The Chimes

  The voice is the voice of Chimes, the melody simple. It is not song at all, but the clearest and sweetest of the bells sounding wordlessly. The words are those that come into my head with the tune as somehow, at last, I hear it.

  ‘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.’

  The tune comes once, twice. It is raw and simple. It has the open fourths and fifths of a folk tune. There is no harmony or embellishment, just the tune sounding simple and sweet.

  Sounding down from the instrument and to me. What my ears tell me is impossible. My mind freezes with it. It cannot be true. Lucien is within the terrible embrace of the instrument, and he is playing.

  Around me, in the hall, people are running. I do not follow their movement. I keep my head down.

  The guildsong comes to an end. Its end is a crashing chord and the chord is pain. It is jagged and crooked. It is broken and splintered and uneven, and it’s sustained for so long at such a pitch that I think my ears are going to burst.

  The chord is death and sorrow and torture. Like millions of people all screaming at once. Just when I think I can’t stand any more, the harshness fades and crumbles. It doesn’t resolve. That is the wrong word. It doesn’t move into harmony, but it breaks, and as it breaks, it shows the possibility of change. It walks forward. It carries the pain into the next chord, but it softens there and there is sweetness again.

  Those two chords are like gatekeepers. And then the story starts.

  It starts with water. A river flowing. It flows from the source down to the sea. Its source is a field, trees all around, flat, undulating green grass. And under a tree a spring. The spring is the origin of the river, and the river is memory.

  It was the only way I knew how to tell it. The water is born up where the river starts, and it is fresh and new. It springs up, and there is birdsong. Lucien has put this in with the highest stops of the instrument. I have no idea how close they might be to life, but I somehow recognise them straight away. The sound bubbles up through the air. It’s free, clear and free, flying around up there.

  It is so strange listening to Chimes use music that isn’t ordered and dense, perfectly neat and rich in counterpoint and all the voices sounding at once that I forget for a while, listening to the simple running melody and its new, true meaning.

  Then I remember that Lucien is in there somewhere, playing. The notes run clear and smooth, and somehow I have to believe that it’s going to be all right. He is going to survive.

  After the origins of memory, Lucien plays the world before Allbreaking and then the birth of Ravensguild.

  Different voices talking. Folksongs. Forecasts. There’s no grand structure. No sonata form, no canon. Just the individual stories coming and going, different currents. Which is not to say there is no harmony or repetition. The same things circle round in their own ways. Babies are born. People are married and die. Songs for planting and songs for harvest, patterns for journeys forward and back. I let myself look up a little from where I’ve been crouched forward, my head on the floor.

  The magisters are still around the table. They are staring all of them at the magister musicae, who is listening with his arms outstretched as if holding captive the attention of a vast orkestra. Then he points to the Carillon’s chambers. He bellows, a bullish, strange sound, ‘Stop the instrument!’

  Three of the magisters jump out of their seats and run to the door.

  I dip my head again. ‘Hurry, Lucien,’ I whisper to the floor.

  I hear the shift in the tune in my head before he plays it. Part of me wants it to stop there. Maybe we all want time to stop, or to be coming the same always. But I know it can’t. Under the green melodies that we carved out and practised together, I can hear the dark rumbling of what happens next.

  Fire starts and it burns books, maps, stories, documents. It burns old electricks. It burns memoryboards and paraboards. It burns music, old scores from before Allbreaking.

  And it burns memories too. In the music, I hear the flames leap up, hungry. Crashing, devouring, turning code to dust and ashes.

  Lucien plays the lives cut short, fragments of story riddled with the black wormholes of sated flame. He plays the memorylost herded, the minds wiped clean, the frenzied dance of chimesickness. He plays the dead of Ravensguild. He plays mouths stuffed with dead birds.

  The music gets louder and louder. Some of the magisters still sitting at the table are bending their heads and covering their ears, their mouths open in sounds I cannot hear. Their despair not at the music’s volume, but the blasphony of it, the mess. The music gets louder and louder, but the playing is triumph. I hear every note as we wrote it and it makes me think of what Lucien said about meditation. How you can hear the forward and backward of a note as if you were bringing it into being. And I hope. I hope that some miracle means his skill is strong enough.

  In the music, something else is coming in. I hear it once and at first think I am mistaken. It is something not part of the melody or harmony we made. Something not part of the Carillon’s voice at all. It is a sound like you hear on the race sometimes in a high wind, when the boats that are still docked there strain against the wood and rope and rubber of their berth. A kind of resentful creaking. The sound of something yearning to pull apart.

  The frenzied melody continues. Death and breaking. I know the fragmented violence of the rhythms so well that I am holding my breath.

  And then wrong notes come.

  Not just the ones we have written, the known dischords, but other notes, notes not intended. Notes stumbled. Two into one. One into two. The wrong chord. Notes missing. The devil in music held long and awkward and loud. The augmented fourth shrieks like pain through the hall and I see several magisters shrieking too, as if they’re vibrating in sympathy with the instrument.

