The Drowned Choir

Overview

The Drowned Choir is a small cove on the outer shore of the Tidelace Coasts, between two harbours and under the edge of the Long Grey, where a crew caught in a storm sang a working to turn it and sang it out of key. No sounding house marks it. It is one of the few off-key places known on Caeldon, where the Dissonance lies close under the true world.

The Place

From the water the cove is nothing much: a crescent of grey shingle under a low cliff, a drowned breakwater across its mouth, and the stumps of an old quay. The old harbour that stood there is a few walls on the first terrace, and its beacon tower has no top.

Keepers and Users

No harbour claims the cove, and the Lacework leaves it out: the inner channel bends wide round its mouth, and its marks are not kept. The beacon wardens of the nearer harbour keep it all the same, in the one way that works. Divers come, because the old harbour's families are said to have sunk their plate in the drowned breakwater before the storm, and Human swimmers from the hamlets hire on for the dive at twice the drowned-harbour rate. Few come up with more than a cold, and the wardens turn back any craft they find inside the mouth.

The grieving are drawn there too. Widows of crews lost in the Long Grey walk down the coast path to the cliff above the cove, and the wardens watch for them.

The Medieval Present

Once a month, at the slack of the spring tide, two beacon wardens go down to the cliff top with a sounding line and a lamp, and one of them calls a reading of the cove aloud: the true depth at the breakwater, the true set of the tide, the true hour by the gauge house's glass, in a clear voice, as every reading is called on a Tidelace quay. They say the voices under the shingle go quiet while the reading is called, and the nearer harbour's tide hall pays for the walk without asking what it buys. A warden who calls a false figure there, even by mistake, is not sent again.

History

The storm fell while the Gaugeward Leagues were young, in the Far-Side Terms. The nearer harbour's sounding house keeps a book of readings from the years the old harbour still stood; the leaf for the day of the storm has been cut out, and nobody knows by whom. Who taught the crew the working, and why they sang it wrong, the tales do not agree.

Tensions

• The plate. A diving crew from a Human hamlet has hired on with a Gnome family that claims the old harbour's plate as its own, and means to go down at slack water, when the cove is calmest.
• The cut leaf. A sounding family has found what it says is the missing leaf in another harbour's archive, and wants it read before the tide hall.
• The warden's widow. One of the two wardens who calls the reading lost her husband to the Long Grey last winter.