The pale cord twitched inside the glass.
Jiang struck Brann's tool tray before Aylin could lean closer.
She stopped with the furnace lamp held over the opening. Its light caught a black-green thread slipping behind the drilled stone, thin as weed in a river.
"It heard us find it," Rian said.
"It hears wet roads," Brann replied. "Do not flatter it."
Ista pushed his hammer aside with the base of her palm. "And do not touch my glass until I tell you how it will break."
"Your glass is in my wall."
"Then your wall has finally acquired value."
Their irritation came too easily to be staged. Jiang trusted it more than another solemn promise.
Ista knelt beside the exposed curl and turned the lamp sideways. Instead of studying the black shine, she watched the bubbles held inside it.
Near the outer cap, they were broad and cloudy. Deeper in, the bubbles narrowed around grains of furnace grit. The innermost glass had flowed over the funeral stone in clear, tight ripples.
Ista scraped lime from the cap and pinched it between her fingers. "This patch is mine. I sealed a dry crack after River-Open."
She pointed to the cloudy layer. "That was Glasswash waste poured while the foundation still sweated."
Her nail moved toward the clear black curl around the cord.
"That formed first. The river laid itself over whatever was already here."
Ossin lowered his hook until the point hovered beside the drilled stone. "Can you swear to that before Whitewake?"
"I can swear you are blocking my lamp. Move."
He stepped aside and let her work.
Brann lay on his good side and brought his scarred ear close to the wall. He did not touch the wet glass. His two rigid fingers rested against his chest while his thumb followed a set of pale scratches beside the stone.
"Flat chisel," he said. "Old one. The edge jumped here and here."
Ista looked. "You know the hand?"
"I know the tool was sharpened by someone who hated corners. That describes half the river crews and all palace labor."
Black water welled beneath the opening.
Jiang stayed on the dry tray. The black-gold mark lay above the folded cloth under his breast, safely clear of the seep. He lowered his beak toward a curl of lamp wick Brann had trimmed and nudged it over the tray's rim.
The dry scrap landed beside the wall.
Water should have carried it toward the underwheel channel. Instead, the wick slid against the slope and kissed the black glass.
Jiang tapped twice and pointed.
Brann's face tightened. "The underwheel is pulling through the burial pocket."
The glass answered in Aylin's voice.
"I opened the gate."
It was the sentence she had given Brann on the stair. The shape of her voice was perfect. The timing belonged to something delighted by a wound.
Aylin did not answer herself.
Ista opened a leather pouch and poured pale furnace sand across the seep. The first handful darkened where it drank water. She added more until a dry ridge divided the wall from the floor channel.
The copied voice tried again.
"I opened the gate and-"
It failed where the wet glass lost contact.
Silence held for one breath. Then Edric spoke from farther inside the wall.
"You took a long road home."
Rian turned his ruined order so the lead fold faced the sound. "The sand stopped the near voice. The wider road remains."
"Good," Ista said. "A limit is useful even when it disappoints you."
Aylin reached into her coat and opened her palm.
The blue shard from her shattered winter seal looked small beside the black glass. One edge carried the curve of the old royal mark. The other was fresh and white from breaking beneath Last Gate.
"There is a hollow behind the cord," she said.
Brann shifted the lamp. A shallow socket appeared where the pale braid entered the stone. Two chipped ridges waited inside it.
Aylin held her shard beside the glass rather than pressing it in. The curve fit. Even the narrow tooth at its edge met the lower ridge.
Ossin's hook rose between her hand and the socket. "Do not complete it."
"I was not going to."
"You have a history with gates."
For a heartbeat, the old Aylin would have punished him for saying it. Jiang saw the reply reach her mouth.
She swallowed the reply and held still.
"Then keep the hook there," she said. "I want witnesses more than I want the piece back."
Ista examined the shard from either side. "The socket matches the seal's shape. It cannot tell us who pressed the seal, who carried it, or whether the glass was already stolen."
The shard slid across the tray when the wheel shivered. Jiang caught it against the side of his beak before its broken edge reached the damp rim.
Up close, the royal glass smelled of lime, Aylin's dried blood, and the wool of her coat. It smelled no more truthful than a common bottle chip.
Aylin took it from him with a quiet, "Thank you."
Jiang had crossed worlds as a penguin to learn that royal evidence still needed someone short enough to keep it from falling into a drain.
