The drum answered him with a note and then, in the middle of the note, with a thud. Sef stopped with the striker up. The third stroke of his test count, at the change of the first watch, and under the whole chord the great heartwood drum gave him two sounds where there should have been one, and the second one had no ring in it at all. He struck it again. Same. He struck it a third time, listening down the length of it with his whole body, the way you listen to a roof. “Pell,” he said. “Bring me a lamp and a knife.”

The hide came off in four pegs and the middle of the drum came up with it. Six feet of black heartwood, a foot and a half deep, hollowed out and left in one piece so that the grain ran all the way round, which is the only reason a drum cut from heartwood rings at all. Around the outside the wood was sound and hard and black as a wet coal. In the middle it was a brown wet crumb, and the crumb went down the whole middle of the drum like a sore going up a bone. Pell put her thumb in it. “Small-bell.” Sef caught her wrist. “Don’t.” “It’s warm,” she said. “I know it’s warm.” “It’s warm inside.” She took her thumb out and looked at it, brown to the first joint. “Sef, it’s warm inside in the frost.”

That was the whole of the finding. The rot of a heartwood drum is always warm, because a heartwood drum is a piece of a tree that is still, somewhere below everything anyone does to it, doing the only thing it knows how to do, which is not decay exactly but the slow turning of a thing into soil. Six hundred years of being struck without one rest in between. Six hundred years of a note that was a half tone under the rest of the ring, arguing with the Held, and now the argument had stopped three weeks ago, and the wood had nothing left to argue with. “How bad,” Maran said from the horn-line.

“There is no good way to say it.” Sef went round the drum with the lamp. “Around the outside, it will hold a hundred years. In the middle, it has until somebody is careless. One hard stroke and it opens from stem to rim and there is no heartwood on the far side of that.” “How long is a hard stroke.” “One.” “And tonight?” “Tonight I have already had three.”

So the eighth of the ring went quiet, and the seventh went quiet, and there was no sound in the world for nine seconds. Then Pell Underhay put her hands over the hole in the middle of the drum and sang. She did not mean to. She was fifteen and she was frightened and she had a hole in a piece of six-hundred-year-old wood under her palms, and what came out of her was the Underheld, the note Sef had been holding alone for two hours every night since the ninth of the ninth, a half tone below the Held, the lowest sound on the mountain. She held it for the length of a breath, and the drum took it. That was the discovery, and it took the rest of the night to make sense of.

The drum was not a part of the Held. The drum was never a part of anything. It was the instrument the wall was sounded through. When a player struck it, the note it made was not a note anybody chose; it was a note the mountain made, coming up out of the heartwood the way it comes up out of the shaft of the bass pipe, and the note it made was the Underheld. It had been sounding the Underheld under the Held for six hundred years at a half tone of permanent difference, and because it was struck and not held it went on ringing long after the mallet was down, which is what a drum is for. It could not be tuned and it could not be mended and it could not be played. And the only thing in the world that can hold the Underheld as long as a drum holds it is a person.

They did the arithmetic in the ninth segment, on the stone, with the roll box as a table, because it was the only place on the ring where the wind came round the corner instead of straight at your face. Sef did it out loud and Pell wrote it down, and the writing down was the part that mattered, and everyone in the room knew it before anyone said so. “The drum rings for the length of a count of nine,” Sef said. “Nine strokes a watch, and between each stroke it goes on ringing, and it does not stop until the watch is over. Four watches. That is the whole night, start to finish, and it has been the whole night for six hundred years.” “Fourteen hours,” Pell said, writing. “With the two hours.” Her pencil stopped. “The two hours are Sef’s.”

“The two hours are mine, and the drum’s fourteen are the drum’s, and they are the same note, and I cannot hold one and the other, because there is no rest in a chord and there is now no rest outside it either.” He put his hand flat on the stone. “So the drum needs a voice for fourteen hours and there are four of us, and the fair way to divide it is three and a half hours each, and I have written that on the stone and I do not believe it.” “Why not,” said Ysolde. “Because a drum that is going to split will find every place where one voice stopped and another began.”

They found out how true that was the same night. They spelled it four ways, three and a half hours each, four changes in a night, and Pell kept the count and marked each hand-off with a nail laid on the rim so that nobody could argue about the timing later. She was good at that. She had been keeping a column of dates since she was thirteen and a player, and a nail on a rim was only a slower version of the same thing. Sef sang the first three and a half hours. Then Maran took it, and at the moment she took it the drum made a sound that was not a note. A crack, down in the wood, not loud. A tick, like a knuckle, the sound a joint makes in cold weather.

Pell put the lamp down and looked into the middle of the drum, and both of them stopped singing, and the Underheld went out of the ring for four seconds, and the wall was not there for four seconds, and nobody said anything about it, and then Sef took it back and the wall came up. “A hand’s breadth,” Pell said. “From the hole, out to the rim. On the first one.” “Mark it,” Sef said. They finished the night. Eleven hand-offs, eleven cracks, each one a hair wide and a hand’s breadth long, and every one of them running out of the middle of the drum where the heartwood was already gone, and in the morning the lamp showed that the middle was a hand’s breadth wider than it had been at dusk.

