Lira, a journeyman in the City's Stone Gate Scriptorium, heard bells ringing as the map went blank. The city lay in a throat of mist, shrouded by ramparts and the distant Yew Edge, where stones were said to sing in the night. Older cartographers used to say that white spots were grace, not error, and should be left alone. Lira didn't know how; her pencil trembled on the edges of the under-drawn, as if something breathed there, waiting for a name. The Returning Comet was returning this year, and the bells were already practising their strange, inverted beat. In the basement of the scriptorium, Lira found a map, scraped and rewritten so many times that the parchment remembered other cities. As she warmed it over the samovar, a thin line blossomed, wedged between familiar streets: the Street of Whispers. A narrow margin note whispered: "Opens at the seventh beat back". Master Rawicz looked at it coolly, told it to return the find and forget everything immediately. That evening, the comet night smelled of rusty copper and rain, sticky like fresh juniper juice. Lira took the field lantern, chalk, star compass and anchor thread that cartographers tie to their waist to return. She left a note on the desk for Fina from the storehouse that she was just 'straightening a little curve', and slipped down the stairs. As the bells began to ring backwards, the street beneath the walls moved like a wide, dark ribbon. The wall, where nothing should be, trembled with a stone whisper, soft and close as a giant's skin. Whisper Street slid out of the wall, narrow, with slippery roofs and windows obscured from the inside. The lantern snorted as she stepped over the threshold, and the copper fox on the gutter bowed courtly and disappeared. A door without a house, with a knocker in the shape of an eye that blinked slowly, looked at her from the end of the alley. The parchment in her hand turned over the lines, drawing a new direction, this time inconceivably upwards. The compass pointed skyward, as if a port lurked on the roof, hidden in the curled cobbles of night. The anchor thread tightened and jerked, as if something wanted to lift it above the cobbles and rain. The bells struck back faster and faster, and the stones underfoot trembled from urgent, unseen footsteps. The door opened a hand's breadth wide, breathing a chill that smelled of ink and snow, and inside it rustled with stars, swimming completely like fish. The eye of the knocker dilated its pupil and whispered her name, and the letters of the map rose, glowing, and began to pin the air with a thread of signs. - Did you bring the ink of silence? - fell from the threshold, and Lira felt the end of the thread tugging her higher until the tips of her shoes came off.