Thief of Time

The Death of Rats winced. The raven took off hurriedly.

HELP ME UP, PLEASE, said a voice from the shadows. AND THEN PLEASE CLEAN UP THE DAMN BUTTER.

Tick

This desk was a field of galaxies.

Things twinkled. There were complex wheels and spirals, brilliant against the blackness…

Jeremy always liked the moment when he had a clock in pieces, with every wheel and spring carefully laid out on the black velvet cloth in front of him. It was like looking at Time, dismantled, controllable, every part of it understood…

He wished his life was like that. It would be nice to reduce it to bits, spread them all out on the table, clean and oil them properly and put them together so that they coiled and spun as they ought to. But sometimes it seemed that the life of Jeremy had been assembled by a not very competent craftsman, who had allowed a number of small but important things to go ping into the corners of the room.

He wished he liked people more, but somehow he could never get on with them. He never knew what to say. If life was a party, he wasn't even in the kitchen. He envied the people who made it as far as the kitchen. There would probably be the remains of the dip to eat, and a bottle or two of cheap wine that someone had brought along that'd probably be okay if you took out the drowned cigarette stubs. There might even be a girl in the kitchen, although Jeremy knew the limits of his imagination.

But Jeremy never even got an invitation.

Clocks, now… clocks were different. He knew what made clocks tick.

His full name was Jeremy Clockson, and that was no accident. He'd been a member of the Guild of Clockmakers since he was a few days old, and everyone knew what that meant. It meant his life had begun in a basket, on a doorstep. Everyone knew how it worked. All the Guilds took in the foundlings that arrived with the morning milk. It was an ancient form of charity, and there were far worse fates. The orphans got a life, and an upbringing of a sort, and a trade, and a future, and a name. Many a fine lady or master craftsman or city dignitary had a telltale surname like Ludd or Doughy or Pune or Clockson. They'd been named after trade heroes or patron deities, and this turned them into a family, of a sort. The older ones remembered where they came from, and at Hogswatch they were free with donations of food and clothing to the various younger brothers and sisters of the basket. It wasn't perfect, but, then, what is?

So Jeremy had grown up healthy, and rather strange, and with a gift for his adoptive craft that almost made up for every other personal endowment that he did not possess.

The shop bell rang. He sighed and put down his eyeglass. He didn't rush, though. There was a lot to look at in the shop. Sometimes he even had to cough to attract the customer's attention. That being said, sometimes Jeremy had to cough to attract the attention of his reflection when he was shaving.

Jeremy tried to be an interesting person. The trouble was that he was the kind of person who, having decided to be an interesting person, would first of all try to find a book called How to Be An Interesting Person and then see whether there were any courses available. He was puzzled that people seemed to think he was a boring conversationalist. Why, he could talk about all kinds of clock. Mechanical clocks, magical clocks, water clocks, fire clocks, floral clocks, candle clocks, sand clocks, cuckoo clocks, the rare Hershebian beetle clocks… But for some reason he always ran out of listeners before he ran out of clocks.

He stepped out into his shop, and stopped.

“Oh… I'm so sorry to have kept you,” he said. It was a woman. And two trolls had taken up positions just inside the door. Their dark glasses and huge ill-fitting black suits put them down as people who put people down. One of them cracked his knuckles when he saw Jeremy looking at him.

The woman was wrapped in an enormous and expensive white fur coat, which might have explained the trolls. Long black hair cascaded over her shoulders, and her face was made up so pale that it was almost the shade of the coat. She was… quite attractive, thought Jeremy, who was admittedly no judge whatsoever, but it was a monochromatic beauty. He wondered if she was a zombie. There were quite a few in the city now, and the prudent ones had taken it with them when they died, and probably could afford a coat like that.

“A beetle clock?” she said. She had turned away from the glass dome.

“Oh, er, yes… The Hershebian lawyer beetle has a very consistent daily routine,” said Jeremy. “I, er, only keep it for, um, interest.”

“How very… organic,” said the woman. She stared at him as if he was another kind of beetle. “We are Myria LeJean. Lady Myria LeJean.”

Jeremy obediently held out a hand. Patient men at the Clockmakers' Guild had spent a long time teaching him how to Relate to People before giving it up in despair, but some things had stuck.

Her ladyship looked at the waiting hand. Finally, one of the trolls lumbered over.

“Der lady does not shake hands,” it said, in a reverberating whisper. “She are not a tactile kinda person.”

“Oh?” said Jeremy.

“But enough of this, perhaps,” said Lady LeJean, stepping back. “You make clocks, and we—”

There was a jingling noise from Jeremy's shirt pocket. He pulled out a large watch.

“If that was chiming the hour, you are fast,” said the woman.

“Er… um… no… you might find it a good idea to, um, put your hands over your ears…”

It was three o'clock. And every clock struck it at once. Cuckoos cuckooed, the hour pins fell out of the candle clock, the water clocks gurgled and seesawed as the buckets emptied, bells clanged, gongs banged, chimes tinkled and the Hershebian lawyer beetle turned a somersault.

The trolls had clapped their huge hands over their ears, but Lady LeJean merely stood with her hands on her hips, head on one side, until the last echo died away.

“All correct, we see,” she said.

“What?” said Jeremy. He'd been thinking: perhaps a vampire, then?

“You keep all your clocks at the right time,” said Lady LeJean. “You're very particular about that, Mr Jeremy?”

“A clock that doesn't tell the right time is… wrong,” said Jeremy. Now he was wishing she'd go away. Her eyes were worrying him. He'd heard about people having grey eyes, and her eyes were grey, like the eyes of a blind person, but she was clearly looking at him and through him.

“Yes, there was a little bit of trouble over that, wasn't there?” said Lady LeJean.

“I… I don't… I don't… don't know what you're—”

“At the Clockmakers' Guild? Williamson, who kept his clock five minutes fast? And you—”

“I am much better now,” said Jeremy stiffly. “I have medicine. The Guild was very kind. Now please go away.”

“Mr Jeremy, we want you to build us a clock that is accurate.”

“All my clocks are accurate,” said Jeremy, staring at his feet. He wasn't due to take his medicine for another five hours and seventeen minutes, but he was feeling the need for it now. “And now I must ask—”

“How accurate are your clocks?”

“Better than a second in eleven months,” said Jeremy promptly.

“That is very good?”

“Yes.” It had been very good. That was why the Guild had been so understanding. Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

“We want much better accuracy than that.”

“It can't be done.”