They brought the mouth to teach the city manners.
Teams of gray pulled the Grand Bell on a cradle of ash and hush-metal, ropes wrapped in linen so they would not hum. Above it arced a lattice, choir-balconies stacked like swallows' nests, railings of tidy silence. Every dozen paces the wheel men lifted, set, breathed—the procession's heartbeat. Along both flanks walked the Null Choir, cords across their chests, mouths trained to square. And at the bell's shoulder, calm as furniture, paced Karsk—champion mended by hush, eyes level, jaw remembering a laugh it had been encouraged to misplace.
The bell swallowed as it came. Prayers went in and did not return. Market calls clipped themselves into neat halves and learned to behave. A lullaby on a balcony went thin as thread and then was only hands rocking a child.
It reached Wharf Lane first—one of the windows Asgrim had cut into the dome. The breeze he'd trellised stole in on its rails and had the nerve to lift a housewife's hair even as the bell told air to sit. The city shivered between instructions.
"On the roofs," Ash said.
She and Fen peeled off with crews, tar sloshing in lidded pans, mallets wrapped in rag. Asgrim took the tiles.
He moved across the ridge as a man crosses a fence he built himself: sure-footed, unashamed of care. Skylaug snug at his forearm, the tar-knot's bite a little warning bell of his own. He didn't call thunder; the Jarl's bell would drink it. He drew.
Coin-waypoints snapped to the air over gutters and chimneys—one, two, three—simple as chalk. He set a Guardian Orbit the size of a cartwheel above the procession's near flank and walked Fellgnýr along it—Stop—Step—Step—Stop—until the hammer's path became a small fence that existed because a man had wanted it to. A guard's spear flicked into that orbit and came out a question; a second spear butt struck edge and forgot what comes next; a third found corner, learned humility, lowered.
On the street, the Null Choir raised their fence—square breaths, mouths in grid. It reached for the orbit's little hum and the wind's handrail and tried to subtract both. Two boys at a bread-stall needed only a palm raised by Ash to know what to do: sweep on the downbeat of By bread, pass a peel on By wind we've taught, set a crate on By work—ours. The verbs filled the fence's holes with impact and weight.
A bell-wain behind the Grand carried lesser mouths—traveling relays with lips capped in linen. Fen reached it at a trot with four rope men and a grandmother who hated neat. He didn't stab, he edited: spear-butt into a yoke-pin; the yoke sagged; two men shouldered the weight by accident; the cart tipped; Ash's crew were already there with pans—tar flung low, not on the face, on the frame, blessing the joints with stick so the bell would argue with its carriage. A worker in gray tried to tug a cap free for a neat ring; tar took his fingers honest; his curse made no sound and was perfect.
Asgrim took the next ridge, felt the hush roll, and almost fell where the bell stole the notion of footfall from his bones. He set a knee rail between chimney pots, then a hip rail across a parapet—low, careful, not pretty—and moved on as if he had always meant to pause there.
The bell breathed again. Lullabies browned and crumbled; pot lids made the shape of clatter and were polite instead. The Choir's fence widened and leaned, trying to cap the windows Ylva had trellised into the dome. In the market, a tar wick caught—Ash's order sent smoke shouldering into hush like a rude aunt into a quiet room. The air thickened. Fences do not love thickness; they require geometry. Tar does not do geometry; it does insistence.
Karsk raised a hand and the procession slowed. He had learned to wear command lightly; he had learned to swallow the noise of it. He looked up once, and in that glance there was winter river, men pulled from ice by hands that didn't ask permission, and then the bell taught his eyes to be furniture again.
"Asgrim of the fjord," he said without looking up, and Asgrim heard it as a shape, not a sound, the way a carpenter hears a board admit to a knot. "You are on my roofs."
Asgrim slid along a tile seam to keep the orbit between Karsk and the spear-men trying to be a wall. He gave the orbit a second loop—two small fences braided—to teach momentum to forget itself. "And you are in my air," he said with his mouth, trusting none of it to carry.
Karsk's cutter man—iron jaw on his back—lifted the frame to catch a recall thread and found no thread to eat. He frowned in a way that made his face temporary and attractive. Asgrim let him have a line between two nails in the air instead and then moved the nails so the jaw snapped itself into a post. The man, insulting physics, tried to pull the post; the post did not agree. He sat down with the dignity of a wrong idea.
"Front!" Karsk signaled. The first rank dropped to a knee, shields up—a sober, decent answer. Asgrim did not punish sobriety; he punished geometry. He set a pressure rail an inch off the cobbles and slid it a foot at the moment a knee would decide stone is a friend. Men who trusted the world to stay put went one notch forward into surprise and found the orbit waiting to teach their spears to be moderate.
