The bell rang. Brannoc heard it before he saw anything at all, in the chest first and then in the hand, the white one, where the weft of the wrist had begun to answer the sound as a plucked wire answers a finger. He was standing on the flooded step of the tower’s inner door, with the water at his waist and the sky a grey lid overhead, and the note came up through the stone under the water and into the soles of his feet. It was long and low. It went down into the lake and came back up slowly, like a bucket hauled from a well, heavy and dripping.
It was not the chapel bell’s note. He had known that the chapel bell was cracked and tired, and its voice had always been a short thin hum, like a tin pot struck with a spoon. This bell was the other thing. It was the note he had dreamed for months, and in the dream it had never once been short. It rang all the way through him and out the other side, and he stood in the door with his mouth open and his eyes shut and let it.
