The Watcher of Dead Time

by Edward Cox

  ‘You want to help us,’ Marney said, unimpressed. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘You sound as though you don’t want my guidance. But I think we both know that you need it.’

  Hamir’s body jerked. The star had apparently finished draining the higher magic from him. The tendril, now less like light and more like a purple gelatinous umbilical, slipped from Hamir’s forehead with a wet sound. Hamir groaned. The process had also drained him of youth. His raven hair now grey, the diamond tattoo replaced by an ugly red wound, he fell face down onto the symbols beneath him looking like the elderly necromancer Clara knew.

  The soon-to-be-aide of the Residents faded and disappeared. The little star fizzed with higher magic as it sucked the gelatinous tendril into it.

  Wolfe said, ‘You cannot find the Nephilim with wishful thinking and blind luck. In fact, you’d be more likely to damn yourselves.’ Face grave, he stood before the purple star and it rose up to his eye level. ‘The machinations of creatures of higher magic are not meant for your understanding. There is information stored in Known Things that could crush your minds beyond redemption. Ghosts that you really don’t want to stumble upon.’ His smile returned. ‘Fortunately for you, I am quite the experienced guide.’

  Wolfe blew upon the star. With a creaking sound like water freezing, its colour changed to emerald green and its shape became a thaumaturgic diamond.

  ‘You know how to find the Nephilim?’ Clara said.

  ‘I certainly know in which direction you must go,’ Wolfe replied.

  Marney continued to aim her steely glare at him. Clara felt perplexed.

  ‘Explanations will have to wait for later, I’m afraid,’ Wolfe continued, and he plucked the green diamond from the air. ‘But a warning – never forget where you are. This is Spiral’s domain and you could not handle knowing everything that he does. Search only for the Nephilim.’

  Above, the multicoloured sky dimmed and the stars began winking out one by one, leaving behind black holes. Clara felt an emptiness inside her as the voice of the wolf growled thunder.

  The Skywatcher’s expression became utterly humourless and his pale eyes bored into the changeling. ‘If your magic wipes Known Things from your mind before you find the Nephilim, there will be no point in you waking up. There will be no one to stop Spiral and every House in existence will fall before him. The Lord of the Genii’s plans go deeper than even his followers know.’

  So saying, Wolfe hurled the green diamond over the magickers. Clara followed its arching path and watched as it hit the scintillating wall with a glassy chime. The diamond ruptured the cloudy colours with a great gout of darkness which rolled up into the air like waves parting a sea. A night sky was revealed, in which shone the clean, bright glare of a moon. The darkness descended, hissing like red-hot metal dipped into water as it formed the silhouettes of crooked buildings and towers lining a long, wide street. The green diamond glinted in the sky, the only star to accompany the moon.

  Baran Wolfe had disappeared but his voice was carried on a cool, gentle breeze that came from the new landscape.

  ‘I will find you again …’

  And then nothing.

  Clara felt as though she stood on the threshold between two different worlds, and she watched as the scintillating, multi-hued representation of Mother Earth continued to darken. Thunder rumbled again, and this time it was underlined with a distinct howl.

  ‘We should go,’ Marney said quietly.

  Clara followed the empath down the street of the city in silhouette. The darkness rolled and sealed shut behind them.

  Chapter Six

  Lord of the Genii

  A sea of red and blue stretched to the horizon, writhing, angry, rolling with clashing waves shining every shade found between dusk and dawn. Thick lines of black stone tried to form something solid in the sea, but the waves tore them to pieces which sank into the depths of perpetual flux. Giant, house-sized bubbles of deep purple rose and burst with sparkles of unused time, spiralling as they were borne up to a livid sky where ulcerous clouds bled the rains of continual shapelessness back down into the sea.

  This was Oldest Place.

  Fabian Moor recalled a description he had once read of the House, written by a poorly educated human historian: A damned place of fire and poison. How little the creatures of lower magic understood.

