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A solitary stone-sealer risks everything to fit a living keystone into a failing arch. Beneath market shades and kettle smoke, he descends into a yawning fissure, times his strikes to the hollow's breath, and binds the city with craft rather than council. Hands, ropes and warmth decide the outcome.
The canal at dawn kept its own kind of hush, a muffled clatter of barges easing past and the faint, cyclical sigh of water against stone. Edda worked by that sound the way other people read hours on a clock: the bite of the chisel at first light, the slope of his shoulder as he leaned into a curve, the way a particular block would accept a groove and sing back a note only he seemed to hear. He set a tiny wedge into a seam of river-wall and tapped, listening for the pitch that meant fit and no more. The city let out a rolling breath when that pitch came right; a baker in the lane below would fold his morning rounds with less cursing, the cobbler might not slam his awl, a sparrow would resume mimicked whistles.
He kept his bench tidy to an almost stubborn degree. Chisels lined by weight, mallets set in a triangle for quick reach, a small iron bowl of crushed limestone for rubbing mortar by hand. A scrap of leather lay across an old rasp like a hand laid flat to ward off bad weather. There was superstition in every tool—an old stonemason's shorthand scratched into the handle of the broad chisel, a set of faint grooves worn into the mallet where fingers had sat the same way sixty winters. Edda had learned the gestures young; they were more than trade, they were punctuation for how the world should behave.
The market at the quay cracked into life nearby with its usual clamor—vendors hawking river-seed cakes, fishwives bargaining with dramatic slaps of oily palms, a woman who sold roasted sea-thorn berries calling them "good against damp knees." Those details were not part of his work, but they kept the world round. He liked the absurd little certainties: that men would stand in rain for a pastry, that the kettle in Tilla Renn's shop would always boil over by midmorning, that the town's children taught pigeons to steal crumbs in pairs as if rehearsal mattered. A man with sticky fingers once tried to hang a pastry on Edda's belt loop and declared it a charm; Edda had muttered something and the pastry did not last long against his stomach.
Someone else might have found the ritual ridiculous. Lio, when he turned up, laughed about Edda's muttered phrases as if the stones themselves were being scolded for sloppiness. "You swear at them so thoroughly they do what you say," Lio had teased three mornings earlier, wiping his palms on a battered apron. Edda glanced at him, said nothing, and carved a perfect bead along the edge as if the slight had been a tool.