The Chimes Read online

  And I heard the silence of the Lady and I went, for the first time, down to the river. To the strand. Then my head knocked half through by the blow of a thrown stone. Down by the ruins of the tower, Brennan threw a stone that hit me. With my head in the river I heard a song.

  The first time I laid eyes on Lucien he stood, pale and blind, with the light in his hair. Then the edge of his mouth twitched up. Half-grin, half-smirk.

  And then he said something else, under his breath and to me alone.

  ‘That song,’ he said. ‘It’s worth your life in these parts.’

  I didn’t understand what he meant. I didn’t say anything, just kept my eyes empty like I know how to do. And he waited, examined me somehow, though without sight. Then the moment passed and the edge returned to his voice.

  ‘Forgive Brennan,’ he said. ‘He is very protective of our territory.’

  The voice in my head is Lucien’s. The questions are Lucien’s. The song is how he chose me. It is where his questions started and the place to which they always circle back.

  The darkness that has kept me covered for so long pulls back. In the half-light that is not yet understanding, I stand up. And finally, finally I walk out to the balcony where Lucien is waiting for me.

  The moonlight falls on his face. When his voice comes, it is as clear as Chimes.

  ‘The arrival in London,’ he asks, ‘what was it like?’

  ‘I was standing alone on the roadside in the rain,’ I say.

  The words seem to come from someone else, or some bit of me I can’t touch or feel. Like bodymemory from a missing leg or finger. ‘I was waiting for somebody to come along the road and give me a ride to London. I waited for a long time before a carter stopped. He handed me his burberry and I put it on, and we went into the city.’

  ‘Good. Where were you waiting?’

  Saltflats in the horizon. Flat fields. A farmhouse with a red door.

  ‘Outside of London. Essex.’

  Lucien is doing something with his hands, twisting a bit of leather cord. He knots it and threads it between his palms. Then he does something complicated and quick with his fingers so that the cord stretches between his open hands like a noose.

  ‘Why were you leaving the farm?’

  I pause. A white shape moves up in me. I don’t want to look at it, but I have to.

  ‘They died. Both of them. My mother first.’

  ‘What did they die from?’

  ‘First my mother’s hands started to shake. It wasn’t bad at first; she could still work. She could do solfege at Chimes, make bread. Then it got worse. She could hardly hold a pencil.’ My voice fades. I stare at my own hands until they blur in front of my eyes.

  ‘After that she couldn’t walk and had to stay in bed. Then she could hardly talk. Then she found it hard to breathe.’ I try to keep my voice calm. I rub my eyes. ‘She died, and then my father. I don’t remember his death. It must have been soon after.’

  And they were buried twice. Once in the ground, once in my memory. My heart hurts. What had I felt before in that spot? Numbness. Hard and lifeless like a dry riverstone.

  ‘I am sorry, Simon,’ Lucien says. He pulls the cord from his hands so that he can sign the mourning cadence of the formal solfege.

  Then he looks at me harder, measuring.

  ‘Simon,’ Lucien says, ‘after your arrival in London, how did you find us? How did you find the pact?’

  ‘I didn’t find you. You found me. I heard the Lady, and I went down to the river. I was trying to find where the silence was coming from. Then Brennan bloody well knocked me out.’

  Lucien laughs. ‘Brennan saw you. If I remember right, he said, “There’s some Walbrook scum on our turn, right in broad daylight.” Before I could stop him, he threw the stone. He hit you and you fell into the water and stayed there. I thought he might’ve killed you. When we got closer, he saw what you were wearing. Farmclothes. So we knew you weren’t Walbrook. Not Effra or Neckinger either. You weren’t even some prentiss who’d stolen a leisure hour for mudlarking. It wasn’t chance or mistake had brought you to the Pale. You heard the Lady and you went straight to her.’

  ‘But you didn’t ask me to join the pact because of my hearing,’ I say.

  To put the memories down like this in a line that starts in one place and moves to another, to know that they live outside me in Lucien’s keeping – not just hoarded in a memory bag. It rings through me that thought, like his voice does. ‘It was the song that came to me when I was head down in the river. You recognised it and warned me against singing it.’

