The Shadowmason's Threshold

Dawn in the Low Quarter comes like a bruise: slow, spreading, hard to trust. Liora had learned to trust the bruise the way a mason trusts the grain of stone — by touch, by the small betrayals visible in a chip or a hairline line of powder. She walked the alley with her tool roll slung over one shoulder, black mirrors tucked flat against her ribs, a palm-lamp humming like a tired beetle at her belt. The lamps of the market stalls were still guttering; vendors folded their latticed awnings and argued about the price of fermented siltfish pies as if the argument itself would keep purchasers awake and hungry later.

She liked that part of the quarter: the clatter, the sour-smile bargains, the way people greeted danger as a neighbor they had learned to borrow sugar from. It was not romance. It was practical and small and a little filthy. Liora's work was precisely the same. Her chisels were named by the nicks they carried rather than by any polite word, and she had a habit of greeting each seam as if it were an old dog that might yet bite.

“Liora!” called a voice from a stair. Old Haller's shout carried more complaint than alarm. He had kept pigeons and grievances in equal measure for forty years. “You taking your sweet time, or are you stitching up hearts as well as doorways now?”

“Only the doors’ hearts, Haller. Yours can beat on its own,” she called back, rolling a shoulder and quickening her step. She passed a child balancing a stack of headcakes, the child's cheeks smeared with bright berry paste. A woman hung laundry that never stopped dripping with the quarter's drizzle; the cloth smelled like smoke and iron. These were details Liora filed like a mason files flints: useful, but not the work.

On her way to the job she should have spent a quarter-day on, she found Pip doing what Pip did best — confiscating loose gloves and making a throne of them beneath a crate. The cat-shadow blinked up at her with a look of dedicated mischief.

“You're a thief,” she told him, because telling a shadow-cat such things was cheaper than admitting she liked the little absurdity.

Pip responded by batting a glove into Haller's hat and pretending to be innocent.

The job at the old tenement smelled of damp rope and wood worm. A seam had frayed in the lintel where the tenement met the alley — a narrow slit of night that had been coaxed along the threshold for years. Liora set her hand to the mortar of that seam as if testing a pulse. There was no pulse. The darkness there moved with a hungry slit's patience, a thin thing gone loose.