At that moment, a deep explosion like the firing of a cannon echoed through the landscape, and saffron clouds spewed into the sky over the hill. “That is one of my incendiaries,” Blister said, eyeing the haze. “They have reached the head of the river.”
The city was out of time. No one had any better solution, so the mayor ordered the town’s engineers to craft a mainspring from whalebone as fast as they could. In a matter of hours, the giant whalebone spring was finished and placed where it belonged, at the heart of the mechanism that turned the city into a snare. The device was wound by a dozen men circling around a huge capstan. The trap was set.
Then a far-off sound like the shearing of giant scissors tore through the air. “That’s one of my fortifications,” Bone said, peering westward through a spyglass. “They are only a few miles away.” The time had come to evacuate.
So they left the city: the citizens piled into ships, and the Yankee peddlers hitched their ponies and horses and mules to their wagons. The mayor invited them to watch the battle unfold from the vessels out beyond the harbor, but the Yankee peddlers shook their heads, and one by one they started up the winding road that had carried them into town in the first place.
The city was deserted when the invaders swarmed into it. A cry of triumph rose from its streets as they discovered that they had conquered without even having to fight. Meanwhile, out on the vessels in the bay, half the citizens watched the city through spyglasses while the other half counted down the minutes on an assortment of timepieces purchased from Alphonsus Lung, until at last the time had come for the trap they had made of their city to spring on the invaders.
And then the assorted clocks on the ships sounded their varied alarms.
Nothing happened.
The citizens shook their timepieces. They stared across the bay. They waited. Still nothing happened, and nothing continued to happen as the conquerors took possession of the port.
The city did not spring the trap it had become. Something was wrong, either with Drogam Nerve’s plans or with the way they had been executed, or perhaps with the whalebone spring itself.
Out on the bay, the mayor and the engineers argued over what had gone awry, and the citizens wailed and blamed and despaired. In the end, only one thing was certain: Nerve had said the device would work with a whalebone mainspring, but he had definitely been concerned that this makeshift heart might change how it worked. Perhaps changing the spring had changed its timing.
So the newly exiled townsfolk watched their city fall—the city they had built, and loved, and then turned into a giant infernal device and left to defend itself. They watched, and still they waited for the whalebone spring to release its force. And still, nothing happened.
In the city, the conquerors celebrated as they took possession, unaware that all around them a hidden weapon lay coiled: a weapon in the shape of a city, its whalebone heart winding slowly, slowly down. And it winds down still, all around us, as the city waits and bides its time.
Which leaves this problem for all who hear my tale to solve: Who are you descended from—the townsfolk or the invaders? And are you, even now, living in the middle of a trap that continues winding down to the moment in which it will finally spring?
Ticking? I hear no ticking.
INTERLUDE
REEVER TOLD HIS TALE without getting up from his chair, with the fire alternately casting him in shadow and gilding his cowlicks with reflected shades of red and gold. He spoke almost without moving.
Maisie, staring up at him from the floor, gave a shiver, barely noticing as she accepted the four aces that Tesserian handed her. The Blue Vein Tavern was in a port town between a bay and a hill. Had something been ticking? Other than, of course, the case clock between the vase of matches and the big music box above the fire? She glanced at Petra, who gave her a wink as she clapped for Reever’s performance.
“Delightful.” Jessamy Butcher stood and crossed from a shadowy little table in one corner of the parlor to pour herself more coffee at the sideboard.
“I’m delighted you think so,” Reever said with a lazy smile. “Will you be telling one yourself?”
“You’ve been wondering what kind of tale I’d tell, haven’t you?” Jessamy’s voice was light as she stirred sugar into her coffee, but Reever Colophon saw her fingers twitch on the cup, and he wondered fleetingly if she was about to crush it the way she’d crushed her sherry glass.
He watched her hands, watched her face, noted the reddish stain still darkening one swish of pale gold hair. “For days.” There was nothing lazy in his expression now, or in his voice.
The room held its breath. If there were music, he would ask her to dance, Maisie thought with a pang. And then she realized that this amounted to exactly the same thing; perhaps it was just as impossible to keep secrets when you told a tale as it was when you danced. Others in the room looked in amusement, wonder, envy at the young man who had, with a mere two words, laid so much out in the open. Sorcha, trying to imagine saying such things out loud herself, glanced almost involuntarily at Negret, who’d taken a chair beside the glass display case full of music boxes in the corner nearest the hallway door. She was the only one who saw the flash of sadness cross the other Colophon twin’s face.
Jessamy met Reever’s eyes at last, and the rest of the room
