The stone ticks again—neat, patient, pleased with itself.
Root doesn't blink. "It's talking," they repeat. "Not listening. A relay."
"Who's it talking to?" Syth asks, already palming chalk like a nervous coin.
"Water," Root says. "And men who think water is a leash."
Kirella's hand finds mine under the lantern handle. "We go now."
"Sideways," I say.
"Fast," Syth adds, because speed feels like a plan when plans are few.
Bora bars the inlet gate and calls three names without raising his voice. Men and monsters move—nets up, kettles off, children counted by hair and ears and scowls. Lelia thrusts a packet into my pocket. "For light-sick," she says again. "Chew. Spit. Hate me. Live."
Root kneels by the wall where the lock mouth sits like a coin trapped under glass. Their finger circles the iron. "This isn't temple," they murmur. "Temple locks sing at you. This murmurs to its own kind."
"Can you quiet it?" Kirella asks.
"Not from this side," Root says. "This is a mirror-face—only a smile. The hinge is in the Maintenance Vein."
They chalk a quick route on the pillar: through the net cellar, into Service Drain 3, left at the rust ladder, under the salt chute, then a narrow drop into the Vein—a long crawl where old locks whisper to one another like gossipy aunts.
"Find the mother mouth," Root says. "Shut it with two truths, or break its tongue with a knot and ring. Either way, seal our copy here with rope and wax when you return."
Bora presses a stub of old candle into my hand. "For wax," he says. "For the seal."
"Us first," Kirella says, eyes on me.
"Then the rest," I say.
"Back in one hour," Root adds. "If the bell rings three, don't return this way. We'll route you to the Abbey Spur."
Syth grins without joy. "I've always wanted to get lost in a church that forgot light."
We slip through the net cellar—bundles of twine on pegs, the damp of old rope, the comfort of things that hold other things together. Lelia lifts the hatch to Service Drain 3 with her hip and shoulder and a noise a kettle would respect. We drop in one by one.
The drain is low, wet, and honest about it. Syth runs point with chalk marks on knee height: → for safe, × for broken tile, a tiny fish for a hole that pretends not to be. Kirella's shoulders fill the space like a friendly door. The lantern rides low, and I draw thin rings to keep our feet from forgetting we love the floor.
We reach the rust ladder—iron rungs married to a wall by time and neglect. Kirella goes first, tests each rung with his weight. I go second. The rung under my boot complains; his hand is already there to shush it. Syth floats up behind like a whisper with scuffed elbows.
At the salt chute, dry crystals crunch under my soles. The air tastes like soup gone wrong. Syth hops down and scoops a handful into her pouch. "For later," she says. "In case later smells worse."
The chute narrows, then drops. Kirella anchors the rope, wraps it twice around his forearm, and lowers us until the floor decides to be floor again. The lantern's glow brushes a wall of old carvings—hands, coins, knives, boats, circles—half sanded away by men who thought history was a stain.
We reach the Maintenance Vein.
It looks like a vein—long and thin and pulsing with a sound too low to be music and too ordered to be silence. The stone here is smoother, the corners smoothed by care, not time. Iron mouths dot the wall at intervals—small circles like the one in our alcove, each with an ear or a key scratched faint around it. Some are sleeping. Some mutter. One near my shoulder ticks and then clicks twice, like a gossip answering itself.
Syth leans in, fascinated and repulsed. "Could I steal that?"
"Steal a mouth?" Kirella asks.
Syth shrugs. "People sell weirder."
"They'd sell you with it," I say. She snorts, which is agreement.
We move along the Vein, listening like rats listen—first with whiskers, then with bones. The mouths thicken closer together until their clicks merge into a pattern—tick…ticktick…tick—like a hand that can't stop tapping the table.
"Code," Kirella murmurs.
"Can you read code?" I ask.
"I can read men who like code," he says. "They count. They smile at their own cleverness. And they like rhythm."
The mother mouth waits at a bend, larger than the rest, iron with a lip of brass. Someone polished it once; someone else fingered it often. Around it, the wall is patched with plaster in a careful square, as if the city stitched its own skin and wanted to show off the seam.
I hold the lantern up. The mother mouth speaks in polite, dusty clicks: one…two three…four…one…two three…four. My ribs remember fighting to a drumbeat. The beat isn't holy. It's market—counting coins, not prayers.
"What two truths shut it?" Syth whispers.
Root said "two truths," but truth is a tool and a trick. The arch took words of promise. A lock like this might want words of commerce. I try the promise words anyway, because promises are what I carry.
"I keep doors open," I tell the mouth, palm on the stone.
It clicks like a laugh in a pocket.
