Sonja solves this problem by sitting at the stool. She reaches to the side of the instrument and makes a series of adjustments to the mechanism there. Then she places her hands on the central keyboard. The instrument is so large it seems to swallow her.
A second’s pause and then a muted miracle of voices springs up. Her hands play clustered chords and her feet too, moving deft over the lower pedals like a dancer. It is a simple Bach prelude. Halfway through, she changes the stops and the plain voices are joined and sustained by throaty woodwinds. The simple melody doubles and twists like a wonderful heavy rope of gold.
At the end she sits back, her hands still alive and alert on the keyboard. She doesn’t look away, but every part of her is listening for Lucien’s response.
If only she could see him, it would feed whatever she is hungry for. Lucien’s face is wide in wonder.
He walks forward to stand beside her. ‘May I?’ he asks. Sonja nods. He places his hand carefully on the upper keyboards, runs his fingertips over the drawerknobs to left and right.
Sonja takes Lucien’s hands and places them in the correct configuration on the central keyboard. With efficient movements she lowers the stool for him. He sits and his attitude is one of reserve, almost constraint. His head is bent and he listens close to what Sonja is telling him.
In undertaking to learn, to teach herself the skill reserved only for the Order’s elect, Sonja has done something I would have never thought possible: she has surprised her brother.There is nothing much for me to do but sit and watch and be silent. The room has filled with a buzz of excitement and concentration that rises off the pair of them and threads through the honeycomb of the wall’s carving.
Sonja is blinking fast. She has dragged a chair in to sit next to Lucien at the stool. He plays an experimental scale. She flexes her fingers back, elbows him out of the way, demonstrates something. Lucien nods twice, replaces his hands on the instrument, repeats a phrase. ‘Like this?’
Sonja has turned the bellows off now, so the instrument does not sound, but it is clear that for the two of them, there is no impediment to the music. In their heads, it is as clear as a bell and echoing into the soundproofed chamber.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ says Sonja.
Then, ‘No, the fingering’s wrong. If you do it like that, you won’t be able to keep it sustained. Here, swap the thumb under.’
Then, ‘Here.’ And another demonstration. After a while they are playing music. I hear the complicated runs as they swap places back and forth.
‘Use the pedal to play the cantus firmus here. It’s louder than the manuals. No. You need to use the other stop for it. That’s right.’
I sit in the chair and I doze off and on. They work together through all the minor hours of the night.
I come awake at some point and Sonja is curled up like a cat on the rush matting with her cloak over her and Lucien is thundering silently away. His elbows are out like wings and I can tell he’s playing the Bach prelude. He moves from the top keyboards to the bottom in fluid movements. Again and again. Then he breaks and plays repeated phrases, selecting different stops. His feet tread light on the pedals.
I sit and wonder for a while. In the two or so hours since I was awake, he has gone from awkwardness to near-mastery.
Before Matins tolls Sonja leaves, as she must, to return to the Orkestrum. Anything else would arouse suspicion, and they will be listening closely to her movements, she says. Keep to the room, stay away from the windows. If anyone comes to the door, do not answer.
Lucien is practising what we have written so far. Putting the music into the Carillon’s voices, changing the story into imaginable and unimaginable sound.
I hear him singing repeated phrases, the tamping sound of the keys moving, presto and then lento. Every now and again he comes out to me to check a story, a phrase, a detail. I play it on Sonja’s recorder. Then he disappears and it transmutes into that soft, deadened sound, the keys hitting muted strings.
I count the tolls, and time creeps on. I lean against the tiled walls of the practice room and I wait.
At None Sonja knocks a trick rhythm to signal us and then opens the door. She is carrying a plate of bread and a bowl of thin vegetable soup with herbs. She places it on the floor where I’m sitting. Her face is white and strained.
‘I’m sorry it’s not much,’ she says. ‘I said I had a headache and needed to return to chambers. I couldn’t take more without making them suspicious.’
‘What is happening in there?’ I ask, gesturing toward the Orkestrum.
Her words are clipped. ‘It is hard to know. Things continue as normal. There is no word of Martha. But they have started searching the students’ quarters. We do not have much time.’ Then she breaks off. ‘Where is Lucien?’ she asks.
I point to the practice room. ‘He has not left there all day.’
Sonja goes into the inner room briefly, then comes out. She is tacet for a while after, and when she speaks it is as if we are continuing an argument.
‘You know that it is very dangerous for anybody without the correct training to enter the sacrum musicae,’ she says. ‘Let alone to be in the tonic chamber, to play the instrument.’
I suppose that I did know that. If Chimes can damage human ears and minds as far away as London, it follows that to be within the Carillon would be much worse. I have tried not to think about it.
‘But Lucien is not untrained,’ I say. ‘He was selected as a novice. He started the training process. And what about his gift? He was marked to play the instrument from birth.’
Sonja looks at me. She speaks piano.
‘You really have no idea, do you? Of what is required. Of the kind of sacrifice involved. To play the instrument, the priests give up everything. Not just family or time or a so-called ordinary life. They give everything to the Order and to the Carillon. Their hearts, their bodies. Their minds.
‘When Lucien left the Citadel, that’s when his real training would have begun. He would have started with four hours of meditation a day. Broken up into blocks at first. Then the rest devoted solely to practice and study. The novices must master all instruments. A mastery that outshines that of the finest soloists you can hear in the cities. They study until they know rudiments and counterpoint inside and out. They fast and they meditate and they work. And after five years they’re allowed to enter the sacrum musicae. Not to play, not to even touch the instrument. They are allowed to enter the first of the seven chambers.’
She stands straighter. ‘At any time in the Order, there are only three or four priests who are able to enter the tonic chamber. Always at least three, never more than four. And that includes the magister musicae, the one who composes the Chimes you hear every day in the city. Being in there while the Carillon is sounding would break a citizen’s eardrums.
‘You have no comprehension of this world. None at all. The sacrifice they make is immense. It is beautiful.’
She is so unhappy. She stands in her fine robes and my mind flashes up a picture of the first time I saw Lucien, covered in thamesmud, his roughcloth clothing, his shoulders broadboned and lean and his hair full of light.
‘The sacrifice might be beautiful,’ I say, and I try to keep my voice somewhat gentle. ‘But that’s because it is chosen. Because it is made freely. We don’t have that choice. Our memories are taken from us by Chimes without choice or will.’
The look she gives me is one of pure hate. Her neck lengthens and she tilts her head back in a familiar imperious manner.