The Chimes Page 13

  The great current is now running perpendicular to us. As I listen, it seems to grow stronger: a full stream, a torrent that will pull us along. After a while Lucien stops and I can hear him breathing in the dark. I hang back, piano, listening to the pattern his halting breath makes in this vast, grand ringing. I wait for him and listen. I let the peals of silver settle over me.

  His voice comes to me through the dark, as it always does.

  ‘Simon?’

  He knows that I am here. He hears me as clear as I would see him in daylight.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. I try to say it without expression, without panic. I doubt that I succeed.

  ‘Can you hear it?’ he asks. His voice has the familiar excitement in it, and my heart rises up as it always does.

  ‘It’s . . . it’s vast,’ I say, finally. ‘I don’t understand what it is.’

  ‘I have to show you. You won’t believe it otherwise.’ He moves forward again slowly until he is about ten beats ahead. He hums soft and then places his hands against the side of the tunnel. The sound of this is hollow and resonant. I can hear him grip something, and then the noise of a short, violent pull. Mettle creaks and strains heavily, and then the tunnel is filled with a different light, a pale glow. In the glow I see Lucien’s profile, with the curled hair pushed back high off his forehead. He turns to me and his eyes are reflected in the light like a cat’s.

  ‘This way,’ he says, calm, and then he disappears into the door in the side of the tunnel.

  I stand there alone. The door stands just ajar and the milky light appears to be flowing from it. The door is thick and made of mettle. Circular bolt heads ring the edges of the door, cruel and ornamental at the same time. In the pulsing glow, I see where they are bleeding dark red rust. The colour sounds something in me and I hesitate. But there is no choice. I hold the levered handle tight and swing the door open and hear its underwater creak. I draw a breath and hold it deep, seal it tight inside me. And then I step inside.

  When I open my eyes, I am surrounded with an intense, silverwhite glow. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and Lucien was right. I would not have believed him if he had told me. We are standing in a vast tunnel. Its roof arcs high over our heads, and the walls are wider than my arms, stretched out full. The tunnel is made of pure palladium. Its glow is blinding. I feel its pulse rolling over me in steady waves, pure peals of resonant silence. My whole body is dripping with silver, humming with it. The resonance seems to begin inside me, in the bones behind my ears, and run down my spine and out to the tips of my fingers. I feel as if my spine is a candle and there’s a white clear flame emerging from the very top of my head.

  I am grinning mad and huge, and I turn to Lucien, who is standing close, and he is grinning too, his smile wide and hil­­arious. The space around my lungs and where my heart is beating is opening up, stretching. I think of the picture in my mother’s book, those creatures with their dark wings stretching too, until they’re full of light and air. The strangest thing of all is that I can feel my parents there, in the tunnel. Their faces come into my mind without effort. I see the two of them alone, standing in the field next to one of the parahouses. They are healthy and young, and their faces are calm. The silvery space opens somewhere inside my throat and middle, and of all things I realise that I am going to cry. Standing in a tunnel under the river somewhere – who knows where?

  Lucien is several feet ahead of me in the tunnel, walking with his stately lope, and reaching his arms out towards the tunnel’s sides as if he wants to pull the light in to him.

  Then something changes. It starts slow, somewhere down in my feet. A sense of unease. Nothing has altered around me. The silver glow is as milky and clear and beautiful. There is no sound in the thronging silence. Nothing has moved or shifted in the tunnel. I start walking in the same direction that Lucien is going in, and I have the sense that I am moving impossibly slow, as if through silted murky water. Nothing there. But round my ankles a feeling of coil and release, coil and release. The feeling moves up from my feet to my knees and hips, and rises then up my spine, where moments before I’d felt the light coming through.

  How to describe it, except as the opposite of the opening, lengthening feel of the Pale. It’s as if my joints are shutting, seizing, refusing. My whole body is saying no. I form the word with my lips as the black current reaches my hands and they seize and grip and try to push against something that isn’t there.

