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In river-bound Harrowsend, mortuary assistant Edda tends bells that keep an ancient tide-hunger at bay. When children return voiceless and the city’s magistrate bargains in silence, Edda seeks a bone-ink vow and a coal-salamander ally in the ossuary below to bind the fogborn predator and bring stolen names home.
In Harrowsend, the river answered to iron and salt. On chill mornings the mortuary’s eaves sweated with brine, and the bell-wires that ran above the bier rails sang a faint and steady hum like trapped bees.
Edda worked barefoot for surer footing on the slate, a strip of linen tied about her hair. She lifted a bell from its hook and set it in the basin, where water went milky with old polish. The bell was small, a child’s bell, its clapper wrapped in wool so the departed would not be startled awake by their own passing. She ran her thumb along the seam and listened. The bells had always given back their secrets: a tremor if the spirit was stubborn, a flutter if it wanted to leave. Today they gave nothing, only a dense silence pressed like a thumb on her ear.
Jorren, the undertaker, shuffled in with a ledger under his arm, its corners darkened by years of grease. He had eyes like wet coal and a spine that curled politely toward the floor.
‘You’re early,’ he said, voice rough with years of pipe smoke.
‘I couldn’t sleep. The air kept pricking my skin,’ Edda answered. She set the bell back. The hook squealed.
Jorren looked toward the shutters where light seeped through like watered cider. ‘The wires were quiet at dusk. They haven’t changed. Hear it? Nothing. Like silt in the throat.’
She heard it, or rather felt its absence the way a missing front tooth nagged a tongue. The hum had vanished. The river’s bargain hinged on hum: so long as bells answered, the tide kept its claws retracted. Everyone in Harrowsend knew this, or pretended to.
‘Maybe the wind shifted,’ she said, and even in her own mouth the excuse tasted thin.
Jorren made a face. ‘Wind, river, curses. Words. Wash the tray. Lysa was in. She’s missing her boy.’
‘Tav?’ Edda dried her hands on her apron, leaving bright ovals of damp.
‘Since yesterday’s blue hour. She wanted you. Said you have a listening ear for strange things.’
Edda’s jaw tightened. She had a listening ear for complaints and gossip; what else could she offer? Bell-rope knowledge counted for little beyond these walls. Still, the thought of Lysa’s wiry hands kneading the empty space where a child should be pressed sharp beneath her ribs.
Beyond the shutters, a gull skated past with a piece of tendon in its beak. The river groaned low against its stone corset. Edda wiped the basin and took the bell again. Silence clung to it like wet cloth. She was still holding it when the door creaked open and Lysa herself stood there, slack-eyed, wind-battered, clutching a soot-smudged scarf.