They climbed until chimneys learned their names. Wind pressed cool fingers along the brick and then forgot them. Hanna set the pace, palm on mortar, boots choosing the parts of the city that liked weight. Han kept the satchel snug against his ribs and let the foundry's heat leave his skin. Above the courts, panes rose in a long arc of glass that pretended to be sky.

The conservatory sat like a folded map of light. Greenhouse frames ribbed the roof; gutters ran with a thin film of grit that tasted faintly of ground glass. A narrow door stood flush with the glazing. Its lock had been taught good manners and would obey if addressed correctly.

"Line," Hanna said.

He passed her cord and a hook. She set the hook and leaned once to teach the ledge respect. The window latch learned at the first try. Inside, air carried plant breath and solvent. A watering chain clicked somewhere beyond view, steady as a clerk's heartbeat.

They moved between beds of dark soil and trays of panes dusted for tempering. Stanchions held half-cured putty like pale veins. In the rear bay, under a skylight scarred by hail, waited what they had come for: a table with a shallow press, a rack of master plates, and a cloth laid to hide a second rack that the cloth failed to hide.

Hanna lifted the cloth with two fingers. The rack held counter-dies for seals—city, house, temple—some perfect, some almost right, the differences small enough to cheat a tired eye.

"Your crest, twice," she murmured, touching the bad one with the tip of a glove. "Their countersign, better than good."

A funnel chimed as a drip met a tin pan. Han set his palm above the plates. Fine grit ticked on leather. He tasted air. Not chalk. Silica sifted through his senses with the clean edge he remembered from the mold. The press still held a test slug between its jaws: wax crowned with a flawless temple arc and a wrong tooth in Han's signet wreath.

He slid the slug into oilskin. "We'll need provenance, not trophies," he said.

"Provenance is a room that confesses when you pull the right board," Hanna said, sighting along the benches. She tapped the floor once with a knuckle and listened. Hollow under the third plank from the frame.

She levered it free with a painter's knife from a tray. The void below kept good secrets: a ledger ruled with thin grey lines, half a dozen vellum slips like the foundry note, a sachet of the grit that dusted everything here, and a glove cut in temple style with chalk worked into the seams until it had forgotten what it started as.

Han set the ledger on the table and opened to the last used page. Dates and shipment marks lived there in an orderly hand: bells sent to Nine; receipts countersigned by a temple junior whose initial had been traced and improved until it looked like a man trying to be his father. Against two entries, a small mark sat, a neat ladder of strokes.

"Audit notation," Han said softly. "He didn't visit this room. He reached for it from a distance."

"How many hands?" Hanna asked.

"Enough to add a new column and pretend it was always there."

The moth under felt nudged the glass with a sound like a fingernail on porcelain. Han bared the jar a fraction. The quartz head drank the conservatory light and returned one thin line that ran from the ledger's margin to the sachet and then to a tray of embossed glass ovals. The ovals bore the temple seal reversed, ready to kiss soft wax and make righteousness look inevitable.

Water whispered somewhere. Then leather creaked—not theirs.

Hanna closed the jar and stepped from brightness into the room's blind side. A shadow lengthened at the door as a man eased it with two fingers and let the latch fall into his palm without sound. He had a beadle's apron and a clerk's posture: careful shoulders, careful gaze, a habit of making space for authority where none existed.

He saw Hanna at the same breath she chose to be seen. His jaw worked once. "Proceedings," he said gently, almost apologizing to the word. "The Auditor requests immediate custody."

"Does he request it of plants or people?" Hanna asked.

"Of doctrine," he said, and meant everything he could name.

Han kept his voice even. "You keep a forgery bench under glass."

The beadle's eye flicked to the press, then away. Good training; bad day. "The temple, too, prefers clean light for its work."

"Work that stamps answers on questions that haven't been asked yet," Han said. He didn't reach for steel. He opened the ledger instead and slid it so the beadle could see. "These shipments. These marks. That grit on your cuffs."

The beadle did look then. His gaze stuck for one heartbeat on the ladder of strokes and again on the glove with chalk in its seam. Something behind his eyes admitted pain before pride remembered the script. "You think this is mine," he said.

"I think it is the Auditor's," Han said. "And I think you will be asked to carry the weight when the table breaks."

The beadle did not step back or forward. He stepped inward, the kind of movement that chooses a spine. "I came to escort," he said. "I will not drag."

"Then help," Hanna said. She let the weight in her voice shift, not quite invitation, not quite threat. "We're going to the Plaza with pages that will be read aloud. You can be the man who found them, or the one who tried not to."