  There’s pressure under my ribs, around my heart. The creature that had opened its wings within my chest now has my insides trapped tight in its claws. And then I no longer seem able to walk. I try to put my hands up to break my fall, but I land hard on the flat of my knees in the silver tunnel. The glow is still playing piano around me, like something cruel, as I retch and feel my back curl, without my control, inward and prone.

  ‘Lucien,’ I say, or try to say, or just think. ‘Lucien. What have you done?’

  The next thing is my arms being pulled from where they’re curled under me, hugged in around my ribcage. Pulled out in front of my head. Pain in the shoulder joint. Hard, pointed pain, not the dry, refusing pain that has taken up everything else. I try to lift my head up to swear at him, but I am pathetic. I have no strength. Lucien pulls my two crumpled, useless arms together so he can grab both and then there’s nothing, followed by a painful wrench that has his whole weight behind it. He’s dragging me. I feel my forehead bump over the pitted silver. We are moving in slow jerks down the corridor. From time to time I hear Lucien go to his knees. Then his feet at my sides as he rearranges his grip on my wrists.

  The claws inside my chest are strong and tight. They have stalked bone by bone up my back and gripped my brain there. My brain is both terribly big and terribly small at the same time. It shakes hollow like a walnut and it grows and pushes fleshily at my skull. At some point I throw up whatever is in my stomach, and then I feel Lucien tip my head and shoulders with the edge of his para-covered foot to avoid the mess as he pulls me through.

  As he does it, I blink. And then I blink again because my brain has not obeyed this instruction. And then I try to spit to clear my throat so I can scream. Because my eyes are open and I cannot see. I am blind.

  The Dead Room

  I come to in darkness. It is cold. I don’t know where I am. I blink, but the dark with my eyes open is the same as the dark with them closed. I am lying on a hard surface and every bone and muscle in me aches and pulls. I try to focus my hearing, but my brain is bruised, seems no longer the right size for my skull.

  Then I try to make a sound, any sound, to hear my bearings. All that comes out is a dry sort of moan. The noise should be loud enough to get some hold on the size of the room, but there is nothing. It is completely silent. I try to hear beyond or underneath the silence, but it is dead, closed, shut. And then there is too much pain in my head and I give up.

  Off behind me is the sudden sound of loud, violent retching. Lucien. Because of the deadness of the room, I cannot tell where he is. I lie still, as I have no choice but to do, and gradually things come back. I remember the running river of silver. I remember a tunnel made of pure. I remember happiness and harmony beating right through me from head to foot. I remember my parents, shining and healthy. And then, from foot to head, I remember the creep of the sickness that is still inside me, that remains as a brittle twitch in my joints and the horror feeling of something pressing on my ribs.

  I understand then. Lucien has brought me here. Lucien has exposed me to something that has made me sick – sick like my parents, like Steppan’s father, like he himself the other night.

  I test my limbs. My arms move slightly, but they are tense and tight, caught in the numb grip. I cannot move my legs at all. I can feel them, though I almost wish I couldn’t, as the pain is worst there, like ice. I lie still and try not to think.

  After a long time the ache of pressure inside my chest and ears eases a bit. I try to concentrate again, to focus my energy enough to move.
Begin at my chest, let my thought move down my arm, trying to remember its network of muscle and bone, to will it back into being.

  ‘Wait.’ And the falling feel of a memory trick jolts me. This is how it always starts. Lucien’s voice speaking to me out of the dark, sounding me through the questions – always detached, always a step ahead. The voice that knows more than I do always. More even about my own story. But that means something else too, I realise. If someone knows all there is to know about you, isn’t that a kind of forgiveness?

  ‘It’s easier if you wait until some of the feeling comes back. You’re going to be all right. You’ve had the worst of it.’

  I shape the one word that I have in my head and somehow push it past my lips with the hope he will understand.

  ‘Eyes.’

