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.