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The ropewright Kestrel opens the Splicehouse to the city, trains a communal crew, confronts sabotage born of panic, and helps weave a shared system of maintenance. Bonds form as hands teach each other to splice, seat keystones, and steady the rim against the chasm’s hunger.
At the lip of the Sundering the tiers hung like hands holding a secret. Houses and workshops and little trading porches were stitched outward from the great hollow, cantilevered on spines of cord and cable until the city’s silhouette looked less like architecture than a careful accumulation of trust. Anyone who had lived long among those lines learned to read them: the slack that meant laziness, the silvered wear that meant age, the frantic new chafe that meant an error not yet confessed.
Kestrel Voss moved among the coils in the Splicehouse as if she had been born inside a knot. Sunlight retained the memory of tar in the beams and the room smelled of rubbed hemp and iron filings; sometimes it smelled—if you liked to pretend—like warm bread. Splicing benches crowded the windows, thimbles and clamps lined up like waiting teeth, and a battered listening stave leaned against a post where it waited to be sung against metal. Kest liked the details that did not argue: the way a well-made splice sat in a palm, the modest honesty of an honest hitch. Tasks were tidy. People were not.
She was mid-lay of a three-strand splice when a voice climbed the ladder and dropped into the rafters—Tane’s courier, breathless and jaunty.
"Kest! Market rig—sheering!" the youth shouted, tossing a length of rope she hadn’t been meant to catch. "It decided we were cloud merchants."
Kest did not laugh; she set her thumb against the lay and measured tension like a priest measuring candlelight. "Cloud merchants are terrible for ventilation," she said, sliding a palm along the strand, listening for anything that would betray an irregularity. The boy’s grin waned. There was a taste of oil and worry in the air now, not bread.
Down below, the lower tiers were a scatter of canvas and crates. Vendors called their wares—fried plant cakes, pickled mushrooms encased in paper cones, small pastries crimped into shapes that looked for all the world like tiny pretzel knots. People traded gossip more eagerly than coin; it was a civic pastime. That fact hung free of the chasm’s appetite and reminded Kest that there were stitches of ordinary life that the city insisted on keeping no matter how much the lip breathed.
She strapped on a harness, picked up a belay and a coil, and went toward the sound. Walking the edge made Kest’s shoulders remember angles and exposed places made the breath sharper. She liked the sharpness; it kept her honest.