  I can hear him shuffle toward me, maybe on his knees. Then I feel cold fingers on my face. The fingertips of two hands touch just at my cheekbones, just under my eye sockets. I try to flinch away. The touch moves on to my eyelids and then to my chin and forehead. Then there is a cool, distant feeling, almost unrelated to me, where I think my hands are. I feel movement as Lucien picks them up and places them on my chest. Both of them lie over my heart, and I can feel their outline and relief.

  ‘There shouldn’t be any lasting damage to your eyes. You’ll start to regain sight soon. But it’s dark in here. Hold on.’ I hear rustling and Lucien’s hands pat at my shoulders. ‘Do you have the lighter, the one your father gave you?’ he asks.

  I hiss an approximate ‘yes’.

  ‘Can I get it?’ he asks.

  I hiss again and feel him tug my shoulders to remove the pack. I want to tell him it’s in the outside pocket, but he finds it presto and I hear the rolling burr-bite of the wheel and see the blue para in my mind. The flint sparks and I strain to see through the dark.

  ‘Anything?’

  There is only blackness.

  I muster a grunt and then wait to hear the wheel bite again. Still just blackness. Grainy, world-ending, silent dark. This time Lucien waits without speaking. I feel the touch under my eyes again, and the cool pressure on my forehead and chin, and a small segment of melody that I do not know.

  ‘Come back, Simon,’ Lucien says, and he strikes the flint a third time and I see it haloed in the black, a small, dull orange glow of flame.

  I try to lift my head. I want to tell Lucien that he has to let the light burn, that it is very, very important to do so. I have never felt so alone, not even on my first arrival in London. But the light flicks off and I am blind again. Helpless.

  Then he begins to talk.

  ‘It wasn’t meant to go like that, Simon. Please believe me. I knew it was a risk bringing you here, but the wind was from the south all day and I didn’t think it would change.’

  He pauses, waits, as if he’s listening for a response. Then he whistles. It’s a few notes from the start of our usual comeallye, and it sends a jolt of homesickness through me. But the notes behave strangely. They enter the room and then they stop. Each note stands dry and separate and dead. There’s no resonance at all. Nothing like the silver hush that comes off the Pale Lady. This is as if sound had ceased to exist altogether, even while it’s occurring. The silence climbs right into your ears, packs them full like wool, or something even drier: cotton, sand, dust.

  So many questions that I can’t put them in order, so I start with the most obvious.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘In the under, near to Batter Sea. The pipe I rescued you from just now runs straight, roughly east to west. If you imagine the scar is the centre of the wheel, there used to be a series of pipes that moved off it like spokes. We were in one of those. As far as I can tell, the scar must have been the site of a forge, where the pressure was generated. They must have needed a huge amount of power to get the airflow.’

  None of it makes any sense.

  ‘You mean the scar from Allbreaking? Where the weapon of dischord was destroyed?’

  ‘Yes, I do. But it wasn’t destroyed. Not completely. We’re inside what’s left of it.’

  Onestory gives you meaning. It helps you understand what it means to live in the time of the Order, and it helps you understand your place. This must be why Lucien always sounded it with us, I think, even knowing what he did. It helps you keep going ahead. But we follow it like we do the weather. It’s always there and it’s always coming, but it’s also distant. When you spend most of your life in the under, the weather doesn’t make much matter anyway.

  And now, somehow, the time we’re living and the time of Onestory have come hard up against each other. As if Onestory has erupted right out of our downsounding and into the night. Here is the weapon that destroyed cities, that brought down Parliament and London Bridge, that put the Thames into a standing wave. It is here and now and real and not just song. And we are sitting inside it.

  My breathing gets calmer after a while. I hold up my hands and I can see them clear at last. The knuckles a raw, violent pink. There’s no pain yet because they are not yet fully part of me.

  Again there is silence, and then Lucien’s voice, chanting. Sounding.

  ‘Mettle in the river, out of breaking’s harm.

  Calm and consolation.

  Bright and balm.

  ‘All we know of the Lady is what Onestory tells us. We know that she came from Allbreaking, when the weapon of dischord was destroyed. But how? That is a mystery. After Allbreaking there she was: mettle in the river. Out of dischord’s ashes, harmony will rise. Tell me, Simon. What have you just seen?’

