The morning after their small feast at the Regent's Respite, Sorrin woke to the smell of coal smoke and rain. The city's breath seeped through the window frame and settled along the floorboards like a thin fog. He lay still for a while, listening to the clatter of the first trams, the rise and fall of voices in the alley, the water hissing along the gutters. Renn's steady breathing marked the space between those sounds like a metronome. It anchored the room.
He pushed up, rolled the stiffness from his shoulders, and went through the motions that had become his daily rite. He brewed bitter coffee, oiled the revolver without really needing to, then cleared a patch of floor and folded himself into stillness. Eyes closed. Breath slow. Find the feeling, not the force. Listen before you ask.
He felt the drag of fatigue first. It had a weight. Then the familiar ache at the center of his chest where terror and relief had once met like dueling tides. He let the ache be. He waited. A faint warmth surfaced, as shy as dawn light through cloud. It lingered, then slipped away like a fish in deep water.
When he opened his eyes, Renn was already awake, cane across his lap, head tilted toward Sorrin with a look that could have been called amused if it were not so patient.
"Any closer," Renn asked, "or are we still teaching the wind to sit?"
"A little closer," Sorrin said. "It rose. Then it fled."
"Then we are teaching a cat, not the wind. You do not command a cat. You invite it."
Sorrin made a face that might have been a smile if he had let it live longer than a heartbeat. "I would settle for a dog."
"Dogs are for nobles," Renn said at once. "We have the next best thing. Rent to pay, and a city that feeds itself on distraction. Come on. Today we practice outside this room. You need to learn to be quiet while the world is loud."
They left the apartment near noon, the streets bright with wet stone and gleaming rails. Pipes rattled above them and released thin white plumes that wandered into the sky. The city had the bustle of a marketplace even in its quietest quarter. There were children with tin toys that clicked as their clockwork innards spun. There were hawkers with crates of sweet oranges stacked like gold. There were old men who argued about the nation's tariffs as if they had written them. Solamen wore its life with pride; it did not hide its machinery or its hunger.
They had gone three streets before Renn's hand touched Sorrin's arm.
"Hold on," Renn said softly. "I feel a stranger watching us."
"Us, or everyone with a pulse," Sorrin asked without turning his head.
"Us," Renn said. "The feeling is steady, not casual. It is the attention someone keeps when they know they need to be ready to move."
Sorrin did not reach for the revolver. He did not tense. He let his eyes wander down a row of stall awnings and the flutter of laundry lines and a copper clock face with a crack through its center. He let his gaze pass over reflections in a shop window.
A woman leaned against a lamppost two doors down. She wore a sailor's coat with the cuffs turned back in a careless fold and a scarf the color of wine. Her hair was dark and braided close to the scalp, and there was a small stud of green glass in her left ear. She was watching them by not watching them, the way a cat watches a birdbath from a sill.
"Friend or work," Sorrin murmured.
"Neither yet," Renn said. "Smell of salt on her coat. Shoes not made for this district. She belongs to the docks, not to our street. Interesting..."
Sorrin considered walking over. He considered wandering in a circle to see if she would follow. In the end, he did neither. He led Renn into the open square that joined three tram lines and two arteries of foot traffic and let the crowd carry them forward.
They passed a troupe of children who had painted their faces with ash to look like foxes. They passed a stall where a woman stamped designs into soft leather with a tiny hammer and an iron flower. They passed a book seller whose wares were arranged in careful towers that leaned but never fell.
Renn's attention shifted. "Left," he said, "and then the second stall with the cloth awning. I smell cardamom."
"It is woven into the air," Sorrin said. "You would eat this city if it would sit still."
"It never sits still," Renn said. "That is the point."
"Since when did you have such a good sense of smell?"
"Heh, picked it up during my childhood. A nice addition to my flow sense, eh?"
They turned left. The second stall was indeed perfumed with cardamom. It sold tea in tins with painted labels and small russet cakes that glowed with sugar like embers. Sorrin bought two cups and a paper packet of the cakes, handed one to Renn, and let the hot spice roll over his tongue. He did not say it, but the taste pulled something loose inside him that had been clenched since the dungeon. The simple sweetness made room for breath.
They were halfway through their cups when the woman from the lamppost arrived in their line of sight as if by accident. She leaned on the corner of the stall and looked out over the square.