“Eleven,” Wend said. She had the folding rule out and the brass lantern on the stone and she measured each crack and wrote each one in the roll, in the third person, quietly, because that is how she worked. “The collector has measured eleven. The collector notes that the width of the widest is the width of a hair and the length of each is a hand’s breadth, and that the cracks are at intervals of three hours and thirty-five minutes, which is the length of a spell, and not of a mistake.”

Sef went down into the Bass Mouth the next night for water. The pipe is a black iron throat a man can stand up in, and the ladder inside it goes down further than the ladder ought to, and at the bottom of it the rock is warm, which no rock on a shoulder above the tree line has any business being. The walls shine with a thin film of green. It is the coldest-sounding place in the world and the safest, and Sef had spent more of his life in it than in any house. There was water on the shelf at the bottom, an inch deep, that had no visible way in. He filled a bladder of hide and carried it up the ladder on his shoulder and up out of the pipe and across the ring to the drum, and they wet the hide, and they wet the wood, and the wood drank.

It drank for two hours. Then it stopped drinking, and the surface of it darkened and swelled, and the pitch came up half an inch, which Sef could hear, and Pell wrote down half an inch, and for about ten minutes everyone on the ring believed they had saved the drum. Then Sef put his thumb in the hole where he had told her not to put her thumb, and his thumb went in to the second joint. “No,” he said. “It is not better. It is exactly the same, and it is wetter, and now it is four pounds heavier on the rim and the cracks are four inches longer.” So they could water it, and watering it changed nothing, and the shell was gone from the middle out to a hand’s breadth, and the honest arithmetic was that there was no version of this winter in which a mallet touched that drum again.

They tried the pair. Sef came up with it on the third night, out of the thing he could not stop doing, which was listening to the shape of things. “Two voices on the same note,” he said. “One hands to the other inside the other, in the middle of the word, so the drum never hears the change. Not three and a half hours each. Fourteen hours, two at a time, all night, both of us singing the Underheld until the Held comes up at the eleventh hour and we go to the Low together.” “How does the drum not hear a change.” “It hears a change in pitch.” He hummed the two notes, one into the other, with no gap. “It does not hear a change in throat. Give me your note and take mine four counts later and the middle of it is one sound with two people in it, and the wood cannot count two.”

They did it. Sef and Pell, because Sef had the most warmth and Pell had the most of everything, and because neither of the other two could lose a night to the drum without losing a part of their own to the wall. It worked. Three nights, and no cracks, and the drum rang under them like a bell with two clappers, and on the fourth night Wend walked the wall with her rule and her lantern and found the curtain over the third segment thinner than it had been a month before by a finger’s width, and measured it, and wrote it down, and did not say anything at the top of the ring where the four of them were standing.

Ysolde said it for her, in her written voice, going on without stopping, in the middle of the second watch, exactly as though the sentence had begun an hour earlier and the rest of the world had simply taken too long to catch up. “The chime-keeper will explain to the ring what the collector has measured, since the collector is too honest to say it and too tired to pretend. There are nine parts and there are four of us, and the striker and the small-bell have taken the drum between them for the whole of every night, and the horn-line and the oldest of us are covering the rest of it, and the wall is thinner over my segment than it was a month ago by a finger’s width, and the collector has measured it four times, and it is not my ear that has gone. It is the wall.”

“I will take the whole of it.” Ysolde said it without any particular weight, the way she said everything, and the ring went quiet in the way it went quiet when something needed to be answered. “I will take the whole of the drum, every night, from the ninth hour to the eleventh in the morning, for as long as the wood lasts. I am seventy-two. I have the frost in my lungs already and I came up here at fifty-five and I have been the oldest thing on this mountain for eleven years. There is no part of me that a night can take that I have not already given to something colder.” She turned her head, and the whistle in her chest went out and came back in. “It should be me. It is arithmetic.” “No,” Maran said. “Six hundred years of this ring and the horn-line has never once said no to a thing that was going to be done.”

“No,” Maran said again, and then, because she was Maran, and because she had been the one holding the Held alone into a wall that was already half a tone of lie, she gave the number. “I am sixty-one. I have forty-two years on this rock. If I take a third of the drum’s nights, that is four and a half years off the end of me, and if the wood lasts four winters it is the whole of what I have left with the last two taken off it. And you are seventy-two, chime-keeper, and a winter of the drum is the winter after next for you.”

It was the market day in the middle of that, the ninth day, and the market was three thousand feet down at the Windward Yard on a gravel shelf with the hitching posts and the stone fire-pits, and it was the only day in the year that the four of them could have gone down if the four of them could have gone down. Sef asked Maran for one day. He asked at the change of the second watch with the drum under his hand, and he had it ready, because he had been carrying it for eleven years and it was the only thing he had ever wanted in a way that made sense.

