Bells never suited Elysiam; the city preferred lists. After the Market unbuilt itself, lists arrived like rain.
Keth stood at the rim of the bowl while wardens stretched rope between fig trunks and posted polite, implacable hands at every approach. No one argued. Even the hawkers who could haggle with weather understood when a place asked for silence.
"Name and count only," Keth told the wardens. "Not value. We anger fewer gods if we don't guess."
Tam of the South Run had already turned his voice into a tool. "Lina, carry what isn't breakable; leave what thinks it's important." He caught Keth's eye. "If a plate remembers it's clay, we'll remember we're neighbors."
Keth nodded. "Good memory."
He walked the rim with a ledger board and a stick of blue chalk. Everything that had been a stall was now a tidy pile of ingredients: boards stacked with carpenterly manners; coils of twine surrendering their reach; crates relaxed into their idea of box. He wrote without adjectives. Four timbers. Six pegs. One strip of canvas that refuses to be persuaded either way. The columns were for his own anger—anger he could not offer the stones.
Lina trotted at his elbow, severe as any clerk. "If it unbuilt itself, can it build itself back?" she asked, trying to bury hope under professional tone.
"Streets mend," he said carefully. "So do people. Things with hinges can learn."
"That's not the answer you give at school," she pointed out.
"School has easier questions," he said. She accepted the joke as payment and resumed counting.
An old man with a rope-burned palm pressed him a tin cup. "Tell us when to be angry," he said.
"When I can tell you at whom," Keth answered.
"Fair," the old man said, and sipped the water he'd just given away.
Keth filed his preliminary report—unbuilding event; no casualties; cause unknown—on a slate the size of his hand. He hated how small the words were, how neatly they would fit in the Forum's tray beside other emergencies waiting their turn to be believed. He set the slate in his satchel as if it might bruise.
"Master Sornchai," a warden murmured. "Gathering at the north path."
Not a crowd—delegates from curiosity: a Chronicle scribe with a fast pen, an Athos sacristan whose lantern wanted to sing, a broker smelling of clean paper. Keth raised one finger—wait—and the wardens' hands did not move from the rope. Elysiam's quiet held. For now, lists beat bells.
Public Works kept its ledgers below street level, where the air forgot to sweat and the shelves smelled like a library that had promised never to surprise anyone. Keth liked that room the way some men liked balconies.
He slid his bronze audit plate into its slot, inked his palm along the sigil strip, and rolled his shoulders as if numbers could read posture. The ledgers came alive as a lattice of columns and marginalia—civic tithe inflows, petition seals, mending schedules in a clerk's hand that tried not to exist. Everything balanced.
Balance was the problem.
He split the view into three tendays and colored edits by source. The city's hand wrote in square strokes, patient. Petitioners' entries leaned forward, eager to finish and be believed. Here and there: a third hand—fine, almost shy—braided through the city's columns, borrowing the vocabulary and returning the pen with the nib cleaner than before.
"Paya," he called without looking. "Bring me the Market's roll for the last quarter. The one with the ink blot shaped like a fish."
Paya slid through the doorway like a note under a door, hair escaping its tie by principled degrees. "How did you know about the fish?" she asked, already reaching for the correct shelf.
"I don't," he said. "I remember who was on duty when the bottle broke."
They laid paper beside brass. On paper, the ledgers were honest in their human way—ink that hesitated where a clerk's attention had been pulled by a cough; a line drawn twice to cover a shortage nobody would admit; a smudge where a petitioner cried and pretended it was rain. On brass, the same numbers sang like a choir under a conductor who didn't allow grief in the arrangement.
Paya frowned. "It's… prettier."
"It's practiced," Keth said. "Prettier happens by accident."
He overlaid signatures. The city's sigil was a brick: proud of its right angles. Petitioners were chalk: smudged, stubborn. The third hand was… violet at the edges. Not color—pressure. A guiding hue that suggested without shouting.
"Is that legal?" Paya whispered, as if legality could be startled.
"If it asks permission, it's legal." He traced the faint entries. "This doesn't ask. It assumes."
She chewed her lip. "Senior Clerk Amre signed yesterday's clearances. And you countersigned."
"Twice in one day," he said. "I'm reliable when I'm tired."
He checked three other wards with minor "blink" complaints—stalls that had undone themselves an arm-span and then reconsidered. The same third hand touched them. He plotted the contact points on transparent vellum and overlaid them on the map. A spiral emerged, precise as a carpenter's jig, winding toward a quarter that poor maps called Old South and older mouths refused to name.