  The air was surprisingly still and clement given the storm-like conditions; but there was nothing breathable about it, not even to a creature of higher magic. Hovering above the sea, Moor had cast a spell, a protective cocoon that wrapped him in fresh air and shielded him from the never-ending downpour of unused time. Mo Asajad and Viktor Gadreel had done the same while keeping their escape route open. Their faces masks of concentration, skin glowing with thaumaturgy, Moor’s fellow Genii laboured to maintain the portal back to the Nightshade. The black, churning disc hung in the air between them.

  After Known Things had given Hagi Tabet the relevant information, it had been relatively easy to find Oldest Place. Leaving, however, just might take a greater degree of luck.

  Moor looked out across the red and blue sea. In the near distance, a grand formation of higher magic rose, connecting the volatile sea to the ulcerated sky like a spout of static-dashed darkness. There was something dangerous about it, almost sorrowful, and Moor’s blood quickened.

  ‘Preserve the portal,’ he told Asajad and Gadreel. ‘Be prepared to leave.’

  And he drifted off towards the formation of magic.

  He flew slowly, cautiously, high enough to avoid the eruptions of the sea. Oldest Place was a ruthless House that would not forgive the Genii any wrong move.

  It was said that the Genii War had not only ended countless lives, but also the Timewatcher’s compassion. Without mercy, She had broken those who rose against Her, and then She abandoned those who had stood beside Her. She destroyed the surviving Genii, flinging their corpses into the primordial mists of the Nothing of Far and Deep before disappearing with Her Thaumaturgists for good.

  Yet despite the magnitude of Her wrath, the Timewatcher had chosen not to execute Lord Iblisha Spiral. For him, the great enemy and instigator, She had created this prison House. And now Moor understood the bitter depths of Spiral’s punishment.

  The location of Oldest Place had been regarded as the Timewatcher’s most closely guarded secret. Theories and speculations had run rampant among the humans since the end of the war. Some claimed that Oldest Place had been set to drift in the great void of space; others that it had been shrunk to the size of a snow globe and stored away in the Timewatcher’s private vaults on Mother Earth. Or perhaps it was in the very bowels of the Timewatcher’s most loveless creation, the Retrospective, where Spiral sat on his throne and fed upon the souls of the dead like some ignoble demon.

  So many guesses and lies. A plethora of myths, spawned from lesser minds, each as wild and unfounded as the next. It therefore came as no surprise to Moor that no one had guessed the true location of Spiral’s prison.

  Oldest Place was beneath the Great Labyrinth. Or more accurately, perhaps, to the side of it. On the periphery, in a gap between the real and the unreal – that was where the Lord of the Genii had been imprisoned; and the denizens of Labrys Town had never known how close to him they had always been. The House of all Houses, the one realm for which the greatest Thaumaturgist had been willing to go to war to conquer; the final irony of Spiral’s sentence was to be incarcerated literally within touching distance of what he coveted most.

  It was almost poetic, and Moor flushed with anger as he looked down at the sea below him.

  Unused time had been manipulated to create Oldest Place – the same substance from which the Timewatcher had created the Labyrinth – but here She kept it in an unstable state: a ceaseless, repetitive loop that ensured time never really passed in this House. Except for the formation of magic rising from the s
ea. As Moor approached it, he realised that it hadn’t been made from unused time. It was something else entirely.

  The static-dash darkness formed a wall of sorts around the plateau of an island of black stone which rose from liquid time like an industrial chimney. Whispered voices, far-off moans and wails, reached Moor’s ears. He kept his distance, hovering in the air, considering what he saw.

  Human mythology might have claimed that Oldest Place reduced Spiral to a monstrous king of demons, but the truth was far more wretched. Oldest Place had been designed with one simple function: to keep Lord Spiral’s body alive so his mind could be tortured by the Timewatcher’s retribution for eternity.

  Again, angry whispers and distant wails reached Moor’s ears.

  To relive the atrocities of the Genii War, to be reminded of the deaths he had caused, the Houses he had destroyed and his every act of betrayal over and over and over again – that had been Spiral’s existence for the last forty years. The island and its wall of strange, dangerous magic was a cell. It had been created from dead time.

