The Chimes (18 page)

He hasn’t heard or seen me, which is good. Trade goes better when you take the lead. I walk forward nonchalant, as if to inspect some of the electricks, until I’m standing direct in front of the dealer. This is how it’s done. No eyes, not until the end. I whistle the common tradesong, a comeallye that all the pacts know, rough and a bit crude, but effective. ‘
You need. You want. You need. We’ve got
,’ is what it says.

Around it I weave a few teases from our own comeallye. Not enough to give anything away but enough of a reminder that ours is the best run of the river. And in there too there’s the silvery interval, an answer to the dealer’s casual hum, and really the most important of all. The advertisement of our wares, the Pale Lady.

Ignoring me with disdain, the dealer continues humming to himself. But this is all part of the ritual. I know that he’s heard me because his melody shifts and beckons. And though I don’t remember his face, I know his song. Ellis uses a simple blue tune on the five-note scale that dealers favour. But he can’t seem to keep a weariness out of it. He’s uncomfortable – he thinks this work is beneath him, he’s past prentiss age, and he’s worried he’s missed a safer line of work.

Then, like that, the courtship is over. ‘How much do you have?’ Ellis asks, underbreath. I turn to see that he has pushed himself upright from the wall and stands with eyes eager. He has recognised me, but he seems confused. ‘Five Rover? Are you here alone?’

I ignore the question. ‘I’ve got five measures of solid,’ I say. ‘Two smaller pure nuggets.’ He is looking for Lucien, I think, and I tense.

‘Let’s see,’ he says, gesturing with impatience.

I glare blankly ahead. I need to take control. He wouldn’t hurry Lucien. I pull the pouch from my T-shirt and unloose it. Ellis reaches under his travelling cloak and offers a small wooden tray. I brush it clear of imaginary specks, blow in it twice. Then I balance the wooden tray with its blue field of velvet carefully and place each piece of palladium we’ve found this eightnoch. The pieces glow quietly. They seem hungry, each pulse taking in a gulp of silence. It’s like the feeling of water entering your ears – a bubble of air, a glotted stop.

Ellis doesn’t make any attempt to take the tray, just stands tacet. His hand plays over the ore as if he’s caressing the glow itself. The gesture reminds me of the moonies’ starburst eyeburst hands, and I hear a note of warning in my head:
Get the trade done and get away.

Then Ellis looks from the Lady and into the far corner of the artefacts hall. My stomach hitches. ‘Hey,’ I hiss. ‘Do you want to deal or not? I can take this elsewhere, you know.’

Ellis shakes his head. I look past him. Who is standing there where I cannot see?

My heart starts up and I rake pieces of Pale.

‘That’s fine. Store’s shut. Moving on.’

Ellis snaps into focus. ‘No, no, no.’ He puts a hand over mine, turns it, studies the nugget.

‘The quality of the three-ounce nugget is pretty low. The others are median,’ he says, speaking presto. ‘The smaller are superfine, but they’re only a few grammes each. I’ll take the lot from you for forty tokens.’

I cough. Lucien said not to drive for more than twenty-five. Everything in me is saying to take the tokens and run. But I need to move careful. Like when you’re clearing snares. No sudden movements. ‘It’s not much debased,’ I say, keeping my voice calm. ‘I’d put it at 0.85 pure. And it’s rare to find nuggets that size now. They go for more if they’re whole like that. Forty-five, for all.’

‘Yes, then. Done.’ Ellis’s voice is clipped, scared.

I hold the tray and shift back and forth. He counts the tokens, leafing them out lento, and he takes a step nearer for the exchange. And then it’s been going on too long. I reach for the money presto and just as I do it, his hand shoots up and closes round my wrist. His grip cold but hard, and I feel the strength of his arm like a bar of mettle. Quick as a flash I bring my other arm up and I flick the tray high into the air. The Lady carves silver arcs of silence into the air so they seem to hang above us for a moment, and in that moment I twist out of his grip, turn heels, run.

I pull the whistle from my neck as I sprint down the hall. Blow a cooee for the others as I go. The crowds fold round me and I don’t look back to see if Ellis, or whoever gave him orders, is following. I pound it down through the market, people turning to watch me go, whooping and egging me on. It’s not till I get to the vegetable vendors at the entrance that I let myself stop, listen, breathe. Echoes of the Lady play through the market. I don’t wait to find whether it’s getting closer.

When I’m down by the railbridge with lungs and ears straining, I cooee again and at last there’s footfall behind me. White faces of Clare and Brennan. We beat back to Dog Isle presto, jogging all the way.

The white of the day has some pink in it as we enter the race, and the storehouse is there like an old friend waiting. We get inside and close up the door. Brennan hefts the heavy mettle bolt into place and it falls with a straining creak.

No one speaks as they lift market goods from their packs. To me, their movements seem wrong, behind the beat. My head is racing onward. Where is Lucien? Clare lifts out two rabbits, a string of sausages, pig’s dripping. Brennan unpacks white loaves, walnuts, sacks of flour, a stickwrap bag of apples, bunches of herbs, carrots, potatoes.

We say nothing and we pack the things away into their places in the kitchen so that everything is square.

