The Whisper of the High Choir

Dragging the iron-capped toe of his left boot against the limestone riser—a dry, harsh scrape measuring the climb step by step to compensate for his lack of motor reflex—Anselm calculated he had less than four minutes before the chapter opened the blowdown valves of the nave. Sixty-four. Sixty-five. Each step demanded throwing his entire weight onto his right hip, fitting the femur into the aching socket, and pivoting his torso before pulling the leather strap that bound his dead thigh to the knee brace. The reinforcing metal screeched against the damp stone with the regularity of a lead pendulum. It would have been easier to stop at the middle landing, press his forehead against the cold ashlar, and wait for his heart to stop pounding against his collarbones, but in the blind stretches of the spiral staircase there was no ventilation; the air rose from the lower boilers laden with a thick, rancid vapor, a lukewarm emulsion of lard and burned mineral grease that clung to the throat's mucosa like a warm varnish.

The pewter stirrup riveted to his left temple transmitted the rhythm of the temple directly into the bones of his face: a sharp, dull, constant hum that did not enter through the ear canal but instead made the roots of his upper molars tremble with every sway of the anchor three floors below. Clack-thud. Clack-thud. It was a flawed beat, slightly limping, much like his own gait. As he rounded the curve of the ninetieth step, the temperature shift between the stairwell draft and the drafts of the upper galleries condensed the vapor upon the round lenses of his magnifying glasses. The world dissolved into a yellowish, blurred smear of lime and forge shadows.

He stopped dead.

With a hand gloved in rancid leather, he slid his glasses down to the bridge of his nose. He rubbed the left lens with the inner corner of his buckram smock—the only part not stiffened by emery dust or lubricant—and blinked twice to clear the grit burning his tear ducts. The tight skin around the rivets of his temple prosthesis itched; a crust of dried lymph had formed around the lower bolt, but scratching there with dirty fingers would have meant risking a suppuration that the infirmary would treat with copper sulfate and a fire tong. He waited for his breathing to flatten. He counted ten pulses in his neck artery. Just ten.

On the landing of the second triforium, silhouetted against the open embrasure overlooking the abyss of the main nave, Friar Bartholomew was neither praying nor watching the counterweight chains; he was tapping the brass dial of a column pressure gauge with the clean nail of his index finger.

"The coil has air," the friar said without turning, as if Anselm’s metallic limp had been cataloged in a ledger long before he rounded the corner of the pillar.

"It is condensation," Anselm replied, keeping his left foot nailed to the flagstone so the orthotic joint wouldn't click. "It purges itself when the one-o'clock valve opens."

"The new rapeseed oil comes with impurities. It smells like fried fish all along the north bay. The junior sacristan says the pure wax candles are bending from the draft's humidity."

"The draft has always been bad in November."

"In November three years ago we didn't have to scrape green soot off Saint John's lattices," Bartholomew retorted, running a meticulous fingertip along the bronze rim of the instrument. "You're carrying the big file in your pocket. You can tell by the way your skirt hangs."

Anselm didn't move. If Bartolomé took two steps to the left and looked down at the cuff of his trousers, he would see the oiled rag wrapping the tempered steel awl and the adjustment shims not listed on the chapter inventory, and then he would have to answer why a mere apprentice carried master tools.

"I need to check the connecting rod shims on the vespers rocker arm," Anselm said, his voice flat, neutral, devoid of any inflection that invited a reply.

Bartholomew looked at him out of the corner of his eye. His eyes were small, surrounded by skin yellowed and waxy from vigils in the middle galleries, and the collar of his habit was so stiff with cheap starch it left a red mark beneath his jawline every time he tilted his head.

"Hurry up. If the lauds bell sounds a quarter of a micron off, the provincial of the order is going to want to know if the fault lies with the foundry or the clumsy fingers of the reed tuners."

The friar turned on his heel, with the dry rustle of twill brushing against the cast-iron balusters, and vanished down the hallway leading to the secondary valves without looking back.

