The Orlei bell tower had two hundred and twelve steps, and Teodor Ilves-Nakamura counted every one of them aloud.

"It's a habit," he said, at a hundred and four, when Sefa glanced round. "Numbers can't be argued with. I find that restful."

"Do you ever lose count?"

"No." A pause on the stair. "I have never lost count in my life. It is possible that I would like to."

They had left the others in the chapel. Bunmi had refused to be parted from Pico and the tin, and Ansgar had volunteered to sit with the dead man, and had gone pale at the thought of it and then gone anyway. It had been decided, with the fast frightened efficiency of people who have run out of time, that someone must go and ask the tower who had written its song. Teodor had the keys. He was, by the odd logic of Annex six and a long-forgotten clause on heritage structures, the Orlei crown's duly appointed deputy custodian of the bell, a title nobody had used since his predecessor retired.

"I've never been up," he confessed, on the hundred and sixtieth step. "I filled in the form every year. I never went. It seemed disrespectful to look at something I'd only read about."

"That's the strangest thing you've said today."

"I believe it ranks fifth."

The stairwell was a narrow stone spiral lit by slits, with a rope for a handrail and, at every turn, a small brass plaque recording some forgotten repair. The air grew warmer as they climbed, and smelled of oil and dust and hot metal. From somewhere above came a steady, enormous sound, a slow heavy tock like the heart of a very patient animal.

At the top was a door with a sign. *KEEPER. KNOCK AND WAIT. I AM DEAF IN THE LEFT.*

Teodor knocked. He waited. He knocked again, and then, with the air of a man breaking a rule he had previously thought sacred, opened it.

The room beyond was the clockworks.

It filled the whole top of the tower, a great square chamber under a pitched timber roof, with shafts of white light falling through louvred windows onto a forest of brass and iron. Gears the size of cartwheels turned slowly in their frames. Pendulums swung. A great drum, studded with thousands of small steel pins, rotated with a faint hum behind a glass screen, and above it, on a beam, hung the bells, five of them, dark and huge and gleaming, each with a hammer on a lever, waiting.

In the middle of it all, on a three-legged stool, with a long-spouted oil can in one hand and a rag in the other, sat the oldest man Sefa had ever seen.

He was small and bald and brown, as wrinkled as a walnut, in a pair of round spectacles that magnified his eyes to the size of eggs. His dungarees were grey with grease. He turned his head very slowly towards the door, the way a plant turns to the light.

"You're late," said the keeper.

"I beg your pardon?" said Teodor.

"By nineteen years." He took off the glasses, wiped them with the rag, which made them worse, and put them back. "The girl is supposed to come when she's lost. I had it written on the wall." He nodded at a smoky blackboard by the window. Chalked in a childish, careful hand, in letters a foot high, it said: *WHEN THE GIRL COMES. THE BOX.* "Evander Lindqvist-Obi. Keeper of the Hours. Eighty-one. You'll be the Tamarak."

Sefa's mouth had gone dry. "How do you know?"

"You've her walk." He pointed the oil can at her. "Little hitch on the left. As though you're apologising to the stairs."

Teodor said, faintly, "You knew Anwen Tamarak."

"I installed her tune." Evander gave a small rusty cackle. "Twenty years ago this March. They'd had a bell here for three centuries that rang the hours, bong, bong, bong, like a funeral for every one of them. The crown wanted something new for the treaty. A signal that would carry to both sides. They held a competition. Seventeen composers from the capital, with certificates." He wheezed. "And then a young woman from the salt pans walked in off the street with a pencil sketch on the back of a lamp-oil receipt. Three bars. She hummed it for the committee. One of them cried. They gave her the commission before she'd finished."

"There's no record," said Teodor.

"There wouldn't be." The old man's eyes slid sideways. "She asked me not to put her name on it. She said a name would only get it noticed. She wanted it to be heard the way a heartbeat is heard. Every day, by everybody, and by nobody at all."

The huge drum hummed behind its glass. High above them, a lever twitched and was still.

Sefa said slowly, "Why did she write it?"

"I asked her that. She was up here for a week, in the winter, with a flask of tea and a cheap pencil, and she'd stand on that stool and watch the drum turn and say nothing. I said, Miss Tamarak, what is it for, besides telling the time?" Evander lowered the oil can. "And she said, 'So that when a certain person is lost, she'll know the way home.'"

Teodor made a small sound in his throat, and turned his head away.

