Cloud pushed upriver and left a clean chill on the quay. Han and Hanna crossed through it toward the Mint's salt house, where blocks from winter were kept under sawdust for dye vats and meat stalls. The place looked like a granary for snow: timbered bays, slate roof sweating cold, a foreman in seal-brown apron counting notches on a hoist.

Scale's note named the foreman—Kier, Preservation Quarter—authority over ice deliveries and brine permits. He met them beside a chute where shavings curled like pale petals. His voice had the flat care of someone who kept rot from winning. "You want Winter," he said. "You've been touching everything Winter touches. You've shut tunnels, muzzled bells, cleaned the calendar's teeth." He lifted a shoulder. "You're late by a season, but not too late for today."

"Where does Winter book his favors?" Hanna asked.

Kier tapped the cold-room door with a knuckle. "Ledger lives on the inside wall. Looks blank unless you chill it. Same with markers—no ink, just rime trained to draw and remember."

He swung the door. Cold snapped at their cheeks. Racks held blocks wrapped in burlap; numbers cut through frost; ropes creaked. Along the far wall, a copper plate the size of a windowpane glowed faintly. Beneath it, a shallow basin fit to the width of the plate held brine clear as glass. A stack of slate slips sat nearby, edges rimed.

Han's breath dimmed and curled around his words. "Write in cold. Warm to erase."

"Other way," Kier said. "Heat makes the lines show. The plate hums out a tiny breath; the brine throws it back; frost bites where the plate tells it. Think of it as a mirror that prefers winter."

Hanna set her palm near the plate. A whisper like a distant harp—no tug, only tone. "Your beams on the Plaza used chalk and heat," she said to Han. "Here the trick is the opposite."

Kier pulled a lever. The plate's glow softened. Lines crept up on its surface as fog collects on a glass. A map formed: arrows, dates, initials that were almost names, each mark leaving no stain, only condensation guided by a pattern etched below. In the corner: a small emblem—four short strokes making a square with one side faint, the same winter barb they had seen in the bank.

"Winter's account," Kier said. "Paid with maintenance money, chained to seasons. The plate keeps the ledger without giving paper anything to betray."

"Who feeds it?" Hanna asked.

Kier's eyes shifted to the far bay where a door wore three bolts and a plain iron lock. "Supply Clerk North, title says. He gamed seniority, won the key five years back. Never spent a winter away from this room." He paused. "He isn't here."

Han ran a finger across the slate slips. Each held shallow channels feathered with salt crystals, a script you couldn't read without shining air across it. He tipped one toward the copper and caught the pattern: delivery codes to the Reading Annex, to the choir stairs, to the calendar frame—names already on their chain. He looked for new destinations. One line ran to a place he did not yet know: "Frostwell."

"Where?" he asked.

Kier answered in the voice men use when referring to an inconvenience that never learned shame. "Old municipal cooler under the Court granary. Built when summers ran hotter. Abandoned except for ice taxes. Good spot to keep a room nobody writes down."

"Can the plate be moved?" Hanna asked.

"Lift the bolts and it sulks," Kier said. "Take the brine, it sulks louder. But it will travel if wrapped cold."

Han studied the emblem again. Four strokes, one faint. A habit, not a signature. He looked at the rack of burlap-wrapped blocks and saw one tied with a loop knot different from the rest—slightly offset, as if a left-handed man had made it. He cut the string. Under the burlap, the ice had a wisp caught inside—a thread like the scarf code, frozen mid-signal. Whoever packed this block wrote messages into the season itself.

Hanna's mouth went a degree drier. "Supply Clerk North thinks in weather," she said.

Kier nodded. "He melts his orders into blocks and reads them back at the plate. The room remembers; the plate writes. Nobody leaves a note. Nobody risks a wax seal."

"Frostwell first," Han said.

Kier pulled three long nails from a pegboard and handed them over with a grin too thin to be called friendly. "He favors these for locking doors from the wrong side. Bring them back if you can."

