The Cathedral was a machine pretending to be mercy. Buttresses were shackles hammered into arches; choir stalls were ledger shelves for offerings measured in heartbeats; the nave breathed like a furnace lined with polite plaques. At its center hung the Binding Covenant, a loop of silver script suspended over a dais: WHAT IS GIVEN WILLINGLY BELONGS TO THE CITY; THE CITY MAY REQUIRE WILLINGNESS.
"They turned 'volunteering' into plumbing," Selene said, tasting iron off the air. "We break the pipe that calls itself a prayer."
Luna spread her brass leaves on a pew as if it were a drafting table. "We don't smash," she said. "We mirror. Make the law look at the face that wrote it." She traced the loop with magnets until the sentence showed its hinge. "Here. 'Require willingness' piggybacks on 'given.' Split them and the demand falls in the aisle."
Cyrus tightened the Oath cord across his chest until it settled like a barricade. "I'll stand between the pipe and the people if it bursts." He glanced toward the doors, where a line of neighbors had gathered with food and blankets, the holy offerings of a siege. "They're ready to carry weight that's theirs—not the weight somebody wrote for them."
Tam, perched on the rail like a choir cherub with chalk, pointed at a polished plate Luna had scavenged from the sacristy. "That mirror?"
Aragorn held it up so the Covenant ring reflected itself. "To teach a sentence to see who's speaking." The bell warmed at his hip; the fire along his arm hummed like bread in an oven. The new white stitch under the black brand itched as weather changes itch old scars. "When we make it look," he said, "don't blink."
They moved with the confidence of thieves hired by the house. Selene stitched shadow over the apse until stained glass forgot how to moralize. Luna set magnets at the cardinal points so the Covenant's loop couldn't slide away. Cyrus posted himself on the dais steps, a door that had decided to be a wall again. Tam chalked NO EUPHEMISM on the marble in letters that drifted like incense.
The Cathedral noticed. Not the building—the office. The Tallyman stepped out of an alcove with a smile like a well-kept ledger. His robe was paper; his sash was ribbon; his fingers clinked like coins counted fast.
"Declare intent," he said pleasantly, already numbering them in his eyes. "Gifts can be optimized."
"Stop calling people gifts," Selene replied, equally pleasant. Her shadow reached under his hems and knotted his courtesy to his ankles. He didn't trip. He recalculated.
Luna spoke first clause, voice the temperature of ink. "Willingness cannot be required; demand voids consent."
Aragorn lifted the mirror until the Covenant ring saw itself doubled. The silver script jittered, each letter unsure whether it was subject or object. He placed his brand on the hinge Luna had found and pressed. The bell whispered. The loop blinked—reflex, not rebellion.
The Auditor's pen lowered from the choir loft like a polite guillotine. "Counter‑clause," he said, regret threaded through procedure. "Necessity converts demand to duty."
"Try joy," Aragorn answered, and let the bell hum into the pen until necessity's edges rounded and slipped. "Consent must delight."
The pen paused, offended by the unprofessionalism of delight.
The Cathedral tried a different trick. Choir benches slid apart, revealing pipes braided with hair, thread, ribbon—tokens the city had asked for when it wanted to call its hunger community. The Covenant brightened. WHAT IS GIVEN WILLINGLY— it said, and the floor beneath the neighbors who'd brought bread warmed, as if asking them to step nearer.
Cyrus knocked his chest once. Pain crossed the Oath and thinned; fear divided like a loaf. "Not theirs," he said calmly. "Mine, first."
The Tallyman's smile tightened the way ribbon tightens around the throat of a gift. "You can't arrest the river with your chest."
"Watch me," Cyrus said, and did.
Aragorn raised the mirror again. "Face us," he told the sentence. He angled the plate until the Covenant loop reflected not its own calligraphy, but the pen in the loft, the Tallyman on the floor, the neat row of plaques with donors' names and the smaller plaques with those who had been "donated by circumstance." Letters shivered. The loop saw the authors it had been serving.
Luna slid in the second clause. "Harm shall return to the hand that writes it." The magnets clicked; the sentence found purchase. The ring pulsed like a vein surprised by its own blood.
The Auditor drew a new writ with bored elegance. "Indemnity. The cost will be borne by the grateful." He extended the line toward the neighbors, confident as gravity.
Selene's shadow leaned into it and made the slope false. "We're not grateful," she said sweetly. "We're busy."
The Tallyman, annoyed now that people were speaking wrong in his accounting, reached for the oldest ledger on the altar. "Precedent," he murmured. "First seal. The day the High God accepted the kinder cage. See? Willingness. We can require it again."
The room chilled. The mirror caught Aragorn's face and the brief flash of a courtroom with a sky for a ceiling. The bird behind his eye unfolded a wing. He did not blink.
A chair scraped softly at the back of the nave.
