God of Clocks

by Alan Campbell

  The room smelled of fire and meat. The brazier still burned bright red in that confined wooden space, turning the scarred angel's body into a demonic silhouette. Her crippled wings shuddered.

  “The hammer,” she said.

  He spotted the tool lying amongst pieces of offal. An old man's hand still clutched its handle. The boy stooped and picked it up. He peeled away Monk's hand and let it drop.

  “My arms,” she said.

  The boy hesitated. “I don't—”

  “My arms!” she screamed, dragging herself a step nearer. Her terrible shadow loomed over him. Scars slid under the scraps of leather that still clung to her. “Break them at the elbow and the wrist, the shoulders…”

  The whole process happened in fits, so he could hardly recall it afterwards. He remembered the weight of the hammer, the momentum as he swung… Pauses between the sounds of snapping bones in which he wiped sweat from his brow… Carnival's voice, growing steadier as time passed. The hands. The knees. This foot. My wings. My spine. She did not scream again. She stumbled occasionally. Once she collapsed. Scars flared like lines of fire around her eyes. He remembered her eyes, at least.

  The boy couldn't say how long they spent together in that room, but when it was finally over the scarred angel rested on the bloody floor, her back pressed against one of the bulkheads. Her leathers hung in tatters about her wiry body, her muscular thighs and small hard breasts. Carnival was barefoot, and for some reason, the boy thought that strange.

  “Your name,” she said. “What is it?”

  He shrugged. “Don't know.” Then he thought about it. “Maybe John. After my father.”

  “Okay then, Maybe John.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Leave here while you still can.”

  “I don't see Cospinol's slaves coming back anytime soon.”

  “Get out.” She said this through her gritted teeth. The anger was building inside her again. “You stupid, ignorant… get the hell out of here!”

  The boy fled. He rushed to the door and pulled it open and ran through, leaving it to slam against its frame. Now he was in one of the ship's main companionways, but he didn't recognize it. He was used to the Rotsward's darker spaces, the cramped tunnels behind the bulkheads and between the decks. But nobody was about to see him. Where were all the slaves?

  He skidded around a corner and ran straight into Cospinol.

  The god of brine and fog occupied the whole of the passage. His sagging grey wings stretched from wall to wall. His lank hair fell over the shoulders of his crab-shell armour, that cracked and useless suit that still stank of distant oceans. In one fist he held an axe.

  “You!” the god said.

  The boy turned to run away, but Cospinol grabbed him. Instinctively the boy's skin began to morph. It became pliant and slippery. He felt claws extend from his feet to give him greater purchase on the floorboards.

  “Oh, no, you don't.” Cospinol struck him across the back of the head. “You'll keep that mangy shape, you little demon.” He wrenched the boy around to face him. “What have you done?”

  The boy realized that Cospinol's hands were trembling.

  “What have you done?” the god repeated. “Slippery little Mesmerist shit. I heard her screaming.”

  “Nothing,” the boy wailed. “I didn't do anything.”

  “Is she in there?”

  “Let me go.”

  “Did you let her out?” Cospinol shook him roughly. “Where is she?”

  A female voice answered, “Here.”

  Carnival hovered at the end of the companionway. Her wings were smaller than Cospinol's and very black. But she stood taller than before. Her limbs had reset and now looked almost normal. Her attitude evinced litheness and power. Only her tattered armour and pallid flesh spoke of her months-long ordeal in the boiling room. Countless wounds burned fiercely red against her pale skin. The blood around her lips had darkened and dried, and now cracked when she spoke.

  “Cospinol,” she said in a low and even voice.

  Cospinol released the boy. “I am Ayen's eldest son,” he said in a tone that managed to sound both defensive and indignant. “Heaven's shipwright. I am the god of brine and fog…”

  She walked towards him. Her eyes were dark and devoid of any recognizable emotion, as unknowable as those of a wild beast.

  She stopped just beyond the reach of his axe, and stared mutely at him for a long moment.

  And then she killed him.

