I walked in to touch the man – or the image – perhaps it was an image, like Fexler’s data ghost, just more convincingly drawn. Something the Builders considered art? Invisible glass stopped my fingers. I couldn’t get close to the man. My hand slid across an unseen surface, cool and slick to the fingertips.
The cell proved large enough for me to edge around the forbidden area, stepping through the dust at the margins of the room. The man’s hand came into view, holding a complex piece of metalwork to his head, an iron tube projecting from it to touch his temple.
‘I know this.’ The oldest of my father’s books held pictures of objects similar to this one. ‘It’s a gun.’
Another step and I saw the face, captured in the instant, imagining the pain but not yet feeling it despite the plume of blood and brain and bone behind him.
‘Fexler!’ I’d found the man himself. Not the memory.
The view-ring showed only the room, with Fexler lit red by the light, as if all the time that red dot pulsing amid the Iberico Hills had been this time-locked circle.
I made another circuit around the tableaux. ‘You stopped time!’ I thought about it, then shrugged. They say the Builders could fly. Who knows which is the more difficult, the stopping of time or taking to the skies? I thought of the watch buried in my baggage on Balky’s back. A device of the ancients – perhaps if I stopped its hands turning I would stop time just as they had.
‘You brought me here, Fexler.’ I spoke to the man. ‘What do you want? I can’t fix you.’
Obviously I couldn’t fix him. What had Fexler’s ghost been thinking? The answer came easy enough. Jorg breaks things. Fexler didn’t send me to fix this – he sent me to end it.
Of course breaking things that are sealed away behind unbreakable glass can prove difficult. As the point of my knife slid over the invisible barrier I started to doubt the glass existed at all. It seemed clear that something had to stand between a space where time flowed and a space where it did not. Zeno’s paradoxes sprung to mind. The Greeks loved paradoxes. Maybe they used them as currency. In any case I made no headway.
I walked away, a slight tremble in me from the fever. In every other cell nothing whole survived. I guess that the device in the ceiling had stopped time and in doing so had stopped the process of its own decay.
Memory stole me back beneath Mount Honas. In the Builders’ halls I had seen the remains of many narrow pipes, most just faint traces of verdigris, some bedded in the stone, some running against walls, some so thin that they could only have been strands of wire. The histories have it that the secret fire of the Builders ran along such paths to wake their devices. My watch needed no such fire but perhaps a coiled spring would not suffice for such mechanisms as that which held Fexler. Certainly it had not unwound over all the centuries. Did the machine need to be fed to keep time stationary?
A slow and minute inspection of the walls revealed no sign of hidden paths bringing fire to the ceiling ring. It took an age of hunting the corridors to find something to support me so I could check the ceiling. In the end I found a collection of bottles, like wine bottles but clear and cylindrical and slender as my arm. Binding all nine of them side to side with my shirt I made a very precarious platform on which to stand. Of all the Builders’ artefacts only glass had seen off the years without loss.
From my shifting, clinking platform I discovered that the barrier which enclosed Fexler narrowed as it rose so that at the ceiling I could get to within an inch or so of the metal ring. I used my knife to jab at the stonework around it. Poor treatment for a good weapon, but I had spare blades stashed on Lesha’s horse if I ever got back to him, and nothing else to work with.
Once before, in Gelleth, I had driven a blade into some magic of the Builders, a spirit trapped behind glass in the room before the weapon hall. A shock had run through the sword and thrown me twitching to the floor. The memory made me have to steel myself for each scratch and jab as I scored a circle around the ceiling ring. My muscles remembered the shock and kept trying to refuse to dig out a chance at renewing the experience.
The Builder stone started to flake and powder under my attacks. It took an hour maybe, possibly a day. It felt like a day. Sweat ran down me in hot streams and my arm ached, growing weaker by the moment as arms do when used overhead for more than a few minutes. I jabbed and scored, scored and jabbed. Without warning a deafening bang exploded around me, the light went out, and I fell with glass shattering