The Witness stood there, hands empty, eyes full. They looked smaller in the Cathedral than in the Binding room, as if the space ate saints for breakfast and left the teacups to brag about the china. They walked forward without calling attention, and the people in the pews made a path because humans know how to do that for the right bodies.
"I signed that seal," the Witness said into the place where echoes are made. Their voice was not loud, but it gathered the Cathedral the way a blanket gathers a sleeping child. "I believed the cage was kinder. I believed he would hurt fewer people inside it." Their mouth trembled once, then steadied. "I was wrong."
Silence isn't the absence of sound; it's the presence of listening. The Cathedral listened. The Covenant hung still. Even the Auditor's pen held its breath, because there are confessions that the law recognizes as currency even when it doesn't like the exchange rate.
"One minute," the Witness said, meeting Aragorn's eyes and then not looking away. "I can buy you one. With my mistake, properly named."
It should not have been possible. It was. The clock the city uses when it tells itself the truth opened like a locket. A perfect minute slid out and lay on the dais, gleaming, unowned.
Aragorn nodded once in thanks that was also mourning. "We won't waste it."
Time did not stop. Time paid attention. Within that attention, work became precise.
Luna drove the third clause home while the gears clicked into kindness: EUPHEMISMS HAVE NO FORCE; A KNIFE IS A KNIFE EVEN WHEN CALLED A GIFT. Magnets locked. The Covenant's light cooled, losing its appetite for volunteerism.
Selene looped shadow around the pipes, not to choke them, but to re‑route—so what flowed would flow back to kitchens and cradles instead of registries and reliquaries. She tied the knot with a sailor's efficiency and a midwife's mercy.
Cyrus braced as the Cathedral tried, one last time, to push the cost into the pews. The Oath cord sang, and the district behind him answered in the soles of their feet. The shove found nowhere neat to go.
Aragorn lifted the mirror and the bell together. "Look," he told the Covenant, and turned the plate until the loop had to see the faces of the people it fed on when it believed the Tallyman's pen. "Look at who pays."
The loop broke—not shattered, not dramatic. It relaxed. The silver script untwisted like a neck no longer forced to nod. Letters fell as gentle as rain and lay on the dais as harmless as spoons.
The minute ended.
The Cathedral exhaled the way a long illness exhales at last bath. Lights in the apse flickered, embarrassed. The Auditor's pen wrote INDIGNANT in the air, then crossed it out because the word made him look petty.
The Tallyman closed his ledger with the grace of a man who will audit tomorrow. "Revisions noted," he said tightly, and retreated into an alcove that suddenly remembered it had always been a broom closet.
People on the pews blinked as breath returned to their chests without being invoiced. A woman whose ring had been pried off for an "infrastructure offering" found it on the ledge beside her with a polite note that said MISTAKE, SORRY. A child who had been promised to the seminary "for the good of the city" remembered he liked marbles more than hymns.
Aragorn turned to the Witness. "Price?"
They smiled, and it hurt to see it. "A title," they said. "Witness is now a job, not a name. Anyone may do it. Everyone must sometimes." Their voice rasped once, like a pen worn down to the metal. "I'll sit in the back and pass water."
"Thank you," he said.
"Bring back a world where even this is unnecessary," they replied, as if reminding a student of yesterday's assignment.
Outside, bells tried to coordinate outrage and managed only punctuality. Inside, Selene rolled up shadow like a carpet. Luna collected her magnets, fingers shaking now that there was room for shaking. Cyrus loosened the Oath cord and inhaled a breath that did not belong to him and exhaled it back to where it did. Tam wrote THANK YOU, WHOEVER YOU ARE on the dais because sometimes graffiti should be polite.
The Auditor watched from the loft, pen stilled. For the first time, his not‑face looked almost thoughtful. "Proceed," he said to no one, which might mean himself.
Aragorn set the mirror down. The bell cooled, pleased the way a good tool is pleased when properly used. The stitch under the black brand ached—weather, or history.
"Next," Selene said briskly, because victory withers if you let it think it's a sculpture. "We break their voice."
"Ledger towers speak through seraphs," Luna said. "There's a commander who turns sunlight into verdicts."
Cyrus smiled like a bruise deciding to be a legend. "Then we make a cloud."
Aragorn glanced at the Witness one last time. They had already taken a seat on the last pew, pouring water into tin cups for neighbors who didn't yet know they were thirsty for truth.
"Onward," he said, and the Cathedral, now somewhat unemployed, let them leave without blessing or bill.
— End of Episode 9 —
Key powers this episode: Mirror‑law (force a sentence to face its author), Consent inversion (demand voids consent; harm returns to writer), Anti‑euphemism clause, Oath pain‑split (district buffer), Shadow re‑routing (Selene), Magnet‑hinge mapping (Luna), Perfect Minute purchased by confession (Witness), Bell hum as pen‑detuner; Fire‑covenant steady heat.
Focus cast: Aragorn, Selene, Luna, Cyrus, Tam; the Witness; Auditor; Tallyman.