The Chimes (13 page)

Narrower, now. The calm, clean echo of the tiles changes into a harsh clang. It’s mettle, filled with the sharp note of rust, a strident, bright smell that pitches us on faster. The melody fills the tunnel right up and takes on an orange ferrous darkness and ringing speed. Try not to trip over your own feet as they outpace you.

Clare takes the lead, shifts us through some tricky cross rhythms and time changes. It’s jaunty, full of darting offbeat flurries. After five bars of the same four-four time, there is a quick near-blind corner and then the path doubles back awhile. Then it breaks into a triplet rhythm, three-eight, for about the same distance. Each version of the tune darts out into another tunnel juncture.

We are breathing presto when we reach the final spurt of the first subject. From there, it’s into a drawn-out, restful melody with long strides all heading northwest. Clare sets our pace at a rolling trot. I put my hands to the walls and feel rough concrete then slim wiring along it, at about the level of my head. It’s a comms tunnel.

The lines of wire, someone said, I don’t remember who, used to be how sound travelled. I don’t understand this, as they are not tight stretched like cello or viol strings, but slack and covered in stickwrap.

After a while we’re coming near to where Lucien sang the Lady’s cadence. I start to listen for her as we run, wait for the telltale drops of silence, the silver shiver.

When her silence speaks out, I pull on Clare’s shirt to get her to stop.

Lento steps and then the usual flash of surprise as her silver fills my mind with quiet blindness. I extend my hand in the dark ahead of me. The water is cold, and leaves and wads of stickwrap and mulched paper swim past as I try to sluice tacet through the muck. And there she is. A smooth, gnarled round and the silver bright in my ear. My fingers close on the nugget and I lift it clear of the water.

We retrace the tune and are heading clear south back to the tonic and the amphitheatre when I hear it. A high cry, cut off sharp. I stop short and Clare, a few metres ahead, wheels. In the few seconds as the echo dies, I take its bearings. We stand and wait for the sound to come again, but it does not.

‘I think that was Abel,’ Clare says. The fear in her voice makes my stomach and throat feel like they’re made of cold water.

The cry came from one of the large tunnels to the east. If I am right with my bearings, it is one of the ones with two times a man’s headroom and echoed mettle tracks. We need the straightest path there.

I force the map up in my head and look for it. I peer through the darkness and its half-lit, ghosted strands. And at last I think I have the route.

With Clare behind, I run back down the gutters of the path we came in on, ignoring all the turnings until we reach a wide brick mouth. It’s a dry stormwater drain, and a long straight run with the brick walls circling overhead. If I’m right, it will open into a service tunnel that will take us down to the tracks.

We sprint down the bricked way. I feel the sweat in my eyes. But after only a few beats of straight run I can see the tunnel’s end, sealed in brick. I curse. We come to the bricked face and slow to a walk and I draw breath. On the left wall is a blue mettle door.

It opens onto a short corridor and a curving mettle staircase. Rust under the yellow paint. At the bottom of the stair, another heavier door and I breathe relief as I know we are in the right place and it opens. We slide out at ground level, into a wide, high tunnel. Dark rusted mettle rails run under our feet.

Four or five beats from us, on the wide grey expanse of the concrete platform above, three figures are struggling. They push and turn in a strange sort of dance. Two are tall pactrunners with legs bound in black stickwrap. The third is Abel.

Abel fights silent. He spits and bites and kicks. The tallest, a thin-faced, dark-haired guy, is trying to hold his arms back while the other searches him. As we watch, Abel’s knee makes contact with the searcher’s stomach.

‘Fucking leave trying to hold him and just get him down.’ And the dark-haired one punches Abel in the face.

Clare flinches. I reach to my ankle and pull my knife. Light is coming into the station from behind us, where the tunnel emerges at ground level. But we’re standing in shadows and invisible. They must be Wandle. Why they’re in our territory I have no idea. The worse for them.