"You two smell like hospital soap," she said without introduction. Her voice carried the lift of the coast, words shaped by wind. "Which means you fight for a living, or you steal for a living, or you are very clumsy." She glanced toward Renn's cane. "I am guessing the first."
Sorrin took a sip. "You open conversations like a knife vendor opens boxes."
"It saves the wrists," she said. Her eyes flicked toward his revolver, which was hidden under the coat but not well enough for an expert. "I am Naeve. I work for people who like their problems carried from one side of the city to the other without losing their edges. I saw the way your friend moved when he listened to the crowd. I thought, those are the ears of someone who respects danger. Respect is in short supply."
Renn lifted his cup in a polite salute. "Respect is expensive. We are not buying, and we are not for sale."
Naeve smiled with only half her mouth. "I did not say you were. I said you looked like you might survive work that is worth doing. There is a difference, even if most merchants cannot tell. If you change your mind, ask for me at the Drowned Bell. I will hear about it."
She pushed off the stall and vanished into the shift of bodies with an ease that spoke of long practice. Sorrin watched the place where she had been until the space was filled with someone else.
"What do you make of that?" he asked.
"A crap ton of trouble," Sorrin replied.
"I'll have to trust you on this one... But to me, it could have been an opportunity to make a crap ton of coin." Renn sheepishly said.
They were about to cross the square when a commotion rippled through the crowd. People turned as one, the way a field turns when a wind passes over it. Sorrin felt Renn's hand tighten on his sleeve. The air carried a new scent, bitter and wrong, like old copper and rot that had learned to sing.
"Curse Flow," Renn said under his breath. "Close."
The cry rose from the far side of the square near a stack of cargo crates under a canopy. A stall keeper stumbled back, hands raw with splinters. The top crate had split along its seam, and something with too many joints was dragging itself out through the slat like a crab born of tar. The square erupted. People surged, stumbled, ran. A child fell and disappeared into the confusion of ankles.
Sorrin moved before his mind caught up. His body knew what to do. He shoved past a man who smelled of oil and caught the child by the collar, whipped him upright, and pushed him toward the nearest stall. He did not draw the revolver. Bullets solved one kind of problem. They also made many more if the wrong eyes were watching.
Renn had gone still in the way a predator goes still. "The creature is small," he said. "A larval abomination, half-formed. Curse Flow binds its shell like pitch. There is a seam along its underside that gapes like an unstitched wound. That is your line."
Two Solamen Wardens were already fighting their way through the crowd. They carried halberds with silver inlay and the kind of steady contempt that comes from being shouted at for a living. They did not see the angle. They would cut it apart, and it would knit itself back together. The crowd would pay the cost while pride learned slowly.
"Can you walk me closer?" Renn asked.
Sorrin swore under his breath. "Renn, your ribs."
"My eyes," Renn said simply, "are more useful than my ribs right now. Move."
Sorrin put the weight of his shoulder into the press of bodies and carved a path. The larva had fully freed itself now. It scuttled forward, legs clacking, maw drooling a slick that turned the boards black. The stall keeper shouted that the crate had come in from the river by mistake, that it had not been his, as if the city would forgive him.
"There," Renn said. "Three paces more. Now stop. You have a clear line. When the left pincer lifts, the seam exposes itself. If you are foolish, you will try to dive under it. Do not be foolish. Distract it. Throw something. Then step during its turn, not before."
"What am I throwing?" Sorrin asked.
"Your pride," Renn said jokingly. "Or your cup. Either is fine."
Sorrin finished the last of his tea because he could not bear to waste it, then threw the tin. The larva lunged toward the flash of metal; he stepped. The seam opened, slick and pale. He struck with the heel of his palm and the bone of his wrist. The creature twisted with a shriek that made teeth ache.
The Wardens arrived. Their halberds came down in gleaming arcs. The first cut bit. The second skated off the oiled shell and sank into the crate. The larva's pincer caught a Warden by the greave and dragged him off balance.
Renn's voice stayed level. "I can bind it for a breath. I cannot hold longer than that without paying a price I would rather not pay in public. Be ready."
Sorrin heard the quiet he had been chasing all morning. It rose in him without thunder. He put the fingers of his left hand against the boards to steady himself, not to call, not to demand. The warmth flowed along the bones of his arm. A thin, pale root no thicker than a quill pressed up between the planks like a curious finger. It wrapped itself around the larva's rear joint and tightened.
The world swam at the edges of his sight. He let the root be simple. He did not reach for more.
"Now," Renn said.
