The Morning of the Black Noon

POV: Dex

He woke at half past four in a room that smelled of lavender, with a girl's hair across his face, and for a full minute he did not move.

It was not a thing he had ever done. He had woken in a good many places. Cellars, sheds, the back of a haycart, a cell in the Palisade. He had woken in the Undervault with his own blood in his mouth. But he had never before woken with a warm weight against his side, and a soft breath on his collarbone, and the dim impossible knowledge that nobody in the world was going to ask him for anything for a little while.

Viv slept on her stomach with one arm flung over her head, in a tangle of black curls, and her mouth a little open. In the gray light her face was bare and unguarded. She looked younger. She had a faint line between her eyebrows, even asleep, the frown of a person who has been working out sums for a long time.

He looked at her for as long as he dared.

Then, with great care, so as not to wake her, he reached under the pillow for the ledger.

…

He did not write anything. He only held it, and let his thumb run along the worn black spine, and ran the day over in his head, the way another man might say a rosary.

It was, he thought, a very simple plan. That was the horrible thing about it. A plan was only a tower of small, plain, reasonable steps, each resting on the one beneath. If one of them gave way, the whole thing came down.

Four-thirty. The Heart.

Hollis, Felix, and Ma Tilly would take the real one down from the belfry. They'd wrap it in felt, and bed it in a polisher's lamp-crate with its brass fittings and tin shades. They'd carry it up the Hill with sixteen Soot Saints in the gray canvas smocks of the Meridian Dome's maintenance staff, who had been hired three weeks before, on the quiet, by a man in a plum coat, to fit a ring of brass reflectors for the Rite. Nobody at the gate would look twice at a lamp-crate. They had signed in at the service door every morning for a week.

Seven. The Lamp Room.

At the very top of the Dome, above the great lens, under the open roof, was the old lamp-chamber where the Founders' beacon had burned in Hannah Merrick's time. A round stone room, forty feet across, with a ring of brass. They would put the Heart there, on a plain wooden table, in the open air, under the sky. It would hear. That was all it had to do. It would hear his voice, from forty feet below, and if his voice was the right voice it would answer.

Eleven-fifteen. The choir loft.

Roz and Josiah. She was to stay at the rail with her hand flat against the wood, listening to a thousand hearts, and to lay a quiet hand on the ones that mattered. Josiah was to stand at her shoulder, in the uniform he'd sworn never to wear again, and be a wall.

Ten. The circle.

Viv, in the center of twelve tall brass mirrors, in a pool of shadow on the floor of the Dome. Where no one would think to look. Where the light would fall.

And at eleven o'clock, because a good plan is built on one fixed point that everyone else can be arranged around, a lame boy in a borrowed coat would climb Crown Hill, alone, and go in through the great doors of the Meridian Dome, to meet the man who had buried him.

Everything else, thought Dex, is only what happens after.

…

By nine the streets of Ash Docks were full of people with smoked glass.

He saw them from the vestry window. They went down Cinder Street in twos and threes, in their Sunday coats, with the little squares of dark glass the Council had issued to every household in Merrick Bay. A strip of sooted pane in a cardboard frame. Do not look at the sun, it said, in black print. The Black Noon is an astronomical phenomenon of a few minutes' duration. The Chairman of the Meridian Trust invites all citizens to witness it from the foot of Crown Hill.

They carried them as they carried hymnals. They looked up at the pearl-white sky, and the thin pale disc, and laughed nervously, and held their children by the hand.

And among them, against the tide, went the children of Penny Penhallow's press.

There must have been two hundred. Boys and girls from five to fifteen, in patched jackets and caps and pinafores, with canvas sacks on their shoulders. They ran in packs. They darted between the legs of the crowd. They slapped a square of paper into every hand they passed, and by the time the hand had turned over to look, they were gone. Dex leaned his head against the window glass and watched it spread.

It was a single sheet. Penny had printed it in black on yellow, in letters four inches high, with no picture and no border. A single word.

REMEMBER.

Under it, in six-point type, in the tiny crabbed hand of a woman who had learned the law by reading it upside down in other people's courtrooms:

At noon today, beneath the Dome, the Chairman will ask Nathaniel Aldridge to sing. Come and listen. You may be surprised what you hear.

He watched an old man in a bowler hat read it, and stop, and read it again. Watched a laundress fold hers and tuck it in her bosom. Watched a stevedore tear his in half, and then, very slowly, tear the halves back together, and look round with an embarrassed face.

Good, thought Dex. Good.

Down at the foot of the Hill, in a line three deep along the edge of the Terrace, stood the Longshoremen. Eleven hundred of them. They had come in their black oilskins and their cloth caps, with their arms folded across their chests, and they said nothing at all. They just stood. A wall of human beings, quiet as a quarry, between the Docks and the road to the Dome. Big Ned Calloran stood at the head of them with a pipe in his teeth and his great scarred hands behind his back.

Nobody gets past my boys, he'd said, that doesn't have my say.

…

Viv woke at six, and found him at the window, and said nothing at all.

