‘Tomorrow I’ll show you what I know, and we will try to fit the two together. Then you can decide how you wish to act hereafter. Tomorrow,’ he says. ‘Can you wait a bit longer?’ Hereafter, I think. A backwards-looking word for time that is still to come. In itself a blasphony. Before Chimes, a voice says in my head, there would have been a time for

‘Do you know what steals your memories?’ I look at him. Because it is a strange question, one that has no answer and many answers. The river of sleep takes memories down into the murk and silt. Night and the darkness take them. Waking takes them, or our own sadness. Or maybe it’s that forgetting is like a spore or blight inside each memory itself,

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 s

Oddments in thamesmud, these memories. Unlinked and unmeaning. And then I put them together in a line.

A swagman sings the there-and-back of his day’s journey, a song whose cadence closes at our village square. All journeymen, lighting their way through near distance with a day’s tune. Most people won’t venture further than a day – tarry longer from home, and the memories kept there, and risk losing the melody back.

When the weapon of dischord was destroyed – and most say that happened in the scar, out past Batter Sea – what they found in the remnants was palladium, the Pale Lady. The Lady was driven by the blast far and wide, and then she settled down, easy as you like, into the river. It’s there that we prospect her. Because palladium goes to make the Carill

I look at the nugget lying on his palm, milky silver and its strange grip of silence. ‘What is it?’ ‘You should pay more attention at Matins,’ he says. ‘This is the mettle in the river. What rose out of dischord’s ashes. This is what they pay us for.’ He closes the mettle in his palm.

After a while my ear begins to hold the tunes in my head long enough to unpick them. The official conversations are loudest – roll calls for choir and orkestra rehearsals, poliss warnings, the announcement of a funeral mass. Below those are striding public conversations – calls for new prentisses, invites to buy food or beer. Then threading through

The words are simple, because words are not to be trusted. Music holds the meaning now.