A Mantle for the Last Watch

Eryk Vale woke to the familiar ache of a right palm that remembered stitches it had not yet made. He pushed open the narrow window above his workbench and let the morning air thread itself through the shop: a thin, metallic tang from the smith across the alley, sour steam from the bakery two doors down that boiled rootcakes in kettles the size of small graves, and the steady, distant rasp of stone where the Watch walked its slow circumference. He counted the breaths of the city the way other men counted coins — not by faces or fortunes, but by rhythms: the vendor with the wheeze who hawked boiled zests, the children who tied silver-moss to their hair for market-day, the municipal bell that hinted at noon whether anyone bothered to look up. These details were not his business; they were the city’s weather.

His bench was a landscape of tools. Bone awls with edges as thin as a whisper; wooden clamps worn smooth by decades of being cupped and cursed; bobbins that smelled faintly of beeswax and sea-tar. A cat the color of brackish cloth pretended to ignore him but performed a series of conspiratorial moves that concluded with a paw on the corner of a spool, so that thread spilled like a small, unruly stream across the floor. Eryk grunted, bent, and with a single, efficient motion — a raking hand, an ankle planted for balance, an index finger that pinched just-so — retrieved the spool and tightened his work apron. It was the sort of small choreography that taught patience and made the body remember its own instruments.

He found humor in small things, a dry sort of amusement that rarely escaped as laughter. Today it registered in the cat’s pointed expression, as though Patch judged his seams and only feigned disdain because it raised his value as a critic. Eryk scratched the cat behind an ear and muttered, "If you scorn me now, you’ll have to tear out every other stitch later." The cat blinked as if to say, good luck with that, and leapt onto a stack of cloth, scattering a constellation of loose pins.

A knock at the street-level door made him straighten. Visitors were uncommon; commissions were rarer still. Eryk wiped his hands on a rag threaded with a hundred small mending jobs and opened. A courier stood there with the city prefect’s seal — a simple stamp pressed in gray wax, no flourish. The man’s eyes were too bright with urgency for someone who carried official business.

"Master Vale?" he asked, bowing with the faint show of a public servant who had learned that the city’s silence often hid sharp edges.

"I am he," Eryk replied, and already his fingers were reaching for the folded packet the man extended. The packet was heavy with its own conviction. When he broke the wax, he smelled glue, and the leather flap inside creaked like paper treated to the dampness of old streets. There was an order: the Mantle of Bearing, to be sewn for the Stone Watch.

Eryk read the lines twice. The prose of officialdom prides itself on the clarity of consequence. The mantle would stabilize a section of the city where the Watch’s tread kept the earth from splitting wide as a throat. The ritual pattern was strict; the weave specified a bearing structure that would, once attached, lock together channels and partitions of the district — in essence, hold architecture like ribs hold flesh. The letter spoke calmly of preservation, of necessary sacrifices. It did not speak of faces.

He felt the parchment’s edges as if it were a living thing and set it on his bench. The cat nosed at the wax seal and left an oily crescent on the wood.

"Is that—" the courier began, but Eryk cut him off with a hand.

"Tell the Prefect I will consider the commission," he said. "And tell him I will require time and materials." He folded the letter back into its leather and slid it into a drawer with implements for measuring angular pulls and the small, coiled tools he kept for impossible hems. The courier bowed and left, tramping through puddles of market runoff with dignity intact.

Once alone, Eryk laid the letter flat and turned away. 'Consideration' had become his polite workword for an inward verdict, but this time the word felt brittle. The mantle was not simply cloth; it was a device of binding. To sew it thinly was to do harm by negligence; to sew it as prescribed might be to bind people as surely as stone. He reached without thinking for an old sample: a strip of fabric he had once woven to support a cracked arch. His hands moved like a man who had taught himself to read and write in the body — thumbing filaments, pressing a seam under a lamp, running a needle that slid through like a fish through water.

Outside, the afternoon markets sharpened. Someone burned a small cask of spice that turned the air sweet and sharp. A girl near the doorway sold ceramic cups painted with a tradition the City called 'rain-pearls'—a glaze that cracked deliberately to look like fissures, then was painted over so the colours shone in the breaks. It was ornamental and had nothing to do with politics or stabilizing mantles. It was purely a city's vanity. Eryk allowed himself a thin grin; the world contained such trivialities even when he was asked to bind it together. He set out instruments he might use: strands of basalt-fiber, a spool of braided gut, a cutter honed until it sang.