This was what Anselm found upon breaching the riveted sheet-metal door leading to the high choir: a narrow gallery, suspended like a mining catwalk between the ribbed stone vaults and the mechanism of the great carillon, where the air vibrated at a frequency so dense the metal seemed on the verge of sweating mercury.

The horizontal transmission shaft—a cylindrical bar of soft iron eight inches in diameter—revolved at knee height with a dull lament, dragging in unison the cams that governed the liturgical hammers and the counterweights of the terminal blades located two hundred feet below, above the stocks of the choir penitents. Each revolution lifted a very fine mist of water oxygenated by the heat, a brackish spray laden with microscopic splinters of rust that fell upon the railings and formed a reddish sludge over the ribbed floor plates. Anselm took three steps, dragging his boot, leaning against the black iron handrail until the toe of his healthy foot stumbled upon something both soft and metallic.

He crouched. The pain in his left side was a cold, vertical stab that rose from his atrophied glute to the base of his skull.

Beneath the shadow of a return connecting-rod cap, kneeling over a burlap sack soaked in dark grease, Sister Melisenda was cleaning a plate with a hemp rag. She hadn't rolled up her habit sleeves; she had tucked them up to her elbows and secured them with bale wire, exposing slender forearms covered in vapor burn scars and battery acid splatters. Between her graphite-stained fingers she held the curved frame of a jeweler's coping saw.

The saw blade was snapped in two.

At her feet, in the gap where the drive bar meshed with the toothed sector of the main anchor, a bed of bronze shavings glowed with a golden, oily paleness amid the bearing soot. These weren't filings produced by the natural wear of two metals in friction. They were thin curls, perfect spirals born from the patient, clandestine, and rhythmic advance of a hardened steel tooth cutting into the spine of the master gear.

"Your eyelids are twitching, Anselm," she said without lifting her eyes from the shaft, passing her thumb over the fresh notch to check its depth with her nail. "It's the implant. When Bartholomew forces the tail boiler to gain two pounds of draft, the hum makes you squint."

"You've sawed three millimeters off the thrust face," he said. His own voice sounded strange to him, muffled by the roaring pistons beating behind the refractory brick partitions. "As soon as the pressure rises to four atmospheres for the dawn mass, the tooth is going to shear off. The ratchet won't engage. The carillon is going to run wild on the flywheel."

Melisenda didn't try to hide the broken saw. She laid it on the cast-iron crossbeam with a dry tinkle, a tiny sound instantly swallowed by the dull thud of the exhaust.

"To save a brother is a sin of pride if doing so means derailing the chapter's mass," she dropped with a methodical, almost liturgical calm, as if she were reciting a passage from the workshop ordinances by memory while wiping her thumb on her apron.

The phrase hung suspended between them, sticky as the animal grease dripping from the upper guides into the drainage channel.

Melisenda reached into the inner pocket of her habit and pulled out a crude, triangular piece, hand-cast in a wet sand mold. It was a wedge of soft lead, with burred edges and an apex flattened by a prior chisel blow. She leaned toward him and placed it in his bare palm. The metal was cold, heavy, possessing that opaque, malleable density that failed to return the hand's warmth.

"Keep it," she whispered to him, and for the first time she raised her eyes; they were grey, clouded by the continuous effort of gazing at tiny parts under the flickering light of the combustion inspection ports. "If you wedge it between the rocker arm and the safety stop before the carillon starts, the escapement will miss its cycle and the boiler will blow through the exterior relief valves without touching the pit. But if you leave it in your pocket, Anselm... if you let the anchor recover the tempo you marked with the vernier when guard changed, the chapter's blade will drop at the sixth chime."

She paused. A burst of steam escaped from a loose flange three paces away, hissing like a blind viper against the flags of the triforium.

"And your own brother is first in line for the dawn stocks."

Silence.

Anselm closed his fingers around the wedge. The lead yielded slightly under the desperate pressure of his thumb, leaving a greyish, brackish mark on the pad of his cracked skin.

How many seconds of delay were required for a man to cease belonging to the liturgy and begin belonging to the wash?