B00DW1DUQA EBOK (22 page)

He was a few steps inside when he heard running footsteps and the familiar rhythmic clank of metal. He stepped backwards, wary of tripping over the frame of the heavy door. An Ironclad ran around the bend up ahead, with another following close behind. They both shouted at Finn, muffled words he couldn’t make out.

The Ironclad in the front unslung a gun from his back and held it up to fire at Finn. It wasn’t one of the muskets he’d seen them carrying previously. This was a more complicated contraption that looked like it fired a grapple about the size of Finn’s hand. Twenty yards away, the Ironclad stopped running to steady his aim. Finn stumbled backwards over the door-frame in his desperation to get away. He heard the crack of a shot and raised his arms to cover his face as he fell.

He heard a whirring, whistling sound, coming at him very quickly. Something heavy and hard thudded off the side of his head, knocking him sideways. At the same moment he felt cold metal grip his arm, very tight, pinching his hairs painfully. A steel chain wound itself around his arm. He couldn’t understand what was happening, the blow to his head blurring his senses. The weighted grapple had latched onto the chain wrapped around Finn’s arm with barbed teeth, locking itself into place. Another grapple on the other end of the cable revolved faster and faster around his arm as the chain wound up to his elbow. He held it away from his head so that the grapple didn’t bash him again. It thumped into the muscle of his upper-arm like a blow from a hammer. Once again, serrated teeth snapped out, gripping the chain, the links designed to interlock with the teeth. Some dug directly into his arm, punching a line of red holes in his soft skin. He shouted out in pain and alarm. The chain was locked fast to his arm. The device must have been intended for his legs, to bring him down like one of the cows on the Baron’s farm, but it made little difference. They had him.

He felt his arm being tugged. A thin line attached to the steel cable led back to the Ironclad who was hauling him in now, back through the steel door. Frantically, Finn tried to scrabble to his feet, but the Ironclads kept him off-balance, jerking him forwards. The other Ironclad began to haul on the cable too. He had no chance of pulling against them. They hauled and strode forwards at the same time, lessening the distance to him rapidly.

Finn managed to catch one of his legs behind the half-open door. It was his only chance. With a roar he yanked his arm backwards, hoping to give himself a few inches of slack to play with. He felt the barbs embedded in his arm rip out of his skin. He shouted again with the pain of it. The steel cable pinched his arm cruelly but he had just enough play in the cable to take a scrambled step backwards and get his other foot behind the door. He braced his feet against the back of the door and with a shout of effort kicked it shut, slamming it in the faces of the approaching Ironclads. It rang with a booming clang. Finn fell backwards, the thin-line attached to his arm severed by the heavy metal door.

He scrambled to his feet as quickly as he could. The Ironclads would open the door again and be upon him at any moment. He couldn’t face going back down the stairs again. He thought, briefly, about lunging back through the balcony-door. At least the drop would mean a quick end. No. His only option was the third door. He ran for it, hearing the catch mechanism on the Ironclads’ door rattling at the same instant. If the third door was locked he was trapped.

The door budged a little as he pushed it, stiff in its frame rather than locked. Frantic, he barged his way through, shoulder-first. Once inside he slammed the door shut behind him. Iron bolts were set into the top and bottom of the door. He worked them shut, skinning his knuckles on the stone door-frame as he did so.

He turned to look around, expecting to see more Ironclads coming for him. There were none. He stood inside the clock. The cogs and weights and axles of it filled the great square room he found himself in. Wheels with sharp teeth whirred near his head.

In the centre of the room stood an old man with a shock of straggly grey hair, a familiar bushy beard. The old man, the clock-winder, looked up from the workings to peer at Finn through small, round glasses. Beside him on the floor stood the oblong bulk of his regulator clock.

‘Ah, there you are,’ he said. ‘It’s about time.’

‘The Ironclads,’ shouted Finn over the whir and click of the clock mechanism. ‘They’re after me.’

The old man waved his arm dismissively. ‘Not allowed in here, boy. Delicate machinery.’

Did the old man mean he, Finn, wasn’t allowed in or that the Ironclads weren’t? Finn stood by the door, expecting his pursuers to start hammering on it at any moment. ‘I’m … I’m not even sure I’m supposed to be in here,’ he said.

