The scream pulled thin through rain, high and raw, the way a child sounds when water goes wrong. Ryo didn't waste a breath on Merek. "Harrod—tie him," he said, already moving. "Priest, sit the weir. Mara, lock the paper. Soren, with me. Anna—bucket. Ren, Toller—poles and rope."
Harrod wasn't stupid. He flicked his fingers. One of his men took Merek's wrists and ran a strap around them tight enough to make the man wince. The bailiff didn't bother with a speech. He looked pissed at his own red cloak for a second and then set his jaw. "Go," he said.
Ryo ran. The south lane dipped and then rose to the cistern green. People stood wrong—clustered near the stone ring instead of back where the ground didn't break ankles. He shouldered through bodies because "excuse me" was for after.
The cistern had a stone curb and steps down to a waist-high pool of water that should have been calm. It churned. A bucket rope cut the water in a taut diagonal. A girl of about eight clung to the rope with both arms, eyes open too wide, mouth open and trying to be brave and filling anyway. Something long and dark had her dress in its teeth. Not fish. Not dog. A sump thing—eel thick as his thigh, head wedge-shaped with side jaws that didn't belong in clean stories. A rope loop sat behind its head like a man had been trying to pull it back and then got clever and used the bucket rope to anchor it.
A man with two dots burnt into the corner of the little board tied to his belt stood on the far edge, half-hidden behind the old pump house. He held a reed whistle between teeth and tongue and blew a thin, high note in bursts, not constant—training cadence. When the girl kicked, he blew three shorts. The eel jerked its head and pulled.
Anna didn't wait. She snapped the lid off the lye bucket with her elbow and pinned it with a knee. "No throw," Ryo said. The burn would blind the kid too. He shoved salt into her hand without looking and ran for the curb.
"Out!" he barked at the two women on the steps who were doing the math between their own bones and the child's. They flinched in the right direction. He took the last three steps down in one drop and went into the water to his thighs. It was bitter cold and slick under foot. He ignored the shock and put his hand on the bucket rope just above the girl's shoulder. It was strung guitar-tight over the curb stone.
"Look at me," he said to the girl. Her eyes snapped to his face because people do that when someone takes the rope out of their panic. "Open your hands on three. One, two—"
Her fingers couldn't have obeyed a saint. They opened because he twisted the rope and slid it free of her forearms and shoved her up with the back of his hand into a waiting woman's arms. The woman fell backward up a step and started crying while still moving. Good. Ryo got the bucket rope alone. The eel kept its teeth on the girl's torn dress and got a mouthful of rope for its trouble. It shook. The skin under its jaw was pale and softer. Good.
"Ren," Ryo snapped. Ren appeared at his side like he'd been teleported by bad ideas, shovel in hand. "Don't break the rope," Ryo said. "We use it."
The two-dot blew again. The eel pulled. The bucket rope sawed against the curb stone and cut fibers. It sounded like someone trying to sing with a knife.
"Soren," Ryo said without taking his eyes off the water. "Name it."
Soren's voice came hoarse and fast. He lifted his countersign high under rain. "By Gareth's hand and mine," he said. "Cistern line. Men who stand on the ring and stairs stand. Nothing pulls through from the drains unbidden. Witnessed."
Anna slapped her palm on the wetted stone. "Witnessed," she said. The woman holding the girl did the same just by following a tone. "Witnessed," she whispered like a prayer.
Emergency line: permitted. Witness threshold: two. Activated.
Ryo didn't feel safer. He felt the rope stop trying to climb into his bones. Better.
He slid sideways, got under the bucket rope with his shoulder, let it ride the meat where it couldn't cut, and fed slack a finger's width at a time to make the eel adjust. He wanted the head higher without giving it enough angle to climb. It took the bait. It rolled its wedge up to get purchase. Ren moved like a man setting a nail where he wanted it first try. He put the shovel's edge in the corner where jaw met body and leaned his weight. Bone? Cartilage? It didn't matter. A lever is a lever.