From the alleys, women in aprons and boys with brooms joined Ash and Fen—work crews, not an army. One crew unbolted a relay frame's cross-brace and let the bell sit wrong; another crew dragged a cart of soaked sailcloth under a balcony and snapped it into a wind that hadn't forgotten them, raising a sheet that pushed the Choir's grid off its math. A girl with a knife scored the linen caps over a set of little hand-bells and smeared sand into the cuts—hush-metal hates grit; the caps drank sound and then gagged on it.
The Grand Bell rolled again, patient. It drank cheer the way a tide takes anything you drop. But a thing was happening: as it moved through the quartering Asgrim had cut into the city, air found corridors under it. A crumb of song made it from one bakery door to the next, like a gossip without shame. Oaths sized for work—push–draw, lift–set—walked along the rails and refused to be confiscated.
At Fishers' Row the procession narrowed. The Choir filed two and two along a wall slick with salt. Asgrim ran the ridge, boots a whisper, ribs reminding him of Chapter 28, leg adding its complaint. He laid a low square over the dancers—Stop—Step—Step—Stop—and the orbit turned men's thrusts into misunderstandings. He disliked three faces he recognized and refused to kill any of them.
Karsk took the curb to gain sightline and found Asgrim above him, patient. They stood like men who used to split wood together and now had to pretend they did not recognize the muscle memory.
"You spared me," Karsk said with his throat, careful, as if crossing a river on a fence.
"And will again," Asgrim said aloud. "If you leave me people I can still respect in the morning."
Karsk's jaw worked—not defiance, not agreement—wrestling with a silence that had replaced his instincts with doctrine. He gestured the line forward, not at a run. He always had good pacing.
The crew on Rope Street had the worst job: a wagon stacked with lesser bells and two novices standing over them like men minding milk. Ash walked straight to the wagon bed, half a step ahead of Fen, and set her palm on the axle box. "This is proud," she said to no one, and the axle—perhaps flattered—admitted it was dry. She tipped a tar pan into the hub. The tar went where a choir has nothing to say. The wheel moved and learned humility—groan—the first honest sound in that yard all afternoon.
A clerk raised a hand to slap her, genteel. Fen took the wrist and set it down four inches to the left on principle. The clerk, surprised at being mortal, reconsidered his schedule.
Asgrim felt the bell lean toward the square where the cathedral's stubs were being clothed in hush. The rails he had laid earlier sagged under that much roof trying to be sky. He could not afford to keep braiding the orbit himself through the long approach. He needed the city to be its own tool.
He planted Fellgnýr on a chimney crown—peg into brick, patient as a stake—then tied his orbit's two loops off to a pair of waypoints at the mouths of the lane. He had done this on beaches and high fields; roofs were no different if you didn't lie to them. The orbit ran by path, not by hand—Stop–Step–Step–Stop—even as he moved on.
"Hold this," he said to Hjalli, appearing with rope and a look that could only have been borrowed from Ash's habit of being prepared. He placed the boy where fence meets flow. "When they hit the loops and falter, you—" he touched the boy's broom "—guide. Not great. Not hero. Guide."
Hjalli nodded, adult suddenly, and Asgrim loved him in the way carpenters love a line that sits true after a bad morning.
The Grand Bell entered the bread quarter. The ovens had mouths again from Chapter 29; the bell pressed its pillow across them. Ash's crews lit tar in shallow pans under eaves and sent smoke rolling—sound's cousin, stubborn and unafraid. The Choir's grid chewed and chewed and got a lungful of kitchen. A hush novice gagged on air with flavor and decided to sit down a minute. Karsk didn't see; he was busy making sure his line did not become a story.
Asgrim leapt the last lane to the cathedral square.
The bell's carriage rolled up onto planks that had been planed into good behavior. Scaffolds laced the rising frame, all hush-metal ribs and careful carpentry. On the facing roofline, a handful of guards lifted a thread-cutter to watch for—what?—a recall line no one intended to offer. Asgrim set rails waist-high between chimneys, then knee between gargoyle stumps. He kept the squares small and mean. This was not show. This was bruise and doubt and delay.
Three guards made the roof and saw only a man with a wrapped hammer and a chain. They stabbed at the orbit they could not see. Fellgnýr worked its belt—tight around Asgrim, protecting him in a hum with no sound—while his free hand flipped a tile with enough malice to teach one man to step wrong. He took a cut for his trouble along the ribs he had been nursing and waited for anger to ask to be large. The tar-knot bit. He stayed boring and correct.
Across the square, Ash's crew brought a ladder to a relay clapper and learned with pleasure that tar makes socks for bells. The sock went on; the note became a behavior; the behavior was ugly and therefore out of doctrine. Fen, humming without approval, slid a pole under a brace and lifted just enough to unsettle the frame. The relay pivoted and rang its own shame in total silence.
