The chime didn’t sound like the academy silver bells that signaled the start of a disputation on the Upper Terraces. Those bells were cast from refined tin and mountain silver, tuned to a ghostly minor third that hung in the vaulted lecture halls like cold incense.
The sound that came from the brass arch at two bells before midnight was a dull, iron clonk-ping, like a boiler rivet striking a cold flat stone slab after being snapped off by a cold chisel.
Pella had been asleep with her forehead resting on the back kitchen table. Her cheek was pressed against the rough fibers of a folded wool drying rag. The single animal fat candle stuck to a chipped saucer had guttered down to a greasy yellow nub that smelled of mutton fat and charred wick. Beside her, the washroom was thick with the cold, wet draft blowing up through the unvented floor drain, bringing the faint, stale odor of marsh gas and decomposing bladder-wrack from the harbor mud.
She sat bolt upright, her hand flying instinctively to the small bronze stop bell tied to her apron cord.
The narrow brass arch in the nook was not dark. The dull, chalky patina of green rust that usually coated its side pillars had warmed to a faint, dusky amber. At the center of the top door beam. There, the rough slate tablet had earlier shown only transient grease-pencil scratches and the glowing green countdown numerals of an active crossing, a series of…