The watering chain clicked. The greenhouse went blue for a breath as a cloud walked the skylight. The beadle's hands opened and closed as if measuring air. "If I carry anything," he said at last, "I carry under the city stamp."

"Good," Han said. "You'll walk between us."

They packed fast. The ledger went into oilskin. The sachet of grit and three glass ovals followed. Hanna slid the bad counter-die into a pocket lined to keep edges from speaking through cloth. The moth stayed in the jar, still as a small decision that has found its next sentence.

On the sill, a bell pull hid behind a fern. Hanna tugged it once. Far below, a door latch gave a hollow clunk. She didn't smile. She led.

They crossed roofs the way people cross rivers—choosing stones that knew the route. The beadle matched them without complaint. He had the look of a man who had been trained to walk behind and was learning what it felt like to walk beside.

At the last span before the Plaza, a catwalk bent over a bakery vent. Heat shouldered their shins; flour drifted in a soft veil. Two beadles waited at the far end with hats square and minds eager for orders that could be executed without questions.

Hanna set the jar on the rail and spoke low to the man she had recruited. "If they ask what you carry—"

"Evidence under city seal," he said. "Not doctrine. Not yours. Not mine."

He stepped out first, posture neither humble nor proud. The others tensed, as if a word from the Auditor lived under their tongues and had promised them glory. He showed them empty palms and kept walking. The catwalk rang a clean note. When he reached the midpoint, he looked back once at Hanna, and something like relief clicked into place.

They crossed without a hand laid on them.

High Court Plaza had changed shade—afternoon's steel turning toward copper. Vendors had sold two barrels of almonds and a quarrel about change. Council clerks drank thin water and thanked it. The lockhouse kept its door ajar and its guards disappointed but sober.

Hanna walked straight to the clerk who had sealed the jar. "Open for custody transfer," she said. "Under Council stamp."

The clerk liked rules more than faces. He liked being asked in the language he understood. He broke wax, drew string, and set the jar beside his ledger. Han laid the oilskin packet and the sachet and the three ovals on the board. Hanna set the counter-die down last, the metal clicking once on stone like a small hammer telling the room to listen.

"Witness," Han said, and the foundry master stepped from the crowd with his apron clean and his faith in heat unshaken. Behind him came the porter from the Archive with tide on his cuffs and a sandglass that kept time by stubbornness.

The Auditor was already there. Winter grey waited in the Plaza's center, chalk resting like frost on his palm. He saw the board and did not blink. That was his craft: to look at trouble and decide it was data.

"You bring toys," he said.

"I bring a process," Han said. "Trial by inventory begins with a table."

Scale's hand rose. The Plaza quieted as if rope had drawn a canvas taut. "We begin at sunset," she said. "But we will seal what has been placed."

"We don't need the hour," the Auditor said. "Arithmetic works at noon or night."

"Then you won't mind arithmetic that starts with provenance," Han answered. He set the ledger so the ink faced law. "Found under glass. In a bench you don't confess to owning. With grit that lives under your stamp and in your countersign."

Hanna lifted the sachet and let the clerk see the dust before tying it again. "This lives in the conservatory panes and in the press bed," she said. "It lives in wax on forged receipts. It does not live in a foundry, a Vault, or an Archive. It lives where doctrine shaves glass to make its mirrors."

The beadle who had chosen to walk beside them looked at his superior and did not lower his eyes. "I carry these under city seal," he said. "Because I prefer law that breathes to doctrine that writes men flat."

A ripple moved—paper, cloth, breath. The Plaza was a lung and had decided to take in more air.

Scale nodded once to the lockhouse clerk. Wax fell, cords bit, the board became a promise.

"Sunset," she said. "Then numbers."

Hanna did not relax. She did not tighten. She set her hand on the jar to tell the moth the room would need it again, and the quartz bead gleamed once like a sign on a road that had chosen its direction.

They stepped back to the crowd's edge. The foundry master took his place near them. The porter turned his glass and let one grain jump. Han looked at the Auditor and saw a man confronting a column that refused to sum.

"After we speak our pages," he said to Hanna, "we climb again."

"For what?" she asked.

"For the person who will try to lift the table while we read," he said. "There's always a hand under the board. I'd like to know whose."

The Plaza took the light of the hour and held it like metal holds heat—without noise, with intent. Dusk waited at the rim of the roofs. The day prepared to answer questions it had been asked properly.

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