"Down," Ryo said—not to the eel, to the rope. He dropped it an inch. The eel's head popped higher. Its side jaw cleared. He got the loop over its nose behind the teeth in a motion that was so practiced it came out of a part of his body he didn't name. He twisted, hard. The loop bit. The eel jerked and felt the bite where it didn't like it. It went to roll.
"Let it," Ryo said. "Guide." He moved with it so his wrist didn't get ripped off. Ren let the shovel ride, not fight. The loop tightened off-plane. The eel's roll took the rope around its head and jammed it into its own teeth. It choked itself a heartbeat.
The two-dot blew three short whistles fast. The eel stuttered, trained. Ryo yanked the line sideways so the cadence didn't match memory. The eel froze for that single beat a dog spends caught between command and pain.
"Toller!" Ryo said. "Board. Nails." Toller slid a plank under the line right where the eel's jaw would slam when it lost slack. "Anna—fat," Ryo added. She tossed him the rag with tallow. He ran it down the rope where it lay over stone to keep it from sawing through.
The eel found breath again and tried to go. It slammed its jaw on the plank full of nails. It thrashed. It didn't learn. Training had removed that part.
Ryo stepped up a step with the rope so his boots had better purchase. Water ran off his thighs. Cold started to mean nothing. "Ren," he said. "Up on three. Pull when it turns so the hook bites at the hinge."
They counted. They didn't shout. They hit at the turn. The loop ate itself into the eel's soft place behind the jaw. The eel bucked and took itself into the nails again. Blood went black in water. The two-dot blew so hard it was almost scream.
"Shut him up," Ryo said without looking. Someone—Brann by the sound of the punch—solved it. The whistle cut short. The eel lost instruction. It found pure instinct and tried to go down and back into the drain.
Ryo let the rope go slack half an inch at the exact beat the eel thought it had respite. Then he yanked. The eel's head came out of water in a splash and hit the curb. Ren's shovel went down. It bit behind the eye socket. The eel writhed wrong. Ryo got his knee on the thing's neck and leaned his weight. Toller slid his board in full and stomped his heel to set it. Nails sank. A woman screamed because some sound needed to leave someone's throat. Anna balled her fist and drove it into the two-dot's gut so he would stop trying to suck air for a whistle.
"Finish," Ryo said, even. Ren did. The flat of the shovel came down twice more. The eel's body kept moving, but it wasn't going to use its mouth again. Ryo held the loop a breath longer, then let go and stepped back without turning his back to the pool.
A boy on the far edge tried to run. He had a small crate under his arm. Two dots burned on the corner. Brann didn't chase. Toller threw his rope and took the boy's legs out from under him. The crate cracked. Tin disks spilled like cheap saints' medals. Whistles clattered. The crowd that had stacked fear in their mouths ten breaths ago made a sound that wasn't pretty. Hands reached. The boy was hauled up in a way that meant nobody wanted to break him but nobody minded if he remembered hands on his collar.
The girl who'd been in the water coughed. Ryo looked at her. She was alive. She had rope burns on her arms and a slice on her calf from where the eel had tried to get a better angle and caught skin. The woman holding her had her head against the child's wet hair and was making the sound of someone who has decided to be grateful before she's finished being scared.
Soren came down two steps, then stopped because he wasn't a fool about where boots and panic go. He looked at Ryo like he wanted to say a speech and swallowed it. "Warden," he said instead, and it didn't sound wrong on him anymore.
Ryo wiped his palm on his coat and stepped up to the curb. He looked at the two-dot. The man had blood on his lips and rage under his eyes. He tried to spit and had nothing left to spit.
"You call that 'fetch' too," Ryo said. "At a cistern."
The two-dot smiled like a man who knows where he'll be when someone else is alone. "It listens earn better than 'sit,'" he said, voice wrecked. "Women teach their dogs the first word from a child's hand."