Things move lento. I pull Clare back into the stairwell, then up one flight of steps. The door to the platform is warped, but we shoulder it together in one push that scrapes harsh on the concrete.

I run with my hunting knife held close to my body, Clare with a full-throated scream, lips back and teeth bared. We’re across the platform before they can turn. Clare jumps the short one and I land a fist to the other’s head, my punch loaded with the knife handle. I feel the jolt through my arm and teeth.

He stumbles. Drops to hands and knees. I go in for the kick, but before I can connect with his ribs, he pushes up and grabs my foot. I hop on the other, kick back hard. My kick connects with shoulder, but he scuttles back and gets up with a sneer. Then he leans low and comes forward with slow sweeps of his arms, just out of reach of the knife.

I see how much bigger he is, as he bounces from foot to foot with a leer. His hair is black with dirt and oil, and his rattish face is grained with it. I flex my fingers against the knife handle, try to imagine the feel of it meeting another person’s body. It can’t be too much different from rabbit or squirrel, is what I think.

Between Ratface and me Abel lies still on the grey concrete. To my right, Clare and the other runner. Clare tight on his back, knees gripping his waist. Her forearm across his neck, and he’s pulling at it, trying to throw her off. She can’t hold him for long. If we want to get Abel clear, I need to get the tall runner down.

I move forward, holding the knife in a hammer-grip still, testing it against the air. The runner backs off, but his face is mocking. He’s watching my eyes, not the knife. He doesn’t think I’ve got the stones to use it.

As if to show he’s right, I hunch my shoulders. I let the tension go out of my neck and I drop my knife arm. I spit into the dust in front of my feet. Then I feint to my left. As he lunges forward to grab me, I twist down under his arms and behind, close enough to get my arm over his shoulder and my knife blade up under his neck. It speaks cold and hard against his jawline and he goes very still.

‘OK, OK, OK,’ he says. ‘OK.’

‘Tell your friend to let Clare go.’

The other runner is throwing himself against the wall to loosen Clare, who’s clamped to his back. I tighten my grip on the knife and Ratface calls. Clare’s runner turns, sees me with the knife and straightens, releasing his grip on Clare’s arm.

Clare slumps off, falls to her knees. She scrambles over to Abel. The runner who held her stands straight and still. He looks from me to the knife to the eyes of his leader. There’s a long gash down his face from Clare’s fingernails. None of us move, apart from Clare, who is feeling Abel’s ribs and face, listening to his breath.

My heart is beating in my ears and I feel sick. I shift my grip and adjust the pressure against the runner’s jaw. My other elbow is tight against his ribs, letting him know what will happen if he tries to twist me off. I don’t remember when I have been so close to another person. He smells of the sweet rot of clothes that have dried damp.

I throw a sharp whistle through my teeth. ‘You!’ I jerk my head at the one who still stands there bleeding. ‘Get down onto the tracks.’

Clare’s runner walks to the edge of the platform, executes a neat jump and lands on the rusted rails. Mice scatter.

What I am holding is a puzzle. How will we get away without them coming after us? Even if Abel can walk, we’ll be slow. The thought of putting one of them out of action doesn’t appeal. I take a breath, but before I can give my next order, there’s a shift in the sound on the platform.

From the edge of the tunnel where the dark bleeds out into the early light, a figure comes at a light jog. Hands lifting and skating along the air in his coming, and I swear I hear him humming underbreath too. Lucien.

He vaults up to the platform and stops a way from Clare. On the tracks at a few beats’ distance behind is Brennan. The runner I’m holding goes rigid for a second as he sees Lucien. Down on the tracks, the other runner has turned too. Then he looks back and I see Ratface shake his head once, lento. I clip his ear with the knife handle.

The next thing I hear is Lucien’s low chuckle.

‘Two, Simon?’ he asks, though I have no doubt he can hear them in mind’s ear clearer than I can see them in the half-light.

‘Yes. Wandle. They had Abel.’

