They climbed when the carriage rolled, the floor's attention on heat. On the second tier the air pressed closer; it smelled not only of bronze and flux but of bell wash, the thin clay that makes a skin between intention and alloy. A tongueless bell hung at eye-level and Hanna paused, considering the symmetry of its lip—how the sound would travel when someone one day gave it a tongue and permission. She put her palm to the bronze. It was warm with stored work.

"The stamp on the Index Leaf," Han said. "Circle with the notch. House Nine."

Hanna nodded toward a line of molds shellacked smooth, each with a chalk number: IX, IX+1, IX-2, and so on—an internal dialect of arithmetic and superstition. The moth rose from its perch as if curiosity had suddenly outweighed decorum. It traced an uneven orbit around the nearest mold, then widened its circle to pass under the gantry rail and return to another casting frame three stations down. There it hovered and stilled, wings half-open, quartz eye drinking the pit's light as if it were reading.

"In there," Han said.

The master mounted the stairs like a man tolerating scaffolding because it had not yet learned to tolerate him. He looked where the moth looked and made a noise in his throat that was not quite a no. "That mold pours in three minutes," he said. "If there's a foreign body in the cope, you ruin the piece and everyone eats the cost."

"We won't ruin anything," Hanna said. "You'll keep your pour—and you'll keep your men." She set her hands to the iron collar that held the cope and the drag aligned and tested the bolts with the knowledge of someone who had learned the language of fasteners by touch instead of diagrams. "Han," she said, meaning: do the precise part.

Han loosened a single pin enough to see a crescent of inner surface, no more. He smelled clay, graphite, the sour hint of burlap used to pack a cavity. Between the cope and drag, in a pocket left by a core pattern and then plugged with wash, something waited. Not big. Not part of the bell's shape. He eased a sliver of wash aside and took out a folded vellum slip—pressed flat, glazed by heat, the size of a man's palm. A dust clung to it that was not shop grit. He tasted it the way air tastes: no sweetness, only edge. Glass pollen—fine as sigh, the kind that lives in greenhouse roofs and cuts light into a discipline.

"Forgers," he said, too quiet for the word to own him. "Roofline work. Not temple."

"Clocks," the master snapped, meaning: mind the pour schedule, not conspiracy. But he watched Han tuck the vellum into his satchel with an expression that allowed the possibility of gratitude later.

A bellman clanged a bar with a measured pace: five strokes to tell the pit that time had condensed to now. Men took places. The crucible's lips came over the mold. The world narrowed to the shine at the edge of liquid metal. The master's hands—square, scarred—leveled the pour with the habit of a priest who has realized he serves weight, not mercy.

Hanna positioned herself by the counterweight that monitored sway. If the crane's chain tried to teach the room about pendulums, she would interrupt the lesson. She looked like the wrong tool in the right place and somehow the place adapted. The pour began. Bronze went where men had convinced it to go. Steam flinched and fled. The shop's language of taps reasserted itself: two quick, one long, hold. When the crucible's lip climbed, Hanna eased the counterweight back into virtue. No drama. Only competence.

Beadles entered the foundry then, because they had never once in their lives considered timing as part of manners. Leather aprons, ledger gloves, hats that could not be seen without wanting to remove them. Three of them, again. One carried a folded writ the way a courtesan carries a fan. The master saw them and made a decision not to see them until his pour said he could afford to.

"Proceedings," the first beadle intoned to the air, as if a building could be subpoenaed. "To preserve doctrine—"

"Pour," the master said, loud enough that the word became a place. The carriage rolled. Heat moved with a logic of its own. If the beadles had known the arithmetic of mass and gravity they would have stood exactly where they stood, but with more humility. They did not, so they spoke again.

"Proceedings," the beadle said, folding the writ open so the paper could be seen worshiping itself.

Hanna's gaze flicked from chain to ladle to men to chain. "Hold your nerve," she told the room, and the room chose to agree. She positioned her weight on the counter lever and found the moment when machines choose to misbehave. She pulled just enough to disagree with physics, and the crucible took that disagreement as a refreshing idea. Metal obeyed the mold. The master cut the pour and nodded, once, as if to a problem that had admitted defeat in good order.

