The Watcher of Dead Time

by Edward Cox

  Home, Samuel wondered. He deadened thoughts of Labrys Town, of the denizens … of Councillor Tal, a lone Aelf standing against the Panopticon of Houses to save a million lives.

  ‘You’re talking about the Sorrow of Future Reason,’ Hillem said, almost excitedly. His fascination with the situation was beginning to irritate Samuel. ‘That’s the House you’ve been searching for, isn’t it? I thought it was a myth.’

  ‘Myth?’ Bellow considered that. ‘The Sorrow of Future Reason is more like hope. For a thousand years the Nephilim searched for a home, and I honestly thought our search had come to an end. But once again, Yansas Amilee displayed her gift for deception.’

  Samuel frowned. ‘She led you to the Icicle Forest.’

  ‘And she abandoned me here almost as soon as the war ended.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s an interesting answer to that,’ Bellow growled. ‘The Icicle Forest – a pretty name for such a damned place, don’t you agree? Spiral really lost no love when he created this House.’

  ‘But he didn’t create it properly,’ Namji added, moving back to her boulder seat. ‘If you ask me, the Icicle Forest isn’t stable. It’s chaotic, like it’s … in flux.’

  ‘And why bother creating all those monsters?’ Glogelder said. ‘What’s their purpose?’ He shivered. ‘I don’t envy you being stuck in here with them outside.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ Bellow said with a smile. ‘Spiral created this House from unused time, which means he had grown powerful enough to do the Timewatcher’s work. But those monsters, Glogelder – they’re not monsters at all. They are Time Engineers, servants of the Timewatcher, magical labourers who Spiral stole and subjugated. They are the builders of Houses.

  ‘You are right to say the Icicle Forest is unstable, Namji, and purposely so. It is trapped in a loop in time, perpetually recycling itself. Spiral’s magic has driven those poor Time Engineers to insanity. They are perversions of what they should be.’

  ‘But that doesn’t explain why you’re here,’ Samuel said impatiently. ‘Look, this is all very interesting, but every one of us has been manipulated by Lady Amilee and I’m pretty sure she sent us here to find you, Gulduur. But why? Surely we’re not all trapped here now.’

  ‘I’m not trapped here – I’ve been waiting for you.’ Bellow broke into a wide grin that revealed blocky teeth. ‘I suspect you’re a man who prefers brevity of information over a good story, Samuel.’

  ‘Yep, and as miserable as you like,’ Glogelder put in.

  Hillem told his friend to knock it off but Bellow laughed, standing up and towering over the group. ‘Although she failed to tell me that it would take decades, Amilee said that a human magicker would come, one who would walk with me on the path that would lead to freeing the Nephilim herd.’ He looked at Samuel. ‘I mean no offence, but I had hoped it would be Van Bam.’

  ‘We don’t know where Van Bam is,’ Samuel said coolly. ‘He’s with another magicker – Clara – and they’re both missing.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘All part of Amilee’s plan, I suppose,’ Samuel grumbled. ‘You said something earlier about needing my help to solve a puzzle?’

  ‘Indeed.’ The giant looked at each of them in turn. ‘Come with me,’ he said, walking off into the orchard. ‘I want to show you why the Icicle Forest was created.’

  Ennis had always known he had been touched by magic. For as long as he could remember, he had felt a connection to Labrys Town that no one else seemed to share. There was something in his blood that steered his thoughts, honed his instincts and senses. Ennis thought of his gift as truth-seeing; the ability to find clues and links that no one else could perceive, to read important information in apparently innocuous conversations and body language. And he was rarely wrong.

  In his youth at the orphanage, Ennis had gained the reputation of a grass. He read the schemes and mischiefs of the other orphans no matter how hard they tried to hide them, and Ennis never failed to inform his superiors. Childhood was a lonely time. But there had never been any spite behind his informing; Ennis had simply been defending those on the receiving end of these schemes. The truth was, he loved this dirty shit-hole that he called home, and there was a desire in his blood to protect its people.

