The clerks' wing smelled of ink and warm parchment, a place where decisions were made invisible by habit. Kellan Rourke moved through it like a man who had learned to be small in rooms that decided large things; his shoulders were a little too tight, his hands a little too careful. He had agreed—reluctantly, under Remnants oversight—to meet Aria in a narrow antechamber where the light pooled like a witness.
Aria watched him sit and felt the ledger's map tighten. Naming Kellan at the hearing had been a hinge; now they needed the hinge to turn. The Council had authorized an inquiry with limits; the Remnants had insisted on custody and witnesses. What remained was the clerk's memory and the small, bureaucratic traces that could be followed into rooms where power hid behind procedure.
"You said you processed requests," Aria began, keeping her voice even because even evenness could be a kind of pressure. "We need the logs you touched, the shorthand you used, and the clerks who routed things through your desk. Not to shame you—so we can follow the chain."
Kellan's fingers worried the edge of his sleeve. He had the look of someone who had been taught to trust channels and to believe that channels were safety. "I signed what I was given," he said. "I routed requests. I rubber‑stamped where instructed. I didn't read every manifest."
"Did you ever see donor codes?" Keeper Sera asked from the doorway, her presence a quiet insistence that the Remnants' tiles would record the cadence of the room. "Did you ever see FACV entries or shell trust notations?"
Kellan's jaw worked. "Sometimes. The codes were shorthand. We were told to treat them as routine. If a request came through the right channel, we assumed oversight had been done."
Thorne, who had come to listen and to translate clerical shorthand into something the Loom could test, leaned forward. "Show us the marks you recognize," he said. "Even a clerk's habit is a map. A repeated stroke, a favored abbreviation—those are traces we can follow."
Kellan closed his eyes and let the memory come like a ledger opening. He drew a small slip of paper from his coat—an old clerk's note he had kept out of habit—and laid it on the table. The mark on the margin was small: a looped sigil, two crossed strokes, a dot. To anyone else it would have been a clerk's doodle. To Thorne it was a facilitator's shorthand.
"That mark," Thorne said softly. "We've seen it in manifests tied to Saltport shipments. It's a channel marker. If you can tell us which clerks you passed requests to, we can trace the broker."
Kellan swallowed. "There's a name I can give you," he said finally. "A midrank procurement clerk—Merrin Halv. He handled a lot of the routing when the Council was busy. He's careful. He keeps things tidy. He also… he sometimes forwards requests with a note that says 'as per favor.' I thought it was just a phrase."
"As per favor," Aria repeated, and the words landed like a small, necessary key. "We follow Merrin. We ask for his logs under Remnants oversight. We ask for the courier names he used. We do not accuse him in public; we follow the chain."
Kellan nodded, relief and fear braided together. "I'll give you what I have. But there's more. Sometimes the requests came with a line of text that looked like ritual notes—phrases about bells and dusk. I thought it was clerical shorthand for timing. I didn't know it was instruction."
Keeper Sera's eyes narrowed in the way of someone who had read too many marginalia and found them all dangerous. "Those marginalia are part of the ledger," she said. "We will catalog them. We will not let ritual language be used as a cover for procurement."
They left Kellan with a Remnants witness and a promise: clerk logs under seal, warded testimony if needed, and a path that would not expose him to retribution for cooperating. The small hinge had moved; Merrin Halv's name was now a node on the ledger's map.
Outside the annex, the city's politics hummed like a machine. Aria walked the short distance to the Council's public records room with Thorne and Marcus at her side. The records room was a different kind of archive—open to magistrates and to those with the right seals, but still a place where paper could be made to speak if you knew how to listen.
Thorne worked the clerks' shorthand like a translator. He fed Kellan's slip through a warded lens and matched the facilitator mark to manifests the Loom had already photographed. The pattern was ugly in its neatness: repeated shipments routed through Saltport, courier names that reappeared in private docks, and a broker who used a merchant guild as a front. The ledger's teeth had a face that looked like commerce.
"We follow Merrin's logs to the broker," Thorne said. "We follow the broker to Saltport. We follow Saltport to the private docks. Each step is a hinge. Each hinge is a person who can be asked to testify."
Marcus's jaw tightened. "And if they refuse?"
"Then we make the ledger public," Aria said. "We do not let procedure hide harm. We use the Remnants' packets and the Oath of Witness to make the ledger speak in rooms where people cannot pretend they didn't hear."
They moved with the quiet efficiency of people who had learned to make evidence move. Marcus arranged for a discreet escort to accompany a Remnants courier to Saltport; Thorne prepared a technical brief that explained the facilitator shorthand without teaching craft; Keeper Sera prepared the witness packets and the warded tiles that would make later tampering obvious.
That night, in a narrow tavern near the docks, Aria met Merrin Halv's courier. The man was a small, nervous thing who had been paid to move crates and to sign manifests. He had the look of someone who had been taught to keep his head down. When Aria showed him Kellan's slip and the Remnants' seal, his hands shook.
"I signed for crates," he said. "I signed and I left. I didn't ask questions. The broker paid well. He said the goods were for neutral towns. He said the Council had approved the channels. I thought I was doing my job."
"Names," Aria said. "Courier names, broker names, docks. We follow the chain."
He gave them a list: a broker named Corin Vell, a private dock at Greyhaven, and a ledger keeper who had a habit of writing the phrase bell echo at dusk in the margins. The phrase had become a refrain in the ledger's margins—an instruction disguised as timing.
Back at the Loom, Thorne fed the new names through the warded lens and sketched the procurement map. The pattern was no longer abstract; it had faces and docks and a broker who liked to hide behind neutral towns. The ledger's teeth had found purchase in commerce and in clerical habit.
Aria added the day's entry to the Spiral Log with hands that had learned to be both blunt and careful: Clerk hinge moved—Kellan Rourke provided clerk logs; Merrin Halv identified as routing node; courier names and broker (Corin Vell) recorded; facilitator shorthand cataloged; follow broker to Saltport and Greyhaven docks; prepare warded subpoenas and Remnants escort.
She closed the log and felt the ledger's map shift again. The Order's threads were not only political; they were logistical. Procedure had been the committee's camouflage; now procedure was the path they would follow to unmask it.
Before she left the Loom that night, Luna found her in the courtyard and pressed a small stone into her palm—a market stone, warm from the day. "They're afraid of being small," Luna said simply. "But small things add up. Stones make a path."
Aria smiled despite the ledger's weight. The work was small and stubborn and human. They would follow the clerks and the couriers and the brokers until the ledger's teeth had nothing left to hide. Procedure could be a blade; they would make it a tool for accountability.