Chapter 3

The causeway to the Wick only shows at the ebb, and only for an hour, a black strip of rock with the sea walking out on both sides of it. I went out in the gray before dawn with a borrowed oar and my boots full of water, and by the time I reached the spit my feet had gone past cold into something that didn't have a name.

The lighthouse was squat and ugly, built by people who cared about weather and not about being looked at. The door hadn't been locked in years; the salt had eaten the hinges into lumps.

Maren Voss was waiting inside with a lamp, and she did not seem surprised to see me.

She was small and bent, seventy if she was a day, with a braid of white hair pinned under a wool cap and eyes gone milky with cataracts. Her hands were gnarled, and she held the lamp like someone who had never once dropped one.

"So," she said. "You're the reason my lamp stood up on its own."

"I didn't mean to."

"Nobody means to." She set the lamp down and took my chin in her fingers and turned my face to the light, and whatever she was looking for, she found it or she didn't. "Upstairs."

The lamp room was a glass box at the top of a spiral stair, and the great lens stood there like a hive of crystal, cold, dark. There was a brass cradle bolted to the frame beside it, and the cradle had two prongs curving up off the plate, and I looked at them and I felt sick, because I knew what they wanted.

Maren took the fork from my hand without asking and laid it in the cradle.

It fit. Not close - exact. The grooves lined up; the prongs cradled the two tines like a hand. The glass above us went wrong for half a heartbeat and the whole room lit, dim and gold, and the light crawled down the oiled floorboards and out across the water.

Down below, in the drowned street, something groaned.

Not a bell. Not yet. A sound inside the water, deep and swallowed, like a man shouting in a well.

Maren snatched the fork back and pressed it against my chest. "Not yet. Not off the tide. Not here." She pushed me away from the lens. "Listen to me. The lamp and the bells were cast in one pour, one metal, one note, and the harbor-master's line is what calls them. Up here's the first mouth. Down in the drowned street, under the meeting-house rubble, is the second, and the fork fits that one too. The lamp calls. The bells answer. But the bells only speak at low water, when the sound has stone to travel in and no sea to eat it."

"What bells?"

"The district bells." She looked out the glass at the mud-brown flats. "They sank with four hundred houses. They're still down there. I hear them sometimes when the wind's wrong and I'm not. The bells remember."

I went cold all over.

My mother used to say that. She'd say it in the freezing room when the fire wouldn't catch, mostly to herself, mostly to the stove. The bells remember, girl. And then she'd cough and tell me to keep the fork hid.

"What was her name," I said. "You know it. Say it."

Maren was quiet for a while. The lens ticked as it cooled.

"Ilsa Calloway," she said. "Shipwright's daughter out of the lower district. She married the harbor-master, and she had a daughter, and the child was recorded dead of the coughing sickness before she was a year old." Her milky eyes came back to me. "Fifteen years ago the harbor-master was murdered, the district was drowned in a night, and a woman I knew came out of the water with a baby under her coat and made me swear an oath on the lamp. She said the girl would come back for the key when she was old enough to spend her anger properly."

I couldn't say anything. My throat had closed around it.

"Then the log," Maren said. "The true one. The one your father kept."

Below us, a garrison whistle blew on the bluff.

We both turned. Through the glass I could see them, a line of men coming down the fish quay stairs with lanterns, and one of them was pointing out across the dark water at the light still crawling off the Wick's glass.

Maren pulled me down below the sill and killed her lamp.

"Go out the sea door," she said. "There's a shelf of rock under the north side. Stay in the weed until they turn. And when they ask you, girl - you never met me."