Anna Smaill - The Chimes

We are deep. Though the walls are sealed in plaster and painted white, I can feel the cold breath of earth coming through them. At the end of the hall is a heavy double door. Martha removes a key and unlocks it. She opens it wide and we walk inside.

I hear space unfold in front of me.

I hear Lucien’s lungs open as if a part of him has come home. For a moment I’m back in London, standing in our amphitheatre at Five Rover, waiting for the map to settle. What we hear is tunnels.

In the mouth to the under, I wait for my ears to sharpen as I always do. The room we are standing in is not large, and it opens into a simple network at first, just one tunnel leading each way, left and right. Then I listen out further and I learn that this family of tunnels is as far from the crazed tangle of our territory, with its wormed maze, its spiderweb of ways, as it’s possible to hear.

I can’t hear the full extent of them, but the opening phrases are as careful and precise as a partsong. They are concentric, coiling like the shell of a snail, and cut through with a grid of straight tunnels. Lucien turns to Martha and quietly sings the winding tune she gave us in the coldstore. She listens with care and then she nods to confirm that he has remembered right. We enter.

We tread light and presto. Martha goes first with the candle, then Lucien, then me. The tunnels are rounded and easy to move in. They are taller than our heads and wider than an armspan, and they have little echo. They are lined in flat white tiles. Our tunnels were built, I guess, to carry other things. Water. Words. Carriages. Sewage. These appear to have only one purpose, to take people from place to place beneath the Citadel.

We follow the tune as it winds, walking tacet. And I get the strange feeling that somehow we are not moving at all. There are no landmarks down here, nothing to offer cadence or modulation. The corridor never changes, just follows the same slow, patient curve. At regular intervals we pass the open mouth of another tunnel in the grid. Keep treading, never quieter. I think of Martha’s instructions and imagine that, after all, I could be floating. I have forgotten which way is up and which down.

Subito, between Martha and me, Lucien stops.

A few paces ahead, Martha halts and looks back at where Lucien is frozen. My throat closes. A dead sound chimes inside me. Then I hear what Lucien has heard.

In the under in London, it is the sound that signals the end of a run, a pleasing glow of luck and reward. Here it means something else.

Far ahead in a tunnel perhaps two from ours in the concentric spiral, there is a pulse of silence. Its whispered hush comes to us through mettle and tile and stone. Martha has not heard yet, but she can read the fear in our eyes. No one moves. I barely breathe. Far ahead in its tunnel, the line of Pale is moving. It moves smoothly at a walking pace. Northeast.

At first the panic drumming in my ears makes me mishear, but after a few breaths I understand. The Pale is moving away from us. As if it will help him on his way, I try to imagine the magister’s steady tread, the glowing flute slung askance his white robes. It is moving, far ahead, in the same direction we are going. Then it turns down one of the bisecting tunnels, farther off. I watch Lucien’s eyes. They are fixed, as if even their movement might reveal our presence.

The constellation of silence traces its journey and we wait. It moves away from us. Steady but sure the silence fades. I feel the blood begin to move more calmly through me and I let my muscles ease a bit. I breathe.

And then I freeze.

In the candlelight, Lucien’s eyes have widened and flared. I train my ears again. The pulse of silence flickers on the edge of my hearing. It is still. Still with the magister’s listening. I look at Lucien and he at me. In the moment that passes, far off in that northeast corridor, the silence makes a small movement back towards us. Almost grudging, like someone pulled back to a task they would rather avoid. The Pale turns and begins its tread back.

Lucien’s jaw is rigid. The bones of his face are raw and stripped. Some awful recognition has bloomed in his eyes. Lento, lento he reaches into his tunic and pulls a leather cord from round his neck. What it draws up is a leather pouch. Muddy from where it was buried in the paratubs on the balcony of the storehouse on Dog Isle. Inside it is the silence of his mother’s ring, and inside that the smaller silence of the guildmedal. A tiny droplet of quiet signalling out to the keen ears of whoever is now walking steady towards us, at the pace of someone who has no earthly need to hurry.

Lucien’s anger as clear as speaking. To have come so far. To have come so far and to have made such a mistake. All I can think is that if we are going to be taken, I don’t want the last sight of Lucien to be in this tunnel, underground, far from sun and air.

Then subito Martha is standing between us. She grips Lucien’s hand open and sees the pouch, the stitched tune. She cannot hear the Lady’s homing pulse, but she knows what it contains. In the tunnel’s slowed time, Martha pulls the pouch from Lucien’s hand. She doesn’t look at him or at me, but walks past us and back down the corridor.

The last sight I have before I push Lucien forward into a run is that of Martha standing solid at the next tunnelmouth, waiting for the coming wave of silence to swallow her.

Out of the tunnel Lucien and I push and fall, and Sonja is there in the corridor at ground level. She is crouched pale against the wall and leaps to her feet as we shoulder the wooden door. She grabs me and pushes me ahead and I’m almost stumbling as I go.

Three doors and we enter the last and we’re inside, locked in soundproofed quiet.

I’m shaking. I see my hands through a blur as if they’re apart from me. I try to clench to stop it. I rest them on my knees, but that’s useless as the tremor is in my legs too. It seems to be in my whole body.

Lucien sits a foot away with his head bowed. He has wrapped his arms around himself. His hands are tight to his upper arms and they’re kneading, punishing the flesh. I get up and go to him, try to pull his hands clear, but he pushes me away, doesn’t look up.

Sonja is silent.

‘Martha?’ she asks. I nod.

‘What happened?’ And I tell her.

Lucien looks up then. His eyes are wild and strange in a way I can’t remember seeing them. ‘It was my fault,’ he says. ‘I made it happen. I cannot believe I was so fucking stupid.’ He pronounces every syllable mercilessly clear. ‘I carried that thing the whole way from London. I brought it with me into the Citadel.’

Sonja stands up and walks to him, sits down. She puts her hand on his shoulder.

‘What will they do to her?’ I ask. I can’t rid myself of the picture of Lucien’s eyes in the tunnel as he realised his mistake. The anger at himself.

Lucien doesn’t answer, but Sonja looks up at me steadily. The first time I think she has done so.

‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘I mean, they’ll question her, of course. See what she knows. But, remember, the magisters didn’t know the ring was my mother’s. They won’t be able to connect it to Lucien.’

‘And the guildmedal?’ I ask.

Sonja is silent for a beat. ‘Martha will buy us time. She’s lived on her wits for a long while. She’ll think of some explanation.’

‘They won’t harm her?’

Her look takes on a hint of disdain again. ‘Of course not,’ she says. ‘The Order practises mercy.’

When I have gathered myself enough to look around, I see that we are in a small room. At the far end is a window. The floor is woven matting, and the walls are soundproofed. But not with the ornate white tiles I have seen elsewhere. Here the tiling is dark brown wood and there are cracks in parts of it, though the silence is intact. There’s a washbasin at one wall and a recess to the right for a narrow single bed. On the left-hand side, there’s an internal door covered in the same soundproofed material.