NOVEL NEXT Chapter 69: Question
Outside, tide stink hugged the seam in the wall, and the slab door took its time closing on the day. Wind had turned, as the porter predicted. A ruffle ran along the channel outside, and in that sound Han heard the start of the next portion of the Archive's sentence. The moth returned to its perch and made itself slight under the felt as if it had learned humility in a library.
They climbed the ramp to the street. Water still spoke through the drain teeth. Hanna wrung her undershirt with a twist that would have frightened a pulley and put her coat back on. The Index Leaf went under oilskin in Han's satchel so that even weather would have to argue. A gull walked the parapet and discovered philosophy instead of lunch. Two fishmongers argued about fairness using identical numbers and different tones. The city resumed its account.
They took the long way home to be sure they were not rehearsing someone else's script. A mirror-shop's window offered them two strangers willing to pretend they had not been followed; a barber's pole gave them a chance to see if anyone preferred reflections to streets. No one kept their distance long enough to deserve a name. That did not comfort Han. The chalk on the glove against his ribs had been warm for a blink in the vestibule; it was cold now. Someone had sniffed and decided not to bite. He preferred enemies who committed.
At the door, Hanna set the jar on the table and loosened the felt. The moth endured daylight with the composure of an elder practiced at receiving visits. Han laid the Index Leaf beside the slate and put the unmarked glove where the moth could make use of it. The chalk glove he set at the end of the board and did not invite.
"Let's ask it where 'Bellhouse Nine' lives," he said.
Hanna tapped the table top once, and the wood remembered manners. "The foundry?" she said.
"And not on the temple's rolls," Han said. "If doctrine thinks it owns everything written, it will have to learn about the places where bell metal cools without tongues."
The moth stirred, quartz eye drinking lamplight. Han raised a finger and drew the same small arc he had used in the Archive, tracing the curve of the tide-clock's bell. The moth lifted, skated the air, and settled on the glove. Its wings cut and folded in short, decisive measures. Light ran to the Index Leaf and then angled across Han's knuckles toward the satchel's lid as if it intended to appoint the route itself.
"Not river," Hanna said, reading the line not as a direction but as a refusal. "Up through heat and dust. Gantries. Hoists."
"Bellhouse Nine," Han said, tasting the number the way a man tastes a coin to be sure of its honesty.
"And beadles," Hanna said, not to invite them, but because the names you speak ahead of time lose the pleasure of surprising you. "They'll come with writs that fold in the middle and make people forget their backs."
Han looked at the Index again. In the corner where the blind emboss had left its circle and notch, a whisper of grit lived in the fibers. Not chalk. Something finer. He rubbed a fingertip and tasted glass the way air tastes glass: no sweetness, only edge. Roofline, he thought. Conservatory grit. But that thought belonged to later chapters, and the city would not forgive him for getting clever out of order.
"Eat first," Hanna said, as if answering an argument he had not made yet. "Then foundry."
"Then foundry," Han said. He glanced at the glove in its kerchief and considered letting the chalk hear his plan. He changed his mind. Numbers traveled without help. He would not donate them speed.
They ate in the way of people who respect the hour but not the ritual: bread, two eggs, a wedge of cheese that described a patient animal's devotion better than poetry. When the plates were clean and the room had finished remembering they lived there, Han closed the satchel and stood.
"Bellhouse Nine," he repeated.
Hanna nodded once, took up the jar by its throat, and left the house first because doors learned obedience from her and because she preferred to meet streets with her shoulders rather than her back. The moth's shadow moved within the felt like a map deciding to become a road. The Index Leaf, under oilskin, lay between them like a straight answer waiting for a proper question.
Behind them, on the table, the chalk glove lay quiet as a sermon. In the city beyond, a set of bells turned the hour without tongues, a percussion of paper tapping bronze. People called it silence. In fact, it was an invitation.
The Hollow Foundry announced itself by smell before the street bent to show the doors. Heat, metal, powdered charcoal—the air tasted like a coin scraped on a whetstone. The building had no patience for ornament. It rose in wedge-shaped bays of dark brick braced by iron, each bay ending in a hooded vent that sighed out a slow breath the color of stormglass. Carts stood with their shafts down, horses draped in damp blankets, wheel ruts stained a gray that never washed away. On a rack outside the gate lay broken sprues and discarded cores: the bones of bells that had failed to be born.
Hanna touched the lintel as they entered, the way a sailor touches a mast—part habit, part pact. Inside, heat took the eyes first, making the distant glow of the pit seem nearer than it was. Gantries crossed the space in three clean tiers, each with a rail smooth from use. Cranes waited like patient birds. Along the right-hand wall, a line of finished bells stood with their mouths down on straw, their shoulders stamped with house marks and weighing scrawls. A few lacked tongues entirely. Even without clappers they believed in themselves; the room listened.
Workers moved in teams, each with a rhythm that would have looked like chaos to anyone who didn't understand how discipline behaves when it puts on speed. A foreman kept tally with chalk on a slate and a piece of twine knotted around his wrist at exact intervals. Somewhere behind the first gantry a lad tapped a pattern with a peen hammer and another answered with a brace against a core frame. It was conversation, but metallurgical: three short, one long, pause; two quick, two quick, rest. The shop used knocks the way other houses used whistles.
The master met them at the edge of the first bay. He wore a leather apron that had learned the shape of his ribs. His beard had the color and texture of bronze filings. The bell mark on his shoulder—bellhouse nine, a circle with a notch at twelve—had been pressed into the leather so often the leather had decided to make peace with it. He looked at Han, at Hanna, and then at the jar in Hanna's hands with the expression of a man counting and refusing to say the number out loud.
"We need to consult an inventory," Han said. "We'll keep clear of the pour lines."
"You won't keep clear of contracts," the master said. He nodded toward a slate hung beside the door. A tidy hand had chalked an agreement with the Pale Tithe, each clause living in its own square. "The temple owns doctrine, and they've said doctrine lives near my molds now. My men have obligations they can't bend when a stranger's sentence asks them to."
"We're not strangers," Han said. "We are customers of a ledger you don't record, and we're here for a stamp that isn't on the temple's roll."
The master's mouth decided it could just as well be a straight line. "You speak like a man who knows his law is an instrument, not a prayer. I respect that. It doesn't change what the temple wrote on my slate."
"Then we'll ask your bells," Hanna said, not as insolence but as a statement of method. She set the felt-wrapped jar on the rail and unrolled it. The moth took heat into its quartz head and answered by doing nothing at all, which was the most interesting way a thing can behave in the presence of many eyes.
"You can stand on the gantry," the master said finally. "You don't touch a mold without my say, and if the beadles arrive, you didn't teach me any new words." He turned and roared a command that was not a shout. Men moved. Lids hinged off pits. Sand racks rolled on hidden wheels. The shop made room for the idea of guests without admitting it had changed shape.
A pour was due. Han read the way crews pulled leather gauntlets and checked the slings running over pulleys. On the far side of the floor two furnaces glowed like suns that had chosen respectable professions. A crucible traveled between them on a carriage with wooden wheels that will never burn because they have made a pact with ash. Hanna scanned the walkways and found the ladder routes mapped as cleanly as if she had drawn them yesterday. "We go up on the second turn," she said.