For three days, Cael kept to his room. He rationed what food remained in the larder - stale bread, a wedge of hard cheese, a bottle of sour wine, and tried to mend the jagged hollows in his thoughts.
But time did not heal everything.
The Spire had taken something essential. Though he still recalled his name and craft, there were moments when memories simply would not rise to meet him - when he searched for a face he knew he should remember, or a familiar street, and found only a gray haze.
It made him feel hollow. Unmoored.
Worse, it made him reckless.
He rose before dawn on the fourth day and donned his work clothes; plain dark tunic, soft-soled boots, gloves with the fingertips cut away. When he looked into the cracked mirror over the basin, he saw a man who might have been any debtor's son. Not a legend, not a thief.
Perhaps that was best.
You are nothing beyond these walls.
He set his jaw and left the room.
The morning was damp with sea fog, the alleys slick with condensation. He slipped through the backways, avoiding the wide avenues where the watchmen would be patrolling.
At a quarter hour before sunrise, he reached the Broken Lantern.
The tavern was no more than a gutted storefront with a canvas awning nailed over the doorway. It served thin beer and stale gossip to the sort of men who earned their bread by knowing things best left unspoken.
Exactly the sort of place he needed.
Inside, the air was heavy with old smoke and the bite of cheap spirits. A handful of patrons dozed over their cups, their faces half-hidden beneath the folds of their hoods.
Cael moved to a corner table and sat where he could watch the door.
After a moment, the proprietor drifted over—a narrow-shouldered woman with eyes like polished coal.
"Thought you'd fled the city," she murmured.
"Not yet."
She raised a brow. "If you're hiding, this isn't the place."
"I'm not hiding. I'm listening."
She grunted, unimpressed, and set a chipped mug on the table. "Then drink something."
When she retreated behind the bar, Cael wrapped his hands around the warm ceramic.
He waited.
It did not take long.
The first scraps of gossip came from a pair of carters trading stories at the next table:
"Some fool broke into the Spire…"
"No, they say it was a sanctioned retrieval…"
"Sanctioned by whom? No one sane meddles in those records…"
He kept his expression blank, but inside, his heart kicked painfully.
So the city already knew someone had entered. That was faster than he'd expected.
More talk drifted in as the morning deepened.
"Three watchers gone missing that night…The ledger itself was undisturbed, they say, but something else was taken…The Spire doesn't forgive…"
He felt the familiar nausea of too much truth tangled with too many lies.
When the proprietor passed again, he caught her sleeve.
"Anything more?"
She regarded him with a flat look. "I might, if I knew what you were after."
"Rumors of debts. Old ones."
Her mouth twitched. "You're not the first who's come sniffing for those stories. They always end the same."
He waited.
At last, she sighed. "Some say the Spire keeps more than contracts. That it holds the ledger of the city itself. Every life. Every debt, every promise. Even the names of those who think they've escaped."
"That's just superstition."
"Maybe." She looked away, voice dropping. "But the older folk say the Spire's memory is older than brick or stone. That it was something else before men built around it."
He frowned. "What else?"
"No one knows." She turned, retreating to the bar.
He finished the drink and left, stepping into the thin, pearling dawn.
His thoughts turned as he walked—slow and heavy.
He'd come here seeking information to reassure himself that what he'd stolen was only paper. That the Spire could not follow him.
But if the stories were true—if the Spire remembered everything—then even now it might be reshaping the debt he owed.
He tried to tell himself it didn't matter.
But a cold certainty coiled low in his belly.
The Spire had let him leave for a reason.
And eventually, it would call him back.
He turned toward the city's north quarter, where Brennor kept his counting house.
He needed to understand exactly what he'd been sent to find - because he no longer believed the Ennos Vey contract was just another proof of debt.
He believed it was a key.
And he feared what it unlocked.