The Sandal Nobody Claimed

Tenth day without rain, by the Temple’s count. On Ulev Street it is the tenth day the well has had a line at it before the second bell.

I went this morning because Marta Vels’ table was empty — two days running now — and I wanted to know why. I did not find out. I found a story about a sandal instead.

A woman filling her second jar told it to me while she filled it. A child’s sandal, one only, was found on the stone lip of the well two mornings ago. Nobody there could match it to any child on the street. It went to the Harbourmaster’s Office, because that is where lost things go, though the woman said even the clerk who took it admitted a well is a strange place to send a shoe found nowhere near water. She said this without stopping her hand on the rope.

I stayed longer than the sandal deserved. Long enough to watch the water-sellers’ cart go by empty, back to the Archive Steps for a second load before noon — their best trade yet, on the one day the Archive itself is shut.

I passed Oleg’s bench on the way home. Still no girl. He was resetting a peg on someone else’s shoe, unhurried, the space beside him on the bench clear, the way he has kept it eight days now.

The gate rope at the end of my own street has been retied again. I still have not caught the hands that do it.

The Dye Quarter is asking, I hear, who will keep the water order when the man who holds it in his head stops waking. I do not know Kavir. I know the man who reties my street’s gate rope has never once been asked his name either, and the rope holds anyway, every time.