Stone held its breath as the litter cleared the arch and entered open space. People drew in to see what cold copper would say. Scale pointed to the table already dressed with cords and sand. "Show them," she told Kier. He set the plate on blocks. North stood with wrists wrapped in linen, posture precise, admitting the moment its place.

No coals this time. A lamp-stove whispered beneath a bowl of water. Warm air climbed in a thin column and licked the plate's underside. Fog stitched itself across the metal, threading into shapes as hairline grooves persuaded vapor to behave: arrows, dates, destinations, the winter barb gleaming faintly at each corner.

The foundry master didn't clap for craft. He leaned close and called weights and distances while the lockhouse clerk wrote in a hand that wouldn't smear if rain came. The tide porter timed the reveal with his glass laid sideways. The Auditor kept his chalk silent, eyes moving, jaw still.

Scale pointed at one entry and then the next. "Annex deliveries, roofline conservatory, calendar rail. Source of payment: maintenance sub-fund. Authorization: blind." Her voice carried without strain. "The same marks we chased through shops and steam vents sit here in frost."

North spoke when permitted. "This ledger neither blots nor tears," he said. "It teaches a discipline: remember only what a season needs."

"Seasons don't requisition panes that hide permission," Hanna answered. She gestured to the wrapped glass on the table's edge. "People do."

The Reading Master watched the fog writing with a collector's quiet hunger, then allowed himself a tired breath. "You have the system. You will keep time by testimony for a while. Then you'll ask the city to forget hard parts again. That is when Winter returns."

"Maybe we make a different recurrence," Han said. He set the scarf with its black bar beside the plate. "Instead of one office, a ring of keepers—foundry, lamphouse, river, market, archive, court—each with a key and none able to act alone."

Heads in the crowd tilted. People follow proposals that look like work they can picture.

Scale didn't nod yet. She waited for the hour to have the room before she gave it a shape. "For now: suspension of every mechanism not described in the charter. Devices and plates under custody. Choir tools cataloged by guild, not doctrine. Banks to unmask intermediaries. Garden frame to run with both hands on the rails."

The Auditor finally let chalk touch slate. "Officer's addendum: publish the map of signals—steam, rope, hymn, frost. If the city can see its levers, it fights theft with understanding, not only arrests."

The Emeritus had chosen a place at the edge, where she could hear and not lead. Her expression carried neither triumph nor sorrow, only an accounting of consequence. "Publication changes doctrine, too," she said. "It forces argument into daylight."

"Start liking daylight," Hanna told her, not unkindly.

Kier lifted the plate free of the blocks and slid a felt pad between copper and table. Fog thinned; the marks faded back into blank. The silence that followed wasn't empty; it was a room deciding what to keep.

Scale marked the end with a sentence that would fit a record and a rumor: "The city takes custody of time until it trusts its clocks." She turned to North. "You will teach us the tricks you taught the winter plate and the small one under the granary. Then you will sit for questioning about the men who paid you to prefer tidy deceit."

North nodded like a man acknowledging a timetable. "I will show the grooves. They are simple."

Simple, Han knew, is what makes harm travel fast.

Hanna read the crowd as people began to loosen. Faces she'd seen in alleys and roofs looked different when their owners realized they were invited instead of managed. A lamplighter raised two fingers in a sign that wasn't a code, just agreement. A porter from the dye quarter tapped his cap brim toward the Reading Master and then toward Scale, sharing responsibility the way men share a load.

The beadle cleared his throat. "There's one more room," he said to Scale and Han both. "Not Winter's. A closet sized for bad habits near the records office. We've always called it the Quiet. Two benches, a kettle, a slot in the wall no one claims. If anything in this city exists for excuses, that slot does."

"Show it," Scale said.

The Quiet lived up to the name: small, swept, smelling faintly of old tea. The slot proved a sliding tube lined with tin that sang very softly when Fingernail met metal. Han dropped a dry bean down and listened to the long bounce into elsewhere. Hanna lifted the kettle lid. Inside, not water—stiff folded paper wrapped in oilcloth, three layers deep. She unwrapped one sheet and found instructions that matched the scarf code in miniature, complete with marks for "if interrupted"—a tree drawn as a fork, a wheel drawn as a cross.

The Auditor touched the tube's rim. "This goes to Registry sub-basement," he said. "Two bends, then the vault bay. A message courier that carries weather rather than ink."

"Close it both ends," Scale ordered. "Post witnesses and leave the paper inside, labeled, for any court that thinks to write when this memory fades."

Back at the stones, chairs set for the afternoon session waited under a sky learning a new temperature. Dockside Ninth had sent a senior partner in sober cloth to negotiate a future in which banks did not lend their cleverness to nameless offices. The pane maker stood with his apprentice and stared at the scarf coil as if it were a snake he had once mistaken for rope. The gardeners held their hats in nervous hands. The Reading Master wore his own calm like a coat finally appropriate to the weather.

"What do you want in the end?" he asked Han, not defiant, genuinely curious. "A city that argues out loud?"

"Yes," Han said. "And a habit that keeps argument from becoming a pretext for erasing ledgers."

A courier from Calendar Garden arrived with a basket of brass shavings and a note from the foreman: hidden shims removed, rails trued, dials checked against star tables. The little bag of shavings went into the pouch with the scarf and the slate slips and the frost sticks. Evidence had the look of junk when it had served its hour.

Scale brought the room back to attention with two clipped words. "New orders." She laid out an interim scheme as clean as a carpenter's list: each bell to host a watcher from a trade unrelated to doctrine; each lamphouse to hang a printed code key in public; each bank to disclose signatures to the court before funds leave maintenance lines; each conservatory and annex to register equipment that changes the behavior of light, heat, or air.

The Auditor added one more: "No bridges between calendars and treasuries unless both agree in writing and read that agreement aloud."

The Emeritus didn't contest. "Doctrine will send readers," she said. "Not to overrule. To explain when language crowds the railings."

"You can explain from the same bench as everyone else," Hanna said. "Bring lunch."

North raised a hand as if in class. "May I show the council how to erase the grooves from copper?"

Han considered him a breath too long and then nodded. "You'll demonstrate how to end your own trick."

"I recommend we leave one plate as living history," North said. He didn't smile. "So the next generation remembers what to refuse."

Late-day wind set the flag above the mint snapping with a voice that belonged to cloth and intent. Scale dismissed no one. She fed the afternoon into smaller rooms: accountants in one, bell captains in another, glassmen and lamplighters at a third table that smelled of resin and brass. The Plaza ceased to be theater and became work.

Hanna stepped to the edge where stone met street and let her shoulders drop a fraction. "We'll sleep after two more doors," she said without conviction.

"Which?" Han asked.

"Registry sub-basement," she said, thinking of the Quiet's tube. "And the chamber under the choir where somebody teaches air to carry sermons into locks."

Han glanced toward the temple's roofline. Sun slid along panes that reflected nothing but afternoon. "Bring boots that don't slip on doctrine," he said.

She grinned, brief and unembellished. "I'll wear the ones that offend choirs."

The beadle joined them with a small bundle. Inside lay a handful of ordinary nails, a loop of twine, and a chalk nub. "For doors that don't know whose side they're on," he said.

"Everything knows after chalk," Hanna said, pocketing the nub.

By sunset, the river would push colder air into alleys and tug the lamps awake. For an hour, the city had acted like a person who chooses to stay honest even when nobody is watching. Han turned that thought over and felt its strange weight. Habit might learn a new route if led often enough.

"Tomorrow," Scale called from the steps, not to hurry them, just to tie the day to the next without tricks. "We finish counting the parts that tried to count us."

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