The maintenance chapel had become a warehouse without anyone taking down its saints.
They watched from their niches above coils of spare hose: solemn stone workers carrying tongs, lamps, and the sort of wrench that had ceased to be made three hundred years earlier. Someone had hung a stocking from one saint’s raised thumb. The toe dripped into a bucket.
Iven approved of putting a useless hand to work.
Outside, Asa was dividing people between the chapel steps and the high street. Rung Gate’s final impact had carried to the back of the ward. Now everyone wanted to be somewhere else at once.
“The roof,” Iven told her. “There’s a receiving gantry above the bell. The galleries can send a cage.”
“Can they see us?”
He looked up through the broken stairwell. Gray air filled the roof opening. The bell tower stood above it, slightly crooked, its lower landing lost to an old fall of masonry.
“They can hear us.”
“Iven.”
“They will.”
She studied him, then pushed a length of rope into his hands.
“Make it quick enough that I don’t have time to regret believing you.”
Brin appeared with an elderly man in a cap. The man had the furious dignity of someone dragged from bed while still composing his objection.
“Found her father,” Brin said.
The woman from the gate caught his shoulders. He tried to explain something about a cold kettle. She hugged him too tightly to listen.
Iven looked away and began to climb.
The stair had once wound around the chapel’s central chimney. Its lower flight was broken, but the attachment points remained. He hooked his rope through a sound iron ring and pulled. A flake of rust came off. The ring did not move.
He tested it again before trusting his weight to it.
Brin held the rope below. Iven put one foot against the chimney, pushed, and caught the surviving stair with his free hand. Hot pain dragged across his freshly bound left forearm.
The graft was an addition his body had not yet agreed to accommodate.
He hauled himself onto the landing. Through the hole in the roof, he could see the overhead freight lines stretched between the saddles. A cage moved in the distance, small against Mercy’s broad armored ridge. Farther beyond, a different Marcher’s back rose out of the basin haze like an island.
He had lived aboard Mercy all his life and still sometimes forgot the scale of what carried him.
A low shudder traveled through the chimney. Below, someone called a child’s name.
He pulled Brin up after him.
“Stay on the stair. Don’t put weight on the outer rail.”
“It looks fine.”
“So did the man who sold it.”
The bell hung inside a timber frame. It was larger than a wash barrel, green with age except where hands and rope had polished the lower edge. A crack ran upward from its mouth, branching beside an old repair staple. The clapper rested at an unnatural angle.
Iven set down his tools and put his uninjured hand against the bronze.
Nothing happened.
Good. For an instant the absence steadied him. He did not want a miracle that decided for itself when to begin. He wanted something he could understand.
He lifted the clapper. Its pin was bent, and the upper bearing had seized. The bell had probably cracked when someone tried to force it after the last failure. Instead of repairing the pivot, they had pulled harder on the rope.
He could feel the history of the bad decision without needing a graft.
“Get the little bucket from below,” he told Brin. “The one under the saint. And the longest straight nail you can find.”
“A holy nail?”
“That would be ideal. Ordinary iron will have to stand in.”
While Brin went down, Iven tested the wooden beam. One fastening was loose, but the frame had not shifted. The receiving gantry above was a separate structure. It might still carry a rescue cage if the upper station had a captain willing to try it.
First they had to attract that captain.
Iven removed the clapper’s retaining washer. The pin would not slide. He heated the bearing with the small oil lamp left in the stair niche, keeping the flame clear of the dry timber, then tapped the pin with his hammer.
It moved a fraction.
He tapped again.
The next strike rang up his arm. The graft tightened beneath its bandage, an involuntary little contraction. He stopped and breathed until the sensation faded.
“Don’t help,” he told it. “I haven’t asked you anything yet.”
He was talking to his arm. Less than an hour after stealing a graft and already he was becoming the sort of man people avoided at lunch.
Brin returned with the bucket and a fistful of nails, followed by Asa carrying a lantern.
“The chapel has room,” she said. “Its air won’t stay good forever.”
“How bad below?”
“People are coughing. Vale’s keeping them sitting upright. We opened every high window that isn’t nailed shut.”
“Open the nailed ones.”
She handed Brin the lantern and took Iven’s hammer. Their hands brushed. He noticed she was trembling.
“You don’t have to stay up here,” he said.
“I’m going to break windows. It’s the nicest part of my morning.”
She went back down.
Brin shifted the parcel under his coat before taking the clapper’s weight.
“Whose medicine?” Iven asked.
“Hemm’s. Seam Three.”
“Why is it still here?”
“Because Hemm’s down there now. I put him by Vale.” Brin looked toward the broken roof. “It needs mixing with clean water, and she said to wait until we had some.”
Iven glanced at the bucket. Water carried rust, oil, and the taste of an old roof. He had almost suggested using it.
“Good,” he said. “You did right.”
Brin pulled the rope a little tighter. He had the guarded expression of someone trying not to appear too pleased by a small compliment.
“Neri’s looking for another apprentice,” Iven said.
“She’s looking for someone who can read drawings.”
“You can read.”
“Words. Those drawings are all arrows with opinions.”
Iven took the bent pin and drew two circles on a patch of dry dust. He added a line through them, then pointed at the clapper in Brin’s hands.
The boy looked from the marks to the assembly.
“That’s it?”
“That’s some of it. If I drew every part at once, nobody would understand anything.”