Sorrin drove his weight into the seam again. The Wardens struck in the same breath. The joint gave with a wet crack, the larva's body convulsed, and the curse-laden slick that kept its shell whole hissed against the boards. The creature went still.
The square fell into the stunned quiet that sometimes follows fear and sometimes precedes more of it. The Warden who had been dragged by the greave shoved himself upright, scowled at the damage to his armor, and barked orders at everyone in general. The other Warden knelt to examine the carcass with a frown that could sour milk.
No one had seen the root. Sorrin had made sure of it. It had already withdrawn, shy as a fish returning to shade.
Renn leaned his weight onto the cane. His breath came quick but even. "You kept your balance," he said.
Sorrin swallowed against the metallic taste at the back of his tongue. "For a moment the room tilted. Then it righted itself."
"Good," Renn said. "You did not bite off a piece of yourself to win a cheer. That's real good."
A woman stepped out from the ring of onlookers. She wore a scholar's coat with every stain earned honestly, and her hair was bound up in a knot that had started neat and surrendered to pins along the way. She looked at the larva, then at the crowd, then at Sorrin as if she had found the one unusual stone on a beach.
"Elegant work," she said. Her voice held the sweet patience of someone who had spent many years trying to explain obvious facts to people paid not to learn them. "Not the Wardens, you."
Sorrin kept his face blank. "We were in the way."
"Most people in the way make the way harder," she said. "I am Doctor Isolde Fen. I consult for the Solamen Archive on matters that involve living things and the strange ways they refuse to stay dead. That creature did not crawl here on whim. Someone shipped it, or something like it. Someone intends a test, or a message."
Renn's chin lifted slightly. "Doctor Fen. You set my leg at the hospital."
She blinked, then tilted her head, recognition softening her features. "The stoic patient with the terrible jokes. Yes. You refused to let the nurse write your height down as impressive."
"I am not impressive," Renn said. "I am a manageable challenge."
"My, aren't you charming?" She said.
She smiled. Then it faded. "The wards will claim they have this under control. They will not. There is a warehouse on the river where a shipment from one of the eastern nations is being held for quarantine. If you are free this evening, meet me by the old crane with the broken clock face. I would rather have you with me and not need you than the other way around."
Sorrin glanced at Renn. Renn did not move, but Sorrin knew the set of his shoulders well enough to hear his answer in the thin line of his mouth.
"We can manage a warehouse," Sorrin said.
"I would not ask if I thought it would be simple," Doctor Fen replied. "Wear boots you will not miss if they dissolve."
She left as quickly as she had appeared, a figure in a coat with sleeves too long for her hands, vanishing into the traffic of the square. The Wardens had already begun to push the crowd back with the habitual offense of men given authority without imagination.
Sorrin and Renn did not wait for questions. They cut away down a lane that smelled of wet rope and gear grease and turned their backs to the square.
"You could have refused," Sorrin said.
Renn tapped his cane thoughtfully against the curb. "I could have. But I heard the way she looked at the creature. There was curiosity, yes, but not hunger. I trust people who love answers more than they love being right." He paused. "Also, this reeks of our luck. If we walk the long way home and pretend we did not see it, the problem will come to our door by nightfall, and it will bring a friend."
Sorrin sighed. "You always make adventure sound like heavy lifting."
"That is because it is."
They reached their apartment just as the afternoon leaned toward evening. Sorrin checked the cylinder on the revolver and loaded a fresh set of clean rounds with a soft click that sounded far too loud in the small kitchen. He packed a coil of rope, a knife that had saved his life more times than he wished to remember, and a handful of iron nails that he could flick with ugly accuracy. Renn changed his bandages without complaint and tested his leg again with a short series of steps that looked like a dance learned from pain.
Before they left, Renn spoke without turning.
"If we have to use your gift," he said, "we use the smallest measure possible. We do not feast on power when a sip will do. You tell me if the world tilts. You tell me if colors sharpen. You tell me if you cannot remember a word you should know. Promise me."
"I promise," Sorrin said.
"Say it like you mean it."
"I promise," he repeated, slower. "If I feel like I'm losing myself, I will say it out loud."
They left as the lamps along the streets were being lit by boys with long poles and soot on their cheeks. The river district lay in a bowl of fog that smelled of brine and spilled grain. Warehouses lined the water like great sleeping animals. The old crane with the broken clock face towered above them, its rusted arm stretched toward the turning moon.
