‘Most of my life, anyway.’ Gilmour leaned in through one of the windows, then backed out quickly, peeling invisible cobwebs off his face.
Steven wandered onto the road, knocking off an icicle as he passed. It slid across the mud. ‘This is another university, isn’t it? I get the same sort of feeling as the last one – although I’m pleased that there don’t seem to be any acid-clouds or starving almor here. That definitely gets this place an extra star in the Barron’s Guidebook to Eldarni Colleges.’
‘Good guess.’
Steven continued, ‘And judging by the general disrepair, I’d guess that this was one of the first schools our friend Prince Marek closed after meeting Nerak back in the day.’
Gilmour leaned against a post and blew a smoke ring. ‘Marek Whitward was a pleasant young man, one of the nicest of the Remonds, and it was quite tragic about him and Nerak – but don’t let me interrupt. Please, go on.’
‘If this university is like those back home, I’d wager that stone building over there with the collapsed roof is the library – but I don’t expect we’ll find any books in there today.’ He pointed to an even larger, sprawling structure, standing at the centre of what might once have been the university common.
‘Correct again, Steven,’ Gilmour said. ‘Any surviving manuscripts would have been taken to Welstar Palace, or destroyed, but we haven’t come here for books.’
‘All right, you have my attention. Why then have we come out of our way to visit a derelict, abandoned and obviously off-limits former institution of higher education?’
The old Larion Senator wearing the chubby soldier’s body smiled, the same boyish grin Steven had seen on both of Gilmour’s previous hosts. ‘I need to look for something, something that’s been missing in Eldarn for some time.’ He started towards a set of double wooden doors, one of which hung crookedly by a single hinge.
‘In there?’ Steven was sceptical.
‘Come on,’ Gilmour said, ‘or wait here. This doesn’t really concern you.’
‘Oh, really? You meeting some woman? Because if you are, I can wait in the car. Or give me a couple of bucks, and I’ll take in a movie down the street.’
‘Trust me.’ Gilmour ducked through the broken frame. The empty room was a hall of sorts, with several doors off it leading to unseen rear chambers and, Steven guessed, stairs to the upper floors. There was no furniture; it, along with most of the floorboards and panelling, had been stripped, probably stolen by intrepid builders from nearby farms. A thick layer of dust moved in the air, disturbed by their arrival.
‘Lovely place you’ve got here.’
‘Like it? I call it Minimalist Grime.’
‘If I run into any homicidal maniacs looking for a quiet summer hideaway I’ll send them to you.’
Gilmour reached the rear wall and tried one of the doors. ‘This one’s latched inside.’ He moved to the next; that was blocked as well. ‘Curse it all,’ he said, ‘I hate to do this.’
‘What? Force the door? Stop joking, Gilmour, just blast the thing off its hinges and let’s get going. Just try not to knock down the whole building.’
Gilmour stepped back and whispered a brief spell; the door collapsed into a pile of kindling. A tremendous cloud of choking dust arose, momentarily blinding them both.
Coughing, doubled over, Steven said, ‘Oh yes, great idea – that’s much better!’ He pushed past Gilmour into the darkness beyond the ruined doorway, saying, ‘Better let me go first – who knows what might be waiting for us now that we’ve rung the bell?’ Two steps in and he disappeared into the dark.
‘I’ll get some lights on,’ he said after a bit and reached above his head. A pleasant glow filled the chamber, a room larger than the entryway, with a high ceiling and a polished stone floor. ‘It’s a damned cavern,’ Stephen said. ‘This one room must take up most of the building.’
‘I thought you might find it interesting,’ Gilmour replied.
Without speaking, Steven waved his open hands towards the ceiling, still invisible in the shadows above, and with each gesture, a fireball, glowing with a warm, bright light, leaped from his palm and floated off to brighten another corner of the massive chamber. There were several bulky, irregularly shaped structures arranged in a desultory pattern on the floor. ‘What the hell?’ he whispered, brightening the orbs with a nod. ‘Gilmour, what is it?’