  The rending sound comes again as the pitch gets higher and higher, louder and louder.

  Through the din I can see the magister musicae gesturing wildly in solfege, his arms moving like a crazed windmill. And something calm comes into my head. A still spot. A voice. It says, The Carillon can’t withstand this.

  I stand up. I hold my hands over my ears. I think of Lucien in the tonic chamber and there are tears running down my cheeks.

  Then silence. In the silence, creaking and a sound I can’t describe. A slow sound of something falling. An arc of silver planing through the air, and then a crash. I feel the whole hall shake from the ground upward. The noise pushes me down.

  Then the instrument resumes like a fallen horse stumbling back up to its knees. What I hear then is awful in its volume and harshness.

  A chord, then another, then another. Cruel, pitiful, violent. The Carillon is playing a mockery of Chimes. Chimes through a black mirror of dischord and heaviness. It pushes and pushes through the rending, as silver crashes all around and as the pipes and bells of the instrument pull apart from each other. Until there is nothing left, only silence, only despair.

  I think, How could you leave me like this, Lucien?

  The story we wrote had a different end. The cruel mirror of Chimes was meant to end in a different song, a new one that Lucien wrote to mean hope and hereafter. But there is no one to play it anymore.

  I get up slowly. The arches still stand upright, but along the left side of the hall, they stretch up into air like hands held in supplication. The roof is broken. Slicing through the immense hole is the silver lip of an immense bell, deformed and broken by the weight of its fall. Huge splinters of wood have come with it, piles of rubble and stone
and white tiling. Dust rises up through the air.

  Silence. Creaking, and the intermittent crashes of debris still falling. Wind plays through the hall from the broken walls and ceiling.

  ‘Lucien,’ I yell forte. My lungs are useless. I get up and run down the hall and toward the damage. I run toward where I saw Lucien disappear into the stair that rises to the tower. Though I know that there is little chance anyone in the chambers could have made it out alive.

  The opening of the stairway is covered with rubble. I find a thick piece of wood and use it to wedge and lever the heavy concrete blocks aside. Then I push the door open. Fallen debris has broken through the inner wall of the stairwell, so the steps are held by one side only, splayed like the struts of a fan. Through the broken ribs to my right I see the silver pipes that formed the instrument’s core. I keep one hand on the outer wall and climb the stairs, pushing over the rubble. Up some way I go and there is an opening to my left, from off the stairwell. One of the chambers of the instrument. I crawl into the carved narrow room. Its outer wall has been shorn clean off and it has collapsed inwards, catching and trapping Magister Joachim where he was trying to escape. From his waist down he is covered in rubble. One of his arms is broken, and his face is turned to me in profile. It is covered in white dust like flour and for a moment I think of my mother making bread. His eyes look surprised. Blank. Blood in a line from his mouth. I try to pull his cloak over him, but it’s caught on rubble, so I gently thumb his eyelids closed instead.

  Then I return to the stairs. As I get higher, they become more unstable; they creak with pain as I crawl. At last it is impossible to climb any higher. Dust clouds around me like smoke. My eyes are running with it, and my lungs are full. Then I look up. Hanging above is a skewed platform with no visible means of support. It must be attached somehow to those of the silver pipes that are still upright. And I know that it must be the floor of the tonic chamber.

  I force myself along the creaking tongue of the step on which I’m standing. I stand at its edge and it gives with a sickening downward flex. Then I jump. I jump upwards and into the fretting that holds the instrument’s remaining pipes. The core of the destroyed Carillon. Its backbone. I use it as a ladder, and I climb upward. Up into dust and blindness.

  At last I am level with the dust-covered floorboards that form the base of the tonic chamber. I am reluctant to add to it my weight, so I stand with my arm hooked through the fretwork of the instrument. I squint through dust and at last I see the thing that I don’t want to see. The impossible thing.

  At the far end of the small chamber, tented by fallen arms of tiling, is a broken shape. The pooled white of a cloak. I push myself out onto the platform and feel it give as I crawl towards the shape on my knees. I see the back of his head. There is blood in the pale curled hair. I feel something building in my throat so huge and hard that I don’t want to open my mouth and let it out because it will rip me apart.

  I can’t reach him. There is nothing else that matters except the distance between us. Everything goes dark, and I inch forward. Though the chamber is open to the air, it is black all around me and the plaster dust comes down. I use my back to prop a huge piece of tiling and push it. Then I can reach him. I reach out to his head, his hair. I touch his hand. It is warm.

  I can’t bear to turn his head to me. I stay like that for a while, just cupping his head in my hands. Then I lean over so that I can move his body clear of the rubble.

  Lucien’s face but not his face.

  The high forehead, the hair rippled back off it. I stare at it and my head does not hear what my eyes are telling me. Or is it the other way around?

  It is not Lucien. It is Sonja.

  Birdsong

  I do not know how I get down but that I get down. Edging backwards; slipping; falling. I escape from the broken innards of the instrument.

  I leave Sonja there in its heart. Held in its clasp and in her mastery and sacrifice.