  Moor felt a pang of doubt. He hovered, summoning the courage to move closer.

  No one but the Timewatcher – and Spiral – could manipulate the substance of dead time. But was Moor’s higher magic powerful enough to fool it?

  He drifted a little closer to the wall. Once before, Moor had managed to fool the Timewatcher’s thaumaturgy. He remembered how it had felt, respected how small he was compared to it. If he had one advantage in Oldest Place, it was that the Timewatcher never knew that some of the Genii had survived the war. She had thought this prison her best-kept secret and that there was no one left who could find it and spring Spiral from his cell.

  Moor understood straight away that if he touched the wall of dead time physically, he would be crushed beyond existence. If he let his own thaumaturgy latch on to it too tightly, it would absorb his power entirely. He required subtlety. He required patience.

  As the world around him roiled in flux, Moor conjured a phantom of himself, an astral copy which drifted gracefully away from his body and headed into the wall of dead time.

  At first, it almost snatched his spirit away faster than he could control. The buzz of static shook his mind. With supreme concentration and perfect calm, Moor slid his magic over the rapid flow of energy, followed its currents until he found a way through the wall into pandemonium.

  His phantom eyes were filled with ghosts: countless screaming sprites and wailing apparitions, spectres and ghouls trapped by the Timewatcher’s spell, rushing and spinning, crushed together, spiralling into a vortex of madness that rose above the island, contained by dead time. The voices were too clamouring and fast for Moor to comprehend, and again he had to bolster his own thaumaturgy lest the ferocity of the ghosts sweep him up into their tumultuous din. He heard enough, however, to ascertain that the voices were shrieking about death and loss, violence, injustice and rage. It was the voice of the Genii War Moor could hear; the chaos of the dead, forced to recount their agonies in a never-ending loop.

  How many millions had died in the war? How many souls had the Timewatcher trapped in Oldest Place instead of allowing them an afterlife?

  And to think She had led them all to believe that She was their loving Mother.

  Below the vortex of ghosts, nestled on the smooth island plateau, was a small, plain jar. Made from terracotta, its lid sealed with wax, the jar’s very presence forced Moor to control mixed feelings of excitement and anger. The Timewatcher had forbidden Her Thaumaturgists to use this kind of dark magic, yet She had used it Herself to preserve the physical essence of Her First Lord, Iblisha Spiral.

  Was there no end to Her hypocrisy?

  A roar, much louder than the tumult of voices, filled Moor’s mind. In the vortex, the giant face of a man formed from wispy radiance. Bald-headed and thickly bearded, his eyes shone with violet light. His mouth opened and his maniacal bellow appeared to be directed at the Genii’s phantom. My Lord, Moor thought to it; but the face, tortured by the voice of war, didn’t respond and shattered into pieces that the storm of ghosts carried away.

  Moor’s heart raced. To witness Lord Spiral’s helplessness was too much to bear. With his body stored as ashes in the terracotta jar, he was powerless to prevent his mind from being ripped and torn for eternity. Yet Fabian Moor, Spiral’s most trusted Genii, still found hope in the knowledge that the Timewatcher had not planned on anyone finding Oldest Place.

  Carefully, masterfully, Moor’s thaumaturgy searched for strands of dead time that weren’t so raw and primal, areas of the wall which the Timewatcher had tamed with Her magic. They were fleeting, always moving, but Moor managed to capture what he wanted.

  A bolt of energy streaked out to surround the jar with a sphere of spinning magical lines. Immediately, Spiral’s mind reappeared as a giant face. With a wail of anguish, it raced down to the jar as though desperate to protect its body. When the face was close enough, Moor engorged the sphere. It sprang open like a trap and closed around Spiral’s mind, holding it inside along with the jar.

  Moor waited for several seconds.

  The ghosts continued to race and wail above.

  Nothing retaliated.

  With a delicate use of higher magic and unwavering patience, Moor lifted the sphere and brought it towards the wall of dead time. Surrounded by the Timewatcher’s spells and manipulations, the contents passed through without hindrance, the wall detecting no irregularities.

