They built the Night Market Vaults for secrets, not for people. You felt it as soon as the spiral stair drowned you beneath the last honest window and the city's noise sealed shut overhead. Lamps nested in iron ribs behind smoked glass and laid careful lozenges of light on brass tags and velvet pads. The air was tidy. Voices traveled crooked, drifting like moths that never dared the flame. Nothing here shouted. Everything was entered.

Han came down with Hanna half a step behind his right shoulder. That was where she liked to be—close enough to steady him, far enough to move first if the floor changed its mind. Her coat was plain and dark, built to ignore weather and men; it hid every detail except the inevitability of her strength. When the catwalk sighed under too many cautious shoes, she put her palm to the rail and the metal steadied as if grateful to be told what to do. The crowd marked them without turning their heads. They always did when she moved this way. No one wants to measure their weight against a woman who looks like she could lift the hinge off a gate and set it somewhere more convenient.

"Lots sit under bells," she murmured. Bronze bells hung from crossbeams like a harvest, each fitted with a paper tongue. When a sale closed, an attendant plucked the paper and the bell gave a single, modest tap. That was the Vaults' idea of applause: a sound so clean it barely admitted to existing.

They took the middle ring above the central pit. Below, clerks rolled ladder-stools and exchanged tablets the way professionals in a friendly card game pass truths so small they can be trusted. The auctioneer wore a white hood pinned with something that pretended to be a feather. His gavel was a quill laid sideways—an announcement that, here, the only strike that mattered would be written. Lots went past with the careless grace of healthy money: a sliver of dock lease, the custody of a bonded raven, billets stamped by the Foundry Guild, a waiver folded like a truce flag. The Vaults sold what daylight refused to hold and issued receipts to teach consciences how to sleep.

Lot Nineteen did not pretend to be ordinary. It sat beneath a glass bell jar clamped by clasps shaped like petals. Inside, on a brass perch, a moth waited. Its wings were lacquered parchment, translucent, veined with tiny golden figures neat as needlework. The head was a bead of quartz that drank the lamplight and returned it as a scatter of patient stars. It looked fragile enough to shiver into silence if anyone breathed on it wrong.

Rumor had sent Han down these stairs: a ledger that did not merely count obligations but bound them, and—if one knew the sequence of pages and the resting places between lines—could unmake them. He had little affection for miracles and none for faith; his trade was leverage, not prayer. But a device that knew page orders like a road and could carry that memory on its wings—that he could use. The Ash Ledger was a book if you believed it; it was a mechanism if you were honest. He intended to be honest about it.

Hanna did not look at the jar. She looked at the people who wanted to look at the jar. A woman with a chain-net in her hair tried for a better angle. Hanna leaned her forearm along the rail for a heartbeat, and the sightline closed as if habit had simply chosen a new route. A man with too many rings kept wetting his lips and adjusting his cuffs; she nudged a mirror, and a clean oval of lamp glare taught his eyes humility at the wrong moments. She did not threaten; she edited. The room obeyed.

A clerk who smelled of iron gall ink arrived at Han's elbow without quite becoming a person. "Sealed bids," he said. "Witnesses on the hour. No withdrawals after the bell is plucked."

"Understood," said Han. "How often do exceptions occur?"

"If an exception is seen, it becomes a rule." The clerk slid a card onto the rail. "We try not to write new rules by accident."

Han wrote what he could pay today and what would not kill him tomorrow. He left the lies to men with weaker tables. Wax cooled; his seal set; the card vanished into the desk with a soft appetite. Hanna added her name—not his seal, her name. It was an old practice between them. She would guarantee the transfer with her standing; the Vaults respected that kind of collateral more than muscle. Some patrons hired six guards and paid for noise. Han arrived with one and paid for quiet.

A late registrant took the tier above, and the ring's grammar adjusted. Winter grey fell into the light like a decision; chalk dust lived on the new man's fingers; pale tally marks stitched the hem of his robe—upright strokes that looked like a ladder of frost. He needed no introduction because introductions would have been redundant. The Auditor-Priest of the Pale Tithe wore the kind of attention that followed him home and checked the locks.