Now he could afford to see beadles. "You'll not serve that paper on my stage," he said, pointing to the clean strip of floor reserved for decisions that belong to bells. "You'll do it over there where sand remembers clumsy shoes."

The beadles stepped wrong and discovered why men who work with heat hate paper: it refuses to learn. "We'll seize any material that touches doctrine," the leader said, raising his glove toward Han and Hanna, toward the moth, toward the satchel with its oilskin throat closed tight.

"What you'll seize is a cough if you stand in this draft," the master said, almost kindly. He nodded once to Hanna, a craftsman to another, and then to Han, a man to a ledger. "You came for a stamp? You found a pocket the temple didn't account for. I saw nothing. If the beadles ask later, I will still have seen nothing. Hand them an argument in a place where people wear robes for a living."

"High Court Plaza," Han said. The words felt like a scale finally remembering which weight belonged where. The tribunal scene would come. But first, the roofline.

The moth left its perch, lifted into a slow orbit around a bell that had not yet been given a tongue. It circled once, twice, then stopped, half-open, suspended like a held thought. The quartz bead in its head drank the lines of the shop and gave back a thin ray that touched the bell's lip and paused. A bell without a tongue does not speak; it waits. The moth indicated waiting as a direction. Up, Han thought. Up and then out. Glass pollen. Conservatory.

"Inventory," one beadle said sharply, as if the word had any purchase here.

"Inventory is what I keep," the master said, his voice finding a lower register the floor liked. "Doctrine is something you recite where no one can break their ankle on it. You'll come back with a different paper and a man who knows what he's asking for."

The beadles considered how much they could steal from the word no with only three bodies and a piece of writing. They pocketed their courage for later. The leader folded the writ, too carefully to look confident, and pushed his hat down as if it would change a conclusion. "We'll remember this," he said.

"Good," said Hanna, already moving to the stair. "Memory makes better witnesses than men." She touched the counter lever gently, a farewell to a machine that had nearly misbehaved and decided not to out of respect.

They withdrew along the second tier while the foundry breathed out heat to replace what the pour had taken. Men began to scrape gates and clean seams. The master resumed counting without moving his lips; his chalk wrote a small new future on the slate. Han and Hanna reached the end of the gantry where a door had been wedged open with a shoe that once belonged to a man the foundry disliked. The lane beyond the door smelled like water and flour—bakeries, buckets, the city exchanging ingredients for stories.

"Roofline," Han said, and touched the satchel where the vellum rested between oil and leather. The moth's shadow passed over his cuff like a map considering whether it wanted to be a road. "After the Court. Or during it."

"Before sunset," Hanna said. "I like roofs before the day decides to forgive them."

They slid into the lane. The beadles delayed at the threshold exactly long enough to reassure themselves that leaving was strategy, not failure. Hanna turned once, not to threaten, only to ensure the beadles saw an expression shaped by a woman who could pin a chain with one hand while she kept a hundredweight of molten obstinacy from learning bad habits with the other. They saw it. They let them go.

They did not walk straight home. Hanna preferred to collect angles. They took a route that ran under a hoist used for lifting ingots through a hatch, then under a lattice of laundry where a family played out a private weather. A girl looked down and saw the moth's small geometry slip through sunlight and decided she would remember that line all her life without telling anyone. In the square, a man hawked spoon molds to housewives, promising economy by the dozen; a boy echoed the pitch for practice. Bells from the foundry made no sound in the street, but the street heard them anyway and adjusted its pace.

At their door, the room remembered them in the way of rooms that have forgiven things and forgotten them at equal rates. Hanna set the jar on the table. Han set the satchel down and unrolled oilskin. The vellum slip had kept its shape, as a lie keeps the shape of the moment when someone believed it. Three ledger references lay in a clean hand: page numbers, cross-signs, a tiny hiatus mark between two. In the margin, a second blind stamp—smaller than the foundry's—pressed a wreath of glass slivers into the fibers. Not visible to the eye unless light wanted it to be. Rooftop. Conservatory. A forger who thought style was a good alibi until it wasn't.

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.