Karsk reached the foot of the cathedral steps. He lifted his hand, and the procession halted. He looked up once into the hush, saw Asgrim's orbit turn a thrust aside without humiliating the man who delivered it, and shook his head as if you might at a cousin who refuses to take a job that would let him eat more comfortably.
"Asgrim," he said, making breath do do not and go at once. "Don't."
Asgrim met his eyes across the square and let Karsk see him choose. "Not killing," he mouthed.
Karsk's mouth made something like respect and like resentment at once. "I know," it said without a voice. He gestured his men wide, not directly up the steps; he would not feed them to a carpenter's fence if he could help it. Mercy travels stupid paths but sometimes finds home.
The bell soldiers set skids, ropes, balks. The Grand Bell's lip—not rung, only present—drank every footfall it could. Above it, the cathedral's spine waited for a crown. On the far edge of the square a seam puckered in the light, then smoothed itself again, shy as a fish; a woman-shaped absence tested the air once, then went still—Rift-Widow measuring whether this was the day and the place.
Asgrim took stock the way Ragna would require later. The cross he had left in the city was holding: wind corridors feeding ovens and lungs even under the bell's breath; tar thickening fences; crews making work loud where noise was forbidden. Two lesser bell-wains sat on their sides like dogs that had been told their trick was cruel and were apologizing for being trained.
He could call nothing big. He could set path and lend pressure where the crowd's courage met the Choir's doctrine. He did it until his shoulders shook and then he did it one minute more, the way you row a last mile because men have to eat on the other side of it.
A hush-pulse came down—the largest yet—and the orbit slipped half a finger from a chimney cap. A spear kissed his forearm; blood made its agreement on skin. He bound it with wire and rag, hating himself for liking how easy it is to be visible when you are bleeding. He kept the loops tight.
Ash's crew reached a final relay at the corner and found a watch with better boots. Tar wouldn't carry; the man stamped his cap square and reached for a horn. Fen took a different road: he knelt at the relay's base and spoke to the wedge holding it to the brace. "You're proud," he told it, "and pride's a hinge." He rapped it with the butt of his spear—once, twice, exactly—timber code—and the wedge sighed, released, slid. The relay sat wrong, disgraceful. The man in boots tried to correct it and found his hands stuck in tar somebody else had placed ahead of time. He learned the grace of waiting.
The Choir closed ranks. Their grid narrowed, met the square in a neat frame, and held. The city under the frame breathed anyway. The windows Asgrim had cut yesterday did not vanish; they remembered what they were for. The bell would have its coronation—but not its harvest.
Karsk looked up a last time. There was a question in it Asgrim pretended not to see. He would not answer it on a roof with tools in his hands and a mouth being eaten by a bigger mouth. He gave Karsk a debt he did not enjoy.
He stepped back from the chimney crown and unplanted the orbit. It held two breaths on path and then bled away into weather, as planned. Enough.
"Roof," Ash called from below, voice riding rails; "spire." She pointed—not to hurry him, to aim him—at the bell tower's naked back where ladders made a road up into quiet.
Asgrim thumbed his cord: no new holes; the summer bead tugged and sulked; the rough cross-of-lanes bead from yesterday sat warm. He nodded to Hjalli, who was suddenly taller for having guided men without being asked to be heroic; nodded to Fen, who was never anything but available; touched Ash's tar-slick knuckles with gratitude you don't say in crowds. He set his hand on the porch-line inside his chest—half hearth, half wind—and told the ledger because talking to the bill keeps men from trying to be legends.
"Spent: ribs, blood, path, loops—held. Refused: big strike, tidy kills. Gained: two lesser bells ruined by tar and wedges; a line that knows how to stand without me; a champion not yet broken."
He faced the ladder.
The Grand Bell waited to be crowned. Above it, the spire cut a seam into the dome's false sky. In that seam a hook-curl of wrong light winked—once—as if someone were considering making a doorway.
"Asgrim," Karsk said, no voice, only breath in a chest. It might have meant stop. It might have meant go. It definitely meant I am not finished being a man.
Asgrim climbed.
He took the steps like a craftsman who hates heights but loves roofs: three at a time when timber was honest; one at a time where joinery lied. He did not look down. He did not look up except to find the next anchor for a foot. He reached the half-landing where spire becomes sky and set his palm on stone warm from the city's held breath.
"By bread," he said, because saying it where bells mean to teach the opposite is medicine. "By wind we've taught into a good job. By work—ours—I'll spend before I ask you to."
Thunder didn't answer. It wasn't owed. Something else was: a choice perched on the spire's lip, hook-glint in one hand, a seam's old grief in the other—waiting to be unmasked and to offer a cut only once.
He went up to meet it. Mercy—spared twice—followed below in boots that had learned to be quiet and a heart that had not.