The Registry's lower corridors smelled of linen glue and iron shelving warmed by pipes. Hanna followed the faint ring she'd heard in the Quiet—tin on tin—until it converged on a wall of rolled plats. Han pressed his ear to the plaster and caught the hollow behind it. A clerk with dust on her sleeves and ink on her knuckle—Oles, Records—watched them with the wary professionalism of someone who protects boundaries for a living.

"Behind these?" Han asked.

"Architects call it a service chase," Oles said, already pulling two plats from the rack. A narrow door lived where maps had pretended to be endless. Inside, a drop chute ended in a padded drawer, its felt worn into a groove like a riverbed. A crank on the drawer's side bore a tune-mark in tiny file scratches.

Oles frowned at the crank. "That's not in any inventory."

Hanna turned it a fraction. The drawer slid and revealed a second compartment under the first: oilcloth parcels and a tin canister. The parcels were wrapped in the lockhouse style, but the twine had been knotted in a way that taught fingers to untie without leaving a bend. The canister held sifted ash mixed with pine flour.

"Fingerprint destroyer," Oles said, disgust flattening her voice. "For those who like their paper to forget."

Han unrolled a parcel. Inside: petitions backdated by pressure, not ink—stylus tracks pressed into varnished margins where a clerk would never think to look. Names of offices rather than people. Requests to "clarify jurisdiction" that, once filed, let a winter committee reach over other desks without knocking.

"Slot feeds your bay," the Auditor said, arriving like punctuation. He ran his hand along the chute's seam. "Two bends, you were right," he told Oles. "Who signed for 'clarifications'?"

Oles pointed to a register on a stand. "Nobody. The signatures stop the week the chute was built. After that the drawer's pad appears to have swallowed paperwork that never existed."

Hanna took the moth's jar from her bag and loosened the lid. The glass head caught lamplight and sent a thin thread toward the varnish gloss. Hidden indexing numbers rose where the stylus had dragged. Oles' frown deepened into something like relief. "At last," she said. "Now I can name what I've been told not to notice."

"Seal the chute at both ends," Scale ordered from the doorway. "Oles, you'll testify about storage irregularities and the drawer's false bottom. Auditor, pull the filing stamps for the week the signatures disappear; we'll match them to ledger moves at Dockside Ninth."

"On it," he said, already chalking a quick list.

Hanna spun the crank again and stopped at the faintest click. Another panel eased loose, revealing a bundle of ribboned rings. She lifted one. It was wax—old city red—poured into a loop and stamped with an obsolete crest, then cut and rejoined so it could be threaded around a sheaf. A way to make new papers wear antique authority.

"Dress-up collars for documents," Han said. "Good trick. Ugly aim."

Oles wrapped them in cloth as if handling nettles. "They go under lock," she said. "I'll enjoy that turn of the key."

The choir undercroft lived between pillars thicker than memory and stone that absorbed sound with a priest's patience. The air had the faint sweetness of silver polish and lamp-tallow. Pipes ran along the barrel vault, narrow as reeds and arranged like a whispering harp. Beside them, chests no larger than breadboxes sat with lids slightly ajar. At each chest, a wire led to a latch fixed in a row of practice doors.

The Deacon Mechanist met them in a frock too clean for work, hands pale where rings had recently been. He didn't deny what the place was. He rubbed a thumb along one reed and let it hum. The closest latch quivered as if it had remembered a promise.

"It's a teaching room," he said in a voice that expected to be obeyed. "Locks respect instruction."

"Locks respect metal," Hanna answered. She placed a finger on the chest lid. Inside, a diaphragm tightened and released, issuing precise breath at a pitch that had been cut into the reed's length. The latch trembled again; the bolt eased a grain.

Han nodded toward a slate fixed to the wall. Lines of neumes—squared notes—sat beside sketches of lockworks. Columns labeled with saints' names matched frequencies to tumblers and travel distances. "You set sermons to hardware," he said. "When the hymn leaves the nave, a latch upstairs believes it's being asked nicely."

The Mechanist's jaw tilted. "Better than cudgels."

"Worse than signatures," Scale said. "Demonstrate, then disable."

He hesitated. The Glasswright Third stepped forward and set a thumbful of soft wax on one reed's mouth. Breath met resistance; pitch died; the latch refused to inch. He placed a cork into the chest's whistle path, and the reed made a dull, embarrassed cough.

