God of Clocks (26 page)

“I'm tired,” the boy said. “I want to go home.” He leaned back and closed his eyes.

The scarred angel grunted. Her heart continued to hammer, as her scars writhed and itched. The battle with the river had not been enough, and she still hungered for war. Her dark gaze dropped to the demon child, and a sudden knot of rage tightened in her gut. It took all of her will to stop herself from ripping out his throat.

She needed a blade desperately.

Mercifully, the shape-shifter hadn't noticed her anger. His face had paled and he was staring up with wide eyes. “No, no, no,” he said. “Not here.”

Carnival looked up.

Overhead the sky looked different. Instead of the usual cluttered mass of brick and iron, a series of black iron conduits led up into the Maze from here. The stonework around these pipes appeared smooth and uniform, apparently the result of some grander
design than simply the chaotic crush of countless souls. This looked
ordered,
like the foundation of one single structure.

“Not here,” the boy wailed. “I won't go back… I won't!”

“What is it?”

“The Ninth Citadel,” he sobbed. “This is where they made me!”

“Who
made you? What's up
there?”

The boy sobbed, and rubbed tears from his eyes. “King Menoa is up there,” he said. “The Lord of the Maze and all his armies and his Icarates.” He sniffed and rubbed his nose. “The river brought you here to meet its father.”

Iron Head led the party into a tall stone gatehouse and, while his men waited there, he took Rachel and Mina on through a massive copper door and into the heart of the castle of the god of clocks.

Whatever Rachel had been expecting, this wasn't it. Iron Head put his shoulder to the metal door behind them, and it swung shut with a resounding boom. The subsequent echoes gave the sense of an immense chamber, yet Rachel could see little in this darkness except for a single shaft of light that fell upon a circular table fifty paces ahead. From all around came the sound of ticking, whirring clocks—the
thunk-thunk
of heavy cogs, tinny metallic chimes, and the dull brassy peals of larger bells. Underlying this orchestra Rachel could just discern a faint hissing sound, like trickling sand.

Her future self stood waiting beside the god of clocks. Sabor was grey-haired and grey-winged and clad in a suit of dull chain that lent him an air of stiff authority. He frowned at the table before him and did not look up as the three newcomers approached. Then he reached under the table and tugged at some unseen mechanism.

Rachel heard a clunk.

“Garstone,” the god of clocks called out, “please refocus lens
number six hundred and twenty-three on level ninety-two—the Buttercup Suite should now be situated seventeen minutes ago, but something seems to be causing a distortion. Did you clean the window glass in there, Garstone? Did you check the timelock lens seals?”

Out of the darkness overhead replied a chorus of many droll voices. “The windows are pristine, sir… One of me shall attend to the lens seals forthwith… However, I fear it is already too late… The Buttercup Suite is about to end its current cycle.” The hidden speakers had uttered their words in complete harmony.

Iron Head began, “Greetings, Sabor. Here—”

“A moment, please, Reed,” Sabor cut in. He withdrew a book from under the table, thumbed through it quickly, and then called out again in a raised voice, “Wait until the suite completes its cycle before you change the seals, Garstone. It's due to slip backwards nine weeks, three days, ten hours and…” He turned the page. “… three minutes. That's night time.”

“Yes, sir,” the voices called down.

Sabor closed the book, and returned his attention to the circular tabletop.

As Rachel drew nearer, she could see the object of the god's scrutiny more clearly. The table was actually a shallow basin made of white ceramic, and upon its smooth surface moved tiny figures. The god of clocks was studying a moving image: a bird's-eye view of streets and houses all wreathed in smoke.

A camera obscura?

Rachel had heard rumours of such devices. In theory they were simple to construct. A series of lenses and mirrors, set high upon a tall building, projected an image of their surroundings down into a darkened room.

Sabor glanced up at the newcomers. His gaze settled on Iron Head, and he called up into the darkness. “Your brother Reed is here, Garstone. No doubt he wishes to speak to you.”

“I am aware of that, sir,” replied the many voices. “One of me will attend to him.”

“There's really no need, Eli,” Iron Head replied. “I can see you're busy.”

“One of me always has time for you, brother,” the multiplicious speakers replied. A pause followed, and then a single voice said, “I'll be down forthwith.”