The old man didn’t reply. He adjusted something in the great clock’s mechanism, delicately positioning a weight on a balance that rocked backwards and forwards. He glanced repeatedly at the oblong clock he had set down on the floor. Finally, satisfied, he took out his black book and began to write.

‘Clock seventy-two, Western Grand Tower, synchronized to master time.’

‘I came through the postern door,’ said Finn, not knowing what else to say. ‘Through the passageways. I got lost. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.’

The old man kneeled and heaved the clock back onto his back. He stood on shaky legs and began to walk away from Finn.

‘I mean, why me?’ said Finn. ‘Why was I given the Sixth Bell duties? Was it deliberate?’

‘Think you’re special do you boy?’ the old man said, not looking back.

‘I just thought, maybe, someone picked me out. Because of the
tests
.’

The man paused. ‘Tests? What tests?’

Was this the same man? The clock-winder and the gatekeeper? He couldn’t be sure, now.

‘I don’t know,’ said Finn. ‘The gatekeeper mentioned them when I arrived.’

The old man snorted but said nothing. He continued walking away.

‘I brought you this back,’ shouted Finn after him. The man stopped again and glanced around. Finn strode forwards, holding out the small brass alarm that had woken him each morning. He held his left arm, the one with the chain locked around it, behind his back, not wanting the old man to see.

The man raised a caterpillar eyebrow. He held out his hand. Finn worked his way between the cogs and spinning shafts to reach him. He had to duck under a silver chain that buzzed through the air at head-height. He handed the brass clock over. The man examined it and held it to his ear. He nodded at Finn, as if he’d done the right thing.

‘What sort of Ironclads?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What company were they?’

‘I don’t know. I thought they were all the same.’

The old man sighed, in an exaggerated way. ‘Come with me.’

Despite his age and the weight on his back, the man was nimble. Finn had to break into a trot to keep up with him as they worked their way through the clock mechanism. They reached what looked like a wooden cupboard door set part way up a wall. The old man twisted a clasp and opened it. Crouching, he stepped through. The clock on his back banged against the top of the frame and he had to resort to crawling on hands and knees. Finn followed him, squeezing his shoulders through the narrow gap, to find that they stood in another passageway, its floor-level two or three feet higher than that of the clock-room. He recalled how the old man had vanished half way up the spiral stairs to the dormitory. Perhaps there were secret doors like this all over Engn.

They set off now down a flight of steep steps, turning through ninety degrees every seventeenth. There were no windows visible but incandescent bulbs flickered at each turning. There were more of the unlit silvery orbs, too, half-embedded in the walls. He asked the old man about them but received only a dismissive grunt as a reply.

Finally they stood on a circular, red-tiled floor, highly polished as if worn smooth by the passage of many feet. A set of wooden doors stood in front of them. The old man found another key from his great collection..

Inside was a round, echoing space, with a large gold circle painted upon it like the dial of some sort of clock. A great many symbols Finn didn’t recognize were marked around the ring at irregular intervals. He watched, amazed, as a vast pendulum swung across the space with a
whoosh
of air. The gold disc on the end of it must have been twenty feet across. Finn could feel the rush of it on his face as it swept past. The pendulum paused at the end of its arc then cut back through the air, across the middle of the room. The old man, not breaking his stride, walked directly across its path. It missed him by inches as it roared by, but he appeared not to notice. Finn, wary, followed the old man. He waited until the pendulum was at the very far end of its cycle before hopping across the gold line that marked its passage. If it hit him, it would swat him away like a fly.

They stopped outside a smaller door. The old man picked up a triangle of cloth from a peg next to it and tied it around his nose and mouth. He held out a second triangle for Finn. Finn took the cloth and copied the old man. It had the warm smell of dust. The old man unlocked the smaller door and they walked through into a room that clicked and clattered with the ticking of thousands of clocks.

Finn looked around, dazzled by the array of shining, whirring mechanisms, brass and iron and glass. Whichever way he looked the movement of some or other device flickered away in the corner of his eye. What were they all doing here? Some were in pieces, being repaired, but most looked to be in perfect order.

