The test room was a corner of the yard office that Tavin had walled off with planks years ago, for weighing crystal. It had a scale on a stone slab, a narrow bench, a window that looked out on the quench tank, and a hook in the ceiling beam from which, that morning, Mara found a length of rope hanging. The rope ended in a loop. Below it, on the bench, lay the green valve’s sister from the reject bin, the brass cup, and Tavin’s wrist clock, face up.
Tavin stood in the doorway with his arms folded.
“Sit,” he said. “Before you touch anything, listen to me.”
She sat on the bench.
“You’ll do this every morning now,” he said. “One session. I count off my clock. Ninety heartbeats.” He held up the clock. “Your heart, not mine. I’ll take your pulse at the wrist before we start, and I’ll count from that. When I say ninety, you stop. Whatever it’s doing. Whatever it’s singing.”
He said singing. She had never heard him use the word.
“Ninety,” she said. “That’s about a minute.”
“About.”
“I listened forty minutes in the shed.”
“And you sat on the floor after.” His voice stayed low. “Ninety. Then you stop, whatever it’s doing.”
She felt the resentment rise before she could stop it, a hot quick thing. Ninety heartbeats was nothing. Ninety heartbeats was the time it took to find a valve’s hum and begin to follow the thread. In ninety heartbeats she would never have found the seam at the third turn.
“My hearing is the thing I’m good at,” she said. “It’s the one thing I can do that nobody else in this yard can do. You want me to do it for a minute a day?”
“Your hands are what I need,” Tavin said.
“That’s not a reason.”
He took his time answering. When he spoke, his voice was low.
“It’s the only one I have that isn’t a lie.”
She had nothing to say to that. She sat on the bench with her hands on her knees and looked at the clock.
Tavin came in and sat on the scale’s stone slab across from her, his bad leg out. He took a small book from his apron pocket, old, the cover soft with handling, and opened it to a page he had marked with a strip of leather.
“There are permissions,” he said. “In the old manuals. The working manuals, the ones the Founders left for whoever was going to run their lamps. I’ve read some of them. Not all.” He gave no source. “A smith in a lamp doesn’t get to do everything at once. The lamp gives permissions, one at a time, as the smith shows she can do the work. Three of them.”
He read from the book, slowly, a line at a time.
“First, a safe grip on the tools. Second, access to deeper chambers. Third, authority to alter a heart’s load.” He closed the book on his finger. “That’s the order. You don’t get the second without the first. You don’t get the third without the second.”
“Who gives them?”
“The lamp. The forge in the lamp. Whatever’s left of the Founders’ machinery.” He tapped the book. “And here’s the part that matters. Nobody gets the load by blood. Nobody gets it because of who their mother was, or who taught them, or what they can hear. They get it by test. By showing the work.”
She thought about that. “Then anybody could.”
“Anybody who could pass the test.”
“How many people have passed it?”
“On Cinder?” Tavin put the book back in his apron. “None that I know of, and none in living memory.” He looked at the rope hanging from the beam. “That’s not why I’m telling you. I’m telling you because if you ever stand in front of a thing that gives you a permission, you’ll want to think it chose you. It didn’t. It tested you. There’s a difference, and you’ll need to remember it.”
She looked at the rope too.
“Who pulls me out?” she said. “If I go too far. If I don’t stop at ninety.”
“I do.” He stood up, went to the rope, and took the loop in one hand. “You’ll have the loop around your waist. I’ll stand here and count aloud. At ninety, I say stop. If you don’t stop, I pull. If I pull and you fight me, I pull harder.” He let go of the loop. “That’s all. I’m not going to talk about anything else this morning until you have the count right.”
So they did the count.
He took her pulse first, two fingers on the inside of her left wrist, his eyes on the clock. He took it for a full minute, counting under his breath, and then he said a number, and nodded, and wrote it on the back of his hand.
Then he took a sheet of paper from the drawer under the bench, a long ruled sheet, and a pencil, and drew lines down it. One line. Two. He wrote headings at the top in his square hand: TIME. HEARTBEATS. WHAT THE SMITH SAYS SHE HEARS.
She looked at the sheet. Three columns.
“I want a fourth,” she said. “For today’s sounds and old ones.”
He asked nothing about what she meant, or about the bell, or the shed, or the notebook with its two columns and its empty third. He took the pencil and ruled a fourth line down the right edge of the sheet and wrote at the top of it, in smaller letters: TODAY / OLD.
He did it without comment, and that, more than anything he had said, made her throat go tight.
“Loop,” he said.
She stood and put the loop over her head and pulled it down to her waist. The rope was rough and smelled of tar. Tavin took up the slack until it ran taut from her waist to the beam to his hand, and he braced his good leg against the bench.
She sat. She tucked the wire behind her ear and pressed the cup to the valve.
“Start,” he said, and began to count.
His voice was low and even. One. Two. Three. He counted in time with something she could not hear, the pulse he had taken, and the count went on under everything like a floor.
She found the valve’s hum at about twelve. A grey drone, the usual cast-metal sound, nothing in it at first. She waited. At thirty she found a thread, faint and high, steady. At forty-five it wavered, and she followed the waver along the bore, slowly, carefully, and at sixty she found where it caught: not at a turn this time but at the flange, where the bolt holes were, a small rough stutter like a fingernail on cloth.
Seventy.
She leaned in. The stutter had something under it. She could almost hear it, a second voice, lower, older.
Eighty.
The graft warmed behind her ear. The pleasure came up, the same small hungry warmth she had felt at the valve drill, wanting the next part of the sound, the part underneath.
Eighty-five.
She pressed the cup harder.
Ninety. Stop.
She stopped.
She did not want to. Every part of her wanted to keep the cup where it was, to find the second voice, to follow it down. The tone was still ringing when she lifted the cup away, still ringing after, in her skull, as though the valve had not noticed she had gone. She sat with the cup in her lap and the rope taut at her waist and her heart going fast, and she did not put the cup back.
The rope hung slack. Tavin had not had to pull.
He let the slack out slowly. He came over, picked up the pencil, and held it out to her.
She took the sheet and wrote, in the first column, the time from his clock. In the second, 90. In the third: grey drone. high thread from 30. stutter at flange, bolt holes, from 60. something under it. In the fourth, after a moment’s thought: today.
Then, below the row, because it was true, she wrote: Stopped at ninety. Tone still on.
Tavin read it over her shoulder. He nodded once at the last line, a small short movement of the chin.
He took the sheet from her and carried it out into the yard, and she followed him, the rope still around her waist, forgotten. He went to the wall above the bench where the chalk letters stood, LISTEN, FOLD, QUENCH, 9 HOURS, and he took a nail from his apron and pinned the log to the brick beside them, at eye level, where anyone who came to the bench would see it.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Same time. Same count.”
He went back to his work.
She stood in front of the wall with the loop around her waist and looked at the sheet. One row filled. Thirty more rows ruled below it, empty, waiting. The chalk letters beside it said LISTEN in large square capitals, and the log said 90, and between them was the whole of what she was now allowed to do.
The tone from the valve had finally faded from her skull. She could still feel where it had been, a faint warmth behind her ear, a shape left in the air of her head.
She took the loop off and coiled the rope in her hands. Ninety heartbeats. A minute, about. She looked at the log, at the empty rows below the first one, and hung the coiled rope on its nail beside the valve, where her hand could find it in the dark.