Doctor Fen stood beneath it, hands in her sleeves, hair looser now that the city's wind had argued with it all afternoon. She gave a curt nod.
"Good. You came. Partnership agrees with you," she said. "The quarantine warehouse is two docks down. The guard on the side door owes me a favor but likes to pretend he does not. We will ignore him when he pretends too much."
"You expect a fight," Sorrin asked.
"I expect surprises," she said. "Which is worse."
They approached the warehouse under the pretense of discussing the price of salted fish. The guard on the side door was indeed a man who owed many favors and wore them on his face like old scar tissue. He frowned at Doctor Fen and frowned harder at Sorrin, then decided not to notice them as they slipped by. Inside, the air was swamp heavy. Crates stood in rows like small houses built by giants who disliked beauty.
Renn halted a pace inside the door. "Curse Flow," he said. "Thin, like smoke after rain. It is everywhere and nowhere. The source is hidden, or the source has many mouths."
Doctor Fen lifted a lantern. Its light licked the edges of the room and retreated from the shadows beyond. "The manifest said dried reeds, preserved eel, machine parts, and one crate marked with a mark I have not seen used since I was a student. A circle of roots inside a circle of stars. That mark should be in a museum, not an inventory."
Sorrin's skin prickled. "You think someone is testing the wards. Teaching creatures to nest in shipments."
"I think someone is using Solamen as a sieve," she said. "Shake it, see what falls through."
They found the mark on a crate in the second row from the back wall. The symbol had been burned into the wood, then painted over and scraped clean. The cover was nailed shut with a care that spoke of fear.
Sorrin set the lantern on the floor, pulled the knife from his belt, and worked the nails out one by one. He did not hurry. Speed is the friend of mistakes. Renn stood angled so that his remained sight could take in the most Flow. Doctor Fen did not fidget. She listened with her whole body.
The lid came free. Inside lay a burlap sack, stitched along the edges with waxed thread and sealed at the knot with a blob of black resin. The resin had a faint shimmer in it, like powdered mica or the skin of a beetle. It smelled like a promise made by a liar.
"Do not cut that with iron," Renn said. "Use the bone handled knife in your left boot."
Sorrin blinked. "How did you know there was a bone handled knife in my left boot."
Renn did not answer at once. "I saw the way your foot moved on the steps. It favored weight as if it carried a secret on one side. Also, you are a creature of habit, and you reach to your left when you are surprised. I guessed."
"You remind me of a certain detective from a very famous novel I read..." Sorrin replied.
Sorrin did as instructed. The bone blade slid through the waxed thread with a quiet, clean sound. When he peeled the sack open, he found no larvae, no squirming mass of corruption. He found a small wooden box no larger than a man's fist, carved with the same circle of roots and circle of stars. The lid did not have hinges. It had patience. It would not open until it chose to.
Doctor Fen breathed in very slowly. "I have seen one box like that. It belonged to a scholar who studied Flow relics that predate every calendar we use. He was gentle. He kept every promise he made. He died because he made a promise to a thing that does not know what a promise is."
"What is inside?" Sorrin asked.
"Anything that fits a lie," she said. "That is the problem."
Renn turned his head toward Sorrin. "If this is bait for your gift, we will not touch it. We carry it to a place with stone thick enough to shame a cathedral, and we ask it to be boring. If it refuses, we leave it there to rot."
Sorrin nodded. His fingers ached to pry, not because he wanted to know, but because something in the grain of the wood wanted hands. He put the box back in the sack and tied it shut with a knot he would remember even if he woke in a fire.
They were halfway to the door when the warehouse changed around them. It was subtle at first. A lapse in the rhythm of the river. A new echo. Then the rows of crates were not rows. They were a maze. The air tasted like old coins and rain that had forgotten how to fall.
Doctor Fen's lantern guttered. She shielded it and struck it back to life with quick, practiced motions. "Illusion," she said through her teeth. "Not common glamour. Old work. The space is folding itself to discourage thieves. Or to keep something in until it is hungry enough to come out."
Renn's face went very calm. "Sorrin. Your hands on my shoulders. I will walk us out. Follow the Flow. Do not argue when the room insists we came from the wrong direction."
Sorrin obeyed. He rested his palms lightly over Renn's shoulders, felt the bone beneath cloth, and let his weight follow the slight shift of Renn's balance like a dancer learning a new step. Doctor Fen moved to their right, her shoulder brushing Sorrin's arm so she would not drift.
