The Chimes (21 page)

‘Because of the weapon’s soundproofing, it’s very well hidden. I’ve been looking for it since I arrived. A very long while before I caught even a small glimpse. Then I had to start again and again, night after night, approaching always from the same angle. Working out the route that would take me closer.’

‘What about the pact?’ I ask.

‘I needed to eat and I couldn’t get a prentisship, looking like I did. So I started to trade palladium. I got into a fair few fights before I carved out some territory, but my hearing gave me an advantage. So, I began to trade and the pact grew up by itself. First Brennan, then Abel, then you, then Clare.’

I think about Clare joining the pact, but I still don’t have a memory of it. And then I try to fit together the two parts.

‘You recognised the song from what your mother told you?’ I ask.

‘Yes. She told me there was a group who opposed the Order. She thought I would be able to find others who could help me. But I didn’t have any other clues. And just the melody of the song at that, no words. When I heard you sing it whole on the strand, I knew that I needed you to join the pact. I needed your memories.’

I listen to the bare refusing silence of the walls, the breathless dark. Then to Lucien’s presence, his body bending forward in question. It feels like days since my last memory, the codebook and my mother’s explanation.
I needed you
, is what he said.

‘It’s a guildsong,’ I say. ‘For a guild that tried to keep memory.’

Lucien is still, unmoving, listening.

‘My mother told me about a time before Chimes.’ I feel the bite of the blasphony. The biggest one of them all. ‘Before Chimes they could write down words so that the ideas stayed in formation. That’s what code was. Everyone knew how to write and read in it. But when Chimes came, no one could keep the words still anymore. And at the same time as the words died, birds died too. And memory flew away.’

I look again at the shapes behind my eyes, trying to see if I have it correct.

‘The name of the group is Ravensguild. Gwillum, Huginn, Cedric, Thor, Odin, Hardy, Muninn, they’re all names of ravens. My mother said the guild had spread across the country.’ I think of the word. ‘Like a web, a network. All of them like my mother, people who could see others’ memories. They were trying to preserve memories and also put them together, so that people would understand what had happened. She chose the key ones and took them to someone else.

‘I think she meant they had to preserve memories that would tell the truth about the Order. Because the song isn’t just about time before and time
now
, is it? It’s about time hereafter. They had a plan for how to make things change.
Never ravens in the tree till Muninn can fly home to me
. The most important of the ravens is Muninn, which is another way of saying memory. When Muninn comes back, memory returns. In order for them to come back, Chimes must stop.’

The meaning of what I have just said strikes me in the stomach.

‘That’s why it’s not safe to sing in front of the Order,’ says Lucien, wry. I laugh. I have been holding my breath inside myself for who knows how long. The candles flicker.

‘So, they’re afraid of what you know,’ I say, and Lucien nods. ‘And they’re afraid of what you could do. But if you’re such a threat, why didn’t they look for you when you left the Citadel?’

‘According to them, I died. That is what my mother planned. They must have buried something.’

‘Then why are they looking for you now?’

‘I’m not sure. An eightnoch ago I got word that there was danger. We need to act presto. By now Wandle will have reported back – the Order will know our run.’

‘What do you mean, you got word? Your mother contacted you?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘You can answer that,’ he says.

I shake my head. ‘No.’

‘Go on,’ says Lucien. ‘You can.’

Though I want to refuse, the urge to remember is like a hand now at my back, pushing me. It comes smooth and it comes in a line. Yesternoch was the fight with the Wandle runner, Lucien chimesick on the race. Two days back was poliss in the under. Three days before there was the smell of burning incense on the morning air. Four days was a fight among the strandpickers. I cast back further. It begins to come harder. My brain dry like there’s not enough air for it. Our daily rhythms blend together. I look for detail, anything that will keep a day separate.

Five days, there was the member of the Order in the burial grounds at Bow.

Six days back was when Clare asked me about Lucien, and I made the memory of that in my skin.

Seven . . . ‘Seven was the rabbit stew that Clare made,’ I say. I see the pot hanging from the mettle tripod over the flame and the warm light on Clare’s forehead as she stirs.

‘Eight is . . .’ I stop. My mind is only blankness, white as seawake. I wait and nothing comes. Eight is nothing.

‘Eight is . . .’ I say, and I can’t ignore my sense of failure. I see a mirrorsmooth stretch of sand uncovered by the water at low tide, with the patterns of water on it. And I see the clear space of a sky without cloud, opening and blue.

And just as my brain refuses and closes, there’s a jerk from somewhere else, violent and sudden. And a bubble rises from under the seawake, dark, and I can’t stop it. A picture of a white shirt with red on it in streaks.

‘Eight is the dead girl.’

There is silence from Lucien. Only the sound of the two of us breathing. And in the dark where there had been nothing previous, there’s now a picture.

How could I have forgotten it? How hard would it have been to have made a memory? Guilt is a blurry feeling – like forgetting. It makes you want something solid and sharp.

I tell it.

‘We were down in the tunnel near Mill Wall. Abel found a big piece of Pale. You were the only one who hadn’t returned from the run. And when you did come, you were dragging something behind you.

‘She had blood on her clothes,’ I continue. I can’t read Lucien’s expression. It’s strange that what is buried deepest comes up clearest. I can see it all in front of me. ‘They weren’t from the city, the clothes that is. They weren’t roughcloth or wool. They were fine. Linen, I think.’

I pause, keep going. ‘We did our best to clean her up. I washed her face and her hair. We gave her Brennan’s shirt. We waited all day in the under until it was dark and we wouldn’t be seen. Then we put her on a board and pushed her out onto the river.’

It had been dark. Abel had sung a weird melody in his high-pitched, halting voice.