  ‘A tunnel of palladium.’ I pause. ‘Are you saying the weapon of dischord was made out of the Lady?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Lucien. He looks at me lento, waiting for me to make the next step. ‘We are harvesting pieces of the old weapon, the first weapon.’

  I stop for a second, as there is something wrong with what Lucien said. There is only one weapon in Onestory.

  He moves closer to me and his voice is hard in my ear.

  ‘The tunnel is not a tunnel, but a pipe. The wind in it was enough to make it sound, though at a far lower volume. And that’s what made you sick for a while. The weapon was a vast instrument, made out of palladium.’

  I blink presto, testing my eyes, unwilling to understand.

  ‘The weapon was a Carillon,’ he says. ‘Or you could put it another way. The Carillon is a weapon.’

  I struggle. I am still shaking from the fear of blindness. I think of everything that I have learnt of the Order, through Lucien and through my memories. But even knowing that, I’d believed, deep down, in the part of my own spine that rings to the chords of Chimes, that the Carillon was driven by harmony and beauty. I cannot grasp that it might be meant to hurt.

  ‘Look,’ says Lucien, and he holds up my lighter again. The walls are made from highly carved white tiles, their grooves deepened by shadow. The tiles’ hollowed trenches create intricate, orderly patterns, swoops and curves and curlicues. Where the light moves, it looks as though the shapes are growing and receding.

  ‘I can’t hear anything. It’s completely dead.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He flicks the light and we’re back in dark. ‘The Lady is a conductor. She is used to make the pipes of the Carillon. But the reason the Order needs her is twofold. In the Citadel, she is also used to insulate. She can convert sound into silence, or soften the effects of sound.

  ‘If your hearing was perfect, you would hear a web of silver lines running right along the tiles, twining through them. So fine they’re almost not there. They are threads of the Lady, running through the walls. Throughout the Citadel there is soundproofing like this.’ He snaps the flame to again so his face is illuminated. ‘In the city, it’s illegal to hold the Lady except to trade. This is why. If citizens learnt of this, they might use her to protect themselves from Chimes.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I ask. I look at his fierce, hooded, unseeing eyes. Lucien springs fully formed out of the Thames. Lucien emerges clean and pal
e, untouched by Chimes. Lucien leads us with his miracle hearing under the city, to the Lady each time.

  ‘Lucien, you need to tell me who you are.’

  He looks at me, steady. ‘I think you know.’

  ‘You’re of the Order.’

  He nods.

  I don’t know what to do next. We are sitting in an abandoned corridor under the Thames, next to the true weapon of Onestory. And Lucien is a member of the Order.

  ‘You’re beginning to look feeble.’ Lucien finds the supplies I packed at the beginning of the night and unwraps the sandwiches. ‘Here, eat.’ Then I hear the lighter strike again and the yellow glow of a candle comes.

  I obey. The goat’s cheese is sharp, and the bread is nutty, and it surprises me that it tastes so good. I wait for a while before I speak again.

  ‘Tell me,’ I say again. And he does.

  ‘You must doubt it could have any good in it, Simon, but when I was young, it was only that way.’

  ‘Why did you leave? How did you come to London?’

  ‘First you have to understand some things.’ Lucien draws a breath, lets it go. ‘In the Order, if you’re born without sight, it’s a sign that you have a gift for hearing. I was born like that, and I was born into music, and I never asked why or what it meant. I just felt lucky. I had another language I could think in effortlessly, one that opened up the world in truth and beauty. I knew that I would never run out of it, you see.

  ‘Not everyone who’s born blind becomes a member of the elect. You have to want it. But I did. It was like a light shining right through everything. The magisters began to treat me differently, give me space, ask my opinion about chord progressions or a complicated piece of rhythmic notation. I remember one particular day when it felt that everything I was learning was part of some bigger pattern. I was walking through the gardens and everything was music – leaves, trees, clouds. I was very happy. There was never a time that I didn’t expect to become one of the elect.’