Renn led as if he had paced this room a hundred times. He turned when there was no corner. He slowed when the air tightened. He stepped across what was not a threshold and frowned at an empty patch of air as if it had offended him in public. The maze sulked, then yielded just enough to keep them moving.
Sorrin felt the box in the sack buzz against his hip very softly. It could have been a trick of the blood. He did not look down. He kept his eyes on the line of Renn's neck and the set of Doctor Fen's jaw.
The door appeared when they were ready to accept that it might not. Sorrin did not insult their luck by running. He opened the door and felt the cold kiss of river air on his face like an old friend.
Once outside, Doctor Fen set the lantern down and let out a laugh that sounded like relief forced into a laugh on short notice.
"That was hideous," she said. "Horrible workmanship. Effective, but cruel. I would like to meet the person who set that illusion and teach them about beauty using a broom."
Sorrin looked down at the sack. "Do we still carry it, or do we drop it into the river and let the carp argue about its destiny?"
"Carry it," Renn said. "We need answers more than we need a clean conscience."
Doctor Fen nodded. "There is a vault beneath the Archive that was built during the reign of a king who never met a wall he did not wish to thicken. We can store it there until I find a way to coax it without opening it. Give me three days. Five, if the Council decides that the best use of my time is paperwork."
Sorrin met her gaze. "You will tell us what you learn."
"I do not trust many people," she said. "But I trust those who have bled near me to handle the truth. I will come to your apartment, if that is not an insult to your privacy."
Renn lifted his chin a fraction. "The door with the cracked window and the neighbor who sings off-key. If you cannot find it, listen for the kettle that screams before it boils."
Doctor Fen took the sack with both hands and vanished into the fog with the certainty of someone who had chosen her road many years ago and had never found reason to regret it.
Sorrin and Renn stood by the river until the fog swallowed their outlines and the city became a rumor behind them.
"New rule," Sorrin said. "If a box hums, we do not keep it in our house."
"A good rule," Renn agreed. "Addendum. If Doctor Fen says please, we learn to bend."
"Addendum...? You're changing, man."
They walked home along a lane where a boy was fishing with a string and a bent nail and the water gave him nothing and everything. The lamps hissed. The sky held its breath.
At the door to their building, Renn leaned his shoulder against the frame and did not go in at once.
"Tell me the truth," he said quietly. "When you touched the boards in the square, did you feel her. Not the power, not the warmth. Her."
Sorrin looked at his hand as if it might speak on its own.
"No," he said. "Only the quiet. It was clean. It felt like a room after a prayer. Not her voice. Not the meadow. Just stillness where there had been noise."
Renn let out a breath he might have been holding since the dungeon. "Good."
"You expected something else."
"I feared something else," he said. "Power tends to bring its own music. The louder it sings, the more a man thinks the song is his."
They climbed the stairs. The apartment smelled like the morning's coffee and the oil Sorrin had rubbed into the revolver. Sorrin set a kettle on the stove and lit the burner. Renn lowered himself into the chair by the window and tilted his head as if listening to a story the city was trying to finish.
"We met a strange courier," Sorrin said. "We met a scholar with a broom and a labyrinth in her patience. We met a crate that pretended to be a corridor. This city is a symphony that forgot how to end."
Sorrin poured the water when it sang. They drank in quiet. The quiet was not heavy tonight. It was the kind of quiet that follows work done without waste.
"Tomorrow," Renn said at last, "we return to practice. You learn to listen while I recite the names of fifty kinds of pastry without laughing. Then you visit the Archive and pretend you are a scholar who enjoys the smell of dust. We stall without being idle."
Sorrin nodded. He let the tea scald the back of his throat just enough to remind him that he was, according to Renn's lecture, alive.
"And after that," Renn added, "we will decide how to meet a courier at a place called the Drowned Bell without getting recruited into a civil war."
Sorrin snorted. "We could simply not go."
"We could," Renn said. "We could also learn nothing and wait kindly for fate to drop a crate with a humming box in our kitchen. I prefer to choose the way I am dragged."
Sorrin leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He felt the thin warmth rise and settle again, the almost feeling, the promise. He did not chase it. He let it rest.
Outside, Solamen breathed. Trams spoke to their rails in sparks. The river turned its secrets in its sleep. Somewhere, beneath a vault, a small wooden box made out of a lie waited for a hand foolish or patient enough to listen.