We each take a fork to the fire, in our circle round the stove, and we drink tea with sweet spiced milk. Bodymemory keeps us in our places. No one speaks in the mornings, not until we’ve gathered ourselves enough to know who we are and what we’re about. Not until after Onestory.

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.

Along the horizon, the fields are lines of grey that get darker as they reach the sky. I stare at them hard to make a picture I can take, but it’s only objectmemories you can trust in the end. And I’m carrying those in the bag already. You can’t force them to flower either. Like bulbs, they show their secrets in their own time.

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

He sings and time stands still, as if he is walking on water. His voice is stark and true, and in it there are stretches of empty skies and a bright rime of salt. The tune starts with a glee and a lilt. The words don’t say much, but I can follow the melody’s meaning. It is about when innocence is really blindness. How when you want something very

How does sound become corrupt? the Carillon asks. ‘In the time of dischord, worship only words. Greedy is the lingua. Greedy are the swords. ‘In the time of dischord, worship only talk. Devil in the music. Put the sound to work.’ What happens in the cities? the Carillon asks. ‘Sound becomes the weapon, sound becomes the gall, Sound becomes the

But for all that everyone keeps them and coddles them, I tend to think most adults wouldn’t know their own memories from anybody else’s. Something in their eyes and how they greet you in the market. At a certain point in your life, it’s like you have to choose what to keep.

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

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