  The attack came so fast that the boy did not see it. Carnival's wings flickered like a passing shadow. Cospinol had no time to raise his weapon. By the time the god's instincts compelled him to flinch, the scarred angel had ripped off his jaw. He gaped at her in-credulously as she dropped the bloody chunk of bone. Then she rushed forward again. It seemed to the boy that she embraced the god, held him close as a lover would. It took him a moment to register that the snap he heard was Cospinol's spine. Carnival buried her teeth in her victim's neck. He spasmed once, but the life had already left his eyes.

  She was a long time drinking.

  When she was done, she let the old god's body crumple to the floor. She then turned to face the boy, staring at him without recognition, her eyes seeming unfocused. Blood sluiced down her neck and arms. The clawed fingers twitched at her sides.

  “You killed a god,” he said.

  “A long time ago.”

  “What? No, I mean Cospinol. Him! You killed him.”

  She glanced at the corpse, then back at him. Awareness tightened the corners of her eyes, and her expression became suddenly suspicious. “I know you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Don't you recognize me?”

  She continued to stare at him as her bloodied chest rose and fell rapidly, her breaths coming in quick rasps. For a moment she looked uncertain. Her hands twitched again. A drop of blood fell from her fingernail and hit the floor. Finally she said, “Maybe John.”

  “That's right.”

  “After your father.”

  “Please let me go.”

  The scarred angel lifted her eyes and gazed into the far distance. She licked the palm of her hand and then licked her knuckles. Then she turned around and walked away, leaving the boy alone with the corpse of the Rotsward's master: the god whose will had bound the rotten skyship together…

  “Oh, no,” said Maybe John, suddenly realizing.

  The first beam broke before he had even scrambled to his feet. A mighty crash sounded somewhere overhead, and the companionway ceiling collapsed as heavy timbers plunged through the thin wainscoting. Clouds of dust rolled into the narrow passage. Coughing, the boy shuffled away—on his knees and elbows—from this scene of collapse. A section of floor gave way behind him and he was pitched backwards down a steep wooden ramp.

  He struck solid boards again inside one of the Rotsward's many crawl spaces. Overhead, the ceiling joists snapped and a mass of rotten wood and dust crumpled into the companionway he'd just vacated, filling it entirely. Now trapped in the gloom of the narrow conduit below, Maybe John glanced around. Debris blocked both directions. There was no way out.

  He changed his human form for another, more suitable, shape, though shape-shifting had never come naturally to Maybe John. He had resisted the Mesmerist implants all along, and the priests in turn had almost given up on him. They'd threatened to put him to work in the Ninth Citadel simply as a door, before he'd finally stopped fighting them. He hadn't liked the idea of people walking through him. He'd told himself that it would be better, after all, to become a shiftblade.

  He clasped his hands and stretched out his arms, allowing his skin, muscles, and bones to flow together into a long ribbon. His metal fingers twisted around each other and became a slender cone. He forced the rest of his body to tighten and elongate behind that cone, becoming serpentlike. As an afterthought he grew metal scales along his back for protection.

  Finally transformed, Maybe John slithered through gaps in the rubble and thus cleared the crawl space blockage. Aroun
d a bend he found another conduit, similarly congested, but this likewise proved to be no problem now. All the while, the skyship continued to break apart around him. Great booming noises issued from somewhere outside the hull. The Rotsward's gallows? Insects scurried everywhere, shaken out of the rotten wood. The boy spotted a tiny hole that seemed to lead in the right direction, and squeezed himself through. He slipped down between decks and reached what was left of the outer hull. Here dozens of the heavy gallows crossbeams had punctured and crushed the skyship's skin as if it were paper.

  The boy coiled around one such timber and slipped outside through the narrow gap surrounding it.

  Nothing recognizable remained of the vessel he had known. The shafts of light that fell from the lowest windows of the Maze revealed dark tangles of broken wood and knotted rope scattered over the River of the Failed. Curious souls peered down through the squares of glass above, as though from portals of a far grander vessel than the Rotsward had been. Cospinol's ship had ceased to exist in any true sense. Stripped of his protection, she had simply disintegrated.