"Every chest will be plugged," Scale continued. "Every practice latch will be detached. If any chapel lock fails to open without song, we replace it. We are done teaching doors to listen for doctrine."

The Deacon Mechanist studied the neumes as if hoping they would grow an argument. They did not. He opened a drawer and brought out a sheaf of instruction slips, each with a different route through the note-table. At the bottom of each: the italic hand that had wound through Ragmarket and Dockside Ninth. "Your donor enjoyed puzzles," he said, and set the slips on the block as if laying down a stubborn hope.

Hanna ran a line of twine along the practice latches and tied them off like a string of stubborn fish. "Unhook them," she told the beadle. "Carry them into daylight so they learn to close when asked out loud."

The beadle grinned for the first time that day. "With pleasure."

Han lifted one of the chest lids fully. Inside, the mechanism was simple enough—a bellows, a reed, a gate cut to speak on command. He dusted flour across the inside surface. The pattern of grease gleamed where a hand had favored certain controls. A handprint ghosted up: long fingers, a healed cut across the pad of the thumb. He pictured the Reading Master's neat wrists and shook his head. Not his. Someone who kept wrenches where other men stored pens.

"Get me a list of maintenance workers for this room," Han said. The Mechanist complied, unhappy but precise. Names of three lay brothers, one sacristy porter, and a visiting tuner who came twice a year to fuss over pitch drift. The tuner's address read like a joke for those in the know: Winter Lane.

"Of course," Hanna said.

"We'll pay him a visit after the session," Han replied. "No sermons."

They emerged to afternoon color. Workgroups still ringed the steps: lamplighters arguing amicably with glassmen; boatmen tracing currents on a chalked board; Dockside Ninth's partner writing language that admitted mistakes without committing to guilt. The frost plate rested under awning shade, packed in straw; North sat nearby with a city scribe, diagramming the grooves he had etched across years.

Scale called a brief halt—water, bread, ink refilled—then gathered the center again. "Registry chute sealed," she announced. "False collars for papers impounded, choir training apparatus disabled, practice locks in custody. We proceed to penalties and interim controls."

The Auditor raised an open hand. "Before penalties: acknowledgments. Oles, Records, for declaring a hole in her own wall. Kier, for loaning cold and returning it. Guilds that admitted where their work had been bent. We change faster when shame doesn't have to be pried loose."

The Emeritus let out a breath that sounded almost like agreement. "Doctrine owes a correction, as well," she said. "We've treated convenience as if it were stewardship. That ends."

"You'll put that in writing," Scale said, warm as granite.

"We will read it aloud," the Emeritus replied, and she meant the harder thing.

Han leaned to Hanna. "We still haven't found the person who carries Winter from room to room."

"He'll hate sunlight more than the others," she said. "Find the man with skin that never learned the color of day."

A shadow moved at the plaza edge where the mint's alley spilled into the square. A figure stood there in a plain coat, hat brim low, boots buffed with the thoroughness of a man who adores polish. Not the Reading Master. Not North. Older than either, posture casual in a way that had been practiced in mirrors.

He watched the frost plate with the look of someone checking the time. When Scale lifted her hand to begin the next piece, he melted into the alley, not fleeing—marking an angle.

Hanna touched Han's sleeve once. He nodded. The beadle saw the motion and drifted wide. The Third eased his loupe into a pocket and straightened as if bored. They let the alley pretend no one had noticed.

Scale spoke the interim rules again, slightly reshaped by the afternoon's work. No hidden channels between money and calendars. No devices that translate songs into authority. Printed codes in every lamphouse. Plates and slates accounted for by number. Witnesses named and change logs read weekly at the market gate.

"And," she finished, "we are creating a watch that does not belong to any office: bell, lamp, river, foundry, archive, docks, markets—one voice from each. They will hold the spare keys together. If someone wants to move a season, they will ask seven hands that don't answer to a single desk."

The Reading Master inclined his head. "You have built a climate rather than a man."

"Good," Scale said. "Climates are harder to bribe."

Applause didn't break; it accumulated—palms, knuckles on knees, the small percussion of relief. Over it, a bell in the next parish rang the hour it owed, nothing extra.

Hanna caught the alley figure again just before he turned the corner. She nodded at Han. "Let's see where he keeps his mirror."

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