  Out of the hall and onto the lawn, and on my knees I spit out dust.

  After a while I sit up and I see the whiterobed figures rushing around me. Magisters pull off their robes as they run. They form strange patterns. They turn to each other like strangers, and their mouths move in silence as if they’ve never had to learn to converse. I watch them move toward each other and then back away, unable to seek consolation. And all of the different permutations of faces that are unaccustomed to the expressions of hopelessness and despair.

  There is no joy in it. I look at the grass in front of me and after a while I understand that their mouths are not moving in silence after all. They are speaking. I simply cannot hear them. There is a slow rushing sound in my ears. I reach up to touch them and the fingers of my hand come away wet with blood.

  How the hell did she do it? Lucien flanked by the tall figures of the poliss, followed by the young magister who would soon be dead. Sonja stumbling out of the hall, pushed by her father. Her path twists in my head like a well-executed run in the under, a melody always two steps ahead. I sit on the grass and I puzzle it and still I do not understand. When did she decide? Her feet, in their dance ahead of me, treading their skilful bluff. Clear and measured and irreproachable. Memorise the music. Steal the knife. Read in your brother’s face the understanding of his betrayal. Listen to his death sentence. Call out once in protest.

  I see her running through the corridors of the hall, corridors filled with the last of that golden light. In her hand she holds my knife. Quick in her memory, the key tune that will open the chamber door. Beneath that, the whole wild close-beating company of her ambition and her loss – the music that she played and learned although it was not for her.

  By the time she reaches the instrument, the poliss have already left. They have deposited the young traitor in the dominant chamber with the magister, hands firmly tied. They have done their duty and are ready for their breakfast. Nobody could expect a young girl to pose a threat. A young girl not even noted for any particular musical gift.

  My thought turns to Magister Joachim, as I found him in the heart of the collapsed chamber. I think of his calm expression and I hope like hell that he was killed in the Carillon’s collapse, as I had thought, and not before. When I remember Sonja’s face as she turned from the sight of Martha’s body I am not fully sure of this.

  I sit on the grass and I know that I have to leave. I must search the rubble again, then the emptied rooms of the Orkestrum, then the tunnels, the corridors. I need to move now and keep moving lest the tense hope that’s subito sprung up in me collapses along with everything else. But I can’t seem to move. My legs do not respond.

  I look up and through the crowds one of the whiterobed figures is walking toward me, steady and tall. He crosses the grass. I watch as he gets closer and I wait for his path to change, for his face to contort. Then at last my body answers and I scramble to my feet and after a while he reaches me where I stand. His body is marvellously whole. Unbroken. He stretches his hand out to mine and then his arms are around me and we stand like that for who knows how long, in the shadow of the broken instrument.

  After is a different place than I had thought, if had let myself think of it at all. It is making the dangerous trip back into the instrument to rescue Sonja’s body, and it is Lucien cradling her in his arms. His face cracked open in grief and the whole desperate unknown expanse of it stretching out.

  After is knowing there is time for grief, and that time will be filled with it. Their heads inclined like that so you can’t tell the difference between their pale curled hair. His hand to the curve of her face as if asking forgiveness. No help for any of it. Just a long path that we must go ahead on. It is the flint from Sonja’s own pocket that lights the bier.

  Smoke from the burning instrument rises upward into the sky. It twists in the air. The sweet wood, fine-tuned and jointed, goes up lento. We stand and watch it burn and the smoke smells like incense.

  Later, in that time called after, we walk unquestioned through the Citadel
. We pass people on their hands and knees with their faces twisted, still howling out their despair in silence. The ringing in my ears lessens, but does not stop.

  The gatehouse is unmanned. Through the para windows is the picture of an abrupt exit. A lute hanging from a chair, still swinging from its broidered strap. Scores scattered on the floor. On a bench a half-eaten sandwich sits on stickwrap.

  Past the tower we walk and through the city. And it is coming alive lento in the early light. Children clutching their half and three-quarter viols and cellos. Instrument makers holding lathes, planes, polishing cloths. The stall holders in markets stare out over dropped fruit, the white blown leaves of sheet music, the unfurled bolts of cloth. Families in stunned lines, mothers grasping babies tight and holding them into their shoulders, shielded from the gauzy wings of the smoke that stretch now through the town and through the market.

  People out and clustering everywhere on the streets. They have emerged from shops and houses, from crosshouses and concert halls and workshops. They stand blinking in the light, and on their faces is the echo of the story that has been sounded. And I wish that I could say it was a look of wonder, or relief, or enlightenment. That I could see understanding there; pain, but the pain that comes from understanding.

  But instead it is like watching someone wake from a dream. The look on their faces is of something crumbling around them as they watch. The look of something taken away.

  It is an awful knowledge. Even if what you are coming up out of is a nightmare, waking is hard. When you were deep inside the dream, all was decided for you. Out in the morning is something else altogether. Something you have to choose for yourself.

  The sky is lightening as we walk. Lucien is tall beside me and I turn to look at him. He stops. We are standing on a hill just past the city.