  The boy resumed his human shape. A few yards to his left, a huge pile of debris shifted suddenly, and then collapsed. The great rope that had pulled the Rotsward slithered across one of the raised banks between waterways, and then it stopped.

  Far across the flooded landscape John Anchor stood beside a woman with red hair. He still wore his harness, but now his rope connected him to nothing but debris. Then the boy saw movement close by. A small winged figure was pushing through the waters in the direction of the tethered man.

  Anchor didn't notice the skyship's demise—probably because destruction had always followed in his wake. He had learned to tune out the sound of devastation. And he didn't immediately become aware of the slackening pressure against his harness because the weight of the Rotsward was not something he had ever paid much attention to.

  It was Harper who noticed it first.

  He was grimly trudging through a warm current when she suddenly grabbed his arm and whispered urgently, “John.”

  “What?” He turned, and then frowned. The rope lay slackly across the mire behind him. He stared at it for a long moment before lifting his gaze to the scene beyond.

  The Rotsward was in pieces. Debris covered the flooded ground for half a league behind him. Wafers of hull sat half submerged in the red channels. Thin lines of rigging rope stretched from one patch of detritus to the next, linking odd arrays of items: clothing, furniture, window frames, painted crockery, a horsehair mattress, several unidentifiable iron drums, and a silver tea tray.

  The air remained still and silent. Nothing moved out there.

  “He's dead,” Anchor said. “My master is dead.” A surge of panic came over him, although he could not say why. He stared at the rope and then he looked at the wreckage again. Had anything survived? He scanned the horizon, searching for larger parts of the Rotsward's hull. There was nothing to be seen but broken wood.

  “Cospinol is dead,” he said again. He felt numb from head to foot. For the first time in years he noticed the weight of the harness on his back. He also noticed that his mouth was dry. “I'm free,” he said. But the words had a cold ring to them. They sounded odd to his ears.

  Harper straightened up. She was gazing across the wreckage, as if looking for something. Her fingers tightened on his arm.

  Anchor saw her, too. He wasn't surprised. From the moment he'd seen the broken skyship he'd known. She was now wading towards them through the bloody waters.

  “She's an angel,” Harper said.

  “Her name is Carnival.”

  8

  BURNTWATER

  Rachel allowed the watchtower rider to escape—a decision that threatened their plans and placed them all in greater danger. From the airy heights of their vantage point behind Dill's teeth, she watched the horseman disappear into the fog-shrouded woods. The assassin, however, didn't get much chance to dwell on possible outcomes, for their immediate situation suddenly became a whole lot worse.

  “Stop this march or we kill Hasp.”

  A small group of woodsmen waited on the stoop of the Rusty Saw tavern in Dill's hands, looking up at them. Oran himself had barked the demand. He'd finally realized the leverage he held over his exiled employers.

  “Well, it was only a matter of time,” Mina said. “I suppose we could tell Dill to rip the roof off that building.”

  Rachel shook her head. “It's too late now,” she muttered. “I'd have risked it before, but we don't know what's going on in there right now. One blow could break Hasp's armour.” Her jaw still ached from the punch Hasp had delivered, and the musket ball wound above her ear continued to gnaw at her. If she'd been thinking clearly, she would have told Dill to free Hasp before the woodsmen ever thought of using him as a hostage, but she had hoped that they weren't smart enough to consider such a plan. After all, Hasp had tried to kill Rachel and Mina, so he must have seemed as much of an enemy to the two women as a friend.

  She shouted down to them, “Kill the bastard if you like. I'd do it myself if he wasn't Rys's brother.”

  Oran laughed at that. “I know my lord's will,” he said. “In this case, I'd be doing him a favour.”

  “Nice try,” Mina said, “but he has a point. Our glass friend is a liability to his living kin. If Rys survived Coreollis, he'll be more likely to reward the man who slays Hasp.”

