The Broken Heart

The warden came to her workshop after dark, carrying a parcel wrapped in sailcloth.

Iona left him outside while she finished fitting a spring into a fisherman’s storm lamp. It was not an important repair. It became important because he was waiting.

When she finally opened the door, he had moved out of the shelter of the lintel so an old woman could pass with a basket.

“Are you collecting something else?” she asked.

“I need a mender.”

“There are licensed menders at the Gate Office.”

“They won’t touch this.”

“That recommends it wonderfully.”

He unwrapped the parcel. Inside lay a curved plate of thick soundglass, dark except for a faint blue movement near its broken edge.

Iona forgot, for a moment, to dislike him.

“That’s from the harbour bell.”

“Yes.”

“You brought a piece of the bell’s heart through the street in a cloth?”

“It was replaced at the last low water. The alternative was leaving it where somebody would destroy it.”

She stepped aside.

Inside, the shop smelled of lamp oil, hot copper and the soup her mother had sent down from their rooms above. Tarin took in the benches, hanging tools, shelves of labelled parts. His eyes paused on a small cracked cup full of pencils.

“Don’t touch anything,” she said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“They always say that immediately before touching something.”

He kept his hands at his sides.

She placed the plate on a folded leather pad and held a lamp behind it. Fine channels ran through the glass in loops that seemed decorative until she looked more closely. Seven channels. Six stopped at plugs of darker material.

“Who made this repair?” she asked.

“It isn’t a repair. The plugs are part of the present design.”

“The present design is wrong.”

“Yes.”

She looked up. He appeared relieved by her anger, which she disliked.

“Don’t say yes as though you’ve been waiting for someone clever enough to agree with you. Tell me what you’ve found.”

He took a roll of drawings from inside his coat.

For the next hour they spoke as two people who understood parts of the same problem. Iona learned that the central bell’s heart had been straining at every high tide for months. The additional memories demanded from the lower wards were being fed into a structure built to share its load with six other bells. Those bells had stood silent for eighteen years.

Everyone knew why. The district bells had been declared unreliable after the winter riots. Their clappers had been removed, their channels sealed, their work transferred to the great bell on the harbour wall.

At least, that was what every child in the city was taught.

“These drawings are older,” Tarin said. “Before the closures. The bells were meant to answer each other.”

“They still are.” Iona tapped one sealed channel. “You can block a mouth. It doesn’t mean the rest of the instrument stops needing it.”

“The Office keeps increasing the levy. Every increase buys less time.”

“Did you tell them?”

“Three reports.”

“And?”

“They asked me to revise my estimates.”

She looked at the window, where the shutters she had repaired after his visit six years ago were beginning to swell with rain.

“Did you?”

“The first time.”

“And the second?”

“I changed the language.”

“And the third?”

He set a folded paper beside the drawings. An order bearing Magistrate Vey’s seal instructed him to surrender his survey notes and take leave until after the storm.

“Now you’ve come to the people downstairs,” Iona said.

“Yes.”

He didn’t improve the admission. It was something.

She struck the plate very gently with a padded tuning rod. One low note sounded, then a faint series of overtones.

Seven. She listened again to be sure.

“You complained about defective assessment glass last autumn,” Tarin said. “Your report was precise. They filed it under commercial grievances.”

“That was why you came?”

“I needed someone who would tell me what was wrong without first asking whether I wanted to hear it.”

“That’s a description of every woman I know.”

A small smile moved across his face. It changed him more than she was prepared for. He had a scar beside his mouth, pale against brown skin, and the smile pulled slightly against it.

“What do you need?” he asked.

She considered lying. Charging him enough to leave the city with her mother. Taking the drawings to someone who might still be able to make the problem belong to the people who created it.

But she had seen the crack in the heart. Leaving a broken thing on the bench did not make it someone else’s.

“The original tuning books,” she said. “And the clappers. Assuming you haven’t melted them down for medals.”

“They’re in the old tidal store beneath the Gate Office.”

“Under the waterline.”

“Dry for a short time at low water.”

“Of course they are.”

Tarin looked towards the stairs, where a floorboard had creaked.

“And your fee?”

“Standard work rate. Hazard rate for the store. No promises about what I can make these things do.”

“Agreed.”

“And no promises about what you’re entitled to because you brought me a broken piece of your conscience.”

He lowered his eyes briefly, then met hers.

“Agreed to that too.”