“Your circles are bad.”
“Yes. It’s a technical weakness.”
Brin studied the marks again. “I could learn those.”
“Tell her that. After we’ve got Hemm his water.”
From below came a sharp crack and Asa’s satisfied shout. One of the nailed windows opened. A current of cooler air moved up the stairwell, carrying the smell of her bread stall under the hot metal.
Brin set his feet more securely and lifted the clapper when Iven asked. This time he watched where the load went. Iven saw him notice the rope pressing against its support and adjust the angle without being told.
They might yet make something useful out of the morning.
Iven worked the bent pin free, supporting the clapper before it could fall. Brin held the weight with a loop of rope while Iven cleaned the bearing. The bucket water turned black. He selected a straight nail, found it too soft, selected another, then cut a replacement pin from the shank of a spare bolt in his tool roll.
That bolt had cost him two silver scales. He had been saving it for a paying job.
He filed the end until it fit.
The clapper swung freely.
Brin grinned. “Done.”
“No.”
“It moves.”
“So does a tooth before it falls out.”
Iven tapped the bell’s mouth with a screwdriver. A dull buzzing answered. The crack was open enough to dissipate the vibration before it traveled around the body. They could swing the clapper all day and make less useful noise than Asa was making downstairs.
He studied the old repair staple. Someone had drilled sound holes on either side of the original crack and driven a bronze bridge through them. The bridge had loosened. Under it, dirt and corrosion kept the crack’s edges apart.
He cleaned the staple seats with his awl. The slit was too narrow to scrape all the way, but the dirt near the mouth gave under a strip of wire.
“When I lift this,” he told Brin, “pull the staple tight. Slowly. If you hear anything sharp, stop.”
“How will I know?”
“You’ll dislike it.”
Together they reset the staple, drawing the damaged edges closer without forcing them against each other. Iven made a spreading washer from the back of a broken tin sign and tightened it under the retaining nut. The repair would not last a season. It might last a morning.
Sometimes a morning was the entire specification.
He tapped the bronze again.
This time the sound lingered.
Brin’s face changed. He glanced toward the street as though expecting a cage to arrive on the strength of that one small note.
Iven knew better. The bell was sheltered between the tower walls. The upper galleries lay beyond a thick service partition and the ridge of the next block. The ordinary alarm line that had once carried a signal from the tower had been removed for parts.
He had found its severed end beside the stair.
He took the rope and drew the clapper back.
Before he released it, he looked down.
Through the chapel roof opening he could see people sitting in the nave: an attendant handing out damp cloths, a woman rubbing an old man’s back, children lined along a wall painted with blue flowers. Someone had brought a cushioned chair for a woman who could not bend her knees. A girl beside her was folding paper birds, holding each one up for approval before setting it in her lap.
Iven let the clapper go.
The bell struck.
The sound filled the tower, rough-edged but true. His left hand went hot.
For a heartbeat he felt two motions at once: the bronze flexing, and the place inside his arm where that flex might begin again.
He almost lost the rope.
The sound faded. The second motion remained.
He stared at his forearm.
“What?” Brin asked.
Iven flexed his fingers. He could feel the bell’s action without touching the bell. Not a remembered note; a sequence of pressure and release, something his hand had learned how to perform.
He understood why restorers called the acquisition settling. A pattern that had belonged to the repair now occupied a place inside him.
He wanted to laugh.
He wanted to try it on everything in reach.
The chapel’s lower door slammed, and the coughs below grew louder.
He could enjoy himself later.
“Hold the rope,” he told Brin. “I’m going to the wall.”
The wall facing the service gallery contained the end of an old signaling strut, a bar of iron once used to carry the bell’s vibration through the partition. The outside length was gone, but the socket ran into sound stone. Iven touched it with his right hand first. Cold iron. Nothing remarkable.
He placed his left palm beside it.
The pattern under his skin answered.
“Get behind the frame,” he said.
Brin did not argue this time.
Iven drew a breath and tried to reproduce the bell’s motion in the iron.
The first attempt was barely a knock. It still hurt, a needle of pressure behind his ear. He snatched his hand away.
Brin’s mouth moved.
“What?” Iven asked.
“I said, was that it?”
The words were muffled, as though the boy had put his head inside a bucket.
Iven swallowed. The sensation eased slightly. He had pushed too broadly, feeding the action back through his own hand and skull instead of directing it into the socket. Or the graft’s damaged return was doing something he did not yet understand.
He looked toward the empty vessel’s coupling kit at his feet.
There would be time to understand it if he could make this work.
From below came Asa’s voice, thin through the tower opening.
“Iven. We’ve got someone on the roof.”
He moved to the gap. On the upper gantry, beyond an expanse of missing roof, a figure waved both arms. The person was too far for him to hear, but a yellow pennant hung from one hand.
A transport signaler.
The signaler pointed toward the gallery, then held up a clenched fist. Waiting. They had heard something. They needed a recognized emergency sequence before the station would release a cage onto the chapel’s neglected line.
Three short. Two long. Three short.
Every child aboard Mercy learned it. Almost none ever needed to use it.
Iven returned to the socket. He pressed his left palm against the iron, braced his right hand on the stone, and pictured where he wanted the force to go.
Not through him. Through the bar, into the gallery, past the closed gate.
The pattern waited beneath his skin, precise and ready.
He gave it somewhere to strike.