Night comes with no Lucien. I think of what he told me last night about Chimes taking memory. But if it does and is thus to be dreaded, why does he follow it so close with us, carving out Onestory each day? And his solfege for the changing chords of Vespers. How is it so clear and accurate that it’s like he sees the music almost before it comes?

Vespers sounds and we stay in the storehouse. I don’t know what else to do. I lead the solfege and the others follow. I am angry at the ease of their acceptance, the way a change slips in and they think it normal, their lack of questions. How long would it take to forget him? It makes me feel sick.

After the last chord has faded, the pact unfurl their legs and arms and bodies from their crouching bracing positions. A feeling in me like a bruise. I can see it in Clare’s eyes too. She rubs at them and presses them deep in their sockets – as if an ache will heal an ache. I look at them and wonder what has been lost.

As night comes in, Brennan begins to get edgy. No one is speaking. The time we would practise passes, but nobody moves. Clare won’t make eye contact with me and she goes to the cupboard and brings back four candles. She passes them round and we hold them, the dark sheltering round the light, which moves with our breath. If you keep staring at the flame, you see many colours. Red, orange, blue. Wet wood in the fire makes it green. The smell binds us to all the nights that went before, that will come. How many will there be?

Clare moves again, this time to fetch a blanket from her quarters and return to the fire. One by one we all follow suit. Do they know we have never done this before? That the vigil is not part of our routine, not part of bodymemory? I feel lonely and I miss the close body blindness of being one with the rest. The smell of damp heated wool is salt-humid and homely. Everyone’s hair is mottled by the fire, shined in it. Clare makes pictures with the shadows of her hands. After a while she turns to me. She scratches her arm through her shirt.

‘Where is he, Simon?’ she asks. And the others turn their faces also, quiet, expectant. A fear so grave it can’t be put into words and can only emerge in their expression as blank trust.

I don’t have anything else to tell them except the truth.

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

In the Under

I wake subito and I am swinging in the darkness. Something has moved. Lucien is standing over me.

‘Where did you go?’ I whisper. ‘I didn’t know what to tell the pact.’

‘I was in the under. I have to show you something. The last piece of the puzzle.’

‘The last piece?’

It doesn’t feel like the last piece to me. In my mind, whatever puzzle Lucien is making is half missing, half scattered. The pieces that are turned right way up seem to come from completely different pictures. I pull myself out of the hammock.

‘I promise to explain. I couldn’t show you before now.’

I stand there, waiting for more information, but it doesn’t come.

‘Bring your memories with you,’ says Lucien, and picks up my roughcloth bag and pushes it into my hands.

I am silent. I follow.

The night smells of fever and smoke from fires around the city. There’s a dull fog hanging close to the river.

We pass tacet under the huge shadows of the cranes. They stand there, judging perhaps. We jog down the empty race and the direction is the same as ever. We are heading east. East to Five Rover.

I follow two steps behind Lucien, through the cold dark. I want to be in my hammock, under the woolsmelling blanket. I want to wake into the same morning as always. The one where I watch Clare heat milk in the copper pan. The one where I help Abel turn the black earth in the polytubs ready for bulb planting. Where I walk the embankment at None and watch the long white sky up to Paul’s get pink. But instead, Lucien and I are out in this hard-edged morning. Later and earlier than ever.

‘Simon, what is the Lady?’ Lucien’s voice is piano in the cold air.

‘The Lady is mettle,’ I say.

‘She’s mettle, yes. But why is she so precious to the Order?’

‘Because palladium gets the clearest tones for the Carillon,’ I say.

Lucien leads us down the steps, taking them two at a time.

‘Doesn’t it strike you that they might have finished building the Carillon by now?’ We edge round the triprope and down to the strand. ‘What if there was another reason the Order needed palladium?’

‘Like what?’

‘Tell me again. What is the Lady?’

I sigh, prepare to start again from the beginning.

‘Let me put it another way,’ Lucien interrupts. ‘What is the Lady to you? When we’re in the under, how do you hear her?’

‘I don’t hear her,’ I say. ‘I hear what’s not there. The Lady is silence,’ I say. As soon as I say her, I see her.
Calm and balm
. Pulses of quiet in the rivermud.

‘Yes,’ says Lucien. ‘The Lady is music, but she is also silence. Remember that.’

We enter in the same place as usual. One second the night sky above, the sounds of the sleeping city extending farther than I can hear. The next, the world stretches as high only as the dome of brick and just the whisper of tunnels ahead.

The run starts straight away. No pause to set our tonic, to sing the comeallye and get bearings. Lucien takes one of the large tunnels that lead off the stormwater catchment, and he leads fast.

For a while I try to keep the map up in my head. We enter the stormwater and splash through several bends. We’re still close to the surface and there are thick glass tiles in the ceiling that let some light in, enough to see the patterned brick. Then a ladder of mettle rungs and a new tunnelmouth and a drier, echoing tunnel that pulls north. And the dark presses its hands on me. From where it’s been sitting tacet for so long, panic gets up, sets up knocking. And with that, I am blind. I must trust Lucien.

We run a long time, following twists and turns. Taking the different terrains of the under – mettle, drybrick, bilgewater, tile. Through tunnels tall and arched and ones tight and narrow as being born. We run until we are many miles from our territory.