‘This? I’m not sure; it looks like a pile of wreckage, probably dumped in here when they closed the school. What I need used to be stored along that rear corridor. Wait just a moment; I’ll be right back.’ He crossed to an antechamber behind the debris and slipped quietly inside.
Gilmour closed the door, cast a small flame toward the ceiling, and examined the gloomy storage closet. As expected, it was empty. He sat on the dusty floor, lit his pipe, and waited.
Steven circled the mountain of trash.
He called toward the corridor. ‘Okay, well, then I’ll just wait in here. That’s fine. I don’t mind cold, damp, dusty, creepy, and dilapidated. It’s kind of like my first apartment, only bigger … Gilmour?’
The debris was actually a stack of variously sized cogged gears, the smallest no larger than a bicycle tyre, the largest a huge wood-and-metal wheel with a circumference of half the cavernous chamber. It looked like the gears had been dropped, one atop the other, in an upside-down pyramid, smallest at the bottom. A polished metal rod was attached to a single cog on each gear.
‘There’s no rust,’ Steven said to himself.
He knelt beside the largest wheel and ran a hand up the silvery metal spike. ‘This might have been something once, but it’s just a pile of rubbish now – this big one has got to weigh two tons, though. And those loose cables up there – what are they for? Hold on a minute, just a minute … they’d have to be attached by—’ He took another lap around the pile, muttering, ‘Eight… eight to thirty and thirty to sixty, but that can’t be right … one is to four, but then there’s a switch, but there’s no switch in here …’ He searched the walls, the ceiling and the pile of cogged wheels, looking for a missing piece that might bring his ruminations to a tidy conclusion.
Stephen lectured to the empty room. ‘It wouldn’t work on the walls, and the rods are vertical… they don’t interlink – the cogs are the wrong size – but they do turn in a pattern; so what’s the denominator for the ratio? One to four to eight to thirty to sixty to— Christ in the jungle, that’s not right: one to four has to be a mistake, unless— unless it’s on the floor … Sonofabitch!’
In the closet, Gilmour laughed silently into his fist, relit his pipe and leaned against the doorframe, listening. He gave it half an aven, then brushed the dust from his cloak, pocketed the pipe and reentered the chamber.
The cogged wheels were suspended, seemingly of their own volition, above a series of coloured tiles cemented into the floor. A matching set of tiles was affixed to the ceiling, just a short distance above the largest gear, which wobbled and wavered dangerously as it hovered above them, parallel to the floor.
‘Good gods! ‘ Gilmour feigned surprise. ‘What have you been up to?’
Now stripped to the waist, his lean frame shiny with sweat, Steven jumped, his apparent reverie broken. ‘Shit, Gilmour, don’t do that!’
‘What is it?’
‘You don’t know?’ He wiped his eyes on the back of his hand.
‘I’m hanged if I have any idea.’
Steven gave a self-satisfied grin. ‘Do you know what day it is?’
‘Of course not.’
‘When was the last time that you knew – for certain – what day it was?’
‘I’d have to say it was about—’
‘Nine hundred and eighty-two Twinmoons ago?’ The excitement was plain in his voice.
‘Give or take a handful of avens, yes.’
Steven focused his attention on the floor beneath the smallest wheel. ‘What you need, Gilmour, is a mathematician, and more than that, you need a mathematician who can tell you wh
at Twinmoon it was when a miner named William Higgins walked into the Bank of Idaho Springs, now known as the First National Bank of Idaho Springs, home of the lowest-interest small business loans on the Front Range, and opened a basic interest-bearing account with more than seventeen thousand dollars in refined silver.’
‘And where would I find one of them, then?’ the Larion Senator asked, smiling.
‘It’s a clock,’ Steven broke in, too excited to banter any more, ‘but it doesn’t use a wound spring or a counterweight.’
‘If you say so,’ Gilmour said, sounding nonplussed. ‘Remember your telephones and calculators? I’m not one for higher-order maths quandaries.’
‘Well, this is one of the best, my friend. Because this clock uses the rotation of the world, the actual movement of Eldarn through the heavens, to determine the Twinmoon. It even charts them, up there. See those couplings, and those wires?’