Kirella's jaw tightens. "Then try its language," he says.
"What's its language?"
"Sale."
He places his palm beside mine. "First truth," he tells the lock. "We won't pay."
"Second truth," I say, catching his rhythm. "We won't sell."
The mother mouth hesitates. The clicks slow, then repeat—one…two three…four—and then add an extra tick at the end like a sneer. It's not a refusal, exactly. It's a counteroffer.
Syth bares her teeth without meaning it. "What if we lie?"
"Then it eats the lie and grows," I say. "That's what market locks do."
Kirella slides his hand down to mine on the lantern handle. The glow steadies. "Two truths can be ours, not its," he says. "It likes purchase. We give it value it can't price."
He breathes once, even. "First truth: Us first."
"Second truth," I say, palm stinging against stone. "We keep each other."
For a heartbeat nothing happens.
Then the low hum in the Vein drops half a note. The mother mouth's tick stutters. A hairline line of warmth leaks from the seam around its brass lip and soaks into my skin, not glass-sick, not temple, just kitchen. The mouth stops counting. It listens.
"Now," Kirella says.
We work quick. Syth jams a wedge of rope—kept-knot already tied—into the seam where the mouth breathes. I draw a ring around it with the lantern, tight and exact. Kirella smears salt into the ring's edge until it grains like sugar on a crust. Together we press both palms to the circle.
"Two hands," he says.
"Two lives," I say.
The ring warms, then hardens into something that looks like light and feels like wax. The mother mouth tries to tick. The sound muffles, then stops. A hush falls down the Vein like flour dust.
Syth leans back, eyes bright. "We muzzled it."
"Not forever," I say.
"Two weeks," she says, hope bargaining already.
We don't wait to learn. We move back the way we came—rope up, chute across, ladder down—leaving small chalk → for ourselves we might not need. The lantern stays low. The floor stays loved.
"Stop," Kirella says, very quiet, at the top of the rust ladder.
I freeze. Syth freezes so hard she shakes after.
A shadow lies across the drain below—long, thin, handsome in the way knives are handsome. It isn't a man. It's a projection—a mirror-image thrown from somewhere clever. The ribbon at its hand dangles without moving. The key at the end shines once and not again.
"It knows we're here," Syth breathes.
"It knows when we were here," Kirella corrects, measuring angles with his eyes. "Light takes time to bounce. He sent this before we muzzled the mother. He was sure we'd be here."
"We were," I say.
"Then don't be," he says, and nods toward a crack above our heads: a spider run of old brick too mean for men and perfect for stubborn women and people who ignore warnings.
We climb sideways into the spider run—elbows, knees, curses under breath. The lantern scrapes once and apologizes with a soft hum. The crack widens to a pocket where someone hid a jar of pickles a century ago and forgot. Syth pops the seal. The smell is an argument. We leave the jar as an offering to stalactites.
The pocket opens into a round inspection room with two dead lamps and a hole in the floor. The hole looks like a drain and isn't. It's a throat bored smooth by engineers and ghosts. On the far wall, a sign etched shallow says: HOLLOW ABBEY SPUR and under it, in smaller letters, This way when the city forgets itself.
Syth touches the letters like a child touches a gravestone. "It forgot itself," she says. "A while ago."
We look back at the way we came. The shadow in the drain below shifts, just a hair. The ribbon twitches like a cat tail. The key does not glow. It doesn't need to. It is old and sure and so bored it is dangerous.
"Root said three bells, take the Spur," I say.
We listen. The bridge-tooth line is silent. The inlet holds its breath.
"We have time to seal our lock," Kirella says. "Then we choose the Spur with them, not without them."
We slip back through the chute and the ladder, through the drain where the shadow waited a minute ago and is gone now, through the net cellar that smells like wet rope and trust. The Commons exhales us in—children counting chalk suns, Bora carrying a beam like it's a conversation, Lelia thumping a kettle like it owes her rent.
Root waits by our wall. The iron circle in the stone ticks once, offended. I warm the wax stub in my palm and press it over the circle. Kirella winds rope around and through, kept-knot tight. Syth draws WE KEEP EACH OTHER around the seal and dots the letters with salt.
The ticking muffles. The wall looks like a wall again.
"How long?" Bora asks.
"Two weeks," Syth says with confidence a little bigger than truth.
"A week if the Key-man smiles too much," Root says. "Two if he frowns."
"So we spend it," Lelia says. "On stitches and soup and choosing the path to the Abbey."
We report. Root listens, eyes half closed, hearing more than our words. When we reach the inspection room with the sign carved shallow, their mouth curves. "The city remembers its own forgetting," they say. "Good. That's the only kind of memory men don't tax."
