Sera Voss smelled of lime and iron by the time she reached the landing. The two scents clung to her skin the way old mortar clung to her nails: not entirely removable, not entirely shameful. She moved with the muscle-memory of someone who had spent years making vertical things safe for other people's weight. Her mallet was looped at her belt like a faithful, if battered, dog; her line-pin and a length of chalked twine hung from a hook at her hip. The flight she had been asked to mend stitched three households across a narrow shaft: a midwife’s cramped kitchen, a cobbler’s back room that smelled of oil and soft leather, and a third door behind which children sometimes made the city sound tolerable. The stairs complained in low, tired creaks as she tested them with her heel.
Gide, her apprentice, was humming tunelessly under his breath and offering puffs of heated mortar in the wrong places. He was all long arms and too many opinions, still too fond of bright phrases and practical jokes to be careful. He grinned when Sera looked at him. “The riser’s got a cough,” he said. “Do you want me to fetch the bonesetter or the lardmonger?”
Sera's laugh was a dry sound that meant business. “Fetch your own sense, and hold the trough steady.” She set her mallet’s face to a nick in the tread and tapped in a rhythm to loosen the old lime. The city had taught her to be precise; an over-confident chip and a flight could wobble and take a neighbor’s whole evening with it. That sort of knock-on ruin was why stairwrights like her kept their tools well-oiled and their tempers drier than bedstone.
It was Tuesday, market day in the lower wards, and a scent drifted up from the open window of the cobbler’s room: sugar-melted root, a local treat called kiln-berries that vendors sold in grease-paper cones. The smell had nothing to do with the work at hand, and that was precisely why it made Sera smile for a half-beat — the city was a machine, but it also had its sweets. On certain evenings the quarter’s people left out a ladle of watery stew for the step-sparrows, small, bold birds that nested under stair-arches and argued about etiquette. Little customs like that were a city's soft seams; they were not engineering, but they were as important as any bracket when the world outside decided to gnash its teeth.