Nineteen annums after the cataclysm
Jos Cail was named for a city. A city that once housed millions, but no more. A city that birthed her grandparents and her mother, and one that died along with all its inhabitants. It had been a beautiful place, her mother had often claimed. Her mother was named Antha Garai, a noble name from the south countries. Jos was a city of a thousand lakes and pools, a city of water, one that thrived in bounty. It was a paradise, Antha told Jos when she was young. Her namesake city was one of wide, white avenues reserved for pedestrian traffic that crossed brightly-painted bridges. A city of lanes that threaded through gardens of colorful flowers and leafy green trees. The city of Jos was where Antha met her husband, and where their only daughter was conceived.
Jos’s father, Hailen Cail, was a Borlander raised in Nerchoh in the north. His people were more severe than those from the south. The industrialists in Nerchoh were brutal in their architecture and music and food. Though Jos never understood how her parents found each other, they were good to her, even if Hailen was often cold and distant in the manner of his people. They were good to each other, and her childhood was a happy one.
They are both dead now.
Why she thought of her parents this morning as she trudged up the dark, spiral stair to the bell tower she didn’t know. Something must have triggered a memory. A hairstyle on someone on the street? The smell of a favored perfume? Maybe later, a recollection would connect. Until then, it wasn’t worth the struggle of remembering.
The staircase wound tightly in a left-hand spiral. The way was steep, and lit by small windows on the south facing side of the tower, which left most of the cylindrical stair in darkness even in the full light of the sun. Jos carried a candle, as she often did. Sometimes she made her way by feel, but she hadn’t done that in a while. There was something bleak about the winter months that could only be chased away by the warmth of a living flame. Her joints ached with today’s climb. She was just past her twenty-fourth birthday, yet…the climb was torture to her. One hundred and ninety-seven stairs from street to tower.
Daron was waiting for her when she reached the circular room just beneath the summit, where a series of long, red-dyed ropes hung through holes in the wooden ceiling. He sat, cross-legged, in what Jos had come to think of as her chair, behind her desk. There was another pair of chairs facing the desk, and why he didn’t choose one of those always mystified her. He sipped from a mug that steamed lightly in the pre-dawn chill.
“You’re in my chair,” Jos said, setting the candle inside a glass and metal box on a hook on the wall that amplified its feeble light. Her hands shook, a tremble that had begun weeks earlier yet had not abated.
“We do this every morning,” he said with a sigh. “It’s not your chair. It belongs, like everything here, to the city.” He sipped his tea loudly, in the Carleyian way, intended to show satisfaction. Jos found it terribly annoying.
“And the lords and ladies of our dear Coniea have been generous to provide us with three chairs for our two-person purpose.” Jos stood in front of him, staring down as he made her do each day. “Must we do this every morning?”
“Fine, fine,” Daron rose from the chair in a huff. He made a show of pirouetting like a dancing dame, then sat with exaggerated delicacy in one of the other chairs.
“Now. Was that so difficult? I cannot fathom what it was that I ever saw in you,” Jos said. She had found him handsome once, with his coiled hair and smooth skin and long tales of travel to other cities.
“Yet you did,” he said in that smug way that he had. “And I miss your bed sometimes.”
“It took weeks to remove the stink of you,” she said. She took a cup from atop her desk and held it out to him. “I’ll have some tea.”
From his satchel, Daron removed a tall flask and filled her cup as directed, then handed it to her. “Have your fill.” She could see the rolled parchment in the satchel, but turned her eyes away.
“Thank you. You still smell.”
“And you have the temperament of a snake.”
She sipped the tea. He had fixed it as she preferred, unsweetened, with a splash of cream. She knew that he took his with fir sugars as a habit. “You fixed my tea how I like it.”
“Yes.”
“It’s bad,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Bad enough that you…”
“Brought you a tea cake? No.” He grinned, though there was no mirth in his smile. Reaching into the satchel he removed a green-and-silver-laced cloth that he unwrapped and held out to her. On the cloth in the center of his palm were two flaky pastries, each glazed with cloudy white sugar and leaking a golden-brown mince from the center. “I brought you two tea cakes.”
Jos could feel her eyes watering, even as she reached for the cakes. “How many?”
“More than a thousand,” he said, his voice not more than a whisper. “It’s nearly sunrise.”
Tears flowed down her cheekbones as she sat back in her chair. “I don’t know that I can do this.” He reached a hand across the chasm between them and she took it, clinging tightly to his warm grip.
“I’ll stay and help,” he said.
Jos could only nod in return.
* * *
Coneia was a small city by modern standards, known as a center of art and learning. Before the fall, it boasted no less than six universities of great renown, a small art museum that nonetheless featured many works of the great masters, and a culinary tradition that was envied throughout Gioveda. The symphony was the finest in the world. Jos’s parents had been drawn Coneia by the culture, the wide, walkable avenues, and the community. They dreamed of raising their daughter to be cultured, worldly, and wise.