High up above his head hung something that wasn’t a clock: a large, metal sphere suspended from the ceiling, spiked with hundreds of tiny tubes. Black cables led off in all directions from the spikes to disappear through the walls or ceiling. Against the background cacophony, he thought he could hear a deep hum coming from the sphere. He walked beneath it warily, half-expecting it to drop on him. As he passed underneath, the hairs on his head lifted, as if the sphere was trying to suck him upwards.

The old man, meanwhile, had stopped at one of the benches. With infinite care, he lowered the regulator clock he bore into an empty space among a jumble of dismantled mechanisms. At home, their most accurate clock had been Mrs. Megrim’s. The Switch House received a message on the trunk line each morning. If anyone else in the valley needed to know the precise time they could then ask the Switch House. Which meant that the whole world followed the time on a master clock somewhere here in Engn. Was it one of these? Was it even the one carried around on his back by this old man? Had Finn lived his life by this clock’s time without knowing it?

He tried to ask, his voice muffled by the mask he wore over his mouth and nose. The old man waved a hand at him, urgent, instructing him to be quiet. He turned and, free of his burden now, walked on through the room of clocks. Finn followed, picking his way over broken cogs and chains and clock face numerals strewn about on the floor.

Then, with a vast jangle, all the clocks in the room began to whir and chime at the same moment, as they all reached the twenty-seventh hour. The sounds clanged in Finn’s ears, coming at him from all angles, seeming to echo around inside his skull. The noise was incredible, but the old man didn’t appear to mind. He looked around at the clocks, nodded in approval of them, then unlocked a further door. He walked through, and once again Finn followed. Outside, the old man took off his mask and indicated Finn could do the same.

‘One breath in the wrong place in there and all the timings get disrupted,’ he said.

‘What would happen then?’ asked Finn.

The old man only shook his head in reply.

They stood, now, in some sort of library. Books, sheaves of paper and rolls of parchment cluttered every surface: shelves, desks, the floor. Pools of candle-light illuminated the scene here and there, leaving most of the room in shifting darkness. The smell of dust and paper and age tickled Finn’s nose, making him want to sneeze.

The old man crossed to a desk and sat at a stool. A vast book lay open on the desk, each page the size of a small bed.

‘Your number?’ he asked.

‘My number?’

‘Yes, your number, boy. Are you stupid?’

‘I don’t have a number.’

‘Nonsense. Everyone and everything in Engn has a number. How else could we possibly keep track of it all?’ The old man indicated the snowdrifts of paperwork surrounding him.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know,’ said Finn. ‘No-one told me.’

The man sighed and shook his head in amazement. ‘Name then? Do you recall that at least?’

‘Finn,’ said Finn. ‘Finn Smithson.’

‘Very well.’

The old man took out his glasses and, his nose almost brushing the paper of the book, feeling his way across the lines of text with his fingertips, began to read.

Finn smelt freshly baked bread. On a low table next to the desk, a meal had been set out for the old man. A jug of water and a glass stood next to a dome of silver mesh. The old man, seeming to sense what Finn was thinking, waved a hand towards the food without looking up, telling Finn he could eat. Finn needed no more prompting. He was light-headed with hunger, his mouth dusty with thirst. He poured himself water then began to consume the bread, dipping it in a beef stew that had also been provided. It was good. Very, very good.

As he ate he studied the old man. He was more and more sure this was the gatekeeper. It was surely the same bushy grey beard he’d seen inside the little hut. He replayed the memories in his mind. And now, as well as gatekeeper and clock-winder, the old man appeared to be some sort of record-keeper too. The masters gave him no end of menial tasks. Was he being punished for something?

The old man continued to read, his fingers spidering along the lines of tiny, black letters. Occasionally he shook his head and a plume of powder billowed out of his shaggy hair to drift down to the table, as if his brains were slowly crumbling to dust and falling from his ears.

With a thrill of alarm in his stomach it occurred to Finn that perhaps
this
was Lud. Perhaps he’d been meant to come up here and find the old man. Finn suddenly wanted to tell him everything. Connor, the pact, all of it. He’d walked alone in darkness for too long. He’d had enough of secrets and of hiding; he couldn’t keep them all in his head. He wanted to ask what he should do. Whether he was on the right path. Whether he was passing or failing the tests. What he was being tested
for
. How to join the wreckers.