Master Cantor

#On the Rank Above the Ladder

A Master Cantor is what a voice becomes at Bastion-Irongate when it has climbed past the last numbered rung and found that the ladder ends in a heated room.

The Gasket Choir sorts its people into tiers. First tier buys residence and menial labour. Second and third buy chorus duty in the minor breath lines. Fourth buys a place in the primary chambers. Fifth buys supervisory stanza work, a post near the gauges, and the right to correct another worker's pitch without being struck in the teeth for it. There is no sixth. Above the fifth there are the Master Cantors, and the Choir's published account gives only two facts about them: their offices are warm, and their sins are called "temperamental."

I have read a great many personnel ledgers, and few are this economical. It gives two facts, and one of them is an adjective doing the work of a pardon.

The Irongate files place the rank in a stratum they call protected. It sits beside the valve foremen, beneath the Choir Magistrates and the Synod Breath Office, and above the licensed chorus workers, whose stratum the same files record only as survive. Protected is a modest word. No document I have handled grants a Master exemption from any statute, and I shall not invent one for him. In practice it means that the cold reaches him last. The Master Cantor commands the Nave.

#On the Instrument Being Served

The Master makes sense only next to the thing he serves: a mountain on the Danube that holds its shape on condition of being sung to.

The Great Hush of A.S. 94 settled the matter. For nine hours the air over the gorge was still. The gaskets dried and slackened, the bolts walked out of their seats, and the pressure doors lost their bite. Then the Third Lung came down on three thousand of the faithful, and the digging took eleven months. After that, continuous chant was compulsory. The Hush made the Choir mandatory, but it is no birth certificate for the Master Cantor, and the Bureau has none to offer. None of the files I have consulted says where or when the rank was first written into a roster.

What they record instead is machinery. The Choir Nave is cut in black basalt beside the sealed wound of the Third Lung. The chant crews stand in their pits and send calibrated sound up into the brass baffles. From there it runs through channels in the rock and along iron ribs, around the pressure doors and into the gasket housings, bolt seats and valve plates. The Magistracy issues the pressure hymnals, numbered and sealed, with one stanza for each chamber and one tempo for each pressure condition. A damp easterly takes a different second movement from a frozen westerly. A convoy surge along the Transit Spine demands reinforcement harmonics in the low registers. A valve replacement in the Fifth Lung requires a held contralto line, timed to the torque pattern of the Gasket-Hymn Mechanics.

That last requirement is the whole profession in miniature. The mechanic seats the joint, aligns it, seals it, tests it and writes it down. The singer holds the note until the wrench is done. Neither may be late. Senior cantorial skill lives inside procedures like this one: an ear that hears a line sagging before the gauge needle shows it, and breath enough to carry a weaker voice in the next pit. The procedures belong to the Choir. The Master inherits them as a bishop inherits a rite he did not compose.

Nor should the Master be confused with his neighbours. The mechanic's ladder climbs to Hymn-Gasket Master. The Diesel Resonance Plumber, who feeds vibration through the pipes when voices cannot bear the load, climbs toward Harmonic Listener. Both titles are honourable, and neither earns a warm office in the Nave. A clerk who files one under the other will be corrected by three offices at once.

#On Licences, Which a Master Does Not Issue

The Irongate keeps seniority of the throat and jurisdiction over throats in separate drawers.

The Transit and Breath Office administers the tiers. The Choir Magistracy oversees licensing and owns the hymnals. Examinations belong to Cantor Ys Varr, terror of the audition bench. She stands the worker before a gauge, names the prescribed harmonic and listens for the crack. The Choir Wardens watch the aisles for compliance. The Hush Court hears silence offences and appeals. A Master Cantor may stand in that Nave with the finest ear in the gorge, but I have found nothing that lets him sign a licence, command a Warden or pass a sentence. For the pedantic, Varr's own rank is recorded as Cantor. I note this and decline to promote her.

Below him the arithmetic is unkind. A worker can lose a tier to a failed candle test, a rasp in the upper measure or a cough that lands between beats, and the tier is what buys warmth. Heat follows the licence. So do rations, bunk hours, and the right to stay inside the mountain on better terms than the Underchords offer. The test hears a wrong note. It does not hear the reason for it. Fatigue sounds like grief, grief like ice-lung, and ice-lung like the first drift of a seal going soft in its housing. The examination has never been asked to tell them apart, because the asking would take longer than the pressure allows.

#On Warm Offices and Cold Throats

The Irongate measures wealth in lung health, voice strength, licence tier and a warm bunk. By that standard the Master Cantor is rich, and the Choir's account makes his riches architectural. He has a heated office in a fortress where the unlicensed freeze and cough in the passages.

I do not know what a Master may do in that office. The files do not say how far his discretion runs, whether a word from him can raise a singer's tier or sink it, or whether the Magistrates consult him or merely put up with him. I decline to supply a tidy answer. What I can state is how the tolerance works. When a chorus labourer's voice fails, the failure is entered as negligence, sabotage or silence of the first grade. When a Master misbehaves, the institution reaches for "temperamental," a word borrowed from the opera house and the stable.

The Choir runs three eight-hour watches, with doubles in pressure weather. Throats in the pits below the Master's door crack in the third hour of a second shift, and their owners are tested again the next morning. If his throat cracks, the record calls it temperament. The Bureau of Doctrine calls the Choir obedience rendered audible. It has not said what to call obedience that is allowed its moods. I propose seniority, with the confidence of a man who has a warm office himself.

#On the Counterkey Objection

The Counterkey Circle is made up of the voices the tiers threw away. It has made the one accusation a Master Cantor cannot answer by singing.

The Circle claims the prescribed harmonics are wrong. On its account they are sufficient to hold the tunnels, expensive in human lungs and convenient to the Magistracy that owns them. Its members write alternative frequencies in gasket grease on the basalt below. If they are right, the senior ear is the finest instrument ever trained to a wasteful score, and the warm office is a pension for having mastered a mistake. The claim damages the rank's prestige whether it is true or not. A Master is distinguished by singing the prescribed note better than anyone else. Change the note, and that distinction becomes a hobby.

Nothing in the record says the Masters know a safer method and keep it from the pits, and I will not write that they do. The Bureau of Bells knows the stone hums without us. The Bureau of Engineering calls the Choir a bracing system. Neither has certified a Counterkey frequency, and an unapproved harmonic can unseat a gasket as readily as it holds one. The Magistracy's interest in keeping its score is plain. So is the danger of abandoning that score on the word of men who sign in grease.

Then there is Morwen, whose instruments are imitation, borrowed voices and the slow wearing-away of a person's own face. The Bureau of War suspects she is feeding the Circle's grievance. The Circle denies it, and nothing is proved. I record only this: a fortress whose highest rank rewards the most perfect imitation of a prescribed voice ought to think carefully before it calls Envy a stranger.

#On the Present Watches

This entry surveys the office as it stood in A.S. 201. The Choir Nave keeps its three watches and its emergency doubles, and the Master Cantors keep their place above the fifth tier. Ice-lung thins the pool of voices each quarter. The Breatheries fill. The gauges remain, in Engineering's preferred word, acceptable.

At the change of watch the river fog comes up the gorge and lies against the tunnel mouths, and the brass baffles sweat. The crews take their marks in the pits. Somewhere above them, a Master Cantor warms his hands before he warms his voice.