Twelve minutes later, the bronze bell in the stone tower of St. Jude’s bridge shrine began to toll the noon hour across the wet slate roofs of Harth.
Jon stood with Sister Oda at the head of the River Lantern’s cellar stairs, the heavy oak door drawn shut behind their backs to muff the taproom clatter where Warden Brecht’s clerks were unpacking dispatch boxes. Jon held his pocket turnip-watch open in his scarred left palm, counting the slow, resonant strokes as they rolled up from the river arch: nine, ten, eleven.
“Right on the upper lip of the sound-bow,” Jon said quietly, two seconds before the iron clapper swung for the final time. “A casting flaw in the tin alloy from the winter of the great frost.”
On the twelfth stroke, the clear bronze note broke in half with a dull, jarring clack—a hairline fracture splitting the bell’s lip that vibrated through the river mist like a snapped fiddle string.
Sister Oda did not drop her bone probe this time, nor did her hand tremble on the stair rail. In the seventh life, Jon had spent two hours at the shrine convincing her through the mint-mark wear on the Room 4 brass key and the predicted bell crack that time had looped back to the ninth dawn. Today, because Oda had already seen the blue municipal script flare across the taproom bar when Cael denied his Harvest Month signature, and because her own consecrated relic-sight carried faint bleed-through echoes across…