Ryo took his rope and looped the man's forearms together. He tied the knot that tightened when you tried to scratch your ear. He didn't say anything about it. He didn't need to.
"Cistern line stays," he said to Soren, loud enough for the green. "We keep a post here. Two women sit with a pole and a shoulder. Anyone blows a whistle at this ring, he sits with his hand in wood until the skin comes off his wrist and he learns something."
"Write it," Soren said. "We'll post names. We'll pay the two who sit with bread first and count arguments later."
Anna pushed hair off the girl's face with a gentle knuckle and didn't say "you're all right" because lying to a child makes liars of you for a long time. "You did what you needed," she said instead. The girl blinked and then started shaking. Anna nodded like that was the right answer and put the girl's small hand on the fat pot. "This keeps rope from eating itself," she said. "Smell it. Remember. If a man gives you a cloth that smells like this and says 'fetch,' you find a brick and break his teeth."
The woman laughed—sharp, shaky—and then almost sobbed because humor and crying sit next to each other in the throat.
Harrod came up with his cloak pulled back and grit on his shoes instead of neat. He looked at the dead eel like it owed him personally. "You're making my work expensive," he said to no one in particular.
"You signed for it," Ryo said.
"I know," Harrod said, dry. He didn't hide the sour respect under it. He glanced at the two-dot. "Your name," he said.
"Tomas," the man said. He grinned. "Two dots Tomas. That's what you'll burn under my head if you're going to do the work right."
Mara had arrived without Ryo seeing at what step. She set her ledger on the low wall and began to write, not pausing. "Tomas," she said as she wrote it. "Of no house. With no mark we'll respect. Interfered at cistern. Aimed beast at water."
Tomas smiled bigger and made his voice almost a song. "By order," he said, and then stopped because he didn't have a seal to finish the sentence.
Harrod took a breath like he was about to say a thing he'd choke on later. "By my order," he said instead. "Bound. Publicly. Five days. Then presented to the hall." He looked at Ryo. "Happy?"
"No," Ryo said. "But I'll take his hands for today."
He watched Rin—the girl's name, somebody called it; he filed it—get wrapped in a dry apron and carried toward the shrine, past Harrod's horse, past men who had wanted to swing a cudgel and had ended up holding rope instead. The green took the kid and the water and the fear and made room for everything else again. That's how villages keep existing.
"Warden," Soren said, breathing like he hadn't since morning. "You can raise lines without me."
Ryo didn't pretend modesty. "Sometimes," he said. "Works better if someone says 'witnessed.'"
Authority: expanded—Emergency Unwitnessed Lines. Penalty increased on abuse.
He didn't say the parts he felt. He scratched the itch in his knuckles against the rope.
Brann looked at the dead eel and then at the two-dot boy he'd roped. The boy couldn't be more than twelve. Brann's face didn't flicker. He put a hand on the kid's head, not gentle, not cruel, like weight. "You don't run errands you can't pay for," he said. "You want to work, come lift. You want to post boards, do it with a real seal or I'll put your ear on one with a nail."
The boy nodded too fast, the way boys do when they're making a map of what hurt doesn't kill you.
Ryo bent, picked up one of the whistles from the cracked crate—tin, neat, two dots scratched on the underside—and put it in his bag. He took two tin disks and the recipe sheet and added them to Mara's ledger stack instead. He wasn't hoarding. He was making sure when someone went to steal, they had to steal from his hands.
"Back to the table," Harrod said. He didn't sound like he wanted to. He sounded like the rest of his day had been set without asking him. He jerked his chin at his man holding Merek. "Bring him," he added. "If he breathes without permission, stuff mud in him."
"Gladly," Anna said before anyone else could. She didn't smile at Merek. She didn't threaten. He watched her like he'd like to make her a problem later. Ryo filed it, along with the shape of his eyes when he looked at a crowd and chose one face to hate.
