Kest Halder kept his palms oily as a confession. The smell of wormwood oil and burned brass lived in the grooves of his fingers like a second handwriting; when he wiped his hands on his smock the rag came away shining with the ghost of a dozen toothings. In the early light that slanted through a coal-darkened skylight, his bench looked less like a place of work and more like the belly of a small, patient animal. Nested calipers, a row of pinions with teeth like tiny combs, and a scattering of shims and wrenches formed a constellation he could read by touch.
He liked asymmetry the way other people liked certainty. His replacements — spindles shaped with deliberate imbalance, detents whose ticks arrived off-kilter on purpose — annoyed the guild and delighted the curious few who lived where waterways made music and ovens chimed. Kest would massage a stubborn pivot free with a pair of pliers, then lay it down and hum a crooked rhythm until the piece agreed to keep time with the rest of the machine. There was a small, private joy in that persuasion: a thing that would not be coaxed into uniformity yielding to the patience of a hand that refused to be ordinary.
The street below smelled of iron-bread and tea steeped too long. A vendor had stacked flat rounds of metal-flecked pastry in a wooden cart and called to passersby with a voice that tried to be louder than the city's constant, polite clanking. Children played a game where they imitated the buskers, beating hollow tins with spoons to create chaotic beats and then trying to make them sound like the regulated steps of a market bell. It was a detail of the city that had nothing to do with the problem Kest would find himself facing; he noted it because small things like human whimsy made the mechanics worth keeping.
"Morning music," said a voice behind him. Tel, his apprentice, was already leaning on the doorway, cheek streaked with oil and a look that threaded eagerness and sleep. He held a tin cup as if it were an offering to whatever gods lived in sprockets.
"If you call it 'music,' I'm calling it a felony," Kest replied, nudging a tiny eccentric cam into place with a finger that smelled of solder. He smiled, which in Kest's face was mostly a rearrangement of serious features. "Keep the spoon, not the cymbal."
Tel grinned, then fell quiet for a moment, watching Kest's hands move. "Why do you make them like that?" he asked. Not a guildman’s insult but the natural curiosity of someone who wanted to learn.
Kest didn't look up. He worked the tiny file between thumb and forefinger. "Sometimes the world needs a stutter so the rest of the noise can be heard properly," he said. The answer was half jest and half trade-secret; he had told apprentices less, but the truth sat easier when shaped for a boy's ears.
A brass raven — a neighborhood oddity Kest had scavenged from a market and rewired — fluttered from a ceiling hook and landed on the window latch. It croaked once, an uncanny parody of a knock. The sound made the dog on the next roof raise its head and whine, as if it too sensed the city was tuning itself against something. Kest's fingers stilled. The pigeon-sized automaton tilted its head and clicked; its tiny gears gave an answer that sounded like an alarm pressed into a smile.