It was one of the priests, of course. They were always wanting her to do something else for the Church. Rebecca climbed up onto the railing and then spread her wings and leapt straight out into the blue sky, her dark hair streaming behind her. She didn't know what day it was, but she also really didn't care.
The goddess blinked in the bright sunshine and looked down the mountainside to where Sabor's odd castle flickered like a bonfire. So that was where she had left Time!
Heaven had seemed so endless without it. And lonely, too. One eternity spent there had driven that message home.
Her two boys each held one of her arms to help her along, and she pretended not to notice the way they glared at each other. Alteus was young, and the young were moody. The boy would learn in good time. As for Hasp…
She squeezed his glass hand gently. Hasp had always been strong. Looks, after all, were just looks, but pain was much harder to heal. She had Time now to think about how to deal with that. All could be fixed in Time, and the assassin would help her, she felt sure.
Rachel Hael.
She suited that name.
How odd these people were! There was the ghost of an angel, a handsome and sturdy-looking fellow, though rather insubstantial in this daylight. That little man in the rumpled suit could hardly stand straight. Those soldiers would not even look her in the eye. And there was a girl with skin to match Hasp's own, and a hideous little dog who looked vaguely familiar.
It took the group most of the morning to descend the steps leading to Sabor's castle. Ayen stopped several times to sit and admire the view—the silver lake, the sunlit plains beyond. Her pretty flowers hadn't changed at all. But, of course, for her no time had passed. She made a subtle gesture, lifting the breeze from that faraway meadow, and the air instantly filled with a luxurious scent. Rather too overwhelming, she decided. Perhaps a forest would look better there instead?
As they approached the castle doors, she said, “So many universes created from a single mistake. We must allow them to die out naturally, of course. There's only room in the continuum for one to survive.”
“This one?”
“If you like.”
Rachel gazed up at the castle. “How long will the other timelines take to die?”
Ayen shrugged. “That depends on the damage done to them. Most will wither away quite quickly, but others might survive for millennia.”
“So anything can still happen in those other worlds?”
“For a while, at least.”
EPILOGUE
Harper could hear Anchor's roars of laughter from the back of the bar, even over the ruckus made by the other patrons. They had been here for about three or four months now, she reckoned, but then the passage of time was hard to judge in Hell. She had just ordered another drink when she heard a shout from the door.
“We found another one!” A wiry little man with three days of stubble was leaning into the main saloon. Harper recognized him as one of the submarine captains from the battle of the Ninth Citadel, but couldn't recall his name.
The surrounding crowd all scrambled for the door in their haste to get outside, but the engineer waited until her drink arrived before joining them.
Outside, a broad terrace overlooked the Maze. The tavern itself was still creeping over a vast area they had started calling The Chessboard on account of the regular patterns of quadrangles found here. Dividing walls constantly crumbled under the building's foundations as they moved from one flooded square to the next, leaving a series of gaps in their wake. A bloodmist rolled across the landscape half a league away, heading for the remains of an Icarate temple.
The bar patrons had crowded along one edge of the terrace, all jostling and arguing cheerfully with one another, but Harper couldn't tell what it was they were clamouring to see. Recently they had rescued all sorts of strange refugees from the surface of Hell: men, demons, angels, ghosts, and machines. The barman, Tooks, and his new hook-fingered apprentice ran a sweepstakes between them, but Harper hadn't participated with the other clientele. The objects they threw into the pot as bets were not always things she wanted to win.
This time it was just a man. The crowd made way for him as he climbed up onto the terrace. From his bronze armour shoulder guard, she guessed that he had been another one of the gladiators who had escaped the Soul Collectors' arenas after Menoa's great fortress fell. He possessed a lean, hard-muscled frame, and quick blue eyes. One of the tavern patrons slapped him on the back, and led him towards the bar, while the others roared and argued over their sweepstakes winnings.
Harper went back inside.
The gladiator was sitting on a stool at the bar counter. She went over and sat down beside him. He turned his head and leered at her, then snorted and faced the bar again.
“Can I get you a drink?” she said.
“Get me some of that black stuff.” He pointed to a jar of the vicious brew Tooks had made from smashed and boiled Maze wall. More often than not, it left the drinker insane.
“That's rotten,” Harper said. “I've got something better for you.”
She took out a small bottle from inside her jacket and set it down on the bar.
“What's that?” the man asked.
She smiled. “That's the good stuff.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Campbell was a designer and programmer on the vastly successful Grand Theft Auto computer games. God of Clocks is his third novel.
GOD OF CLOCKS is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales
is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Alan Campbell
All rights reserved
Published in the United States by Spectra, an imprint of The Random House
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Campbell, Alan.
God of Clocks / Alan Campbell.
p. cm.—(The Deepgate codex; v. 3)
eISBN: 978-0-553-90647-9
I. Title.
PR6103.A465G63 2009
823'.92—dc22
2009003068
www.ballantinebooks.com
v3.0
God of Clocks Page 36