She came and stood behind him with her chin on his shoulder and her arms round his ribs. They watched the street. After a long time she said, in a thick voice, "I'm going into the glass today."

"Yes."

"Twelve mirrors."

"Yes."

"And a thousand memories."

"Perhaps more."

"And I'll pay."

He did not answer.

"You wrote that down," she said. "In the book. 'Cost: unknown.' I looked."

"I did."

"Good." She tightened her arms. "Say it out loud."

He closed his eyes. It was a very strange thing, to have a person ask him, in so calm a voice, to say the worst thing in the world.

"I don't know what it will take," said Dex. "I know it will take something. Possibly a great deal. Possibly the thing you told me last night." His voice was rough. "And I'm asking you to do it anyway, because I haven't another way. I'm sorry. I will always be sorry."

"Thank you," said Viv.

She kissed the back of his neck. It was brief and light and fierce.

"Now put on your boots," she said. "We have a revolution."

…

He went up Crown Hill at eleven.

He went alone. That had been the one thing he'd insisted on, in the end, and the others had let him, because they understood that it was not courage but arithmetic. A man could not sing and be watched at once. He walked up the broad gravel road in a black frock coat, borrowed, a half-size too small, with the cane in his right hand and the ledger in his breast pocket. He had no mask. He had shaved. He walked slowly.

The morning was extraordinary.

The light had changed. He didn't know how to say it. It was not dim, it was not dusk; it was something strange and thin and exact, like looking at the world through the bottom of a glass. The shadows had grown sharp as ink. The air had a hush on it. A flock of rooks wheeled over the Terrace roofs and cried out, once, in confusion, and fell silent. The sun was a pale gold coin in the white sky, and when he lifted his smoked glass to look, a small black notch had been taken from its edge.

Eleven o'clock, he thought. It's begun.

The road went up. It went up and up, past the white stone mansions of the Terrace with their shuttered windows, past the stone urns and the wrought gates, past the crowds massed at the barriers. They stared at him as he went by. Some of them whispered. A small girl with a yellow sheet in her fist pointed at his cane and said, in a clear carrying voice, "That's him."

By the middle of the slope, his leg had begun to scream.

It was an old pain, a familiar one, hot and deep, like a poker in the thigh. He'd walked through it for eleven years. But he had never walked uphill on it for twenty minutes toward the place he was going to die, and it had a new savor. He gritted his teeth. He fixed his eyes on a spot twenty paces ahead. He counted. Seven. Fourteen. Twenty-one. A cold sweat ran down his back. The cane shook in his hand.

Not here, he thought. Not yet. Not on the road.

The leg buckled.

He caught himself on the cane, and swayed, and for one terrible moment the world went white at the edges. Then a hand slid under his elbow, small, strong, rough as a boot, and held him up.

"There now," said Ma Tilly.

He turned his head.

She stood beside him in her best black bombazine, and a bonnet he'd never seen, with her chin up and her round face set like a cliff. She was breathing hard. There was dust to her knees. She'd climbed the Hill behind him, the whole way, without being seen, and had come out of the crowd like a ghost.

"I'm to go up the back stair, love, with the lamp," she said. "But I thought I'd see you to the door." Her fingers tightened on his arm. "Lean."

All his life he had walked alone. It was a matter of principle. He had refused every arm that was offered him: a Longshoreman's, a priest's, a pretty girl's on a ferry. He'd learned that a man who leaned on others owed them. He'd learned to carry it all himself, the cane and the leg and the ledger and the pain, and to fall on his own.

He looked down at her hand.

Then he leaned.

It was not much. It took perhaps a quarter of his weight. But he felt something go out of him as he did it, a long loose thread that had been wound too tight since he was nine, and the road, for the first time, did not seem quite so steep.

"There," said Ma Tilly, gruffly, looking straight ahead. "That's not so bad, is it."

"No," said Dex. "It's not."

…

The Meridian Dome stood at the crown of the Hill like a great white egg.

He had seen it all his life, from the Docks, as a pale glimmer on the skyline. He had never been inside. It was a vast circular building of white stone and glass, two hundred feet across, with a copper-green dome rising over it like a second sky, and at the top, a tiny gleaming lantern. Twelve doors of black oak. Twelve tall pillars. Twelve statues of bronze Founders, each with an arm raised, each with a pair of tarnished eyes. The steps were crowded with Lamp Order troops in dress blue. They parted for him without a word.

At the great doors, Ma Tilly let go.

She did not say anything. She only looked at him, and then she reached up and, with brisk and furious precision, straightened his collar. She turned him by the shoulders. She gave him a little push, like a mother at a school gate.

"Go on," she said.

He went in.

…

The inside of the Dome took his breath away.

It was a hollow of light. The walls curved up and up, in tiers of pale marble, to a ceiling so high he had to tip his head back to find it. Far above, through an oculus in the crown, he could see a disc of sky, white with the pearly light of the eclipse. Down through it fell a single column of daylight, hanging in the dim air like a pillar of smoke. It struck the floor in the exact center of the hall, on a circular dais of black stone, and made a ring of brightness there, sharp as a coin.