They crossed to the granary through lanes where carts ground salt into the cracks. Frostwell hid where Kier promised: a trapdoor inside an empty stall, hinges greased to silence, ladder dark with use. Hanna dropped down first, testing each rung as if it might lie. Han followed with a lantern hooded to a needle. Under the floor, they found a corridor of stone that still remembered summer. Cool air moved in an honest drift. At the bend, a door had been braced with the same long nails, driven in at a clever angle so wood would hold itself shut without a bar.

Hanna levered the first nail free with Kier's second. Metal complained under its breath. The third came easy; nobody expects anyone to return with the exact tool needed. Inside, the room was modest and complete: table, small stove, box of brine sticks, a copper bowl like the salt house's basin, a folded scarf tied with one black bar. On the wall, a second plate, smaller—portable Winter.

A man stood behind it. Older, hair thinning, posture tidy from long hours spent not lifting anything heavier than ledgers. He had the eyes of someone who had taught himself to ignore hunger and praise punctuality. His hands were inside his sleeves like a monk who loved discipline but had never met faith.

"North," Han said.

The man looked relieved to have been named. "You found the salt," he said. He glanced at Hanna's knife and corrected himself. "You would have."

"Your plate writes messages out of air," Han said. "It also tells on you."

North smiled like a clerk who had stayed dry through a flood. "Plates tell on everyone. That is their beauty."

Hanna moved so his line of sight had to pass through her to reach the door. "You'll tell on yourself in daylight."

"Daylight is cruel to subtleties," he said, without bitterness. He rested his palm on the plate. Letters formed in fog under his hand, fast and practiced. Not codes—names. Kiln owners, messengers, two gardeners. The Reading Master's initials. Then, at the end, a simple word: WINTER.

"That isn't a person," Han said.

"It is an agreement," North answered. "A promise to keep the clock clean by any means that prevents panic. We smooth time so men can work without arguing with the date. You make an enemy of that? You'll have an enemy of everyone who prefers breakfast at the same hour."

Hanna looked at the bowl and the brine sticks. "You funded treachery with paint money and taught devices to erase themselves," she said. "That isn't breakfast. That is cowardice with a tidy desk."

North's jaw tightened, then released. He removed his hands from his sleeves and put them flat on the table. "You will take the plate, and you will show it to a crowd that enjoys outrage more than maintenance. They will cheer until the hour changes, and then they will ask why the hour changed. They will want Winter again."

Han didn't argue. He put the hooded lantern near the plate. Heat ran across copper. Lines brightened—older routes, archive stairs, bank vault codes—then thinned as the warmth rose. The plate tried to remember; the room refused to help. He reached for the scarf with the bar and folded it into the evidence pouch with care reserved for tools, not trophies.

"You'll answer with the Emeritus," Hanna said. "With the Reading Master, with the gardeners, with the pane cutter. We've collected a chorus."

North inclined his head. "The choir always wanted better singers."

On the way out, Hanna drove Kier's nails through the door at angles that would make reentry polite instead of theatrical. Up top, the salt house breathed its steady cold. Kier took the nails back and tucked them into his apron as if returning spoons to a drawer. "You found him."

"We found a habit given hands," Han said.

Kier's eyebrows went up a tick. "That's all any office is."

They carried the plate between them on a litter borrowed from a rack of fish boards. Cold licked their wrists; the copper hummed low. Outside, the river leaned its shoulder against pilings and pretended to be harmless. Market callers switched from flour to fish; carts changed voices. The city did what it always did when someone pulled a quiet nail: it adjusted, loudly at the edges, quietly at the joints.

Scale met them halfway to the Plaza. She took in the frost, the copper, the tired set of North's mouth. "Enough to teach the room?" she asked.

"Enough to teach a season," Han said.

"Then we won't waste the hour," she replied, and turned so the path to stone, and witnesses, and ink that refuses to be trained by weather, lay clear.

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