‘Gentlemen,’ begins Lucien, looking direct from Clare’s runner on the platform to the one in front of me. ‘Gentlemen of Wandle. You’re in our territory.’

Down on the tracks, Clare’s runner walks closer to the edge of the platform where Lucien stands.

‘It won’t be your territory for much longer,’ he says. ‘Not if they have anything to do with it.’ And he reaches to the pocket on the side of his jeans.

‘Hey,’ I yell, and tighten my grip on the knife.

With his spare air, Ratface shouts his friend a warning, ‘
Jakes
.’

But Jakes doesn’t hear. He swaggers insolently close to the platform.

In a quick few steps Lucien is crouched beside him. His hand snakes out and he has Jakes by the T-shirt, pulled close under his throat. He grabs the runner’s hand in his fist and removes what’s crumpled in it. Then Lucien leans his head close to the runner and whispers something. A dark second passes. I cannot hear what is said, but I see the runner buckle. His legs weaken and he sways and I notice in shock that he is almost crying.

Lucien pushes him back gently. I let out my breath as he stumbles and falls loose on the tracks.

Lucien unbends and looks straight at me.

‘Under the Green Witch parallel, the territory is open. We leave you, Wandle runners, to prospect there. We typically have more than we need, so we can afford to be generous. However, it would be worth your while to keep in bounds.’ Then he nods to me.

I let go the runner I’ve been holding and shove him forward with my foot. He takes a step and then looks back, as if checking he’s done what he was supposed to do.

‘Get out,’ says Lucien, reasonably.

Ratface jumps to the tracks where Clare’s runner is still sitting on his arse. Then he roughly grabs him, pulls him to his feet, propels him forward. The fallen runner stumbles, as if some life or fight has been taken from him. They push off down the tunnel, into the dark. We are left alone in silence.

Lucien sings the melody for the quickest way back to Five Rover. Brennan takes Abel on his back and Clare walks beside, stroking Abel’s forehead now and again and murmuring to herself in disgust. I’m last. I cast a look back over the platform. I try to think how long we’ve gone without any territory dispute. Why was it worth Wandle’s while to enter our run?

Clare lies Abel down by the cookstove and tries to get some sweet milky tea into his mouth, though most of it dribbles back out. One of his eyes is swollen shut, and a bruise spreads down the side of his face. His eyes move under the lids. Lento, like he’s in no hurry to surface. And I see he needs a push to come up. Or something to reach down and hook him.

I leave the storehouse and run toward the vendors at the edges of the Cut. I run it with my footfalls hard and echoing on the flat concrete. The tunes bristle sharp with banter and haggle among the stalls and carts and blankets. A man with a tall trolley crammed with bottles stands some way down the line of them. Next to him there’s a large pot boiling on a sterno ring that wafts clouds of hot gin steam, heady with sugar and lemon.
Rum, sweetwine, porter, brandy
, goes the man’s song.
Sweetwine, ginpunch, brandy, rum
. I fish the tokens from my pocket in exchange for a small, flat bottle of his brandy. ‘Careful of the kick,’ he says, and his braying follows me down the canal.

The swig I take on the way back burns salted fire down the back of my throat and makes my eyes run. ‘Strong enough to bring anyone back from the dead’ is what I say to Clare when I hand it to her.

Later, through the curtains, I hear the muffled sound of Abel coughing, then a low murmuring until all is tacet except the rhythm of Lucien pacing. He did not speak to me when I came in, but his voice is somehow still in my head.
Do you trust me?
he asks, and the weight of his hand on my shoulder.
Every spare moment you have, try if you can to remember.
I hold my memory bag, let my fingers move over the objects. Silent textures slip through my hands without snag or speech. And then I come to rest on a piece of cloth with a frayed edge. I fetch it up.

Roughcloth. Hardy, for farm use. The colour faded. Something thrums inside me and I know I have chosen right because I smell the smell of sunheated parasheeting, the peppery perfume of daffs and a green and brown warmth and I go down . . .