbon of canvas and smoke. Spice sellers crack cardamom pods on their thumbs and make the air taste like heat. Fabric hawkers drag their rainbow down from beams and let it fall across their arms: coals, sky, bruises. A pickpocket makes a slow circle near my hip, sees the shadow twitch, and decides to believe in destiny after all.
Whispers spool in our wake.
"That's her—"
"The Abyssal—"
"She spared the soldiers—"
"She ate the dark—"
"She'll eat your sons if they volunteer for the Tower—"
Some bow their heads and back away. Some spit and cross their fingers. One old woman raises a hand and draws her thumb across her teeth like a door being locked, but then she sets a second bun on her stall and turns it so the sugar faces me. I take it. I set a coin where she can deny seeing it. Both of us pretend we've done something ordinary.
Cas buys a fist of figs from a boy with a gap between his front teeth and gives him one of his own knives as change. "For peeling," he says. The boy looks at the blade like it might have opinions about his future. Maybe it does.
We climb the Hill of Bells where guildhouses wear their wealth like armor. The Temple of the Radiant Flame sits high enough to collect certainty from the wind. Priests in linen whites sweep the steps with brooms that have never met grime. One steps forward as we pass, sunlight trapped in his hair like gold leaf. His smile doesn't touch his eyes.
"You are an offense," he says pleasantly, as if offering me perfume. "A wound wearing a crown."
Cas yawns theatrically. "Father, your metaphors are bleeding out."
I ignore him. "What did your flame do when holes swallowed the river?" I ask the priest. "Aside from write condemnations of the bucket."
His jaw clicks. "Faith holds what power cannot."
"Faith fed the hole," I say. "If you want to protect your flock, teach them where to kneel."
A breathless cluster of novices has gathered behind him. One girl's knuckles are white around her broom. She's not much older than I was when I learned that hunger argues louder than doctrine. The priest lifts his chin and gestures us away. His mouth shapes a blessing. His eyes pronounce a ward.
Cas lets the silence walk with us for a while. "You just made a sermon," he says finally.
"Then may it do what sermons are supposed to do," I answer. "Change behavior."
We take the Scribe's Lane down, where copyists scratch neat lies into beautiful books and sell them to people who want truth to have gilt edges. A sign creaks—a quill and a scale. Inside, the air smells of ground ink and glue. Shelves hold ledgers tight as soldiers. A woman with silver-threaded hair looks up from a desk and hides her surprise well.
"We don't serve Tower business," she says.
"Good," I reply. "I'm not here for the Tower."
Cas drifts along the wall, as if admiring bindings. "We're looking for a ghost," he says idly. "A name scrubbed from a ledger the night the docks burned their prayers."
The woman's eyes flit once to a locked case behind her. Bad habit. She scolds herself in a blink.
"Plenty of names go missing when debts get ugly," she says. "Paper is honest. People aren't."
"My father's name was Vale," I say. The word is a knife I lay on the counter between us. "Someone put it where it didn't belong, then paid to erase the mistake."
Her throat works. She says nothing. But her hand sets down the pen with too much care. She doesn't reach for the lock. She doesn't look at the case. She looks at the floor like it might have instructions.
Cas turns a page in a book he isn't reading. His voice goes conversational. "I heard Morvain paid triple wages to night-scribes for a week, then fed the old sheets to the kiln. Nice fire. Nice smell."
The woman closes her eyes for one heartbeat. When she opens them, they're harder. "If you kick at a ledger long enough," she says, "it kicks back. Take your ghosts elsewhere."
"Thank you," I tell her, because refusal is still a kind of direction. "You've told me which door to kick."
Back outside, Cas blows out a breath. "That could have gone worse."
"It went fine," I say, and tuck the scribe's flinch into my pocket.
We cross into the Slopes, where the city sheds manners and remembers it has needs. Roofs lean on each other. Walls share heat. Laundry becomes flags in a wind that can't decide if it's clean. I know these streets by their angles, not their names. A boy runs three steps ahead of his shadow. A woman haggles over coal like her child's sleep depends on winning. It does.
A man on a crate tells a story to anyone who'll stop:
"…and I said to the watch, 'if she can eat a rift, I say let her. What has the Tower eaten lately? Our patience? Our coin?'—"
Someone laughs, too loud because they want to be part of a laugh that doesn't cost. Someone else mutters a prayer to a god who can't be bothered to show up without candles. When I pass, the storyteller's words trip and then he recovers, shrugging his fear into theater. "There she is, then," he says, sweeping a bow so low he almost finds a better career in picking pockets. "Bless the Empress or curse her, just don't block her way."
I should keep moving. I stop.
"Tell me a better story," I say.
He blinks. Then he straightens, looks at my face as if I've asked for bread and not flattery. "Right. Better, then." He jerks his chin toward Dyer's Court, where a tangle of alley-mouths lip a square of broken cobbles. "Night of the fire in South Alley, two winters back—the night they say your family fell—three wagons were seen leaving by the Mint road at dawn. Heavy, covered. No one remembers their crests, but the horses wore bells braided with red thread. That's a Morvain wedding custom, not that there was a wedding." He scratches his jaw. "I didn't think about it then. I do now."