"My father used that winter mark."
"So did everyone empowered to make the world inconvenient in his name."
Rian almost smiled. His expression remembered that the subject was treason and changed its mind.
Brann had gone quiet.
The underkeeper stared at the pale cord as if it had pulled something from his damaged ear.
"I moved this," he said.
Aylin lowered the shard. "When?"
"Before the gate caught me. Before the warning failed."
Brann sat back against the chain wheel. Mud cracked at his belt as he rubbed his good thumb across the two fingers that no longer opened.
"It came down wrapped in work canvas. A stone frame, empty inside, cut about your height. The cord was already threaded through the weights."
"Who brought it?" Ossin asked.
"Two covered faces in lower-yard coats. That was ordinary during flood drills. Nobody wanted river glass in the eyes."
"Did either one speak?" Ossin asked.
"One told me the frame would measure pressure if the royal spill opened. I called him a liar because pressure measures do not need shoulders."
"And you moved it anyway," Aylin said.
"I was twenty, tired, and carrying a palace order I could not read. Pick the sin that comforts you."
She flinched without looking away.
Brann continued. "We set it beside the lower gate. It was gone when your father turned the wheel. I assumed the flood took it."
Ista touched one trapped grain beneath the clear black layer. "The flood buried it here."
Aylin looked at Brann. "Did my father see the frame before the flood?"
"I never saw him beside it. He reached the lower wheel after the current turned. I will not put him in a room because you need him there."
Aylin's thumb pressed against the broken shard until blood brightened its edge. Then her grip eased.
"Thank you for leaving that part empty," she said.
Aylin backed into the chain wheel. One iron tooth caught her coat and held it there.
Her funeral frame had entered River-Open before River-Open became a disaster. Someone had prepared a dead princess while she was still alive enough to make the choice that would condemn her.
Jiang watched her fingers close over the blue shard.
"The warning line was cut first," she said. "This was placed first. Then I opened the gate."
Brann's scarred ear turned toward her.
"That is the sequence," Brann said.
His face stayed hard. Aylin kept her hand open and let him see that she had heard.
Rian drew his belt knife. "We take the stone now. Glasswash can witness the tool cuts above."
"No," Ista said. "Above, it becomes a loose rock carried by people accused of wearing stolen faces. Here, it is beneath the first flood layer."
Ossin studied the moving thread. "Leaving it gives the thing a road."
Aylin looked from the socket to the blue shard. She could break the curl, pull the cord, and carry away the one piece that resembled proof from her father's hand. She could also destroy the only place that proved when the stone had arrived.
She put the shard on the dry tool tray beside Jiang.
"Brann saw it before the flood," she said. "Ista can read what formed over it. Rian, you will remember the seal matched and everything it failed to prove. Ossin, keep your hook between me and the glass."
"I will manage that gladly."
"We leave it until Glasswash sends more eyes."
The black-green thread vanished.
Jiang snapped his beak at the empty line.
The thread was racing through the wall.
The wick scrap beside the wall spun once and shot toward the underwheel.
Brann threw himself at the chain. Dagna caught the opposite handle, and both of them hauled. Iron teeth climbed with a groan from beneath the floor.
The wheel stopped halfway.
Clear water surged through the Glasswash channel. Black water curled around it and entered old scars in the chamber wall, lighting each one green as it passed.
"It abandoned the stone," Rian said.
"It found the wheel," Brann answered.
Ista kicked her sand pouch toward Aylin and seized the lamp. "Which gate is opening?"
Brann put his scarred ear against the chain housing.
The answer struck from below.
Stone boomed under Jiang's tray. Heat rushed up through the floor, followed by a wet crack so deep he felt it in his breast before he heard it.
Ista went pale. "First furnace row."
"Are those cellars occupied?" Ossin asked.
"My night wash is down there. Six workers, three apprentices."
Another impact lifted the dry sand in a ring. Through the Glasswash channel came the roar of water meeting a live saltglass furnace.
Steam punched from the stair vent.
Dagna tore Jiang's tray away before the blast could wet the cloth beneath his mark. Aylin caught the blue shard, then shoved the whole sand pouch into the vent. The copied voices died inside the white cloud.
Beyond the wheel, the black-green thread split from the flood and raced into the narrow channel marked with a royal crown.
It had the palace road.
Below them, someone began hammering for help.