The crack ran from the bell's lip almost to its shoulder. Anwen could put a fingernail into it. Someone had wrapped a strip of white linen around the bronze, as if the bell were a hurt wrist.
“My mother used to say it could be heard from her bedroom,” Mikkel said. “Even with the windows shut.”
He had told her that twice since dawn. This time Anwen looked down through the square opening in the belfry floor. The padded cradle waited far below, between the chapel's empty pews. They had taken out six boards to make a path for the bell. Through the gap she could see the soles of the steward's shoes as he went about collecting hymnbooks.
“It won't sound the same if they mend it,” she said.
“They'll cast a new one. This one belongs somewhere people can see it.” Mikkel adjusted the chain hoist over their heads. “You should come back for the dedication. The service, I mean. You might find something there.”
Anwen tied the loose end of her red wrist cord beneath her sleeve. She had worn it to work for twenty years. Mikkel had noticed it on their first job together and had been trying, in gentle increments, to find out what would make her take it off.
“I found the side door,” she said. “We brought the hoist in through it.”
He smiled, almost sorry for her. “You know what I mean.”
She set down the pencil with which she'd marked the safe path on the floor. The bell was still on its old wooden axle. Nothing was hanging yet. They had time to settle this.
“Look, since we're going to be working together, I'm going to make something very clear to you. I am not converting to your faith. I already have one. And if you keep trying to make me change my mind, I'll summon a demon to drag you down to hell if I have to.”
Mikkel glanced at the empty stairwell, as though she had embarrassed them in front of someone. “Anwen.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.” His voice softened. “That's why I worry.”
She picked up her pencil. He could worry. He could do it without trying to enter her head. “Pass me the short sling.”
They worked through the morning. Mikkel was good with his hands, and careful in most ways. He checked each shackle pin by touch and gave the old axle a slow inspection before they freed it. When the steward brought bread and cheese, Mikkel thanked him and bowed his head over his portion. Anwen sat on a packing crate and ate hers. She spoke the names of those who had taught her to work with weight, too quietly for anyone else to hear. Mikkel did not ask what she was saying.
By afternoon the bell hung from the hoist, its mouth a little above the opened floor. The chain held its weight. Two guide lines, tied to a padded band around its waist, kept it clear of the square opening's stone edges. Anwen had the west line around a cleat. Mikkel held the east, its spare length coiled beside a cleat near the stairwell. A broad board protected the west edge of the opening. The bell's crack faced Mikkel across the gap.
“The sling takes its weight a little off center,” Anwen said. “When the mouth passes the floor, it will drift west. Keep that line snug until I say slack. Don't haul it back if it moves. The hoist will take the weight.”
Mikkel nodded. He had helped lower machinery heavier than this. Still, he had rung this bell as a boy; she could see him trying not to look at the linen band someone had wound around it. He touched the line, then the catch at his waist, making sure he could pay out rope without letting it run.
They began the descent. Chain clicked through the hoist, one measured length at a time. The steward had gone outside on Anwen's instructions. Below, the cradle looked too small until she followed its corners with her eyes.
The bell's mouth reached the level of the floor. Mikkel eased his line.
“Hold it,” Anwen said.
“The cracked lip's too close to the east stone. If I give it room—”
“It hasn't cleared the west edge. Hold it.”
He looked at the bronze and not at her. His fingers opened a little. The bell drifted west, as she had warned. Its lip pressed into the protective board. Wood broke with a sound too sharp for its size.
Mikkel hauled at the east line. The bell swung back across the opening. Anwen locked the chain brake and felt the floor quiver under both feet. The cracked lip struck the east stone. A thin bronze flake jumped free and fell, ticking twice on the pews below.
“Let the line go slack,” she said.
He kept pulling. “It'll hit again.”
“If you pull, it will.”
He let out one breath, then one hand's width of rope. The bell stopped moving. Dust drifted into the open square. It hung inches from the east stone, the hoist loaded at a slight angle. They could leave it there for a minute. They could not leave it there for a night.
Mikkel stared at the new pale scar in the bronze. “I thought I could keep it off the stone.”
“You thought I hadn't seen where the stone was.”
“I didn't say that.”
“You didn't need to.” Anwen crouched to check the west guide. It had not frayed. “We can raise it a little and reset. Once I see whether the lip will clear.”
Behind her, Mikkel said, “When the floor shook, I thought we'd both fall. I thought about what comes after.” He glanced at the red cord at her wrist. “Come to the evening service with me when we finish. You can hear what we believe and leave if you want.”
The invitation might have been bearable on another day, after another accident. Here it followed her answer of that morning and the one before it, and the one on the quarry job when he had offered to bring her to a meeting, and the one in the wagon afterward. He could name the lines and their loads. He remembered the steward's instructions about the chapel door. It was only her refusal that fell out of him as soon as he heard it.