Paya stood on tiptoe to see. "Is that… where That Incident started?" she asked, respectful of the capitals people used when they didn't want to open an old story at its beginning.
"It's where the city never stopped whispering about it," he said.
In the margin he wrote: Pattern present. Foreign entries borrowing civic form. Spiral toward Old South. He wanted to write someone else is steering and didn't. The ledgers were already too willing to believe anything that sounded like grammar.
Maps calmed him. He didn't trust them either.
He unrolled the city's service scheme onto the long table—a spiderweb of water, waste, and work routes. He set pins where the foreign hand had touched—Market, two blinked stalls, a misbehaving culvert that suddenly decided to behave like a saint. He tied them with string the color of unearned praise.
The strings pulled south.
He added time. Each pin wore a paper flag with an hour. The flags marched toward Old South in an order too intentional to be weather and too cautious to be accident.
He called over Senior Clerk Amre, who had a gift for adding sums while saying nothing at all. "If you were feeding a rite," Keth said, "and you didn't want anyone to see the bowl, how would you ladle?"
"Thin and from many pots," Amre said, instantly. "Never two ladles from the same hand in the same bell."
"And if you wanted the bowl to be where no one wants to eat?"
Amre tapped Old South with a long nail he'd never admit he polished. "There."
"Why?"
"Because anyone who goes in is either lost or lying," Amre said, and left before the conversation became gossip.
Paya hovered. "Should we—" she wiggled a hand to indicate kick doors, shout, be brave.
"If the thief is careful," Keth said, "he counted on us to shout. If he counted on us to shout, he built a quieter plan for when we do."
She considered. "So we don't shout."
"We build a net," he said. "Nets don't ask fish to behave. Nets behave around fish."
Keth drafted narrow, boring orders—the kind that worked because they did not look like plans. He wrote soft chokes on new permissions within four blocks of each touched site—nothing dramatic, just enough delay to make a hurried hand show its outline. He added scrutiny flags on filings that leaned violet at the edges—again, not color, but pressure: petitions that suggested rather than asked.
Paya watched his pen. "And if they're patient?"
"Then we learn that," he said. "Patience has a shape."
For bait, he penned two decoy requisitions—requests irresistible to anyone assembling a large rite: portable anchors, resonance-grade chalk, five spans of pre-marked seamline. He tucked them into the ledger with just enough sloppiness that a siphon combing the accounts would pluck them like burrs.
He called in three wardens who could stand for hours without forgetting they were standing. "Corners where lines cross," he told them. "Backs turned the right way. Write what you see in small words. Do not be brave."
The captain with the scar across her nose tilted her head. "If we spot a rite starting?"
"You'll spot people carrying useful things and walking like they have permission," Keth said. "Remember faces. Remember which boot scuffed and which didn't."
He added passive plates to his satchel—brass squares that recorded ambient permissions without announcing themselves. He would plant them where gutters met stubborn doorstones and where rain liked to lie.
Paya cleared her throat the way a clerk does when courage must be filed. "If we catch them, will we punish them?"
"If we punish too loudly, we teach a louder student," Keth said. "If we punish too quietly, we'll be hiring choir-engineers by evening."
"That sounds like a joke," she said.
"It is if we end with everyone alive," he said.
He titled the circular with a wince: **Doctrine of Useful Boredom**. The name offended his ear. The effect would please him.
The first warning arrived as a prickle along his forearm before it became a bell on the plate. A restricted folio in the Scholarly Archive—light-writing keys, violet-edged—registered an access attempt just after second bell. His soft choke tightened; for three breaths the request hung, caged.
Then the cage was empty.
Keth ran.
The archive's main hall did not do panic. It had learned tranquility from marble. Custodian Yao met him at the stair with a smile that did not exist. "We had a visitor," she said, guiding him toward the violet wing. "We will not have them again."
"Description?" Keth asked, already knowing he would hate the answer.
"A hand," Yao said. "Steady. Knew the shelves by smell. Logged a reader's number we inactivated three years ago. Wore ink like someone who earned it."
"Door?"
"Still locked," Yao said, showing him a door honest enough to be ashamed. "They came through the building, not the lock."
Inside, the shelf held exactly what a plundered shelf should hold: absence pretending to be organization. On the reading table, a lamp chimney wore a fog of breath that had not decided to dissipate. Keth crouched, touched the wood, and felt the table's opinion of the reader: neat; hurried; no guilt worth noting.
He traced the approach. Not the main stair—too many eyes. Not the servants' passage—too narrow for the case someone had carried in and out. The gutter balcony, across the refectory roof, in through the scriptorium's lattice, a three-step to the inner table. No forced hinge. Just the space where permission had been, obligingly, when it needed to be.