Like many of the other, older cities, Coneia was surrounded by thick walls; remnants of a time when wars ravaged the lands. When the world fell, it was those same walls that once again made the city valuable. Thousands of people came from all over the countryside, from the volcanic mountains of the Garies to the steppes of Nagle Tary, seeking shelter and safety in numbers. For a while it worked.
When Jos finished her tea and had eaten as much tea cake as her stomach would hold, and once her eyes were finished with their tears, she climbed the stair to the bell tower. As he had promised, Daron stayed with her, following up to the bell tower. With the ropes, she could have rung the bell from the office below, but she insisted that she do it from the roof so she could see the people below.
From the roof, they looked to the east for the rising sun. The sky was a brilliant wash of roses and flame that fought away the blackness. There were eight bells in two rows atop the tower. Jos stepped to the largest bell, one that was taller than her, and covered in a tapestry of symbols, the meanings of which she had never cared to find. The sigils were arranged in circular rows, surrounding a larger symbol in the middle. That symbol was familiar, the one that she knew. The central image, of three concentric circles intersected with a cross, represented stone. Dirt. The land. The symbol was why this bell was rung every morning.
It was also the symbol of death. Matà.
Sunrise was moments away. Daron held the roll of parchment in his hand. “Are you ready?” He asked her with a surprising amount of concern.
Jos nodded, stretching the fingers of her hands. “Yes.” She gripped the rope of the death bell, her palms already sweating.
He unrolled the parchment and watched the horizon, Jos’s pounding heart made her fingers throb. As the first edge of the sun topped the horizon, casting them in brilliant light, he read the first name.
“Matthy Bricia,” he said. With the intonation of the name, Jos hauled on the rope until the heavy clapper struck, sending one deep, sonorous note across the still-sleepy city. Daron waited for a long breath, then two. It was considered a dishonor to speak the names too quickly, a devalue of a life lost.
“Jamy Bramas,” he read. And Jos tolled the bell. And she stared at the rising sun.
Years ago, when the cataclysm roiled their world, the sheer amount of death was unfathomable. Billions around the world perished in the first years. In Coneia, the city elders decreed that this bell, the one marked with the sigil of death, would be rung once for each death in the city. Lest the people become unaware. Lest the people grow immune from numbers. Let each day, they proclaimed, begin with the tolling of the bell of death, at sunrise, when the people felt the most hope. For almost twenty years now, the bell had rung each morning. To be the bellringer was a position of great honor, but also of great cost. The last bellringer, a man named Hayeson, leapt to his death from this very tower after completing his charge one morning. Jos had been his reader. He finished the day’s duty, smiled at her, and said, “Heavy is the heart that brings the tones.”
The next morning, Jos tolled the bell for Hayeson. And she had been ringing it ever since.
“Rice Adas,” Daron said. “Sicy Jenking. Renda Marte.” The list went on and on. And the bell tolled well into the late morning. For over five hours, until Jos’s arms screamed their pain, and her head thrummed with the echoes of the bell. She wept openly until her tears dried in the cool morning breeze.
When, at last, Daron read the last name, he nodded at her, and Jos collapsed to the stone. Daron sat beside her without a word, placing a hand softly on her back while she sobbed. After she was finally spent, she sat up.
“Thank you,” she said to Daron, accepting a square of cloth that she knew he carried just for her.
“You did well,” he said. He had the tracks of tears in the dust of his face as well, though she knew that he hid them from her, unwilling to take away from her catharsis.
She wiped away at the wetness on her face. “I’m beginning to understand why Hayeson took the short way down,” she said after a moment.
“Don’t say such things,” Daron said. He took her hand in his and squeezed. “You are not to follow him,” he said.
“Why would the elders put this duty on a single set of shoulders?”
Daron shrugged. “This is what happens when you rule by committee.”
“Tell me something happy,” Jos pleaded as Daron stood to leave. He would make his way down, and leave Jos to herself, as he did every day. She needed the time alone to release what had happened here. He would leave before her, and, she knew, she would find a glass of Glos Wien waiting for her on the desk.
“On most days, I would not be able to. But, this morning, well. This morning I can.” This time, Daron’s smile was genuine. “Janae had her baby last night,” he said, a glow forming on his face. “A healthy baby boy. She has named him Denni, after his grandfather.”
Jos smiled. “Really?”
“Really,” he said, and she hugged him. “Welcome to this munted world, Denni Ricia.”
“It appears that I’m going to have to call you Uncle Derry from now on,” Jos said, pulling away. She looked at the bells, and an idea came to her. “Daron…” She walked to the smaller bells, running her fingers across the runes that covered their thick metal surfaces. “Do you know what these symbols mean?”
“Some,” he said. He walked along the bells, pointing to large runes as he passed each bell. “Water,” he said. “Energy.” He stopped at one of the smaller bells. “Life,” he said.
Jos took the rope that led to the small bell, and Daron stepped back.
“The elders may not be pleased with you,” he said.
“I can hope.” Daron laughed. “Say the name,” she said, but he hesitated. “Please,” she insisted. And for her, he did.
And for the first time in a generation, the clear carillon sound of life pealed across the rooftops of Coneia.