  Rachel rubbed her head. This whole land was beginning to grate on her. It seemed backwards and hostile, and she hardly knew who to trust anymore. She had also sustained more injuries from her supposed allies than from her enemies.

  She stepped back from the wall of teeth and considered their situation. Oran knew he could not attack the arconite himself, and his threats to burn down the Rusty Saw had been nothing but bluster. Rachel and Mina had the gold, and an ally powerful enough to crush the soldiers at any moment, should they choose to do so. And yet they were prisoners up here.

  Oran had Hasp.

  “I'm surprised at you, Mina,” Rachel said. “You haven't ever suggested we let them kill Hasp.”

  Mina pouted and gave a look of indignation. “I like Hasp.”

  The assassin sighed. “The whole point of recruiting help was to prevent Menoa from using them against us. And now I've turned these bastards against us anyway. The Mesmerists couldn't have done a better job of it if they'd tried.”

  “Hasp put you in a difficult position.”

  “He put himself in a difficult position. And now I have these bruises to thank me for getting him out of it. How long until we reach this settlement on the lake?”

  “We're moments away, although it would seem entirely sensible to avoid the place altogether. We're not likely to find any friends there now.” She shrugged. “Should I also remind you that we now have eleven arconites in close pursuit of us? Or would that just be confusing the issue?”

  Rachel leaned against the inside of Dill's incisor and peered out through one of the gaps. The air smelled fresh and cool. The sun had risen behind them in the southeast, and filtered through the white mists ahead, where branches laced the fog like gossamer. The forest was mostly deciduous here and had been thinned recently. There were still signs of recent logging: stacks of freshly cut logs and piles of smaller branches. Wide trails crisscrossed the grey-green earth underneath the cradled tavern. A reflection flashed across the steel blade of Dill's cleaver. Down below, one of the woodsmen on the stoop moved suddenly.

  An arrow struck the edge of the incisor, glanced off, and hit the roof of Dill's mouth. It dropped, landing just inside the row of huge teeth.

  Rachel flinched. She heard laughing from below, and then Oran yelled up: “You have until we finish this to come down.” He held up a bottle of whisky. From up here Rachel was unable to tell how much drink was left in the bottle. “And then we're going to start peeling the glass armour from your drunken friend.” They moved back inside the inn.

  A second arrow struck the edge of the incisor and ricochet
ed off. But this time there were no archers around to fire it. All of Oran's men had gone back inside. The arrow bounced off the roof of Dill's mouth and fell in exactly the same place as the first one.

  Rachel stared down at the thin wooden missile. There was only one arrow there. “Mina?” she said. “Did you see one or two arrows hit the roof?”

  The thaumaturge was sitting further back, her head resting against the inside of Dill's jaw. She yawned and stretched out her arms. “Two, why?”

  “Because there's only one here now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean two arrows flew up through that gap, but there's only one here now. And it's not just that. I've been seeing strange things for days now… memories that don't match up with reality, moments in time that repeat themselves. They're like defects, as if reality… or even time itself has somehow become fractured.” She watched the other woman frown. “Dill experienced the same vision you did—of the world cracked open.”

  “That was… odd,” Mina admitted.

  “Something strange is happening,” Rachel said. “Thaumaturgy, or…” She waved her hands. “I don't know. Something to do with what happened to Rys's bastion in Coreollis… or else something involving the god of clocks. Doesn't Sabor study time?”

  “He observes time,” Mina said, “but what you're talking about sounds like the manipulation of time itself, and that's impossible.”

  “The same arrow came through that gap twice. The same arrow. And just before Rys's bastion fell I saw two versions of the god of flowers and knives. One Rys on the balcony and another Rys inside. I'm sure of it now.”

  Mina considered this for a long moment. Finally she said, “I experienced something odd, too. When Dill pinned down that arconite… for an instant it seemed to me that it was Dill lying on the forest floor, and Menoa's warrior holding him down.”