‘Aha.’
‘It uses magic – although I bet I could get it to work with an electromagnet – because these wheels look like interlocking gears, but they actually hang here, just like this, completely independent of Eldarn’s rotation. They interact with one another, but they only interact with Eldarn on the aven.’
Steven interrupted himself, ignoring the gigantic ruined timepiece for a moment. ‘Have you really lived the last thousand Twinmoons without knowing the exact time of day or the exact day of the Twinmoon?’
Gilmour shrugged. ‘There are a few tally-fanatics out there who claim to have maintained an accurate count, but their sum totals all conflict with one another, so none have any real credibility.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Exactly how old? I don’t know.’
Steven looked shocked, then said, ‘Do you know the role that the mechanical clock plays in a culture? It’s one of the first steps in socialisation, centralisation and industrialisation. Business, city life and urban development, education, medicine and research, they all hinge on people agreeing upon what time it is and what time things happen.’
‘I know; I was there.’
‘Why didn’t you come back and start this thing up again?’ Steven asked.
‘I didn’t know how.’
Steven smirked. ‘I did.’
‘Show me.’
‘You see, if Eldarn has a north pole – and based on the construction of this clock, the orbit of your twin moons, the motion of your tides, the changing of your seasons, and a rack of other variables, we must assume that it does – anyway, if Eldarn has a north pole and you could suspend yourself above it for a full day with a writing instrument in your hand, what would you draw if you left its tip on the pole for eight avens?’
‘A very small circle?’ Gilmour guessed.
‘Top marks, but an even better answer is a dot, a spot, a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree speck. The north pole, the south pole, too, for that matter, would rotate around the tip of your pencil, quill, whatever, forming a dot on the page.’
‘All right, I’m with you so far,’ Gilmour said.
‘Now, imagine you’re suspended above Eldarn’s centre point, its widest point: the equator. What would you draw?’
‘A huge circle?’
‘Right, the biggest circle you could draw and still be in Eldarn, and everywhere in between the dot and the gargantuan circle fits in the ratio between the tiny and the massive.’
‘Why don’t you forge ahead without me?’ Gilmour suggested, looking blank.
‘That was the tough part,’ Steven said, ‘and, as luck would have it—’
‘Good luck, or our luck?’
‘Good luck, for once! So as good luck would have it, all the work here has been done: the ratio has been calculated, and the mechanism put into place. I just had to figure out how to get it all back where it belongs.’ He cocked a hand on one hip and took in the strata of overlapping gears. To Gilmour, he looked like a grimy ditch-digger taking a break.
‘And it all hinges on that little wheel, there on the floor? What is that? An aven?’
‘Four, actually.’
‘Why four?’
‘These engineers were frigging brilliant – they knew how to measure avens exactly, and they did it every day, but they checked themselves twice during every four seasons, at the winter and summer solstices. You see, no one knows how long an aven is until someone measures it exactly. Whoever built this clock knew the longest day and longest night, and by using those lengths, dividing the full day by eight, and then knowing where this room was in relation to the pole and the equator – they knew exactly how far apart to space the cogs on this little wheel and the metal rods on this floor.’
‘So they didn’t measure an Eldarni day in eight avens?’ Gilmour asked.
‘Nope, they could be more accurate by measuring four avens and then repeating the process.’
‘So the floor moves with Eldarn’s rotation, but the wheels don’t, and the metal rods in those tiles on the floor move the cogs in this small wheel, the aven wheel, and the aven wheel completes two revolutions in one day …’
‘And Bingo was his name-o!’ Steven did a little dance.
Gilmour frowned. ‘And once each day, that rod sticking up there turns the next largest, the day wheel? And then the day wheel’s vertical rod turns one cog on the Moon gear every thirty days and the Moon wheel turns a cog on the Twinmoon gear every second time it rotates, because there are two Moons in every Twinmoon.’
Steven quoted his Larion mentor, saying, ‘You get it all started and it will go on for ever, like the Twinmoons.’
‘What about Ages and Eras?’ Gilmour asked.