Bora pins a new chalk mark on the pillar: Spur—scouted. He draws a short line from the inlet to the inspection room and a longer dotted line toward a smudge of stone labeled ABBey because his hand ran out of room and humor both.
We eat. We drink. We breathe. The lantern hangs over the table and pretends to be a kitchen lamp. The pretending is almost true.
Then the bridge-tooth line rings one—two—three.
The Commons stills. Even kettles hesitate.
Root's head lifts like a deer that knows which twig makes which sound. "Flood just turned," they say. "Not up. Around."
"Circle net," Bora says, already moving.
Lelia gathers children with her apron. "Hands," she says, and twelve small fingers hook her belt like ticks on a dog that loves them anyway.
Kirella's eyes meet mine. "Spur?" he asks.
"Spur," I say.
Root steps between us and the gate. "Take this," they say, and hand Kirella a bone whistle smeared with ash. "Blow once if the Spur refuses. Twice if it lies. Not at all if it opens. We will hear."
They turn to me and lay two fingers on the lantern glass. "If the Abbey has a door, it won't want applause," they say. "It will want kept."
"We brought kept," I say.
Root's mouth softens. "You brought each other."
Syth is already shouldering rope. "I brought salt," she adds. "And hate for kettles."
We slip into the net cellar and out the hatch to Service Drain 3 again, faster now, but not foolish. The drain tastes like wet iron and bold plans. At the rust ladder, Kirella rigs rope for a faster return. At the salt chute, Syth pockets more crystals because she believes in carrying too much of good things.
We reach the inspection room. The HOLLOW ABBEY SPUR letters wait like old advice on a door frame. The throat beyond is dark, not cruel. A faint wind moves in it, patient as Root's voice.
Kirella lifts the bone whistle to his lips and doesn't blow yet. He is a man who asks a place's name before walking across it.
"Ready?" he asks.
"No," I say, honest.
"Us first," he says.
"Then the rest," I answer.
We lower ourselves into the throat. The lantern's glow licks the stone and leaves thin rings where future feet might need them. The air smells like paper and rain that hasn't fallen yet.
Halfway down, stone changes under my palm—from city cut to old carve. I touch a groove and feel the faintest hum, like a prayer that forgot its words and kept the tune.
At the bottom, a door waits.
Not a gate. Not an arch. A door of dark wood with iron straps and no handle. On its face someone carved old symbols shallow and careful: hand, boat, bread, cup. Under them, new scratches: WE KEEP EACH OTHER—not mine, not Root's. Someone else got here once and wrote the same rule.
Kirella puts his palm to the wood. It is cool. Not unfriendly. Waiting.
The lantern warms in our hands.
"Two truths?" Syth whispers.
"Not this time," I say, reading the carvings like a market list. "Two gifts."
"Bread and water," Kirella says, nodding at bread and cup.
I pull Lelia's packet from my pocket. Bitter leaves and hard biscuit. Kirella finds the little flask he keeps for cleaning wounds and not dying of thirst. I break the biscuit in three, because that is the right number now. We pour a sip into the cup shape carved shallow and press the crumbs into the bread mark.
"Speak," says the door, but not out loud. In wood. In grain. In a voice like tables.
"I'll leave this door open," I say, because some habits are bones. "I'll come back for three."
Kirella sets his palm over mine. "I won't go where she can't," he says. "Not for orders. Not for coin."
The wood warms. Not like fire. Like ovens after bread is out.
Syth leans close as if listening to a secret. "Do I… say a thing?"
"If you want to," I say.
She swallows. "I won't steal by hunger where sharing is the rule," she says in a rush, as if the words would escape if she didn't catch them.
The door breathes.
It opens a finger's width.
Somewhere above, three bells ring again, quick, anxious. The flood doesn't climb. It circles and looks for new throats.
Kirella lifts the whistle and blows once.
The sound doesn't echo. It travels. The Commons will hear. Root will draw a line on the pillar and make it true.
The door opens another inch.
A smell slips out—old stone, old paper, something like apples stored in a bell tower. The lantern brightens, not wide. Deep.
Behind us, very far now, a polite voice slides down stone like oil. "Little red," it calls, soft and pleased. "Markets are patient."
He cannot be here. He isn't. He sends his voice through the places he already bought.
Syth flips him a rude sign with two fingers and no fear, because fear is busy.
We look at each other.
"Us first," Kirella says again, almost a smile.
"Then the rest," I answer.
We step through the Abbey door together.
And the chapter ends there, with the door breathing open on a place the glass forgot, the flood circling behind us like a dog that hasn't decided to bite, and the lantern's kept light steady between our hands.