"Has anyone else asked about it?" said Sefa.

"One," said Evander. "Every year, the same day, the anniversary. The Brine-Master. She comes up all those steps with her stick and her ring-fingers and sits on that stool and asks me to ring the tune a second time. Out of hours. Against regulations." He gave his rusty cackle, but it ended too soon. "I do it. She weeps. I give her a clean rag. She's never once asked what's in the box, and I've never once offered. I'd say she doesn't know about it. I'd say your mother was careful."

"She left something for you," the old man went on. "I wasn't to open it. Wasn't to touch it. I was to keep it in the box under the weights, in the dry, and to wind the clock every Friday, and the day a girl came up those stairs asking who wrote the bells, I was to give her the key." He felt in the breast of his dungarees, and drew out a bit of string, and at the end of the string hung a small brass key, bright from nineteen years of being worn against a heart. "I've kept it dry. I've kept it close. I've said nothing to a soul. I'd be obliged if somebody would take it off me before I die."

Sefa took it. The metal was warm.

The box stood beneath the great hanging weights at the far end of the room: an iron-banded chest the size of a loaf of bread, set into the stone floor with its lid flush to the flagstones. The weights hung above it, two stone cylinders on chains, swaying slowly with the beat of the pendulum.

She knelt. She tried the key.

It turned a quarter and stopped.

She tried again. A hard, definite refusal, like a hand on a door.

"There's no second lock," said Evander, behind her. "I've looked. She didn't tell me what to do. She only said, the box will know."

"It's a puzzle," Teodor said. He had crouched beside her, careful of the knees of his trousers, and was running two fingers along the iron band. "There is a slot. Here. For something narrow."

There was nothing narrow. She turned her head. Under her ear, from the iron, she could feel a faint vibration, a hum, deeper than the clock's. It rose and fell with the drum.

Sefa knew, in the way she had known the truth in the kitchen, that she did not need a tool.

She sat back on her heels. She closed her eyes. In the great dim room, with the weights swinging and the gears turning and the old man holding his breath, she opened her mouth and sang the third bar.

It was only six notes. They came out thin and cracked and a shade flat on the high one, exactly as her mother had sung them, and she did not stop to be embarrassed. She sang them. And then she stood very still, and she waited.

The pins on the drum turned. A lever lifted. High above them, a bell spoke, one low round note, the same pitch.

In the iron, something clicked.

The key turned all the way.

She lifted the lid. Inside the box, on a bed of clean wadding, lay a single folded sheet of grey customs stock. Nothing else. No bottle. No twist. She picked it up, and it opened in her hands, and it was written in the leaning, beautiful, running script she had just seen in the kitchen, in ink that had not faded a day.

It was addressed to *Rabbit.*

She read it. It did not take long. It had only two lines.

*I'm sorry about all of it. Whoever comes laughing, don't sign.*

Beneath it, in the corner, a lopsided little fish.

Teodor had been watching her. He had not leaned in, or craned, or asked. Only when she lowered the page did he say, very quietly, "May I see?"

She held it out. He took it in both hands as if it were hot, and turned it to the light from the louvre, and looked at it for a long moment, his dark eyes moving over the grey surface and finding nothing at all.

"It's blank," he said. His voice was level. "For me, I mean. It is a clean sheet." He handed it back with great care. "I want you to know that I am aware this is not a flaw in the paper. I am aware that it is addressed to you. And I am aware that I should like, more than I have wanted a number to come out right in my life, to be able to read it."

"It says she's sorry," said Sefa.

"Then I am sorry on her behalf, as far as I can say." He went very faintly pink. "And I think, if she wrote it twenty years ago, to a child, in a tower, that she must have been a person with a great deal of courage. I would not say that for most people."

She folded the page and put it with the others, against her ribs, where the surgical tape was beginning to itch. She did not trust herself to answer. She looked up at the bells instead, at the slow turning drum, at the pins that had been playing her mother's heart to the whole of Tuzlag every hour for twenty years, and she thought: *I have been listening to you all my life.*

The bell tower tolled the half hour, one soft bronze note, and then fell quiet. From somewhere far below, through the louvres, faint and cheerful, came the sound of a motor, and a brass band, and the high bright cheering of a crowd gathering at the gate.

"What's that?" said Sefa.

Teodor had gone to the window. He stood with one hand on the frame, looking down, very upright, and when he spoke, his voice was extremely careful.

"The Concord's delegation," he said. "They are early. By half an hour."