The bell rang on time.
That was how Eryk knew something had already been removed.
The yard did not surge the way it used to. No jostling. No elbows thrown to claim a place in line. No loud, nervous talk to prove a man was still in the world.
The bodies present simply moved a little closer together, as if closeness could replace missing weight.
Eryk saw the gaps and kept his face blank.
Not empty spaces exactly. The line bent inward. Shoulders shifted, boots adjusted, and the missing became a curve instead of a hole.
That was how Blackstone handled loss now. It folded it out of sight.
Bran stood where he always did. Tomas stood two places over, eyes rimmed red, mouth set like he had spent the night biting down on words. Hala stood by the pot with her arms folded, staring at the yard like she was counting without wanting to.
She did not shout.
That was new.
She spoke once, flat and efficient.
"Pump and carry. Tool intake after. Quarry run if the foremen still want it."
No threats. No insults. No promise of the midden. Just the assignment, delivered like a ration.
Eryk went to the pump.
The handle resisted more than yesterday. The wood was rougher under his palms, grain raised like it had dried too fast. The beam sat wrong, just enough out of true that the rope rubbed where it should not. The bucket scraped the inner wall on the way up, a muted grind that made the men nearest it tighten their shoulders and pretend they had not heard.
Eryk pulled anyway.
Water rose slow and dark. The bucket bumped once against stone and sloshed. He watched the surface long enough to register the color, then moved his eyes away. Staring did not change the taste.
Tomas worked beside him without his usual noise. His breath came too fast for the work, as if his chest was still fighting the night.
After the second load, Tomas spoke without looking up.
"They didn't come back."
Eryk kept his hands on the handle.
"Who?" he asked, even though he already knew there were only a few names Tomas would say out loud.
"North storage," Tomas replied. "Night rotation. Two guards."
Eryk nodded once.
Night rotation had been thinning for weeks. Guards rotated out and were replaced late. Then they were replaced by boys running errands. Then they were not replaced at all. The work stayed. The eyes watching it did not.
Tomas's grip tightened. "You think they got sent up?"
"Reassigned," Eryk said.
Tomas let out a breath that sounded like a laugh he had no energy for. "To where?"
Eryk did not answer.
They carried water across the yard. The pigs were still in their pen, but the pen had been dragged farther back from the main path. The trench beside it had been filled with loose soil instead of covered properly. The soil sagged in the middle, a shallow dip where boots had crossed it too many times.
The dogs were fed early.
No one explained why.
At intake, the upper yard felt wrong in a different way.
Not fewer tools. Less shape.
Crates sat unopened in a leaning stack. Broken wedges lay mixed in with usable ones, cracked heads not separated out. Chain links were piled in a dull heap instead of hung, as if someone had stopped believing in sorting.
Only the younger clerk stood at the desk.
The older clerk had not returned.
No chalk board. No plank. No scratch tally. No neat list for foremen to pretend they followed.
The clerk did not look up when Eryk stepped in.
"Take what you need," he said.
It was not permission. It was abdication.
Eryk waited a heartbeat anyway, out of habit, as if a second voice might appear to correct the first.
Nothing happened.
He stepped forward and chose carefully.
Handles without splinters. Picks with heads still tight. A wedge that had been hammered back into shape once already but not yet split. He stacked the better tools on top and the worse ones beneath, not hidden, just placed where a tired hand would reach last.
He did not treat it as defiance.
It was how you made a day survive itself.
A foreman approached, face drawn tight. His eyes flicked over the tools and then to the desk.
"Where's the sand?" the foreman demanded.
The clerk shrugged without looking up. "What sand?"
"We're out."
"You were logged for two sacks last week," the clerk said. His voice was calm in the way a wall was calm.
"We never got them."
The quill did not move. No note. No pending line. No under review.
The foreman leaned in, breath fogging the edge of the desk. "That beam's slipping. If we don't brace it, the next lift drops."
The clerk finally lifted his eyes.
"Then do not lift," he said.
The foreman stared, disbelief turning slowly into something like understanding.
Not agreement.
Understanding.
He had come to argue logistics. He had found the edge of something else.
"We're already behind," the foreman said, quieter now.
"Then you will remain behind," the clerk replied, and dropped his gaze back down as if the conversation had cost him too much.
The foreman stood another moment as if expecting the world to correct itself.
It did not.
He turned away without another word and took the tools he could carry.
Eryk watched him go.
The arguments had changed. They were no longer about right and wrong. They were about who would be forced to own the consequences.
And consequences were moving downhill, toward hands and backs, away from the people who held ink.
By midmorning, the quarry sounded wrong.
Not quieter. Not calmer.
Misaligned.
Hammer strikes overlapped poorly, like men were working out of rhythm with one another. Chains rattled without the usual cadence. A crane operator shouted for a signal twice before someone answered. The answer came late, half a gesture.