He saluted the white hood, acknowledged the bells, let his gaze rest on the jar. "This lot is an instrument of doctrine," he said, a little hungry, perfectly calm. "Doctrine belongs to the temple. I am prepared to redeem it at a reserved price known to the proper hands. In return, I will grant lenience upon this market's year-end errors."

There it was: a simple bargain hinged to a pit. Clean the house if you surrender the key. The Vaults liked to style themselves a conscience, but anyone who had ever balanced a column knew the temple was a stomach. It digested. The auctioneer's hood inclined one finger-width; the air remembered how to be cool.

"It was consigned with witnesses," the auctioneer said. "We are bound by that record."

"I am bound by numbers," replied the Auditor, and showed his palm. A faint sigil lay there, precise as a blueprint: a loop, a crossbar, a short ladder of strokes. It was the kind of mark that could be laid on a glove with a courteous touch and later read into a book as if the book had seen it happen. No one wanted it. Everyone wanted to observe who received it.

Hanna tipped her chin once. Han answered the sign with a nod so small it could have been a breath. If names could be unmade, he would not let the instrument of that work rest in anyone else's hands. She began her quiet war in earnest. A courier didn't arrive on time because her elbow decided to be comfortable at the edge of a chair for exactly three seconds. A mirror flared at the precise height to peel a rival's eyes away from the jar during a crucial moment. Hanna had a talent for displacing intention by the width of a finger.

Bids went out in envelopes of silence. Paper tongues trembled beneath their bells. Han wrote a figure that would sting for a season and leave a mark he could carry. Then he added something that would not pass: a favor. The Vaults would send him a dispute no one else could hold, and he would carry it until it admitted defeat. He did not ask what shape it had. One should not bargain for riddles and then refuse the first answer that arrives.

The bell above Lot Nineteen moved far enough to count as motion. The quill gavel rose; the hood turned. "By the record and witness of ledgers," the auctioneer said, "Lot Nineteen is adjudged."

Before the attendant could pluck the tongue, the moth opened its wings.

It did not fly. The quartz head flexed. Light broke and drew lines on the inside of the bell, a brief constellation that linked and paused and linked again. It did not offer enough for a thief to steal with a glance; it only proved it knew the road and knew how to make a road from numbers. The ring took one careful breath together and put it away unshared.

The paper tongue came free. The bell made the smallest sound a chime can make and still confess to being truly itself. Clasps released. Felt folded. Faces arranged themselves around a dozen new decisions that would follow their owners home and appoint tomorrow's tasks without asking permission.

The Auditor approached as near as manners permitted and offered his chalked palm like a blessing. "A fair sale," he said. He expected the transfer touch, the traditional courtesy that would set a faint debt-stamp on Han's glove and allow the temple to pretend the temple had not minded losing. Hanna stepped into the angle where courtesy lives and altered the geometry of the moment.

"Allow me," she said, taking the receipt, taking the jar, accepting with clean competence the weight no one in the Vaults could measure. She did not look hard at the Auditor. Recognition would have granted him more presence than he deserved.

He found Han anyway by choosing not to move and letting other people's movement deliver his quarry. "Lord Han," he said—never "my lord," never a syllable more than contract required. "Some obligations reveal themselves only under audit. When you are ready to meet them, show your hand at the temple door." He wrote a small, invisible equation in air and let it fall onto the back of Han's glove. Han felt no contact, but when he tilted the leather toward the lamplight a faint loop and bar showed, tidy as frost.

He did not wait for an answer. Paper traveled faster than men, and chalk, in his hands, had longer legs than either.

"Carry as is?" Hanna asked. The jar, swaddled in cedar-scented felt, rested against her hip. Inside, the moth's shadow shifted like a thought deciding whether to be said.

"As is," Han said. "And not by the river stairs."

"Mirror corridor," said Hanna. "Accounting gallery. Pawn cages. Up to the court. Fewer eyes. Better lines."

They went left while the ring leaned right. Clerks performed their small migrations—stool, tablet, breath—to a rhythm no one would ever admit had been taught. A mirror Hanna had left at a minor angle added a heartbeat to a pursuer's decision, and the heartbeat was sufficient. A hallway the color of saved letters accepted them and declined to notice them. In the accounting gallery a boy with ink on his knuckles saw the felt, blinked in professional courtesy, and decided he had never been young.

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