God of Clocks

when we're out of turnips and coins they'll come looking for soulpearls, mark my words.” He gave a short bitter laugh. “Yet you ask me to employ these purposeless men simply to prevent them from being used against me- legions of combatants who are entirely useless against my real enemies.”

“They cannot fight Menoa's arconites, but they can still fight.”

“Fight who?” he exclaimed.

The witch's dog growled, and nudged her leg. She picked it up again. “Since we are defeated, ill-equipped, and presently fleeing for our lives, I propose we pick a fight with a new foe.”

Cospinol just stared at her, but a great gruff laugh came from the back of the cabin. The boy heard Hasp's deep voice booming out: “I think I see where this is going. Oh, Mina, you've offered us an end that will shake history!”

The conversation went on, but the boy had lost interest. He was watching a beetle crawl along the dank wooden passageway. He stabbed his steel fingers down around it, trapping it in a cage.

The beetle tested its prison. The boy watched its antennae moving. He scooped it up and ate it, then slouched back a bit and began to scratch a maze into the passageway wall. Bored with that, too, he crawled further down the rotting conduit into deeper gloom, and on through a ragged hole that snagged his sailcloth breeches. He found Monk waiting for him in a narrow gap between an inner bulkhead and the Rotsward's cannonball-chewed outer hull.

Monk claimed to be an astronomer, but he wore an old musketeer's uniform and looked like a grave-digger's apprentice. He squatted there with his filthy knees poking through the holes in his breeches, like partially unearthed skulls. His eyes were as fat and moist as globes of frogspawn, their black pupils trembling as he searched the shadows. He clutched a wooden bowl and spoon. “Who's that?” he said. “Boy? Don't skulk in the dark. Where is my soup?”

The boy shrugged. “They're still boiling her,” he said.

“After twenty days?”

“Fifty days. She's still kicking at the inside of the pot.”

Monk frowned and set down his bowl and spoon. “You could kill me a gull,” he muttered.

“Ain't any gulls here,” the boy replied. “The air's too smoky. There's crows, though, down there on the battlefield. You can hear them from the lower gallows.”

Monk said, “I wouldn't go to the gallows, not to hear no birds cawking.”

The astronomer had been dead for a hundred and fifty years, or so he said. He wouldn't return to the Rotsward's gallows, not ever. Not after all the time he'd spent hanging out there on a gibbet next to that wailing filibuster from Cog. Besides, they were liable to just string him up again if he went outside, weren't they? No, it was best to hide in here, stay quiet, and keep his head down. Work with the boy and share all the beetles and birds' eggs they found between themselves.

But Monk never found any beetles or birds' eggs. He never left his hiding place, never got up except to stagger down to the big hole in the hull where he kept his musket and his battered old sightglass.

Monk followed the boy's gaze. “No stars last night,” he said bitterly.

“Maybe there aren't no stars no more,” the boy replied. “Maybe they all fell down like Cospinol did. What if Pandemeria is now full of gods, and the skies above are black and empty?”

“I don't think we're in Pandemeria anymore,” Monk said. “Last I saw of the world was when they cut me from my gibbet to fight at Skirl.” His gaze now focused inwards on his own memories. “Needed us old veterans to stand against the Maze King's first giant,” he said. “Guaranteed freedom for those who took up arms against that thing.” His tone became animated and mocking. “ ‘No more gins or nooses and that's a promise.’” He spat. “Fat lot of use, anyway. You can't kill a thing that can't be killed. And we couldn't even see to shoot at it in this damn fog.”

Monk had been in Pandemeria during the uprising, attached to Shelagh Benedict Cooper's Musketeers. He said he'd read the stars for Shelagh herself, and shot seven Mesmerists, too.

“Never saw the stars neither,” he went on. “None of us could leave the fog without just melting away into Hell. We started to fade as soon as they lowered us from the Rotsward's deck, and when our feet touched the ground we were nothing but ghosts on the battlefield, spectres dragging muskets we could hardly lift. We were about as effective against the Skirl arconite as a fart blowing round its heels.”

“Because Cospinol ate your eternal souls?”

Monk nodded. “He stole the stars from me.”

“I don't want to leave anyway,” the boy said. “I like it here.”

“You like tormenting the god of brine,” Monk observed. “He'll chop your head off if he catches you.”

The boy just grinned. “Then I'll make myself a new head, a metal one.”

“ Shape-shifters.” Monk sighed. “You all think you can do what you like. How are you going to make yourself a new head if you don't have a mind to imagine the shape and feel of it, eh? It's not like forging those fancy new fingers of yours.” He made a chopping motion with his hand. “One deft shnick and that'll be the end of you. Cospinol won't be bothered about losing one soul to the Maze, not when he has so many hanging from his gibbets already.”

The boy shrugged. He hadn't thought of that.

“Don't see why you can't change yourself into something useful for once,” the astronomer said. “Something to help your old friend Monk pass the time.” His eyes narrowed, the pupils like peepholes into some cruel realm of night. “A weapon, maybe…or something softer.”

“I'm not a shiftblade!” the boy cried. “I'm not like them.”

The old man chewed his lip. “No, you're a good lad who brings his friend Monk kettles of soup. Except there's no soup because that scarred angel just won't die in her cooker. Fifty days? What the hell is wrong with her?” He looked at the boy. “You wouldn't be holding out on me?”

“No.”

“You wouldn't be lying to your old friend Monk?”

“No.”

“So you won't mind if we go take a look together?”

“But…” The boy took a moment to assemble his jumbled thoughts. “You don't go anywhere.”

“And you were counting on that?” The old man surged forward and grabbed the boy by the nape and dragged him back down through the sloping inner space of the hull, his grey hair as wild as a busted cord of wire.

The boy panicked and began to change his shape, willing his bones to wilt and flow out of the man's grip.

Monk punched him in the face. “None of that,” he growled. “You'll keep the bloody body you were born with, for once.”

The shock of admonishment emptied the young shape-shifter's mind. He scrabbled against the inner bulkhead, his fingers scraping gouges in the wood. But Monk simply stuffed him back into the narrow conduit and pushed the boy ahead of him like a clot of rags. “Which way now?” he demanded. “Larboard or starboard?”

Not knowing, the boy turned left, and they bumped and shuffled onwards in a noisy brawl of knees and elbows.

Once they reached the crawl space Monk shoved the boy aside and peered down through the spy hole. The brass buttons on his epaulettes shone dully in the light of the brazier below, while the hooked tip of his nose glowed like a torch-heated spigot. He was silent for a long time.

The boy looked at the kettle on its hook above the spy hole, and then he looked at the astronomer's head.

“A witchsphere,” Monk whispered. “And they've reinforced it.” He frowned. “Witchspheres don't open from the inside and they don't break. They were designed to contain a whole world of torment.” His frown deepened. “So why bother to reinforce it?”

From the chamber below came a mighty boom. Steam blasted up through the gap. The astronomer flinched.

“That's why,” the boy said.

Monk stared into the shadows for a moment. “She just kicked like a babe in a womb.”

“Told you,” the boy said.

The old man rubbed condensation from his brow. With a grim expression he went back to studying the cooker