"Inventory?" he asked.
Yao's mouth thinned. "One folio: Cursus Lucernae—light-writing keys, early copy. Unpopular; too many cautions."
"Cautions are where the good parts live," Keth said. Yao did not disagree.
He tightened the choke on nearby wards until authorization requests piled up like annoyed citizens. In the brass, he saw the ripple of the thief's exit—table to lattice to roof—and then nothing. The city's surfaces had cooperated out of long habit. He added a note to himself: Our politeness is a door.
On the way out, a student with a candle asked, "Master, will the Archive close?"
"No," he said. "It will learn to walk with its cloak tighter."
The student nodded, reassured by the idea of clothing rather than locks. Keth approved. Locks were invitations. Cloaks were advice.
Provost Maris Alon had a way of listening that made other people run out of words at exactly the right time. Keth spread his map and his brass and his temper on her table.
"Not a resource failure," he said. "A legal one. A foreign hand is borrowing our habits. The siphons are thin—dozens of wards, small skims—but they march toward Old South in a pattern that can feed something large."
Maris steepled her fingers over a blot where last year's flood had tried to edit her desk. "Fuel?"
"Our tithe," he said. "And anything else that holds still."
"Proposed response?"
"Watch," he said. "Soft chokes. Nets, not spears. If we go loud, we'll chase smoke through half the city and be remembered for shouting."
She considered. "Athos sent a note. They would like to demonstrate a choir-seal near the Market 'to soothe civic nerves.'"
"They will leave footprints," Keth said.
"Chron scholars want comparative access to exception rolls for a paper they are absolutely not writing."
"They will leave copies."
"Merchants want an indemnity fund announced yesterday."
"They will leave receipts." That one he didn't mind.
Maris sealed a narrow writ with the decisiveness of someone who knows how much paper a city can bear. "You have discretion inside your cordon," she said. "Bring me a place, not a theory. And Keth—no heroics. We need the city to keep believing in itself."
He thought about telling her the city didn't need belief; it needed sleep. "Yes, Provost."
As he turned to go, she added, almost gently, "If they break something, we'll repair it. I'd prefer not to have to sing while we do."
"Me too," he said, and pocketed the comfort of agreement.
Dusk made the city honest. Keth preferred honest streets; they lied less expensively.
He walked the three-street ring outside Old South, planting passive plates where a child might hide a treasure: in the shadow behind a drain crook; under a lintel that had never shed the memory of a bakery's steam; in the crack of a step where couples had argued kindly. He did not draw lines. He wrote lists.
A lantern-keeper polishing her wicks watched him with the suspicion lamplighters reserve for men who touch stone too much. "Magistrate," she said, proffering a tin cup—lamplighters never let anyone be thirsty where a flame lives. "Men with blank faces walked by an hour ago, carrying a thing that made the corner look away."
"Which corner?"
She pointed without looking. "The one that remembers bread."
He marked Bakery Corner on his private map. "Thank you."
"You're welcome," she said. "Make the city borrow my caution, not my oil."
Two children chalked a miniature city on a clean stretch of stone—lanes, wells, a plaza the size of a forearm. One dragged a bottle cap along a line and said, "This street goes away." The other nodded as if it were a rule they'd agreed to last week.
Keth nearly said don't and didn't. He wrote the place in his head instead. He trusted children to be cruel only to chalk.
He stood a while longer, feeling the ground as if it could feel him back. Drains hummed a quarter-tone low, not wrong but anxious. Awnings, taken down for the night, lay folded like obedient thoughts. Windows that had refused to be glass again watched with brick patience.
When the second bell trembled the air, the plates in his satchel ticked, each at a slightly different mood. Together they made a pattern that hadn't yet decided whether to be music.
Back under stone in the ledger room, he spread vellum and brass and the day's collected nerves. The soft chokes had found someone: delayed approvals clustered in the wedge between the Archive and Old South. The decoy requisitions had not been plucked—his thief was disciplined enough to avoid easy bait. The scrutiny flags caught two petitions that leaned violet at the edges—innocent on their faces, suggestive in their posture.
On his plate, three neighborhoods pinged in sequence—tap, tap, tap; rest—and then again. Not random. A working cadence. Someone was lifting something heavy with friends.
He wrote to himself, not for any record: They're rehearsing. Then, softer, because the room preferred honesty at night: We are too.
He took a final pass over his map. Pins marched toward Old South like arguments that wouldn't stay quiet. He circled the quarter and put his hand flat over it as if keeping a promise warm.
"Soon," he said to the empty room, and did not specify to whom.