The Gyreheart of Harrowe

The city of Harrowe hung like a constellation of iron and rope between the lower fog and the bright blue beyond. Islands the size of gardens and small farms drifted on tether-lines, and between them ran the carved wooden bridges and webbed spindles that let people move from roof to roof on gusts and sails. Wind lived in Harrowe like a neighbor: it creaked shutters at dawn, braided laundry on the terrace, tilted the lamplight in crooked patterns. Machinery took the wind and made it useful — mills for grinding sea-salt grain, great bellows that fed forges, nets that caught featherfish from the warm clouds. In the heart of the city, inside a tower of riveted plates and glass, the Gyreheart throbbed like a sleeping star. Its hum was a constant that stitched the neighborhoods together.

Ori worked with hands that had always understood gears better than gossip. At twenty-two he had the streaked knuckles of someone who handled wire and soot more than fine clothes. He kept his hair shorter than most, because curls snagged on cogs, and his shirt was patched at the elbow where he had first learned to file a rotor with his mentor's patient instruction. Far Elsin had been there when Ori was a boy, his voice like a low fan: 'Let the tool teach you, not the hurry.' In the workshop the air smelled of oil and citrus wax; a half-built windwing leaned like a sleeping bird against a crate, its leather ribs marked with scale drawings Ori had made in the margins of older plans.

Plume sat on Ori's workbench: a small mechanical kestrel he'd made from brass scraps and an old lens. Plume's feathers were thin plates that caught light in colors Ori had never seen on living birds. When he tapped its side, it chirped, the sound a clink and a sigh, more machine than creature and yet companion enough to knock tools from a belt and find them later. People in Harrowe called Ori reckless when they meant fast; they called him stubborn when they meant stubborn like the tide. He preferred the names of things to the names of causes. He could mend a torn sail in half an hour and could guess by sound whether the Gyreheart breathed steady or ragged.

That morning, when the festival banners looped like bright fish across the bridges and children chased each other with ribboned kites, the hum from the tower was wrong. Ori was at the forge, hammer under his forearm, when the bell above the square stuttered and then went silent. The bell wasn't wired to the Gyreheart directly; still, people looked up with the kind of slow worry that crosses a market like spilled grain. Far up the main thoroughfare a man shoved through a crowd, his face pale but set, and someone called his name: 'Patron Mael — the tower's dimmed.' The word moved like smoke. On the bench, Plume tipped its head and made a tiny, uncertain chirr.