The captain grimaced.

Rachel gazed down in wonder at the ceramic depression. The image there was warped and blurred in places, yet she recognized the scene instantly.

Burntwater.

Fire consumed the entire wharfside, sending billowing mountains of black smoke into the air. The neighbourhood beyond lay smothered in dust, but she could see that it had been completely destroyed. Here and there, a few smaller, isolated fires had taken hold. The remains of hundreds of buildings lay open to the sky, their roofs staved in and their walls smashed apart. Piles of rubble clogged every street. But there was no sign of Dill, or the other giant automatons. The settlement was utterly deserted.

“Where's Dill?” Rachel asked, grabbing the edge of the table.

Sabor made an adjustment to some hidden mechanism beneath the table. Rachel heard wheels turning. The projected image gave a sudden lurch, and then scrolled rapidly across the tabletop. Rachel caught a glimpse of the shore flying past her fingers before the view moved out over the lake. For several heartbeats she saw nothing but water, but then the image settled again on the opposite shore—
this
side of the Flower Lake. Rachel's breath caught in her throat.

An arconite was dragging itself out of the water and up into the forest beyond. Rachel's heart screamed at her that this wasn't Dill, that it couldn't be him—that it
had
to be one of Menoa's angels. But her head told her that this wretched thing was indeed her
friend. His wings and armoured back plate had been ripped off, exposing his naked spine to the sky. The shattered vertebrae trailed behind his neck like a broken chain, barely held together by a tangled assortment of pipes. One of his legs was missing entirely; the other ended at the knee. His left arm had been crushed in three places and flailed pathetically in the muddy shore behind him. His jaw was gone, and his skull had been smashed open, revealing the machinery and gleaming crystals within. Chemical blood leaked from the engine in his chest and stained the waters black.

But he was still alive.

With his one good arm, Dill pulled his broken body further into the trees above the waterline.

Seventeen minutes ago?

The image vanished, leaving nothing but the plain white surface.

“What happened?” Rachel cried. “Get it back.”

Sabor raised his head and yelled up into the darkness above. “Garstone?”

“As I feared, sir,” came the chorus in reply. “The room's cycle has now finished. It is currently recharging.”

The god of clocks nodded. He glanced at Rachel and then at her future self. “That particular view has ceased to be.”

“This happened seventeen minutes ago?” Rachel said. “But that means Dill is down there now. We have to go back.” She spun to face the Burntwater captain. “Iron Head, I need your help.”

“Wait,” Sabor said.

Rachel stopped.

“There isn't time,” Sabor went on. “The suite that returns you to this morning will complete its own cycle shortly. You must go back now or lose this opportunity.”

“No.” She turned to go.

“Light the lamps,” Sabor yelled.

Far overhead a light flickered and brightened, immediately followed
by another, and yet another. In moments the whole chamber became illuminated.

Rachel felt suddenly giddy.

The interior of the castle resembled a twisted cylinder or vortex, much like the spiraling body of a whirlwind. It consisted of hundreds of levels, each with a multitude of inward-facing doors set around its circular gallery. Stairs of curlicue metalwork connected one level to the next, all canted to follow the crooked walls. The towering room terminated far overhead in a glass hemisphere, from the center of which descended a complex optical array of interconnected brass tubes, mirrors, lenses, and cogs. Rising above their heads, its burnished metal columns formed a towering spine in the center of the room, from which many more links extended sideways to disappear into the surrounding walls. This queer arrangement of glass and metal occupied most of the space between the galleries. The image of Dill had issued from its lowest tube, suspended mere yards above Sabor's viewing table.

The god of clocks straightened. “Please forgive my discourtesy, but we simply do not have time for arguments or discussion. Miss Hael,” he inclined his head towards Rachel, “you
must
go back to the past, in order that the rest of us might deal with the issue of your giant friend. If you refuse, and choose instead to leave my castle now, you will endanger all that we have achieved, and will subsequently achieve.”

Rachel glanced over at her other self, and was startled to see the fear in the woman's eyes. Her twin caught Rachel's inquiring look and said, “Just listen to him.”

“She's right,” Mina said. “Rachel, we'll look after Dill.”

“I can't just leave him,” Rachel said.

