Time's Mistress (22 page)

He spent his days watching the chronophage building God. That was how he described what he was doing. He was building God. God was in the machine. At first Suli hadn’t grasped what he meant but day by day it became clearer. The Great Mechanism was a colossal construct. Its gears and levers, pendulums and cogs were all part of the guts of the world. They were the rhythm that everything in creation danced to. It was illuminating. Suli was a hungry student. He lurked at the man’s shoulder listening to every mumble and curse as something went wrong and every slight joy as something went right.

When Suti realized she had a rival for his affections she laughed. It was that familiar derisory laugh she used to belittle him. It pleased him. It meant that he was hiding his strength from her as well. She might have taken his prick, the ‘man’ on the outside of his body, but she would never take the man inside.

She underestimated him.

Ultimately that was how he had been able to kill her. She had never imagined him capable of such deception. But of course he had always been capable. That was why the Sultan had kept him around, not because of his wry wit or his asexual good looks. He had killed more than once for the man, and taking the drink, sacrificing old age for this prolonged youth was a deal that worked well not only for Suli but for the Sultan and his son, and his son, and his after. He was the constant in their lives: death with his charming face.

Of course, it had been nothing more than a coincidence that his plan had come to fruition on the same day the Odalisque was brought into the palace. It was his fault that the clock had stopped. No one save for him and the Sultan himself knew the truth of what had happened. The Sultan because it was his will, Suli because it was his doing.

When he asked Immaculada if it was time he was asking so much more than: is this when you leave me? He was asking her if it was time for his final gift. Only at the very last would he open the book and show her the truth. The chronophage might have found God but it was Suli who stole him. It was Suli who had taken God out of the machine and given it the liar instead. Soon it would be time for him to share this stolen God with the woman of his heart. He longed to see her expression, to see the wonder in her eyes as it all came to life before her. What better way to leave this earth than looking into the face of the divine? He thought, stroking her brow.

It had been hard watching her grow old. Time was merciless. More than once he had regretted killing Suti simply because she must have known where the wellspring was. She had given him the clay goblet, she had made him drink the water and the water had kept this face of youth on his old bones. One sip could have bought him a decade with the Odalisque. One mouthful a lifetime.

So he had done what he had for a reason. He had stopped the clock. But it was more than just that, it was murder. He had torn the divine from the machine and trapped it within what he called the book of the world. It was all in there, every secret. And every page was inked with Suti’s blood as though finally bled dry she might record the truth she was named after.

The murder had needed stealth, of course, and cunning. He was equipped for both. First he gave the chronophage plans for adjustments to his Grand Mechanism. The man had been resistant until Suli had explained that these few changes would give God a voice. That had sold him on them. It was one thing to find God but if you couldn’t communicate with him then what use was it?

The man made the changes. The clock ticked on.

Suli had sent word via one of the wives that the Sultan would see his first wife beneath the great pendulum of the Grand Mechanism for he had a miraculous truth he would share with her. It was about the absence of divinity. No more, no less. Enough to capture Suti’s attention and spark her imagination, and maybe just maybe fire her greed, but not so much that she would hear the lie. Then he had sent word to the chronophage to meet him beneath the God Bell at the same time. Next he bade the raveller meet him betwixt and between the Grand Cogs and requested a scribe be there to record every word. Explicitly, he was to bring his quills and parchment but no ink. The ink would be provided. His final missive went to the Sultan himself. While the old man would never dirty his hands he did like to watch his will be done.

All of these separate threads came together in a careful pattern, each triggered when it was needed and not a second before. He had the time measured out in huge booming ticks and backwards tocks. He could not hide from it.