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’

  ‘Well, what does it mean?’

  He shakes his head lento. ‘That’s what I need you to tell me. Can you sing it?’

  ‘No.’ But as I say it, words come into my head.

  ‘In the quiet days of power,’ I say. All at once I am certain. ‘That’s how it starts.’ Then I stop. ‘I don’t know what comes next.’

  ‘Take your time,’ says Lucien.

  I close my eyes. Why was I coming into London, and what did it have to do with the song? Pictures float up and pull apart and come together again. Then at last I see a picture of my mother standing next to me. We are working. I feel the rhythm of it in my hands, a grip and twist like kneading bread. Then my mother singing.

  I listen. I wait.

  Nothing comes. I close my eyes again. I hear a rhythm first and then nonsense syllables that roll in my mouth.

  ‘Gwil-lum Hu-ginn Ce-dric Thor,’ I say.

  Lucien looks at me, wondering.

  I hold my hands in front of me and study them. The echo of the movement is in the muscle. Grip and twist. Easy and sharp. What were we doing?

  And subito I have the answer and as soon as I do, I see that it could not be anything else. Not kneading bread. Breaking bulbs. A clean break and the smell of white sap. A drawing of an animal with a hooked beak, wings spread. Wings.

  Seven ravens in the tower, I think.

  ‘Seven ravens in the tower,’ I say out loud.

  I look at Lucien. His eyes are bright. Then I say the whole thing out without stopping.

  ‘In the quiet days of power,

  seven ravens in the tower.

  When you clip the raven’s wing,

  then the bird begins to sing.

  When you break the raven’s beak,

  then the bird begins to speak.

  When the Chimes fill up the sky,

  then the ravens start to fly.

  Gwillum, Huginn, Cedric, Thor,

  Odin, Hardy, nevermore.

  Never ravens in the tree

  till Muninn can fly home to me.’

  Lucien’s face glows in the half-light. He places his hand on my shoulder so I feel the weight of it right down my back. ‘Thank you, Simon,’ he says in a low voice, and there is nothing of joke in it.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Do you trust me, Simon?’

  I look at him. In the under, we follow Lucien. Follow him like blind faith. In the under, when the map flares up around like a fire with the door open and the arms of the tunnels reach out, it’s all you have. A following that’s almost like falling. And once you’ve felt it, nothing else has much pull anymore. Why would it? What else opens up your veins like that, pulls the sky in, fish-hooks the stars into such brightness?

  I nod.

  ‘Then listen. I don’t know what the song means. I know the tune and I know its threat. But I need you to remember what your mother told you about it.’

  I stare at him. He has slipped the leather cord between his hands and I watch the patterns he is making, triangles moving and being cut in half and then in half again. His hands muddy, like he has just dug something out of the earth.

  I realise that there is something else he needs to know.

  ‘We saw a member of the Order in the burial-ground crosshouse, Brennan and I, when we went to sing the snares.’

&nbs
p; His hands halt with the pattern of crisscrossed cords between them. ‘What night was this?’

  I think hard, count back. ‘A thrennoch ago, I think.’

  ‘Not at Ropemakers, at Bow?’

  ‘Yes. Ropemakers was empty, no snares, no people, which I thought was strange. He was walking among the memorylost. He . . .’ I try to see it again, the movements he made. ‘He looked like he was prospecting for Pale. He listened to the air around the memorylost. Then he disappeared out of the yard and back into the crosshouse. We heard something scratching on stone.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘After he was gone, we checked the crosshouse. We wanted to see what he was doing. What made the sound.’

  ‘And?’

  I describe what the member scratched in the wall at the entrance. The staves the length of a broad armspan. Then I pause, turn presto and leave the balcony. On the shelf behind my hammock, the folded paper is sitting where I left it. When I hand it to Lucien he says nothing. I watch as he opens the paper. He shades his brow and squints hard and then he traces the deeply lined scratches. After a while his pale eyes flinch and then flare. I have not asked him if he is able to read music. For some reason I do not need to.