  Moor returned to his body and gently coaxed the sphere out into the still, unbreathable air of Oldest Place. Separated now from their prison, Lord Spiral’s body and mind were perfectly preserved by the spinning lines of magic.

  Suspicious, Moor waited, ready for Oldest Place to react, to rise up with some magical retribution; but nothing changed. The sky still bled; the red and blue sea roiled. Its prisoner gone, the island, the cell of dead time, incarcerated only the voices of countless ghosts, trapped for eternity.

  Moor allowed himself a small moment of triumph. Unimpeded, he drifted back towards Asajad and Gadreel, the sphere flying ahead of him.

  Oldest Place had lost its prisoner.

  Ennis had been hearing stories of Lady Amilee for as far back as he could remember. This Thaumaturgist – a Skywatcher – had been the patron of the denizens, vital to the Labyrinth in the old days. But like the rest of the Thaumaturgists she had slipped into legend and become a mythical figure long before Ennis was born. He had never really stopped to consider that Lady Amilee might be real. But she was – the last of the Thaumaturgists – and the blue ghost was her avatar, sent to Labrys Town as the harbinger of disaster.

  A flash of light came from the workshop’s doorway, followed by a line of hard swearing. Ennis shook his head. Sitting behind the counter out in the junk shop’s display area, he continued waiting for Long Tommy to finish his feats of magical engineering.

  Earlier, Ennis had watched Tommy work on the shard of strange thaumaturgic metal. Jars filled with powders and potions of varying colours surrounded the old shop owner on his workbench. From a notebook, he followed handwritten guidelines transcribed from the avatar’s instructions. Over the green flames of magical fire, Tommy had melted the metal in a bowl of black Aelfirian glass, while whispering alien words and adding ingredients Ennis couldn’t identify – and didn’t want to, judging by the stench they created.

  The metal had shed pearlescent light as it liquefied and the atmosphere in the workshop became odd; not hot, as Ennis had expected, but filled with a pressure that tingled upon his skin, like it was trying to seep through his pores. It evoked a disquieting feeling in Ennis, and he hadn’t been able to shake the notion that the metal was sentient, and that it recognised him.

  Tommy, however, had remained unfazed. He had been dealing with magic for decades and it was fascinating to watch him work. Even so, when he put on welder’s goggles and warned that the light was a
bout to get too intense for the naked eye, Ennis had seized the chance to leave the room, relieved to escape the uncomfortable atmosphere.

  He had been waiting in the main shop for almost two hours.

  Ennis had arrested a few magic-users in his time but never actually witnessed spells being cast. Given that Tommy was also working with thaumaturgy, Ennis reasoned that, under normal circumstances, what he was allowing to take place in the old junk shop was grounds enough to get them both executed under the Resident’s law. But these were not normal circumstances, and the Resident’s law didn’t seem to count for much these days.

  Ennis shivered.

  Another name the avatar had brought back from the past was Fabian Moor. It was little wonder that Ennis had been so confused over the last couple of days. He had a gift for piecing together information, solving the most bemusing of puzzles, connecting the unlikeliest of links and arriving at the truth. But even he couldn’t have guessed that Fabian Moor and three other Genii had survived the war and taken control of the Nightshade. And soon, the denizens of Labrys Town would understand the reason for the Genii’s return.

  Spiral was coming.

  ‘Prepare,’ the avatar had warned. ‘The Lord of the Genii will care for no one. Do as I say, or every denizen dies.’

  Ennis rose from the chair, anxiety making him restless, and began to pace the shop.

  Where was Lady Amilee now? Why send only her messenger when the denizens needed her, their patron, a Thaumaturgist? The avatar had been evasive when asked questions, its answers often cryptic. ‘Events will unfold as they have to,’ it had said before it disappeared. It was now apparent that Lady Amilee and her avatar expected an old-time crook and a lone policeman to perform the task of preparing Labrys Town.

  Or every denizen dies …

  Those words echoed around Ennis’s mind, preoccupying his thoughts as he paced. He didn’t notice Tommy emerge from the workshop at first.