The cathedral roof was a keel turned skyward.
Ribs of timber ran like a ship's memory under slate. The spire cut the dome's false sky into clean seams. Below, the Grand Bell crouched at the lip of the square, its carriage stalled for breath it had already taken from the city. The Null Choir held their neat grid. Karsk stood at the foot of the steps, line steady, eyes level—furniture that remembered it had once been a man.
Asgrim topped the last ladder and stepped onto the ridge as a carpenter steps onto a beam he trusts: with disrespect for drama and respect for gravity. Skylaug hugged his forearm; the tar-knot Fen had sewn bit early, as intended, to remind his wrist that sugar wears a uniform. At his hip, under a single turn of sailcloth, the rift-hook lay cold as a decision.
He set Fellgnýr's wrapped head on the roofline and looked along the city's cross—the four rails he'd planted yesterday that had settled into habits: breath along Wharf Lane, lift over the kilns, the market's gentle intake, the granary's exhale. The dome leaned; the cross held. Work carried what shouting could not.
He set his palm to the ridge stone—half hearth under him, half wind over it—and spoke quietly to craft and sky and the thousand throats that had been taught to be small.
"No bargain," he said. "A bill."
Then he planted Fellgnýr.
Not a ring to impress or a stamp to scar. A stake through slate and oak and king-post into the old beam where masons had carved initials in years only pigeons could read. The world around the head did what it always does when the tool is honest: it remembered jobs. Air along the ridge woke without boasting. A long silence bent its knee—not broken, engaged.
He pinned waypoints—small, coin-clean—over the four quarters of the city: one above the bakehouse chimneys, one over the lime hill, one at the fountain's lip, one over the granary eaves. He could feel them sit—marks on an invisible joist.
Below, the bell drank the middle out of sentences. Men's mouths moved and their hands carried the sense. Ash had a crew on each roofline; Fen moved among braces and wedges; Ylva stood where wind remembers its first language. Ragna waited with empty book and full attention.
Asgrim lifted both hands, not big, simply visible, and let the work crews see him on the ridge.
"Witness," he said, size of a hammer-talk on a bench. The word moved along rails and doorways, was shaved by the bell and still arrived.
He turned toward the square and did the thing Rift-Widow had demanded and his own rules had always required: name the price first.
"My name," he said—plain, unornamented; a board set square on pegs. "I'll spend my own name to break the Great Quiet. Not yours. Mine. If I lie, let thunder take me only. If I tell the truth, let it go where it's owed."
The word name cooled even as he spoke it. The bead-cord warmed—driftwood and wire and ugliness honest as a door hinge. Ash's knuckles tightened on a ladder rung and she did not call out; Fen's jaw flexed once and he did not look up. A thousand people learned what it feels like when a carpenter puts his own house on the line so the roof he's fighting won't crush theirs.
He breathed. The dome tried to edit it. He spoke anyway.
"By bread," he said, and bakers thumped peel to stone.
"By wind we've taught into a good job," and oarsmen—standing in the alleys with no boats to their names—pulled once on air as if it were water and the ropes in their hands agreed.
"By work—ours—" and brooms struck cobble, bellows pushed and drew, wedges seated under braces, tar rolled its stubborn smoke under eaves.
"We'll spend before we ask you to."
The words reached people in pieces, as they had learned to do when bells tried to hunger. The city took them the way a crew takes a line—hand to hand, weight to weight.
Asgrim turned his face to the false sky. He had never liked talking to it. He preferred beams. He spoke to both.
"City," he said. "Speak with me."
He didn't offer poetry. He offered verbs.
"Push—" he called, and the kiln hill answered with bellows handles.
"Draw—" the lime burners returned, and the soundless push–draw still made its way along handles into lungs.
"Lift—" cried the granary men with sacks they had no right to be proud of and were.
"Set—" answered women setting pans and poles and children on benches out of the way.
"Knead. Tie. Wedge. Sweep. Carry."
The Null Choir squared, laid their fence across the square, and tried to pull syllables to pieces. They caught halves and lost impact. The city obeyed the verbs it could do.