  ‘It’s formal,’ he says. ‘A kind of fugue.’

  I wait for him to say more.

  ‘An old form. What used to be called a ricercar. Which means “to search out”. The first few notes are a name. Then the last part means forze, or “power”. The way it’s put together is what makes the message.’ He pauses. ‘We will have to move presto now. We need to know all that you can remember about your mother. We need to know more about what the song means. We don’t have much time. Every spare moment you have, try if you can to remember. I will downsound it with you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. I wait, but Lucien is tacet, still in thought.

  ‘Well?’ I ask.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘What does the message mean?’

  There is something unspoken in his pause and he looks straight at me, testing, waiting.

  ‘There are a couple of ways you could read it. But in the ver­­nacular the simplest reading is: Lucien, we will find you.’

  Wandle in the Under

  Today we start off at a quick jog. Though everything underneath and above it has changed, the rhythm of the day stays the same. I wake. The pact wakes. We sound Onestory. We run in the under. The tune is bright and cocky at first, moving stepwise up the tonic chord into the large tunnelmouth to our direct north. It’s a stormwater drain, but a large one, quite dry.

  We run easy, barely crouching, side by side. The echo of our splashing feet in the tile tunnel keeps us company. Sometimes the splashing seems to be coming from ahead of us, and sometimes from behind. And then I’d swear that I hear a third lot of footfalls, speeding and slowing, as if trying to get us to lose our pace. Strange sounds are part of the under. Sometimes you see strange things too. Glowing patches moving with us as we run, floating across the path. Maybe it’s gas burning off. Maybe the spirits of pactrunners who’ve died down here.

  The tune takes us further down the tunnel, deep into the heart of the map. Its beat fits to our jogging rhythm. I hear it thumping in my blood too. Then the tunnel starts to bend and we both hear the modulation to the fourth chord coming in mind’s ear. The modulation that spins around the home key and shows us which tunnel to take. It’s an easy path. The first tunnelmouth that looms up ahead is the one that fits our cadence. Due west. Without a word, we both veer off the main tunnel and enter its dark mouth.

  Narrower, now. The calm, clean echo of the tiles changes into a harsh clang. It’s mettle, filled with the sharp note of rust, a strident, bright smell that pitches us on faster. The melody fills the tunnel right up and takes on an orange ferrous darkness and ringing speed. Try not to trip over your own feet as they outpace you.

  Clare takes the lead, shifts us through some tricky cross rhythms and time changes. It’s jaunty, full of darting offbeat flurries. After five bars of the same four-four time, there is a quick near-blind corner and then the path doubles back awhile. Then it breaks into a triplet rhythm, three-eight, for about the same distance. Each version of the tune darts out into another tunnel juncture.

  We are breathing presto when we reach the final spurt of the first subject. From there, it’s into a drawn-out, restful melody with long strides all heading northwest. Clare sets our pace at a rolling trot. I put my hands to the walls and feel rough concrete then slim wiring along it, at about the level of my head. It’s a comms tunnel.

  The lines of wire, someone said, I don’t remember who, used to be how sound travelled. I don’t understand this, as they are not tight stretched like cello or viol strings, but slack and covered in stickwrap.

  After a while we’re coming near to where Lucien sang the Lady’s cadence. I start to listen for her as we run, wait for the telltale drops of silence, the silver shiver.

  When her silence speaks out, I pull on Clare’s shirt to get her to stop.

  Lento steps and then the usual flash of surprise as her silver fills my mind with quiet blindness. I extend my hand in the dark ahead of me. The water is cold, and leaves and wads of stickwrap and mulched paper swim past as I try to sluice tacet through the muck. And there she is. A smooth, gnarled round and the silver bright in my ear. My fingers close on the nugget and I lift it clear of the water.

  We retrace the tune and are heading clear south back to the tonic and the amphitheatre when I hear it. A high cry, cut off sharp. I stop short and Clare, a few metres ahead, wheels. In the few seconds as the echo dies, I take its bearings. We stand and wait for the sound to come again, but it does not.

  ‘I think that was Abel,’ Clare says. The fear in her voice makes my stomach and throat feel like they’re made of cold water.