The world tightens to the size of a bell.
Cas goes still beside me. "Red thread," he repeats softly. "That's old Morvain. Prettier than using signatures to bribe the law."
"Where do the Mint road wagons go?" I ask.
"Warehouses east of the glaze kilns," the man says. "Or over the ridge if you're hiding something. The road forks."
"Which fork," I say.
He spreads his hands. "I sell stories, not maps."
I toss him a coin I shouldn't need the Tower to justify. "Then buy a map and learn which fork," I say. "Come find me when you have it."
His grin is sudden and honest. "Aye, Empress. I like a job where the boss doesn't lie about being the boss."
We move on. My hands are steady. My breath is not. Three wagons. My mind sets the bells in their threads, counts them, imagines the sound, small and cheerful at dawn to disguise weight. Graves don't need wagons. Prisoners do. Stolen ledgers do. People you mean to disappear do.
The Goddess leans close, pleased. See? Faith is not only for temples. Faith is the rope men tie around their lies so they can drag them easier. Pull the rope, little ember. Watch what comes.
We cut through Knife-Maker's Row, where the windows sweat steam and the anvils write blunt poems. A blacksmith with arms like folded doors glances at me, glances at the shadow rising and falling with my breath, and nods once as if we've agreed not to waste each other's time. It's the closest thing to blessing I've felt all morning.
Cas peels off briefly, returns with three skewers of something that used to be part of a sheep. He hands me one. "Eat or your temper will," he says.
"Sound advice," I tell him. The meat is smoky and shameless. Grease runs down my wrist. A child watching me lick it off decides I'm mortal after all and steals the third skewer. Cas lets him, loudly complaining that crime is a public service.
We take the Old Wall walkway for the view, because he's sentimental about heights and I'm sentimental about seeing where threats can come from. The city spreads like a game board: markets glitter, chimneys cough, temple spires stab at opinions they haven't earned. Far off, the river throws light like coins. A gull draws a line from one horizon to the other and calls it enough.
Cas leans his elbows on the parapet. "You know he's watching, right?" he says without turning.
"Darius?" I ask. The name puts a taste on the back of my tongue like a copper coin.
"Mm." Cas nods toward the long shadow that the Kael barracks throws across the drill yard. "Not here-here. But he has eyes. He'll want to see if you use your anger to move or to burn."
"I can do both," I say.
He glances sideways, the corner of his mouth kicking up. "That's what worries men like him."
Below us, a patrol of Tower guards crosses a square. Their shadows break and reform around a fountain where pigeons swagger like nobles. A girl in a blue dress runs after a hoop and laughs without asking permission first. I watch, and the ache in my chest does something I don't have a word for yet. It isn't pain. It isn't peace. It's a door in the dark with a hand on the latch.
"Red thread," I say, pulling it back to the part that hurts in ways I can use. "If those wagons left by the Mint road, someone logged their passage. Tollkeepers. Kiln-guilds. Morvain's own docks."
Cas taps the parapet with his knuckle. "There's a woman named Sera who hears things in the kiln quarter. Scares guildmasters for sport. She'll know which fork men take when they don't want to be seen."
"I'll ask her," I say.
"We'll ask her," he corrects, because he's already decided how this story tells itself when it gets drunk at a tavern. "And we'll bring sugar."
We head back toward the Tower when the sun begins to consider its exit. The city changes color the way a bruise does: yellow to purple to a dark you can lie in. People finish with selling and return to living. Someone sings off-key from a window. Someone else fights with a door that has opinions. I pass an alley that smells like yesterday and remember being small enough to hide in the sound between two crates. The memory catches my heel; I keep walking.
At the gate, the guards pretend they haven't watched our approach for the last fifty steps. Their hands stay near their spears because training says hands should, not because we need the reminder. Cas halts outside the wardline, respectful enough of old spells to let them have their boundaries.
"Red thread," he says, like we're testing how the words sit in the mouth. "Sera. Wagons. Fork."
"And ledgers," I add. "Locked cases. Women who flinch once and never again."
He tips two fingers in a half-salute. "I'll start rumors in directions that make certain men trip. You start truths."
"Meet at the kiln quarter," I say.
"When the bells lie about dusk." He grins. "Try not to conquer anything without me."
"I make no promises," I tell him, and step through the wards as they taste my skin and decide to keep me—for now.
The Tower swallows me. My shadows settle like a cloak thrown over a chair. The city hums beyond stone: a beast I have begun to learn the scent of. Somewhere out there, three wagons left at dawn with bells braided in red. Somewhere, a ledger remembers what men tried to burn out of it. Somewhere, a door in the dark waits for a hand that knows its name.
I wash the grease from my wrist and the fig sweetness from my tongue, and I plan the next place I'm going to put my foot.