Anna Smaill - The Chimes

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.’

‘So, we find her. We learn more about these memories. Then we travel to the Citadel. We must get within the walls and we must destroy the instrument.’

His voice is improbably confident and clear, as if describing a new place to set snares, rather than the impossible act of breaking Chimes. And I feel the creeping arms of the Lady reaching down to me from somewhere far away. And the deafening silence presses down heavier on my ribcage.

‘How will we get into the Citadel?’ I say.

‘My mother will help us. And my sister too.’

‘You have a sister?’

‘Yes. She was two years behind me in the Orkestrum. A cellist. Far smarter than I ever was.’ He looks at me and laughs at my disbelief. ‘Why shouldn’t I have a sister?’ he asks.

Fully formed from out of the river, I think. Born pale each morning, untouched by Chimes. Then I shake my head. ‘Do you miss her?’

‘Of course.’ He looks at me as if seeing something new, measuring it. Then he moves back, pulls me to standing. ‘We can’t wait any longer.’

I nod. They’re looking for Lucien, and where are we going? Straight into their stronghold.