  But the use of magic was punishable by death in Labrys Town and it had been that way since the Genii War ended and the Retrospective came. Small wonder, then, that Ennis wound up joining the police force, where his magical gift could easily be mistaken for honest detective work. But Long Tommy said that if Ennis had been born a couple of generations earlier, he would have become an agent of the Relic Guild. Was that true? Was Ennis fulfilling the duties of the Relic Guild now?

  In the central district, at the very heart of town, Ennis stood amidst the panic taking place in the large foyer of police headquarters. A crowd of denizens were shouting and arguing with officials who were losing an increasingly desperate battle to maintain calm. A group of armed police officers rushed out of the building onto the streets where panic was beginning to rise into a storm of pandemonium.

  Labrys Town was in trouble.

  The denizens believed that the Relic Guild were making their move, spreading their plague and preparing the town for the chaos and perversion of the Retrospective; but Ennis knew differently.

  Pushing his way through the crowd in the foyer, he ascended the stairs to the upper levels. He crossed the open-plan office, usually bustling with activity but eerily deserted now – apparently even the administrative staff had been called to attend the mounting crises. Reaching the top level, he strode down a long corridor with doorless rooms on either side. Inside the rooms, police watchers lay on reclining chairs, their faces hidden by black bowl-like receptor helmets. The watchers were tuned in with the eye devices on the streets of Labrys Town and would feed any troubling information to the street patrols. Ennis reasoned that troubling news was currently plentiful.

  He reached the closed door to Captain Moira’s office and heard her agitated voice coming from inside.

  ‘I don’t care how thinly we’re spread, the denizens need protecting.’ She barked a curse. ‘This damn virus has already become an epidemic. If anyone shows signs of infection, your orders are to shoot them dead. Now get out!’

  The door opened and three officers rushed from the room without so much as looking at Ennis. They headed off down the corridor to the lower levels.

  ‘Where in the Timewatcher’s name have you been?’ Moira snapped when Ennis entered the office. ‘I haven’t seen you for days!’

  ‘I’ve been following your orders,’ Ennis replied calmly.

  ‘Obviously without much bloody success.’

  Moira had taken off her uniform jacket and her shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbows. With sweat stains at her armpits, she looked dishevelled and tired. Ennis glanced at the eye device fixed to the office wall. The fluid inside the glass hemisphere was still: a sure sign that the eye was inactive and no one was watching or listening to their conversation.

  ‘I asked you to find the Relic Guild,’ Moira said, simmering. ‘I trusted you, Ennis. I gave you free rein to do whatever you thought necessary. And so far I haven’t received one single report. Care to explain?’

  ‘Things got complicated,’ Ennis replied. ‘There’s more to this than you realise.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Moira gritted her teeth. ‘More than the virus outbreak that we can’t control in the northern district? Or perhaps you haven’t heard that the deliveries of cargo have stopped coming through the portal outside the Nightshade? While you were off discovering complicated things, did you happen to notice that the underworld has risen up against the police and the warehouses in the southern district are being raided?’

  Venting …

  Ennis experienced a moment of relief at the news of the warehouse raids. Long Tommy had managed t
o convince the criminal underworld of the real situation and was making good on his side of the plan. Food stocks and weapons were being stolen and hoarded in the central district, where the denizens would make their last stand. Now Ennis just had to convince the police captain.

  ‘The denizens are panicking,’ Moira continued. ‘We don’t have the manpower to deal with an emergency of this size, and now I can’t contact the Resident.’ She pushed her fists down onto her desk, struggling for calm. ‘Ennis, maybe I sent you on a fool’s errand. I think I already know where the Relic Guild is. They have taken control of the Nightshade.’

  ‘The Relic Guild isn’t the problem,’ Ennis said.

  Anger returned quickly to Moira’s face. ‘Have you been listening—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Ennis snapped and continued before his captain could object. ‘You asked me to do a job, and I did it. What I discovered goes far deeper than rogue magickers.’

  ‘Sergeant Ennis—’

  Ennis drew his pistol, thumbed the power stone and took aim at his captain.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Moira whispered, her voice a dangerous growl.