“One day,” he said. “Down and back. The stair and the yard and the fire-pits and the noise of it, and then up again, and nobody says a word about it in the record, and I will hold the ninth part for the two hours before and after, which is four hours I have not got, so you can take them out of the drum. Maran. One day.” She did not answer straight away, which for her was a long time.

“The drum takes two at a time and the chord does not stop,” she said at last. “If I go to the yard, then the third chime and the Middle are on the old girl for a day and the High is on the small-bell, and the small-bell is fifteen and the High is the part that carries the top of the wall, and the wall over the fifth segment is the thinnest place on the mountain after mine.” She turned the valve with her white hand. “I would be asking the High to be carried by the High’s opposite number, for a day, in the deep months, and if she drops it once, the valley has a hole in it the size of a barn, and it is the ninth clause, striker, and the mountain will keep the shape of that.” “It would not come to that.”

“It would come to that once,” Maran said. “Once is all it takes, and you know it, because you are the one who reads the cracks.” And then, in her own voice, not the count: “I am not saying no because I have never been relieved. I have been off this ring for one day in forty-two years because it is not safe and never was, and I would go down tomorrow if it were safe, and it is not.”

Sef went back to the drum and put the striker down and did not touch it again that night, and in the morning the small-bell came and sat on the floor beside him with her notebook open on her knee. “You did not tell me about your column,” he said. “I did not put one.” “You put one.” She showed him. The left-hand page, four names in a column, hours a night beside each: Ysolde four and a half, Maran four and a half, Sef three and a half, and Pell, three and a half, with a figure underlined twice underneath, and the figure was not three and a half. “That is not the same as the others.” “It is the same as the others.”

“It is not, because I am fifteen and I have the most of everything, and the arithmetic of it is that my hours are worth less than yours, and so I should take more of them, and I did, and you will not let me, and if you will not let me then the whole page is a lie and I have been keeping a lie in a book for four weeks.” Sef took the pencil out of her hand. He wrote a second column on the right-hand page, the same four names, the same figure beside each of them, all of them identical, and then he put the pencil down on the page.

“The mountain does not price by the year, small-bell. I have been trying to make it do for eleven years, because a man of thirty-four thinks he has eleven years in hand and a man of fifteen thinks she has sixty, and both of those numbers are wrong in the same direction.” He tapped the four figures, which were the same. “It prices by the hour. And it takes the hour off whoever is holding. That is the whole of the pricing. There is no second column, there is no discount for being young, and there is no surcharge for being old, and if you write a second figure anywhere in that book I will put my hand over the page.” Pell looked at the two columns for a long time, the fair one and the one she had wanted to be true, and the pencil stayed still in her other hand. “What is the number for that,” she said at last. “There is one number, small-bell. It is the same in all four rows. It is the number.”

The winter turned. The drum rang under two voices, all night, and did not crack, and the wall over the third segment stayed thin and did not get thinner, and the ring held. And the drum died in the middle of the fourth month, the way heartwood does, without a sound, in the space between one stroke of the count and the next. The shell opened from the hole out to the rim, the way Sef had said it would on the first night, and the two halves came apart on the cradle and lay there, black on the black rock, six feet of honest wood with nothing left to say. They carried the two halves to the edge of the slab and set them down where the wind could get at them, and Pell wrote the date, and Sef wrote the hour, and neither of them wrote anything else, because there was nothing else that was true.

That night, before the ninth hour, the small-bell came up with her book and stood in the ninth segment with the ledger open in the cold and the two true notes ruled side by side on the page and four names in two columns, all of them the same. She had the sum ready. She had had it ready for a month and had not wanted to look at it. The drum’s part is fourteen hours a night. Four players spell it. A winter is a hundred nights. Four winters is four hundred nights.

And what comes out of that, added up the way the mountain adds it up, in hours taken off whoever is holding, is more than the four of them have left between them. Not much more. Two winters and a bit, by her arithmetic, with a hand’s width of error in it either way. But one winter fits inside the four of them, and one night fits inside one winter, and there is no fifth column in any book in the world for what is left over when the first one is spent. She wrote the sum at the bottom of the page, in pencil, in a small even hand, and then she sat with the pencil down and looked at the number, and there was nothing she could do with it that would make it a different number, and she had asked that question of everything else for four months and it had never once worked.

“Strike a line under it,” Sef said, from the dark, where he had been holding the ninth part for two hours before anybody had come up. “That is what a line under a number is for. It is so that the next person knows you finished adding.” Pell drew the line. Then she turned to a clean page, and at the top of it she wrote, in pencil, a single column heading with a name in it that was nobody’s, and ruled it down the page, and left it empty, and closed the book on it, and put it back inside her coat. Behind her, out over the range, the curtain stood over the Vellmark in two lines, the upper one green and the lower one cold and older, both of them thin, and neither of them broken anywhere at all.