They moved again. The rain had decided on spitting. People cleared a path like they had decided tables were better than fights in the lane when someone had just dragged a girl out of a cistern. Ryo let the bag ride on his shoulder, his palm pressed to the canvas to feel the book under it. Every time his fingers brushed the cloth with Book or Blood, he felt the temper in his spine find something to brace against.
At the shrine, the priest had kept the weir men in a room made of his body and a look that said the word "no" better than his broken broom did. The Lurker still lay pinned in the side run. It had stopped thumping. It wasn't docile. It was waiting. That was enough.
Mara put her ledger flat and tore the page she'd been writing on cleanly. She handed it to Harrod. "Sign your removal words again," she said. "Add that you accept fines on your men if they blow whistles where women stand with buckets."
Harrod signed, jaw a hard line. He pressed the seal. He wasn't proud. He was efficient.
Merek watched it all with his hands bound and a cut starting to show purple at his hairline from where Ryo had introduced his forehead. He smiled small when Ryo looked at him, the kind of smile men use when they plan to live long enough to enjoy someone else's bad day.
"By tonight," Merek said, conversationally quiet so only Ryo and Anna and Harrod heard him, "there'll be a man at your door with a seal that eats yours. He'll say the word tribunal with nice teeth. He'll say warden like he's naming a stray dog. You're going to stand there with rope on your hands and you're going to hate that the village needs you and can't keep you."
Anna leaned in, unkind. "If a man with a seal comes at my door with the word tribunal, I'll show him the side of the pot I boil fat in," she said. "He can eat seal there if he wants."
Harrod didn't tell her to hold her tongue. He kept his eyes on Merek. "You say tribunal like it scares me," he said. "Olsin can send ten. I'll bring them to this table and we'll write lines in ten hands."
Ryo didn't give Merek the argument. He looked at Soren. "Ready?" he asked.
Soren lifted his countersign. His hand didn't shake. "Read," he said to Mara.
Mara read the lines she had written that would make what they had done mean something when people's lives didn't. Names, marks, two-dot crates, whistles, abater statements, weir liability signed, cistern line raised, eel killed. She read Merek's attempt to whistle and where he'd had two slivers and how many tin disks sat on the table. She read how Brann's mark would stay suspended even if he didn't like it. She read who had witnessed and who had counted.
People listened. Ryo watched faces because that's how you know what you can do next.
The crowd's weight shifted to the table. That made something click inside Ryo that felt like a door finally had both hinges.
Warden: standing recognized. Civic leverage +1.
He didn't know what to do with the words. He tucked them under the bone he used to carry rope.
Harrod tapped the page. "Now we move your frog out of my weir," he said. "Before all this ink drowns because your boards fail."
"Agreed," Ryo said. He put his hand on the rope out of habit and because his body wanted to touch the thing he'd set. He made himself look at Harrod. "We do it together. You put your hand on it, you sign you did."
"Done," Harrod said.
They turned toward the weir. Something moved at the far bend—small, fast. A runner? No. A boy with a message flag. He skidded in the dirt and didn't bother with breathing.
"Riders," he gasped. "Not red. Black coats. Grey pins. Coming from Millroads. They've got a harness that looks like chain and a pole with a loop big enough to take a horse. The man in front's got a seal I've never seen. He said, 'tell your Warden to open the gate or I'll take the gate off the road.'"
Harrod swore like a man who had been measuring enemies and had run out of fingers. Soren made a sound that was a laugh and wasn't. Mara dipped her pen again without comment.
Ryo set the stocks pin in his palm. It fit like always. "Good," he said flat. "Bring them to the line."
The black coats didn't wait to be invited. The first one trotted up like he owned the bend and lifted a metal yoke on a pole that gleamed where rain ran off it. He had a hard, tidy face and a seal at his throat shaped like a knotted chain. He smiled without warmth and said, loud enough to reach the weir and the shrine, "By the Chainmaster's writ, abatement is contracted. Step aside, Warden, or we unmake your line." He drove the yoke straight for the rope. Ryo stepped forward and felt the boards under his feet change pitch, the line humming like a string tuned too tight.