  There were secrets in this town, things that Ennis simply could never guess, not even with his magical gift. But once the avatar revealed them to him, it had all clicked into place. The way forward became clear. Ennis and his magic knew what to do next. The need to protect the denizens surged through his blood.

  ‘Moira,’ he said softly, ‘on the night the Relic Guild disappeared, two of them were found in this police station, in a secret room beneath the building. It’s important that you take me to it. Now.’

  She stood proudly, defiantly. Her eyes flitted to the holstered pistol sitting on her desk and Ennis knew what she was thinking.

  ‘Don’t,’ he warned, his aim steady. ‘You trusted me once, and for good reason, so trust me now.’

  ‘Trust you, while you have a gun pointed at me?’

  ‘The denizens won’t stand a chance unless you do as I say.’

  Moira looked warily at the pistol aimed at her, and then she studied Ennis’s face, as though finally recognising the sergeant she had been so willing to trust.

  ‘What have you discovered?’

  Calculating …

  Ennis gestured at the door with the pistol. ‘We don’t have much time. Take me to this secret room and don’t even think about calling for help.’

  With the weapon aimed at her back, Moira led the way out of the office and to the end of the deserted corridor, where they stood before a recess. A small square of its back wall was covered with a hundred tiny mazes.

  ‘Believe it or not, there’s a door in this wall,’ Moira said drily. ‘But we haven’t been able to find it, let alone open it.’

  ‘Stand back,’ Ennis said.

  Keeping the pistol trained on Moira, he laid his free hand upon the square of mazes, praying that everything the avatar had said about a magicker’s touch was true. He felt warmth on his skin, and then there was a deep click. The outline of a door appeared and slid to one side, revealing an elevator.

  ‘After you,’ Ennis said, again gesturing with the pistol.

  With a frown, Moira entered.

  ‘Explain your actions to me, Ennis,’ she said as they descended for a short time before the elevator opened onto a narrow, gloomy corridor.

  Nerves fluttering in his stomach, Ennis told Moira to follow the corridor to the end, adding, ‘We’ve been wrong about the Relic Guild. The night they were down here, they were trying to help us.’

  ‘Hard to believe,’ Moira replied darkly. She glanced back at the pistol. ‘I’ve seen no evidence to convince me that they’re anything but the enemy.’

  ‘That’s because we’ve been listening to the wrong people,’ Ennis replied. ‘The truth is, Captain, the Nightshade turned against the denizens the moment a new Resident arrived. But there was a safeguard built into the Labyrinth, an emergency procedure to get us out of situations like this.’

  The corridor turned left and came to an end. Ennis placed his hand against the wall, which was also decorated with small mazes. A door appeared and swung open with a click. As soon as the police officers stepped into the chamber beyond, the door closed and disappeared behind them.

  The air was unnaturally still and oppressive inside the chamber. A single ceiling prism gave pale light. The pattern of mazes was repeated on each cream-coloured wall to almost hypnotising effect. Ennis deactivated the power stone and holstered the pistol. Moira didn’t appear to notice; she was transfixed by a head-sized sphere of glass sitting atop a slim pedestal. It was filled with a thick substance alive with sparks and streaks of purple lightning like a trapped storm cloud. Moira couldn’t take her eyes off it.

  ‘Captain, you’re old enough to remember life before the Genii War,’ Ennis said. ‘You must recall names like Fabian Moor?’

  ‘Yes,’ Moira replied distantly.

  ‘Our Resident and her aides, they’re not who you think they are. They’re the Genii, Captain. They came back, and they’ve freed Spiral from Oldest Place.’

  Moira managed to drag her eyes away from the scintillating lights to give Ennis an incredulous stare. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘It’s true.’ Ennis pointed at the sphere. On either side of it, the glass was indented with handprints. ‘That thing is the emergency procedure. If the Nightshade is incapacitated, it falls to us – the police – to instigate it. Once set in motion, it will activate Labrys Town’s defences and send a distress signal to someone outside the Labyrinth. I don’t know who, but someone who can help.’

  Moira’s mouth worked silently for a moment. ‘What?’