“You
aren't
leaving him,” her future self said. “I'm here, and I'm
you.
For the gods' sake, just go and let us do this.”

“Go where?”

“This way.” Sabor beckoned her over to the nearest staircase. “Hurry—I'll explain as we go.”

Rachel glanced at Mina, who nodded.

The small party hurried after Sabor, who led them up a metalwork staircase that curved towards the first tier of his castle.

“This fortress,” Sabor said as he ran up the stairs, “offers one the opportunity to explore paths back through Time.” He indicated the many doors situated on the tiers of galleries above him. Iron steps rattled under his feet. “Each of these doors leads to a timelock, and behind each timelock is a suite. And each of those suites exists in a separate moment in the past: whether one hour ago or three hours, two days in the past, a year, a month—it all depends on the suite's current cycle. The Obscura's engines keep the whole thing ticking.” From a pocket under his mail shirt he withdrew a chart, quickly unfolding it to many times its original size. “Each room's temporal reach changes with the passage of Time. They cycle through various set permutations. It has been my life's work to map them all.” He stabbed a finger at the huge sheet of paper. “Right now, for instance, the Larollen Suite on the thirteenth floor looks out upon the new moon of four months ago. But when it finishes its cycle, a year from today, it will only be able to take a traveler back five days.”

They reached the first gallery. A walkway with a smooth dark wood banister encircled this level of the giant chamber, with a second staircase then rising up to the next gallery. A dozen or so doors led off this platform, each one boasting a round glass window like a ship's porthole as well as a tarnished gold dial similar to the locking mechanism found on a safe. Some of the portholes were dark, while light shone through others. Tubes from Sabor's camera obscura ran into the adjacent walls.

Here were the clocks Rachel had heard from downstairs. On the walls between doors hung every sort of timepiece, from the modest to the ostentatious. Hands ticked around faces in short halting steps past numerals and dates and diagrams of suns and moons.

As they hurried past the first door, Rachel glanced through its
porthole. Beyond the timelock she glimpsed a comfortable room full of many more clocks, handsome furniture, and bookcases stuffed with ancient tomes, cabinets of astrological instruments, and an enormous brass device set upon a tripod before the exterior window. This, she thought, must be one extension of Sabor's obscura, and it was currently looking out through an outer window upon a dark and starry sky.

“How is that possible?” she said.

Sabor glanced back at the dial on the door, and then checked his map. “That particular room exists forty years ago,” he said. “The temporal register appears to be in accordance with the clocks inside. This therefore remains part of our current timeline, our actual history.” He raised his head. “Garstone? Where are you, Garstone?”

Rachel gazed back at the porthole in awe. “So stepping through that door would take you back forty years?” She found herself racing to catch up with the others again. “Why don't you go back and change the past, stop the portal from opening at Coreollis?”

“It's too late for that,” Sabor replied. “This castle was intended to be an
observatory,
not a vehicle for would-be time travelers. One can safely journey back to the dawn of Time, so long as one remains inside the castle. But the moment you set foot outside these walls, you threaten the natural order of Time. Then every action you take, no matter how small, might alter history and thereby create a parallel universe. Time would split, like a fork in a branch. Thereafter, that room would become a junction, a crossroads between two realities—the one you left behind and the one you created
yourself.”
He glanced at his pocket watch. “Faster—the cycle change is due any moment.”

“If it's so dangerous, then why am I going back?”

Sabor threw up his arms. “Because our own timeline has already been corrupted,” he cried. “It's failing, rotten. The universe outside these walls is dying a slow death, and nothing we do now is going to make it any worse. It might last another hundred years—
or ten, or a thousand—but the cancer has already spread out of control. All we can do is hack at it with a knife and try to buy ourselves some more time. Right now, you are that knife.”

Just as they reached the second staircase, one of the doors on the first level flew open and a stooped old man, wearing a garishly striped brown and red suit, stepped through it. He had his nose buried in a book, but when he noticed the group he nodded to Sabor and then to Iron Head before disappearing through the neighbouring door. A heartbeat later a third door on the opposite side of the circular gallery opened, and the same old man stepped back onto it. This time he was wearing a plain blue suit and scribbling notes in his book. He spotted the group again, nodded two times more to the captain and the god of clocks, and then vanished through an altogether different door.