Asgrim looked down into the square and found the Jarl's balcony in its shade. The White Jarl stood with his hands folded as if attending a funeral he had planned carefully. He did not signal. He did not need to. Men whose mouths had been trained to think in lines obeyed their geometry.
Asgrim set the oath onto the ridge like a beam. He spoke it slow, each joint pinned with a visible nail.
"I swear the World-Storm Oath," he said, and the word swear had weight because he had fed it with the right kind of days.
"—to shatter the Great Quiet," he went on, not big, precise. "Not for glory, not for rule. For bread. For breath. For work to keep its teeth. I swear to break the lid that sits on this city and teach wind to take its job back."
He felt the runes under his skin lift, not like dogs smelling blood—like men standing from a bench when the beam is ready to be raised.
"I name the price," he said again, because you don't set a single nail in a joint you care about. "My name. Take it from me now, not by surprise later."
Down in the press, silence tried to push back. The oath had edges the bell could taste and didn't like. The city made its compensation: a low drone rose—the pitch people sharpen knives at—old men, grandmothers, boys who had learned to be rude correctly. It wasn't a tune. It was witness.
Clouds above the dome, which had been pretending to be painted on, stirred. Wind moved in the high there like an animal waking from a winter you shouldn't have let happen. Not a show; a job remembered with shame and relief.
"Truth—" Asgrim said, and felt the bell want to shiver that word into safe particles. "Thunder."
He lifted Fellgnýr. The sailcloth slid; the wrong violet under it showed an ugly glow and then held—tethered by oath, not appetite. He did not call a bolt. He set the hammer head on the stone, both hands on the haft, and pushed the oath into joinery.
"Witness me," he said to the people. "Say it with me."
He didn't demand their big voice. He gave them pieces to carry around the bell's teeth.
"World—" he said.
"World—" said a thousand mouths in off-times, across rails, along corridors.
"Storm—"
"Storm—"
"Oath—"
"Oath—"
"Break—"
"Break—" (mallet set into brace)
"The Great—"
"The Great—" (bellows push)
"Quiet."
"Quiet." (broom stroke; sack lift; peel set)
"Price—" he said.
"Price—"
"Name—" he said.
"Name—" and somewhere a child flinched at the cold and didn't know why and his mother put a hand on his back and kept the line going.
He felt it go out of him. Not a word—a handle. Air caught the shape where his name had been warm. The bead-cord on his wrist heated as if embarrassed to be jewelry. The ugly porch bead he'd cut yesterday cooled to the temperature of tools. His name slid off his own tongue and sat in other mouths with more interest.
"Take it," he told the weather, and the weather—womanish—took only what was offered and waited for the rest of the bill.
The dome corkscrewed.
You could see it even if you were a clerk. Not because the sky changed color—because light moved as if a pillar had been shifted and the roof had remembered it was air. A long windsleeve turned—not the theatrical rope of a god, the tight twist of a craftsperson wringing a rag dry before using it. It tightened over the spire and hung there, looking for permission.
Asgrim gave it work.
He set two more waypoints—just above the bell's lip, too far for a thread-cutter to jaw—then walked Fellgnýr along a triangle in air from ridge to spire to square. Stop—Step—Step—Stop. A shepherd's path for wind. The rails he had left yesterday thrummed like lines under a raised hull.
Ylva, hair whipped into attention, lifted both arms at the kiln hill and bent pressure along streets to meet the twist. She spoke in the sea's grammar to a storm who thinks she's river when indoors. "Gentle under roofs," she told it. "Sharp on domes. Friendly to ovens. Teeth for bells."
The Choir tried to throw up a fence across the oath and found verbed tasks where nouns had once been easy prey. Push—draw, lift—set, sweep—carry, knead—tie—wedge—square breath learned humility in a neighborhood insisting on chores.
Asgrim felt the pull through Fellgnýr—not hunger, harness. He set the oath's beam with four sentences, each driven home like a peg.
"Harbor first, war last," he said. The roofline heard it. He would not drown a city to punish a bell. He would not ride Storm-Fury through houses men had built with their hands.
"Build before break," he said, and the rafters under him liked the order of that. The storm altered its grip—pressure first, then strike.
"Truth → thunder," he said—because you say the rule out loud when you mean to survive it. "If I mix pride into this, let my back take the lash, not theirs."