  Anxiety gnawed at Ennis. ‘But here’s the problem. The Nightshade isn’t incapacitated. Hagi Tabet controls it, and she’s a Genii. We can activate the defences but Tabet won’t let any distress signal leave the Labyrinth. For that to happen, she has to be removed from the Nightshade. She has to be killed.’ He stared at the sphere. ‘It takes two people to initiate the emergency procedure.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Ennis?’ Perhaps Moira thought he was insane; perhaps she was frightened by the truth in his words. ‘I’m not touching that thing.’

  ‘I never expected this to be easy for you to accept,’ Ennis said. He felt the tingle of magic upon his skin. ‘But maybe someone else can convince you.’

  The ceiling prism fizzed and died and the chamber was filled with blue luminescence. Moira backed away to where the door had been as a ghostly presence materialised. Tendrils of sky blue waved in the air around a vaguely human shape the colour of twilight. Void-like eyes leaked tears of vaporous black.

  ‘Greetings, Captain Moira,’ the avatar said. ‘The denizens need you.’

  There was a road in Labrys Town called Resident Approach. It stretched from the central district to the furthest reach of the northern district, all the way to the home of the Resident, the Nightshade.

  The northernmost end of Resident Approach was lined by a host of statues – fifty-four of them, to be precise. Each statue represented a former Resident of Labrys Town; they were monuments to the men and women who had governed the denizens, dating back a thousand years. And in their hands, each held a spherical eye device.

  Beneath the light of Ruby Moon, a troubled wind blew down Resident Approach as though the Timewatcher Herself had sighed with displeasure. The statues began to shake. The eyes fell from their hands, rolling into the road like oversized marbles. The milky fluid inside them pulsed with violet light. Stone began to crack with sharp barks. Debris clattered to the ground. Metallic hands emerged from the statues, followed by silver arms and torsos and legs. As the stone shells shattered, an army of automaton sentries revealed themselves and formed ranks on Resident Approach.

  Eight feet tall, created from thaumaturgic metal, the automations reflected the red light of the moon fr
om the smooth plates covering their faces and chests. Their exposed internal mechanisms – intricate cogs and pistons – whirred and pumped. As one, the army marched, heading southwards.

  And from the eye devices they left in their wake came a commanding voice, a woman’s voice that could be heard emanating from all the eyes in every district of Labrys Town, repeating the same message over and over, and she said:

  ‘This is an emergency. All denizens must proceed to the central district. This is an emergency …’

  Gulduur Bellow led the group through his orchard to the cavern wall where a simple doorframe of unfinished wood had been set into the rock. The door itself was a cream-coloured panel decorated with a repetitive pattern of tiny mazes.

  ‘It looks like a wall in the Nightshade,’ Samuel said, surprised. He moved closer. A small square hole in the middle of the door exposed the red rock on the other side.

  ‘Lady Amilee assured me that this door leads to the very centre of the Icicle Forest,’ Bellow said. ‘I believe this House is so hostile because Spiral designed it to protect what is kept there.’

  ‘Fabian Moor,’ Samuel realised. ‘This is where his essence was found.’

  ‘How curious,’ Bellow said with a deep frown. ‘Amilee mentioned nothing of Fabian Moor. She claimed there was a portal of some kind on the other side of this door. A way out of the Icicle Forest that would lead me to my herd.’

  ‘You haven’t looked?’ Namji asked.

  ‘No. The door cannot be opened.’

  ‘Looks like there’s a piece missing,’ Glogelder said, peering closer at the maze-covered panel.

  Bellow pointed to a bowl-like depression scooped out of the floor. It was three feet across, and above it a small cream square bearing a single maze hovered in eerie violet magic.

  ‘Amilee left the pieces of this door for me to construct, like a puzzle,’ Bellow said. ‘I completed as much of it as I was able, but as you can see …’ The giant approached the missing piece. He attempted to snatch it from the air but his hand passed through it as though it was no more substantial than smoke. ‘The Skywatcher made damn sure that the puzzle could only be finished by a human magicker.’