Round the dais, in a perfect circle, stood twelve tall brass mirrors.

They were his. He'd chosen them. He'd stood in this hall three weeks ago, in a gray canvas smock, and watched a gang of Saints bolt them to their plinths. Each one was nine feet high and angled just so, to catch the beam from above and throw it, in a cold bright web, round the walls. They looked entirely innocent. They looked like decoration. Nobody, looking at them, would have guessed that behind the third and the ninth, hidden by the angle of the plinth and the fall of a long gray curtain, a thin dark girl in a gray dress was already waiting, with her back against the stone and a lens in her hand.

She's there.

He did not look. He kept his eyes on the dais.

Around the hall, in tier on tier of gilt chairs, sat the Houses of Merrick Bay. They were masked no longer. They sat in their silks and their velvets with their smoked glasses in their laps, faces pale in the half-light, murmuring like a congregation. Behind them the choir loft rose, a high curved gallery, empty and dim. Somewhere above it, in a few minutes, a woman would stand with her palm against the rail, if the east gate held.

"Mr. Aldridge."

The voice came from the dais.

…

Augustus Whitcomb stood in the beam of light.

He wore a black frock coat and a plain white cravat, and his silver hair had been brushed back from his forehead. He looked grave and pleasant and rested. He looked, Dex thought with a sudden vertigo, like someone's grandfather. In his left hand he held a small green vial, corked and sealed with red wax. On the lectern at his side, on a cushion of black velvet, with its pink glow turning softly in its heart, lay a clear sphere with a hairline crack from top to bottom.

"I am so glad you could come," said Whitcomb.

Dex mounted the dais. It was seven steps. He counted every one. He crossed the black stone, and stopped an arm's length from the man who had murdered his father, and stood leaning on his cane, with the beam of light pressing on his head like a hand.

"Chairman."

"You are punctual. I admire that." Whitcomb held up the vial. "This is yours."

Dex looked at it.

It was a plain thing, an inch and a half of green glass. A thread of silver-white light turned inside it, languid, delicate, like smoke in a bottle. A paper label hung from the neck on a loop of string. He could read the clerk's neat black copperplate from where he stood.

ALDRIDGE, N.

Something moved in his chest. It was very small, and very old, and it had waited eleven years.

"After the verse," said Whitcomb gently. "As agreed. You will give me the song, and I shall give you your childhood. It seems a fair exchange."

"It's a fair exchange," said Dex.

He had meant it to sound like a boy's greed. He found, to his dismay, that it sounded entirely true. He drew a breath, and made his voice a little ragged.

"Where is Miss Marchetti?"

"She is no longer at my house."

"You've let her go?"

"I have not. She escaped." The Chairman smiled slightly. "It was rather neat. I understand she took a lens from a rifle. I confess I was impressed." He tilted his head. "But I find, Mr. Aldridge, that I no longer need her. A hostage is only useful until the bargain is struck. And I think we are both gentlemen."

Dex bowed his head.

And in the stillness, from inside the Chairman's waistcoat, he heard it.

Tic... tic... tic.

A half-beat late.

He had heard it in the dark of a cellar, eleven years ago. He had heard it through six inches of earth, in the black, with a mouth full of dust. He'd have known that dry little half-hesitation at the bottom of the world. It was the sound of a man who had been slightly too slow. And it went through him like a nail.

His heart began to slam. His hands went cold. His vision narrowed to a pinprick and the beam of light on the floor swam, and tilted, and the edges of the hall went gray.

Don't, he told himself. Don't you dare.

He fixed his eyes on the floor. On the black stone, with its fine white veins. On the steps behind him, down which he'd just come. Seven. He began to count them back. Seven. Six. Five. The breath went in. The breath went out. Four. Three. Two.

He was still counting when the old man's hand touched his sleeve.

"You are pale," said Whitcomb. "Are you unwell?"

"No."

"You are not afraid?"

"I'm always afraid, sir," said Dex. "It's never stopped me."

…

At ten minutes to noon, the moon touched the sun.

He felt it before he saw it. A chill passed through the Dome, thin and cold and slow, like a hand drawn across the back of the neck. The great column of light shivered. The pearly sky in the oculus began to darken, from the edge, as if someone had taken a bite from a white plum. The murmur in the hall died away. Fan after fan stopped. In tier after tier of gilt chairs the great families of Merrick Bay lifted their smoked glasses, one by one, and fell silent, and looked up.

A bird cried somewhere outside, once, in alarm. Then no more birds.

Dex stood on the black stone with his hand on his cane.

He felt the hush settle over the Dome like a held breath. The air had cooled ten degrees. The shadows were deepening. The beam on the floor was no longer gold but a thin, strange, metallic white, and in the circle of mirrors round it, the light had begun to quiver.

It's time, he thought.

He put his hand on the cane, and began, quietly, to count.

He did not count steps. He counted the seconds. Seven hundred and twenty of them, to totality. He had worked it out on the back of an envelope. He counted slowly, in the old way, one two three, one two three, in the rhythm of a waltz.

This is the last price, he thought.

And I am ready to pay it.