  The cry came from one of the large tunnels to the east. If I am right with my bearings, it is one of the ones with two times a man’s headroom and echoed mettle tracks. We need the straightest path there.

  I force the map up in my head and look for it. I peer through the darkness and its half-lit, ghosted strands. And at last I think I have the route.

  With Clare behind, I run back down the gutters of the path we came in on, ignoring all the turnings until we reach a wide brick mouth. It’s a dry stormwater drain, and a long straight run with the brick walls circling overhead. If I’m right, it will open into a service tunnel that will take us down to the tracks.

  We sprint down the bricked way. I feel the sweat in my eyes. But after only a few beats of straight run I can see the tunnel’s end, sealed in brick. I curse. We come to the bricked face and slow to a walk and I draw breath. On the left wall is a blue mettle door.

  It opens onto a short corridor and a curving mettle staircase. Rust under the yellow paint. At the bottom of the stair, another heavier door and I breathe relief as I know we are in the right place and it opens. We slide out at ground level, into a wide, high tunnel. Dark rusted mettle rails run under our feet.

  Four or five beats from us, on the wide grey expanse of the concrete platform above, three figures are struggling. They push and turn in a strange sort of dance. Two are tall pactrunners with legs bound in black stickwrap. The third is Abel.

  Abel fights silent. He spits and bites and kicks. The tallest, a thin-faced, dark-haired guy, is trying to hold his arms back while the other searches him. As we watch, Abel’s knee makes contact with the searcher’s stomach.

  ‘Fucking leave trying to hold him and just get him down.’ And the dark-haired one punches Abel in the face.

  Clare flinches. I reach to my ankle and pull my knife. Light is coming into the station from behind us, where the tunnel emerges at ground level. But we’re standing in shadows and invisible. They must be Wandle. Why they’re in our territory I have no idea. The worse for them.

  Things move lento. I pull Clare back into the stairwell, then up one flight of steps. The door to the platform is warped, but we shoulder it together in one p
ush that scrapes harsh on the concrete.

  I run with my hunting knife held close to my body, Clare with a full-throated scream, lips back and teeth bared. We’re across the platform before they can turn. Clare jumps the short one and I land a fist to the other’s head, my punch loaded with the knife handle. I feel the jolt through my arm and teeth.

  He stumbles. Drops to hands and knees. I go in for the kick, but before I can connect with his ribs, he pushes up and grabs my foot. I hop on the other, kick back hard. My kick connects with shoulder, but he scuttles back and gets up with a sneer. Then he leans low and comes forward with slow sweeps of his arms, just out of reach of the knife.

  I see how much bigger he is, as he bounces from foot to foot with a leer. His hair is black with dirt and oil, and his rattish face is grained with it. I flex my fingers against the knife handle, try to imagine the feel of it meeting another person’s body. It can’t be too much different from rabbit or squirrel, is what I think.

  Between Ratface and me Abel lies still on the grey concrete. To my right, Clare and the other runner. Clare tight on his back, knees gripping his waist. Her forearm across his neck, and he’s pulling at it, trying to throw her off. She can’t hold him for long. If we want to get Abel clear, I need to get the tall runner down.

  I move forward, holding the knife in a hammer-grip still, testing it against the air. The runner backs off, but his face is mocking. He’s watching my eyes, not the knife. He doesn’t think I’ve got the stones to use it.

  As if to show he’s right, I hunch my shoulders. I let the tension go out of my neck and I drop my knife arm. I spit into the dust in front of my feet. Then I feint to my left. As he lunges forward to grab me, I twist down under his arms and behind, close enough to get my arm over his shoulder and my knife blade up under his neck. It speaks cold and hard against his jawline and he goes very still.

  ‘OK, OK, OK,’ he says. ‘OK.’

  ‘Tell your friend to let Clare go.’

  The other runner is throwing himself against the wall to loosen Clare, who’s clamped to his back. I tighten my grip on the knife and Ratface calls. Clare’s runner turns, sees me with the knife and straightens, releasing his grip on Clare’s arm.