“No,” she said.
“I only meant—”
“I know what you meant.” She stood. The bell rocked once, very slightly, on the chain. “I told you what I'd do.”
Mikkel's expression changed. Not fear. The same concern he'd shown her all morning, with a little weariness beneath it, as though she had made his duty harder.
Anwen drew her red cord from under her sleeve. It was the one her father had knotted for her when she began to work. His warning about the old words had been that the speaker must answer for them afterward.
She wound the cord once around her fingers and spoke the name she had been taught. The air at the stairwell darkened. A figure stepped from it, narrow enough to pass between the railings though its shoulders seemed wider than the door. It wore a coat the color of banked coals. Its feet left ash on the boards, and through the gap below Anwen saw that its shadow continued downward past the cradle, into a distance the chapel could not contain.
Mikkel let the east line slip through his palms. Its loose end spilled from the coil, and the bell shifted toward the torn board. Anwen pinned the rope under her boot, then made it fast on the stairwell cleat.
The visitor looked first at the loaded hoist. Then it looked at Anwen.
“You called,” it said.
She had heard that voice in childhood stories, but never with her own ears. She had expected heat. She felt cold at the back of her neck.
“I did.”
The visitor turned to Mikkel. His heels left the floor. He gripped a timber post with both hands, and for a moment Anwen could see something beneath him that was neither stairs nor chapel. A wind rose out of it with the smell of hot iron. The visitor had not touched him. It had only made the distance possible.
“Do you ask me to take him?” it said.
Mikkel did not speak. Anwen had wanted him to believe her. She had not pictured his empty hands, with rope burns across the fingers, grasping wood while the bell waited above an open floor.
“No,” she said. “I asked you to hear me say that I could.”
The visitor held her gaze. Anwen felt the plain ugliness of that answer. She had used its arrival to frighten him, whatever else she had called it. The cord tightened around her fingers, not by magic but because her hand had closed.
“You can take him,” she said. “I do not want you to.”
Mikkel's heels settled on the boards. The distance beneath him closed. The visitor regarded the two of them, the bell, the gouge in the east stone. Then it walked to the stairwell. At the top step it brushed ash from its sleeve. The ash fell through the boards and was gone before it reached the pews.
Anwen waited until the stairwell was only a stairwell. She unwound the cord and put it away. Mikkel still held the post. When he let go, the grain of the wood had left pale ridges across his palms. He watched the bell.
“We have to lift it back,” he said.
“A hand's width.”
He reached for the east line.
“Leave that,” Anwen said. “It looks wrong, but pulling it will turn the crack into the stone. Put your hand on the chain brake. When I say up, give me three clicks. No more.”
He looked at the line lying against his boot. It was what he knew how to control. The brake was hers; she had worked it all afternoon. He stood with his palm on the lever for so long Anwen thought he was going to argue.
“Three clicks,” he said.
She took the west guide to its mark. “Up.”
One click. The bell shifted, and Mikkel's free hand moved toward the east line. He stopped it on his own knee. Two clicks. At the third, the bronze cleared the torn board. He held the brake where it was.
Anwen pulled out the damaged plank. She laid a pad of folded canvas on the east edge, then moved to the guide line beside him. “Now give it slack. Slowly.”
He did. The bell turned away from the stone. They lowered it through the floor with only the small sounds of chain and rope. When the cradle took its weight, the cracked lip touched its padding without a note.
Mikkel kept his hands on the rope after the chain went slack. “I can still feel where the floor went away.”
“I called it to frighten you,” Anwen said. “I didn't need it for the bell. You should hear that from me.”
He rubbed at the marks the post had left on his palms. “I think it was evil.”
She had no wish to try to settle that while its ash might still be on the stairs. “You can think that.”
“I still believe what I told you.” He looked at her then, not at the cord under her sleeve. “You told me this morning. I understood. I asked anyway. I won't keep at you about your faith.”
Anwen let out the breath she'd been holding. “All right.”
The steward returned as they were stripping the slings. His eyes found the pale mark on the bell.
“What happened?” he asked.
Mikkel looked at Anwen, and she wondered whether he wanted her to make the answer easy for him. She was too tired to guess. The bell had been cracked before they arrived; the mark was new. Anyone could see both things.
“I gave the east line slack too soon,” he said. “Anwen told me to hold it. Put that in the record before you sign.”
The steward went to fetch the work sheet. Mikkel stayed by the bell, not touching it. After a while he bowed his head. Anwen could not tell whether he was praying, and did not need to. She rolled the red cord once between finger and thumb, feeling the knot her father had made, then began to coil the lines for the walk home.