Eryk carried water down the upper descent and adjusted his steps without thinking. Fine grit had collected along the edge of the path where it used to be swept. It shifted under his boot soles. He widened his stance a fraction and kept the buckets from swaying.
Bran walked beside him, eyes down.
"They're not sending replacements," Bran said quietly.
"For what?" Eryk asked.
Bran's mouth twisted. "For anything."
On the working tier, men drank fast and did not linger. They wiped their mouths with sleeves and returned to their places as if thirst was just another rule. A few looked toward the crane without letting their heads turn fully, like they were measuring how close they were to the swing and whether anyone would notice if they drifted a step farther away.
It was not fear of death that made them do it.
It was fear of being the one closest when something failed.
One man coughed and did not straighten for a long moment. When he did, he pressed his sleeve to his mouth and looked at the cloth as if checking a tool for damage.
No one commented.
By midday, stew arrived late.
Hala did not explain.
The portions were uneven, not by intention, just by the slop of a ladle moving too quickly. Some bowls got more liquid. Some got more bone. One bowl had nothing but hot water with grease floating on top.
A boy scraped his bowl too long, trying to catch whatever clung to the bottom.
Hala did not strike him. She did not even yell.
She said, "Move."
The boy moved.
Eryk ate what he was given and felt the hunger stay. Not sharp. Not desperate. Present like a stone under the tongue.
After the meal, the steward's door was closed.
It had not been closed in weeks.
Clerks moved in and out with papers held close to their chests. None of them looked at the yard. They walked with their heads down like men trying not to make eye contact with the work they were supposed to be organizing.
Eryk passed the ledger room without seeing the ledger.
That mattered.
In the afternoon, the pump failed.
Not fully. Not dramatically.
The handle slipped in its housing and dropped half a hand span with a sudden jerk that yanked Tomas forward. Tomas caught himself on the iron rim, knuckles striking hard enough to split skin.
Blood streaked across the pump base and ran in a thin line down the stone.
Tomas stared at it, breathing fast, eyes fixed as if he expected someone to call out a name for what had happened.
No one did.
No foreman stepped over.
No guard leaned in.
No clerk appeared with a paper to mark the damage.
Tomas wiped his hand on his trousers and gripped the handle again.
The blood dried quickly in the cold, darkening, then dulling as dust settled over it. Within minutes it looked like part of the pump, a stain as old as the stone.
Eryk felt the yard change around that silence.
Not softer.
Less watched.
Later, two carts sat in the upper yard, loaded and left where they stopped.
Not because there were no hands.
Because no one had been assigned to say where the loads should go.
Foremen gathered and spoke in tight voices. Eryk caught fragments as he carried past.
"Who told them to stop here?"
"Where's the intake list?"
"We don't have time for this."
"Then move it to wherever."
They argued for less time than a day's work cost.
Then they stopped.
Each assumed someone else would decide. No one did.
The carts sat as if waiting for permission to exist.
Eryk watched them in passing.
The wheels were not chocked.
The axles looked dry.
One wheel had a split that had been patched with rope. The rope was fraying.
It was small, ordinary neglect. The kind that turned into bigger things without anyone choosing it.
At dusk, men drifted toward the sheds without the usual call to gather. There was no patrol voice outside. No late footsteps. No shouted correction from the yard.
The absence of sound felt deliberate.
Inside the shed, the air felt hollow.
Three pallets were gone.
Not packed away neatly. Not shifted to make room. Removed, and the straw around them had been spread to fill the spaces, smoothed flat as if someone had tried to erase the shape of sleep.
Bran sat with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped, looking down at nothing. Tomas lay on his back and stared at the rafters as if counting boards.
Eryk settled onto his pallet and listened.
Outside, nothing called.
No boot steps.
No shouted name.
Just the shed breathing, coughs and straw shifts, the low creak of wood in cold.
After a long while, Bran spoke without lifting his head.
"Before," he said quietly, "they didn't tell us because they didn't care."
Eryk waited.
"Now," Bran continued, "they don't tell us because there's no one left who knows what to say."
Eryk did not respond. He let the words sit where they fell.
Outside, something scratched near the wall.
A soft sound, brief and careless, like a rat testing wood. It scratched again, then faded. Nothing called back. No boot steps. No shout.
Eryk turned onto his side.
The yard had not become kinder.
It had become less owned.
He closed his eyes and felt the day's small failures lined up behind his ribs, the stiff handle, the missing sand, the unchocked wheels, the blood drying into the stone, the carts left where they stopped, the door closed, the gate left open because no one remembered to close it.
Blackstone still moved.
It still rang bells. It still fed bodies enough to keep them upright. It still pulled stone out of the hill.
But the parts that watched had begun to thin, and where watching thinned, things did not become freer.
They became unclaimed.
In the dark, the shed held its breath around them like a place waiting to be emptied.