And it’s like my hands have ears. My fingertips reach out and at last touch something. Something that is smooth and cool. Alive in its silence, or with silence growing from it like roots. My hands close.
When I lift them clear, I’m holding a lump slicked with muck and grit. The thing, whatever it is, pulses with milky light and a weird world-calming silence. I wipe it on the coat, spit on it, wipe again and hold it up in the fading light. A fist-sized nugget of silver mettle. All twisted as if it’s been kneaded by some great heat.
I stand there and my heart slows and I feel the silence come into me and with it a kind of peace. Then there is a loud splash and I jump. About a foot from where I’m standing heavy ripples spread out in the oily water. I take a step forward and something flies past my ear and lands next to me in the dirt and grit with a thump. I stoop to look — it’s hard as a brick, slick in greybrown mud. Then the world cracks open in stars.
Pain in everything. Pain that is blackness. Blackness broken by stars, veined in red. It licks the side of my head and moves off to leave me still in the water at last. Tacet dark with the watery light and my head in the stillness halfway between strand and sky, halfway between water and air. And there is old code flickering down at me to say, whatever there is of meaning in the letters blinking, and what is it? Bricked high and stretching up into whatever sky’s still left. Old letters blinking and old brick stretching, and my upsidedown mind shifts against my will and a snatch of song buried deep dislodged too late. With words that go together with the tune. In the quiet days of power, it says against my will too late, seven ravens in the tower.
And subito I am with my mother. We are standing in a forcinghouse. She is singing the song to me in notes that I repeat after her.
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.
I wish to hold on to my mother’s voice with its dark vowels, but she is insistent and tells me that I must repeat it, that it is very important. The notes go down, down, down.
Head in the river, I go down with the song into the place of cool darkness where mud will cover my eyes and stop my mouth and—
Wrenching.
A slap.
Something shakes me and I spit out water, gulp in air. Rough hands roll and pull me and I’m out of the water and blinking light again.
In front of me stand a pair of legs in ragged jeans. Then a face pushes into mine. It’s broken in a grin of contempt. Brown hair in hacked clumps. Anger rising like a smell. A thickset guy of prentiss age, anywhere between fifteen and eighteen winters on him.
‘What the god d’you think you’re doing raking our fucking turn?’
Before I can move the prentiss drops his full weight onto my chest, pins my shoulders with his knees.
The silver nugget.
Something in me fights to keep it. I tighten my grip and try to roll, but he is too heavy.
‘You fucker. What’ve you got?’
His mudgritted hands scrabble at mine, pulling up fingers one by one; then he wrenches the nugget from out of my grasp and I am left with nothing but a handful of thamesmuck.
The look on his face as he holds it up to the waning light is strange. The mettle has given him confidence. He shifts his weight on my shoulders.
‘You’re on our run.’ The weight gets harder; his face pushes closer. ‘What do you think happens to riverscum we find on our run?’
There is no guildsign on his shirt. He is not a prentiss at all. Which makes no sense. No guild means no work; no work means no bodymemory; no bodymemory and it’s a quick step to memoryloss for certain. But his eyes are sharp, and his movements are smooth and sure.
Then from behind him I hear a second voice. It says, ‘Leave him, Brennan.’
It is cool and clear, the voice, like at the very end of Chimes when the pain shifts off and it’s just the notes hanging in the air.
The one called Brennan shifts his weight from off my shoulders and sits back on his heels lento. I’m into a crouch so that I can run if I need to. His heavy threat behind me.
But I cannot run.
For one thing, Brennan is holding my bag. He has my memories. For another, I want to see the owner of the second voice. The one with the cool silver in it like the last notes of Chimes.
He’s standing a few paces back on the strand. He is lean and tall and pale, and he’s wearing too-large trousers made from green roughcloth, and no shirt. His trousers are pulled in with a thick leather strap. He has wide, bony shoulders and there is light in his curled hair.
But none of that matters. What I stare at are his eyes. They are so pale he must be close to blind, each with a pinprick blank pupil in the middle of its milky white. With these strange sightless eyes he looks straight at me. He walks forward and when he is close, he stops and proffers his hand. The gesture is like a mockery of introduction, and I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of a response. He stands there for a little; then the edge of his mouth twitches up.
‘You’ll have to excuse Brennan,’ he says. ‘He’s very protective of our territory.’
They take me to a storehouse on a place they call West India Key. In the middle of the room is a drum with a glowing fire in its belly. The wood of the floor is cut out from round it, and the drum has been lowered into that and banked with riverstones to keep in warmth. A big black beaten-up teakettle hangs from a mettle wire strung over the drum’s open head.
Another one of them is in the room, standing still as a frighted rabbit in the light of the stove. They call him Abel and the leader cuffs the back of his head friendly enough as he passes. He is a good few planting seasons younger than me, with a thin-lipped scar down the far side of one cheek that ends a narrow step from the vein under his jawbone. Whatever happened was a close-run thing.
The storehouse is warm. On one side, hammocks hang from the roof beams. I am floating with tiredness in the warmth, and I have my coat and my bag close by. I wind the leather straps round my hands, pull them tight to my fingers so the blood gets painful and the pain keeps me awake. I see the one called Brennan notice what I am doing, shift his eyes back to the fire.
The leader’s pupils are larger here, as if he can see more in the half-darkness of the storehouse. He sits both inside and outside the small circle of light. And then he interrupts the silence.
‘So, what’s a lone farmboy doing prospecting in London?’
I don’t say anything.
‘Did you lose your parents in the market?’
The small one called Abel speaks then, piano. ‘Maybe we let him get his bearings awhile, Lucien?’ he says. ‘He looks half drowned.’
‘We took pity on him on the strand. We’ve given him dinner. We have been altogether very friendly and hospitable. But you know, Abel, we can’t afford to keep a houseguest.’ Lucien glances at me and the corners of his mouth twitch again, as if we’re both in on a grand joke.
‘He got lucky today stumbling on the Lady like that. But look at him — just another scumsifter. Likely doesn’t even know his rudiments. I’d bet in a dark room he couldn’t tell his nose from his arse.’
I’m angry, as I see he means me to be.