Suli had hidden himself away and watched as the liar paced back and forth beneath the pendulum and seen her perturbed frown as the scribe hustled up with his carefully wrapped quills. She did not like being made to wait. It showed. He looked up to see the Sultan in place, obscured from Suti’s position by the swing of the pendulum’s mechanism, and the raveller beneath the bell. The only one missing was the chronophage. Without him none of it would work. He gritted his teeth. He hated waiting every bit as much as the Sultan’s wife. Having eternity at his disposal only made him despise it all the more. Finally the little man shuffled into the chamber. As ever his eyes lit up at the sight of his great folly. Folly, Suli thought, because no matter what he might have hoped to achieve all he had actually built was one single enormous timepiece. The miracle of it was that it did not require a timekeeper to run constantly from mechanism to mechanism to keep all the springs wound tight. But in a few minutes his machine would be miraculous in so many more ways.

Suli gave the signal. He hadn’t known then how it had coincided so perfectly with the hammering on the door outside and the arrival of the girl child who lay withered and old on her bed beside him now waiting to die.

The raveller whispered his invocation, and touched the metal plate that anchored the huge pendulum. Mid swing it began to buckle and twist becoming a serpent. As it passed over the head of the liar it struck, sinking its huge fangs into her face. She screamed but Suli had expected that. No amount of screaming would save her. The scribe darted forward, dipping his quills in her torn flesh and began to transcribe the words that babbled out in agony, writing each one down on her body as it bucked and writhed, trying to shake free of the fangs. He turned her into a book of flesh and blood. Her last words becoming the testament of her body. The chronophage played his part perfectly. He fed her to the machine. He had added a metal harness, a cage that could be assembled by pulling various mechanisms and twisting certain cogs. He shackled the cage around her. Then the bell sounded, a single deep chime and the cage retreated back into the machine, taking her body back into it piece by piece until she became a part of the Great Mechanism. This was the worst of it, Suli knew, because if he was right, she couldn’t die. So piece by piece she was consumed by the cogs and the wheels, she greased the axles and kept the pendulum smooth.

The scribe crawled on his hands and knees collecting the shreds of his manuscript. Later Suli would have them bound in to the living book. For now it was enough to retrieve them from the machine.

He remembered the day as vividly as if it was yesterday. He emerged from hiding and found the tatters of her face. He held it in his hands wanting to believe he saw some signs of life in the ruin. She wasn’t beautiful anymore.

As the doors opened and the baby was brought in Suli gave the second signal and the chronophage started the Grand Mechanism again. It lasted for three hundred and twenty seven full pendulum swings. In that time the chronophage’s alterations spat out the book of the world page by page, the words of God, for want of a better description. Suti’s flesh pulped and mangled until every last ounce of color was squeezed from it onto the pages the scribe fed into the machine. He didn’t know if she was dead. He didn’t care. He had exacted his revenge. She would not cuckold the Sultan with a string of lovers or scheme against his wives. Instead she had become what she was born to be: the truth.

He had given the pages to the scribe and bade him to stitch and bind them. Instead the man put out his own eyes and died weeping tears of blood. None of the Sultan’s other scribes would touch the cursed pages so Suli took them to an aged leather worker on the outskirts of the city. One of the wives had told him about the old man. It had been her grandfather. He had been blinded in a tragic accident in the tannery and never worked again. Suli convinced him to take up his needle and braddle and all the other tools of his old trade and work one last piece of magic, turning the pages into a book.

When he held it in his hands he knew it was a work of art, worthy of holding the truth of the world and all of the petty things of existence. He had carried it carefully back into the city. It felt strange in his hands. Alive. Hungry. He felt it pulsing. The pulse made his skin crawl. Despite that he couldn’t help himself, he wanted to turn the page, to read the first truth of Suti … but it wasn’t his place. This was a gift fit only for the Sultan, not for some lowly eunuch in his service.

The Sultan had rewarded him well when presented with the book. Holding the thing with a mixture of reverence and trepidation the old man had opened the book. His eyes roved hungrily down the first page but after reading it he closed the book and said he had no wish to read more. The old man looked visibly shaken. “Take it, hide it. Never let this fall into the wrong hands, my friend. Do you understand?” Suli had nodded. “The living book can never be opened. Some truths the world does not need to know,” the Sultan had told him.

