The Chains of Pendara

Chapter One: The Sound of Eleven

Mara Duvain could tell the weather three hours out by the sound of the chains.

She stood at the edge of the Second Tier freight dock with a tally board braced against her hip, listening the way other people watched the sky. Above her, four colossal anchor-towers rose out of the mountain's shoulder — the Northspar, the Pike, the Wrist, and the Old Mother — and from their crowns hung the chains that held Pendara over nothing at all. Each link was longer than a man and forged with resonance humming inside it, so the whole city sang, always, a low chord you stopped hearing by your second week of life in it.

Mara had never stopped hearing it. That was her whole problem.

"Duvain!" Foreman Kesk waved a stub of chalk at her from the loading ramp. "You planning to count those crates or serenade them?"

"Sixty-two in the manifest," she said. "There are sixty-four on the deck."

"Then we've been blessed."

"Or somebody's using our dock to move goods that don't exist." She wrote the number down anyway, in the neat hand two years of tallying had beaten into her. Two years ago she had signed her name across flight logs for the Aurantine corridor, the youngest navigator ever certified for it. Now she signed for turnips and lamp oil.

Kesk sighed, the sigh of a man who liked her and wished she were less trouble. "Take the overage slip up to the Fourth. Weighmaster's office. Then go home, you look like a rag somebody wrung out."

The lift to the Fourth Tier was a rattling cage that ran up the inside of one of the great chains, and Mara rode it with her hand flat against the cage wall. Through her palm the chain's voice came up as a tremble in the bones of her wrist. She had been able to do this since she was six years old, sitting on her father's shoulders on a warden's inspection walk, telling him the Old Mother sounded happy today. Tomas Duvain had laughed so hard he nearly dropped her into the chasm.

Today the chain did not sound happy. It sounded thin, like a rope with one strand parted.

She told herself she was imagining it. She had told herself that a great many times in two years.

The Fourth Tier was the busiest of Pendara's seven, and its market hall was the busiest thing on it — a long timber-and-iron barn slung under its own set of four chains, so crowded at midday that the whole structure had a slow, comfortable sway to it, like a boat at mooring. Mara pushed in through the produce end. Steam off the noodle carts. A man shouting about copper wire. A woman weighing dried apricots with a brass scale that swung gently, in time with the hall, and never once gave an honest answer.

A girl of maybe twelve went past Mara at a dead run, barefoot, jumping a stack of baskets and vanishing through the crowd with a stolen roll in each fist. Behind her a baker bellowed without much conviction. Somewhere near the far wall a woman's voice called, "Tavi! Tavi, you put those back—" and was swallowed in noise.

Mara was three steps from the weighmaster's door when the chord broke.

She felt it before she heard it: the floor's easy sway hitched, stumbled, caught. Then the sound came, and it was not a groan or a crack or any honest noise of metal under load. It was a scream — a harmonic gone sour, two notes fighting inside the same steel, a shriek that climbed until her back teeth ached and the hairs on her arms lifted.

She knew that sound. She had heard it once before, in a storm over the Aurantine corridor, in the half second before the Colbren's sails went dead.

"Out!" Mara's voice tore out of her. "Everyone out — get to the tier deck, get off the hall—"

The eastern chain let go of its harmonic.

The market hall dropped four feet on one corner and stopped with a bang that flung people off their feet. Baskets, apricots, a hundred clay jars went sliding. The apricot woman's brass scale flew past Mara's head and out through a shattered window into open air. The hall swung, and this time the swing was wrong — a long, sickening arc, the floor tilting so far that Mara went down on one knee and grabbed a support post with both arms.

Screaming, now, all of it human.

She made herself think. The hall hung from four chains. Three still sang. One was tearing itself apart, and the load was shifting to the others with every swing, and any warden's child could do the arithmetic.

"The north stair!" she shouted. "Not the ramp, the ramp's under the bad chain — the north stair!" She got a fistful of a man's coat and hauled him the right way, and then she was moving, pushing, shoving strangers toward the narrow iron stair at the hall's cold end. A cook had his arm through the handle of a soup vat and would not let go of it; she pried his fingers loose and he wept at her. A boy sat frozen in the wreck of a fruit stall and she picked him up bodily and passed him to the nearest running adult.

The hall swung. Overhead, the wounded chain shrieked in its two voices, and Mara, even then, some cold clean corner of her mind still working, counted the beats between the peaks of the discord. One. Two-and. One. Two-and. Steady as a metronome. Nothing broken was ever that steady.

They got most of them out. Most.

When the wardens finally clamped emergency resonators onto the failing chain and the hall settled with a shudder into a sullen, crooked rest, eleven people were dead. Two had gone through the shattered windows into the chasm and were never found. Nine were crushed under the collapsed produce gallery at the ramp end, and one of them, Mara learned later, was a woman named Sera Fell who sold buttons and mended coats and had a daughter who ran too fast to catch.

Mara stayed. She carried water. She held a lamp for a warden splinting a leg. Ash and rock dust came down from the mountain shoulder in a fine grit that settled on everything and turned the whole tier the color of a dead fire.

Near dawn she saw the girl again. Barefoot, thin, hair hacked short, standing at the rope line with her arms straight down at her sides while wardens carried out shapes wrapped in canvas. She did not cry. She looked at each shape with terrible attention, as if she had a job to do and this was it.

Mara had seen that face before, in a mirror, in a tribunal hall, listening to three names read out.

"Hey," Mara said. "Do you have somewhere to go?"

The girl looked her up and down: dock coat, dust, tally board still tied to her belt like an idiot. "Do you?" she said, and slipped under the rope and was gone up a maintenance bracket into the dark of the underside, quick as water going down a drain.

Three days later the Consulary published its finding. A resonance tremor of natural origin, arising from settling in the mountain's deep strata, had caused metal fatigue in Chain Four-East. Regrettable. Unforeseeable. The families of the deceased would receive a bereavement stipend of forty marks.

Mara read the notice twice, standing in the alley outside her berth-house on the Second Tier — a berth being a hammock in a stack of hammocks, hers the third up, with a shelf for everything she owned.

Metal fatigue did not scream in two voices. Metal fatigue did not keep time.

She went inside, climbed to her hammock, and lay in the dark with her hands folded on her chest and the city's chord vibrating through the wall against her shoulder. And under it, very faint, so faint she could believe it was memory: a wrongness, a sour thread woven through the true note, like a bad singer standing at the back of a choir.

Two years ago they had sat her in front of a tribunal of five and told her she had failed to compensate for a storm gradient, that her negligence had cost the lives of Bettan Ruse, Hollis-not-that-name — no. Ilma Ruse, Denek Vor, and old Pallo Trant, whom she had known since she was nineteen, and whose widow had spat on the tribunal floor at the verdict and never once blamed Mara for anything.

Mara had accepted it. That was the part she could not forgive herself for. She had stood there with the sound of the sails dying still in her ears and let five people in good coats tell her what she had heard.

She was not going to do that twice.

In the morning she put on her only clean shirt, drew her savings out of the tin under the shelf — eleven marks and some coppers — and went to find the last man in Pendara who had ever taken her father seriously.