They chose the Bonebridge because the bridge was a throat the city could not ignore. It ran through Saltport like a spine—market stalls clinging to its ribs, launches tied along its flanks, a constant current of people who traded in coin and rumor. If the Loom wanted the ledger's truth to be seen, they had to make it public where the city already watched. A packet read at the Bonebridge would not be a whisper; it would be a bell.
Dawn was a thin thing, the sky a pale bruise. Apprentices set up the reading table beneath a tarpaulin, a simple plank on sawhorses, the lead-lined case at its center. Halv and Rell moved through the crowd like shadows with purpose: a rope here, a false manifest there, a pair of apprentices planting witnesses in the front rows. Luna arranged the teachers in a tight semicircle behind the table, their hands folded, their faces set. They were not only witnesses; they were anchors. The Mass Cadence they planned to use would require more than one voice. It would require a chorus—and it would cost them.
Aria stood at the table's edge with the shard wrapped in oilcloth and the manifest unsealed. The donor spiral glinted in the lamplight like an accusation. Around them the market's noise folded into a low hum: vendors calling, a child's laugh, the slap of a fishmonger's knife. People drifted closer, curiosity a currency that could not be bought. Word had spread—rumors of a Loom packet, of a donor mark, of a patron house named aloud—and the Bonebridge's crowd had come to see whether the ledger's margins would be pried open.
Rell tapped the tracer's readout and nodded. "Registry imprint matches the manifest," he said, voice low but steady. "Virelle trust line. Transfer dated two winters ago. Private vault on the Salted Bastion."
A ripple moved through the crowd like wind through reeds. Someone laughed, sharp and unbelieving; someone else spat. The market's attention tightened into a single, hungry thing.
Aria set the manifest on the table and unwrapped the shard. The oilcloth fell away and the pale plate caught the morning light. The donor spiral was small and precise, stamped into the margin like a signature. Forensics had already translated the tracer's lattice into a ledger line; now the city would hear it.
"By the authority of the Loom," Aria said, voice carrying across the planks, "we present evidence of a donor trust stamped into a Pale Codex fragment. House Virelle's mark appears on a registry transfer to a private vault on the Salted Bastion. We call witnesses who saw the transfer and ask the city to hold this ledger open."
The first witness was a courier—thin, jittery, a man who had been paid to be late and had been paid again to remember. Luna stepped forward and laid a hand on his shoulder. Her voice braided a small Echo Shield around him: a minute of steadiness so forensics could anchor his memory. The shield would cost; the teachers had agreed to pay that cost in the margins. Luna's eyes flicked to Aria and then to the semicircle of teachers. They were ready.
The courier spoke in a rush: launch three, a crate wrapped in oilcloth, a donor token at the corner, a man named Marek who took manifests to the Bastion. The crowd listened like a thing that had been waiting for a story to make sense of its own ledger. Forensics recorded the cadence; Rell's tracer translated pressure into pattern; apprentices copied the testimony into the Loom's ledger. The Echo Shield collapsed and the courier blinked, the small haze settling into his face like a bruise. He would remember, Luna promised, but the memory would be thin for a day.
That thinness was the first cost the crowd could not see. The second cost would be visible.
Luna raised her hand and the teachers began the Mass Cadence. It was not a song so much as a weaving of voices: low, layered, a chorus that braided breath into a living ward. The cadence was meant to hold the packet's witnesses steady while the manifest was read aloud and the shard's marginalia displayed. It would protect the crowd from the brokers' tricks—Shade Hares, echo-scrapers, mirror rips—but it required more than one teacher. Mass Cadence demanded a chorus and, with each voice added, the ledger's arithmetic took a toll.
The first notes rolled out like a tide. The market's noise thinned; people leaned forward as if listening to a distant bell. The teachers' faces were set, their throats working with the strain of holding a public ward. Aria felt the cadence like a pressure at the base of her skull, a steadying force that braided the crowd's attention into a single net. For a moment the Bonebridge felt like a single organism, breathing in time with the teachers.
Then the brokers struck.
A handler in broker black—too quick, too practiced—moved through the crowd with the ease of someone who had been paid to be invisible. He flicked a pale Shade Hare from his sleeve and let it brush a vendor's palm. The vendor's laugh thinned and then snapped; a face in the crowd blurred. The Hare folded into the market's noise like a smear. The crowd's attention wavered.
Luna's voice tightened. The Mass Cadence shifted, a minor key that braided the ward into a tighter net. The teachers' faces went pale; the strain of holding a district-scale ward was visible in the way their hands trembled. The cadence held, but the cost landed like a tally: a small memory here, a phrase there, a day's clarity thinned. Teachers blinked and pressed fingers to their temples. The ledger's arithmetic was being paid in the teachers' minds.