It was the same book that rested on the nightstand beside Immaculada’s death bed.

He had wanted to tell her so much before she left him. He had wanted to confess his love—but of course he did not need to. Some things never needed to be said. They were known. He looked at the clock on the wall. The shadow had moved on. It was deep in the night now. Long past the moment yesterday when she was alive and into today when she was dead. “One last story,” he said.

She smiled at him. “Make it a short one, my love.” It was as close as she came to admitting she was slipping into darkness.

Which one should he tell her? Should he take her back to the day she went from whore to wife? It was a beautiful day. The old Sultan had died and his first son took his place. He knew the story of the woman and the clock, as did everyone in the palace, and he decided that this miraculous girl should be his wife. What more auspicious omen could there be than marrying the child who stopped the hands of time itself? She had been seventeen. They had taken her out of the children’s palace three years earlier and with no one to shelter her she had been welcomed by Farusi the harlot. But she had always been different. The others in Farusi’s house were whores, Immaculada was never a whore, she was only ever the Odalisque. She lay with a single man during her three years in the house, the old Sultan himself. That was another reason the son wanted her, to possess something his father had only ever ‘borrowed.’

It didn’t seem like a fitting death bed story.

Then he wondered about the birth of her own son, but that was a tale that ended in tragedy so he did not want her dwelling upon it as she left this world.

Instead he told her a story she had never heard before, a love story of sorts. His mother had told him the story of the stone. She had been given it by his father. She had told him it was enchanted. He had never really believed that. He just liked the story. “Have I told you about my father’s last gift?” he asked. He knew he hadn’t but he wanted to keep her involved, to make her interact because it would keep her alive a little moment longer.

She said, “No,” and smiled. He loved her smile. “Is it a sad story?”

“No,” he promised. “My grandmother was blind. My grandfather would come to her day after day and sit with her, telling her all about the world she couldn’t see. Words were his last gift.”

“I can’t imagine anything more intimate,” Immaculada said. He knew she was imagining it. He had heard his grandmother talk about those days before he was born so often, but he was so young he couldn’t appreciate what she meant. The tenderness in her voice as she lived in those memories hurt him in some most basic of ways. Now he did. Now he knew what she was feeling was loss. His grandfather, Lukas, had died long before her, leaving her but she wasn’t alone anymore, his mother, their baby girl, Poli was with her. The one story of hers he remembered was about those few weeks when she could see and how she hated the blandness of the world, and how after his grandfather’s death she had left Aksandria and moved across the great sea to the Komark where she knew no one but at least she wasn’t surrounded by the smells and sounds that she would forever associate with her hopeless romantic of a husband. Breathing in the fragrance of Immaculada he finally understood. These corridors would never be the same again without her fragrance clinging to them. They would be forever empty.

“I am so tired, Suli. I think I will sleep now.”

He looked at her and knew instinctively that her eyes would not reopen. He moved around the bed and took the book from the nightstand. “I always wanted to grow up like my grandfather, though I never knew him,” Suli said. His smile was tender. “I can’t imagine a more precious gift than words,” he handed her the book. “I might never have been able to touch you in the way a lover could, not with my body, but if my grandmother’s story taught me anything it was that lovers didn’t merely touch with hands and fingers and lips, they touched with something much more intimate.”

“Words,” she said, still with him. Just. He realized he was crying.

He opened the book for her. He wished he could see whatever it was she saw, but instead he contented himself with watching it come alive in her eyes. He saw the blue first, the shape of the world slowly spinning in the dark pupil, then all of the other colors, so rich and vibrant. Her lips parted, not quite the death-breath. “What can you see?” he asked. He couldn’t help himself.

“Everything,” she said to him. “All of it. I never knew … I never … look,” she demanded, tilting the book toward him but he reached up to stop her.