‘I don’t have those figured yet, but I think they’re calculated by the interaction of those cables up on the wall near the ceiling. That’s a tough one, because Ages and Eras are specific to Eldarni time and I don’t know anything about them – I was only able to figure the clock mechanism, because I have some knowledge of maths and …’ Steven’s voice trailed off. ‘You old sonofabitch …’
‘What?’ Gilmour suppressed a grin.
Steven glanced at the door through which Gilmour had disappeared almost an aven earlier. His voice boomed to the rafters as he jogged towards it. ‘You tricked me! You knew!’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ Gilmour followed. ‘Wait, Steven, wait! You shouldn’t go in there. It could be dangerous.’
Ignoring him, Steven threw open the door and cast a small light inside the empty closet. A cloud of aromatic pipe smoke billowed out. ‘Just as I thought: you did this on purpose.’
‘I knew you could do it,’ Gilmour beamed. ‘Magic is about knowledge. You deciphered the timepiece. No one in Eldarn could have done that, Steven, not me, Kantu, not even Nerak.’
‘Because I knew when William Higgins opened his account? It was October 1870; I’m not sure which day, but you could have come close, hell, even if you had guessed.’
‘But I don’t know the maths, all the calculating you’ve been doing, comparing your time to Eldarni time.’
‘I’ve tried to account for as many unknowns as I can. I’m embarrassed to admit I don’t know exactly how many minutes there are in an Eldarni day even after I’ve been here this long.’
‘You’ve had a lot on your mind,’ Gilmour excused him. ‘What’s your guess on the Twinmoon?’
Steven used his cloak to dry his sweat, then pulled his tunic on. ‘Based on a starting date of October 15, 1870, and something just over twenty hours in an Eldarni day, which is damned close, I’d call this next Twinmoon, the northern Twinmoon, nine hundred and eighty-five Twinmoons since Higgins opened the account.’
‘So be it,’ Gilmour said. ‘You used your knowledge and your magic together. That’s how the Larion Senate worked. I wanted you to experience this without my coaching. This day, this exercise will make you more powerful, Steven. Now, set the clock.’
The magic began as a faint tingling. To Gilmour, Steven said, ‘Eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty hours in a year
. That’s over four hundred and thirty-three days in an Eldarni year, more than seven Twinmoons. How many days until the next one?’
‘I think eleven,’ Gilmour said, ‘eleven – or maybe twelve …’
‘Eleven.’ Steven went back to his murmuring; the orb constellation grew brighter with the burgeoning magic. ‘That’s about fifty days in this Twinmoon so far. Fifty days. And we’re just past the midday aven today.’
As if hearing him, the aven gear rotated halfway around, pivoting on each metal rod in turn. After passing over the fourth, the entire wheel spun around the rod and returned to its position over the first tile, ready to repeat the morning process. ‘Look at that,’ Steven said. ‘I was right.’
‘Yes, you were,’ Gilmour whispered.
At the clock’s centre, magic radiated between the tiles on the floor and the ones in the ceiling, a powerful current of energy. Steven revelled in it, sensing its response even to his most insignificant commands. This was how magic was supposed to feel, not flailing wild gestures or bombastic explosions, but careful, controlled and powerful – the very energy he had used to heal Garec’s lung, and to locate the almor above Sandcliff Palace.
Now he used it to start time in Eldarn. This was precision, accuracy and skill, and coupled with compassion, Steven felt there was nothing he couldn’t do. This is what the spell book had been trying to tell him; this was the power Lessek’s key had used to trip him on his way into the landfill, and this was how he had managed to defeat Nerak in the glen below Meyers’ Vale. The world around him blurred; it was all inconsequential. He was focusing on the right things: the gears, the cogs, and the rotation of the world itself. Looking towards the Moon wheel, he said, ‘Eleven days until the next Twinmoon.’ The gears complied, rotating until eleven cogs remained on the daily wheel and one bigger cog on the Moon wheel: it would rotate the Twinmoon gear once, and Eldarn would be back to marking her own time.
The Larion Senators Page 30