The violet under the cloth stopped showing off and felt like tool again.
"And witness, not worship," he said, because he had learned that one late. "If I am going to fall, let there be a thousand hands to set things back on the bench."
The wind answered the only way it knows how: by working. Down in Wharf Lane a flag that had hung like regret stood out and pointed. The city's four corridors filled—gently, insistently—with breath. Smoke rolled under eaves, stubborn as bread. A child's hair lifted in a draft and the mother smiled because you can pretend not to love a god, but you cannot pretend not to love that.
Karsk looked up. He could hear almost nothing and understood everything worth hearing. His men shifted their grips, not to attack, to hold.
The Jarl watched the corkscrew lean. He did not gesture to toll; the bell would toll soon by the nature of things. He did not smile. He is not a man who enjoys losing even politely.
Asgrim opened his mouth one last time—not for poetry—for a joiner's line that pins oath to world.
"City," he said. "On three."
He raised his left hand—the one with the wire-tied beads; he raised his right—the one with the hook coiled under cloth; he counted: one—breath filled the lanes; two—Ash's crews lifted tar, lowered wedges; three—
—and a chorus pitched itself under the corkscrew.
Not art. Not pretty. Useful.
"By bread—" (paddle)
"By wind—" (bellows)
"By work—ours—" (broom, wedge, sack)
"We'll spend—" (mallet set)
"Before we ask you to."
The sound should have been eaten. Under the corkscrew it wasn't. The twist made a throat for it. The oath rode that throat.
The dome pushed back; the storm pressed forward. Their meeting made a skin—not visible to clerks, obvious to carpenters. Asgrim felt it like a hide pulled taut over a frame. It would take a cut. Not now. Soon. One use. He could feel Rift-Widow's caution lying cold against his arm.
His name thinned.
He could feel where it used to sit in his mouth, the way a tongue checks the gap where a tooth has finally been pulled. It didn't hurt. It was missing. Down in the square, where children stand on toes to see better, a dozen voices said it warm, and the warmth came back up the rails and took a seat behind his heart like a friend who doesn't need a chair.
"Ledger," Ragna said aloud from the granary roof because she has no respect for atmospherics. "Tell it."
"Spent: my name, up front," he said, and the city let him say it because it had become theirs already. "Breath. Shoulders. The urge to be pretty. Refused: bolt and brag. Gained: a throat through the lid; a storm that does work; a chorus that is bigger than me."
Lightning showed its teeth in the corkscrew and then remembered manners. Thunder rolled but kept its voice low, as if instructed. Rain licked its thumb and tested the air over the bell and withdrew to wait. The Jarl's balcony curtains lifted and found they preferred the shape of wind to doctrine; the Jarl did not blink.
Karsk took one step back and one step wide, making room for a thing he could not name and refused to worship. He put his palm to a soldier's shoulder—not to push, to brace. The soldier remembered how to be held.
Asgrim felt the hook move very slightly against the chain, not eager—ready.
He set Fellgnýr's head into the ridge stone as into a bench dog, freeing his hands. He planted his feet where the spire had taught him to earlier. He put his palm on the porch inside his chest—half hearth, half wind—and for once did not say the little sentence that keeps him square. He didn't need it. The chorus was saying it for him.
He lifted his right hand and touched the cloth over the hook.
"On my word," he said, to Ash and Fen and Ylva and Karsk and Svala and Ragna and Hjalli and the thousand who had carried him here, "I will cut the right thing."
He did not look at the Jarl. He had already answered him.
"Hold, city," he said. "Hold this."
The corkscrew tightened, clouds drawn into a taut twist above the bell like rope over a capstan. Wind woke like a starving animal that has been handed a good job and means to do it without biting the wrong hands. The bell drew the next breath to drink the world and found resistance in its mouth.
Asgrim reached under the cloth and took the hook in hand. It lay cold and exact in his palm. One use. He breathed once—by bread—and the breath came back in a thousand pieces, each the size of a job.
"Now," he told the weather.
"Now," answered the city.
He stepped off the ridge toward the spire's back—toward the place where skin had formed between dome and storm. Chapter Thirty-Three was already pulling at his boots like a tide.