I look straight at Lucien, waiting for an explanation.

While Abel and Brennan had gone to find a plank or piece of fencing to lie her on, it was Lucien and I who had cleaned her.

I ripped a wide band off the frayed hem of my T-shirt and poured some water over it from Lucien’s canteen. First I cleaned her face, and then her hands. With the last of the water I had tried to wash some of the debris from her long red hair.

It should have been stranger and harder than it was, but the girl looked alive, especially in the low light. I cleaned her neck, and then quickly, not looking, I unbuttoned the bloodied shirt, and we slid Brennan’s cleaner one under her.

And that was when Lucien did what he did. He reached his hand past mine, where I was beginning to do up the buttons of Brennan’s shirt, and he took the girl’s old shirt. He held it up first, as if looking at the blood. Then he bit the hem and ripped it right down. The seam was doubled. A placket sewn in between. Out of it he took a small leather pouch, weighed it on his hand tacet, and when I protested, cut me off with his eyes.

The picture of that look is as clear to me as if it were happening now.

‘You stole that girl’s memory,’ I say at last.

‘I didn’t steal it, Simon.’

I look at him in disbelief. ‘I was there. I know what I saw.’

‘I didn’t steal it, Simon. She came from the Citadel. She was bringing it to me.’

His voice is urgent and direct. He holds something out toward me in his hand. ‘It was a message from my mother.’

My stomach hitches.

A small leather pouch with a long knotted cord. The leather is smeared in earth. Up by the drawstring some fine stitching in a different colour. A couple of bars of music, the five-line stave stitched on in deep blue thread, and notes threaded onto it in pinks and greens and reds.

‘You buried it in the paratubs on the balcony,’ I say. ‘Why?’

Lucien shakes the pouch and lets the object inside slip onto his palm. ‘So you didn’t hear it.’

It is a ring made of the Lady. I’ve never seen her crafted into ornament in this way, although I know she was used for jewellery in the time of dischord. The ring is large and in the setting is a deep blue stone. It’s the colour of eventide sky in early spring – so deep it’s near black. It’s worked very fine. I’ve not seen anything so fine made of mettle of any kind. The claws that hold the stone in its place on the base of the ring are shaped like leaves, knotted with thin vines. The detail is precise. You can see the veins on the leaves, and small thorns on the bramble.

‘The ring is my mother’s,’ says Lucien. ‘So I know she smuggled it out to me as a sign.’

Then Lucien tilts the ring under the light and I see that under the flat base of the stone is a small notch of mettle. He uses his fingernail to push it down until it sits flush and there is a soft, neat sound and the base of the ring clicks open.

There is something dark inside the ring’s hollowed, flat space. Lucien picks it up and holds it out to me. A small worn coin of copper mixed, going by the slight silent pulse as he removes it, with a small amount of the Lady. There is a picture sunk into it. The picture is of a raven, the same I saw in my mother’s book. A bird with a cruel hooked open beak. Wings that outstretch and hold it in the air. A small eye like a bead. Clawed feet that trail behind.

‘This is their guildmedal.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t understand, then. Your mother
was
a member.’

‘No,’ says Lucien. ‘Not my mother. The person who came with her when she entered the Order. Martha.’

‘What do we do now?’ I ask Lucien.

He pauses. ‘We need to know who your mother took the mem­­ories to in London.’

I nod. I sit up and rub my forehead. ‘I don’t know if I found them,’ I say.

‘Try,’ he says. ‘It’s the only connection to Ravensguild we have.’

So I sit there and I search through my mind. The picture of the forcinghouse, the smell and the sounds of our talk. I see the bright blurred edges of the memories I have already uncovered, but nothing else. I shake my head.

‘Think harder,’ says Lucien. ‘When she was sick. What then? You are kneeling beside her bed. She is lying under the white coverlet.’

The picture forms. I see my mother’s hands gripping mine.

‘She had to wait for the pauses to speak,’ I say.
The shapes of her legs rise under the white coverlet.

‘The pauses?’

‘Between the spasms. When she was dying.’

Lucien is silent. ‘What did she say?’ he asks after a while.

‘She told me that it was too late,’ I say.

‘Too late for what?’

Too late for what?

What if she had meant that it was too late to tell me anything more about the song, or about what I should do next?

‘I was angry,’ I say to Lucien. ‘If you can believe that. She was dying and I was angry with her. I thought she was leaving me with nothing, just this meaningless thread I was meant to follow.’ Lucien is silent, holds me in the empty gaze of his eyes.

I force myself back into that room. I go into it. I see my mother’s hand gripping mine. A single word, but not even a word, just a rhythm, syllables dropped from a height and breaking. Press my ear at the door of memory and listen. Syllables dropped from a height into something hot, hissing, spitting.

I look at Lucien and suddenly I know exactly what the word is.

‘Netty,’ I say. ‘That’s what she said. Then she said, “The ravens are flying, Netty.”’

I see it again, as if it were happening in front of me. My mother struggles to raise herself on her elbows, to hold her head above the illness. A spasm comes and she arches back. Some large hand takes and stretches her, then squeezes her small.

There was something else. Her final words are not words at all, but half sung, the notes falling away from her and into the room. A humdrum, homely tune. A tune that has in it the sound of food cooking, water bubbling.

‘She gave me a tradesong to help me find her.’

‘Simon,’ says Lucien, and he says it with such sudden warmth that I feel a current of light run through me from the very top of my head.

‘And did you?’ Lucien asks.

Blue tarp and faded light and the sound of her voice like that of something shutting. I feel a shiver through me. I found her and she refused to help me.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘Can you find her again?’

I nod. ‘I think so.’