Aria read the manifest aloud. She spoke the registry line and the donor mark and the transfer date. The crowd heard the words and the market's mood changed like weather: whispers became shouts, shouts became a rising chorus of outrage and fear. Someone in the back began to chant for the Council; someone else spat that the Loom was making trouble. The packet had done its work—what had been a rumor in the margins was now a public fact.
The brokers did not stop. A glass-scraper flashed at the edge of the crowd—an echo-scraper meant to reflect a teacher's cadence back at its source. It struck the Mass Cadence like a knife. For a heartbeat the ward wavered and the teachers' faces went slack as a small, private thing thinned: a taste, a lullaby, a name. The Mirror Rip had been used as a weapon.
Luna's hand flew to her throat and she steadied the cadence with a new thread, a teacher's improvisation that braided the ward into a different shape. The teachers answered with a chorus that was less perfect and more human: breathy, ragged, fierce. The Mass Cadence held, but the cost was visible now—teachers' eyes glassy, their voices thin. When the ward finally collapsed, the teachers sagged like a net that had been hauled in.
Aria felt the ledger's toll in her own chest. She had not sung the Mass Cadence, but she had stood at its hinge. The manifest's words had been spoken aloud; the donor mark had been shown. The city had seen the ledger's margins. The packet had been read.
The immediate fallout was a thing of motion. Market stalls closed as vendors feared reprisals; a militia captain who had been in the crowd barked orders and men in leather belts moved toward the Bastion's docks; a broker's launch cut its moorings and fled down the channel. The Council's envoys—three men in dull coats—pushed through the crowd with the practiced indifference of those who had seen too many spectacles. They took the manifest from Aria's hands with a bureaucrat's touch and promised an inquiry that would be swift and public.
But the city did not wait for the Council. The packet's reading had been a public setpiece and the market's reaction was immediate: a vendor smashed a crate of imported fruit in a fit of anger; a group of apprentices began to chant for the Loom to take the Bastion; a broker's handler tried to pull a witness away and was set upon by a crowd that had suddenly learned the value of names. The ledger's truth had become a public hazard.
When the teachers finally let the Mass Cadence collapse, the cost was clear. Luna's fingers trembled; she pressed them to her temple and tasted the thinness of lemon peel where once there had been a bright edge. Another teacher—an older woman with silver hair—stared at the crowd with a look of private grief; a lullaby she used to hum to apprentices had thinned to a memory she could not quite reach. The ledger's arithmetic had been paid in pieces of the teachers' private lives.
Aria stepped away from the table and found Halv waiting with a cloth and a cup of bitter tea. The safe, small ritual of being tended felt like a mercy. Halv's hands were steady as she pressed the cloth to Aria's wrist where the manifest's edges had nicked her. "You did what you had to," Halv said, voice low. "You made them see."
Aria let the tea warm her hands and felt the tremor in her own fingers. The packet had been a success in the ledger's terms: donor mark public, manifest recorded, witnesses anchored. But success had a price. The teachers' memories would thin in the days to come; some small, private things would be lost or dulled. The city would react in ways they could not predict. Patron houses would mobilize counsel and muscle. The Bastion would not sit quietly while its vaults were pried open.
Luna found Aria then, moving through the crowd with the slow, careful grace of someone who had just given a piece of herself. She took Aria's hand in both of hers, fingers warm and steady. "We held it," she said. "We made them see."
Aria looked at the crowd—faces bright with outrage, faces pale with fear, faces that had come to watch a ledger be opened—and felt the ledger's thread tighten. "We made them see," she echoed. The words were small and fierce.
They did not linger. The Loom had to move fast now: witnesses to safehouses, forensics to the tracer, the manifest to the Council's envoys with a chain of custody that could not be broken. Halv barked orders and apprentices moved like a tide, gathering evidence and escorting witnesses away from the Bonebridge's heat. The market's noise rose and fell like a living thing, and the packet's echo would not fade quickly.
Before they left, Aria found a quiet corner beneath the tarpaulin and let herself breathe. Luna sat beside her and leaned her head against Aria's shoulder for a moment—no words, only the small, steady contact of two people who had chosen to carry a ledger together. It was a private thing in the middle of a public storm: a touch that said we will count the cost together.
The Mass Cadence had been a public act and a private sacrifice. The ledger's margins had been pried open and the city had seen the donor mark. The Loom had forced a reckoning into the open, compressed politics into a single, combustible setpiece. The consequences would come fast—embargoes, militia mobilizations, legal packets—but for now the Bonebridge held the echo of a truth that could not be bought back into the dark.
They packed the manifest into the lead-lined case and moved through the crowd with witnesses in tow. Behind them the market's shouts rose and the Council's envoys argued in clipped tones. The packet had been read; the ledger's thread had been pulled taut. The Loom would follow it to the Bastion and beyond, and they would count the cost of every step—together.