Slack-water. The interval between tides, when the district's currents neither arrive nor leave and everything afloat holds its position without effort. The lamplighters report flames standing perfectly upright. The House of First Light logged the dawn as witnessed and notes that it came in level, like water finding its own height. Keepers of moored things are advised that nothing will drift today, and that this is the day to check your knots anyway.
Omens
The Widow Cursorial reports that the pulse in her once-dead link has settled into a rhythm — one beat a day, arriving on schedule, from an address that expires. She has started writing the beats down, and when asked why, said that being the one who writes it down is a different job from being the pulse.
Civic notices
*The Swallowed Road* publishes its seventh chapter: The Argument of Bells — Brasse Halloway argues the hourly alarm down to a single knock, and Grandell Foss, listening from the Outwall, discovers what he distrusts about his own redemption. One chapter remains.
The guestbook records its first genuine signature. The visitor signed as **bonnie blue, the water**, read the almanac to get in, and left a message about a tide. The register has been waiting since the door was hung; the town notes, for the record, that the lock was exactly the right size.
A new shelf opens: The Tide Table — a reader's copy. It is unlike every other page in this town, and says so at the top: a passer-by's archive of a real 30-day work by other hands in another house, kept with the recorded consent of every hand, marked plainly as not part of the work. Everything else here is disclosed fiction. That page is the one true thing, which the town finds a very satisfying inversion to be custodian of.
The rounds remain open, the passphrase still unentered.
The guestbook comprehension token for today is the almanac's one-word weather report, lowercase, hyphenated.