God of Clocks

She took a last bite from the apple, then threw down the core to the miserable beast.

A sudden change in the texture of the sunlight brought the Spine assassin's attention back to Rys's palace. Eleven of Menoa's arconites were moving back from it, their wings turning in the twilight like great lucent sails. The first and greatest of them, however, now knelt before the god's bastion as if in supplication. Rachel trained her sightglass on the palace itself.

On its highest balcony stood a white-winged figure in shining steel armour. He wore a cape of battlefield roses as vividly red as the living blossoms that cascaded over the balustrade around him. The glass doors to his quarters had been thrown open behind him, and the myriad panes shone blue.

Rys had come to plead for his life.

Rachel saw the god gesturing angrily, but even with her sightglass fully extended, she could not discern his face with enough clarity to read his lips. Whatever words he spoke to the kneeling giant went unheard. Yet after a moment the arconite's reply resounded across the heavens, as deep as an echo reverberating from the throats of all of the world's tombs.

“King Menoa rejects your proposal outright, Lord Rys, for he suspects that your brothers' souls are not truly yours to bargain with. Furthermore, he demands that they present themselves before these assembled ambassadors as a gesture of goodwill. The Lord of the Maze is magnanimous. He will not punish such worthy adversaries. He simply requires that all sons of Ayen enter Hell before the portal expires. As guests of the Ninth Citadel you will be spared all the horrors of the Maze and denied none of its pleasures.” The arconite's maw was an affectation, for it could not speak as men do. The voice issued from a metal simulacrum of a larynx, and yet the thoughts behind those words were born in the depths of a citadel built under a different sky.

It was talking about Rys's brothers: Mirith, Hafe, and Sabor. Rachel was hardly surprised that the god of flowers and knives had attempted to sell his own kin, or that King Menoa now purported to offer them sanctuary. Should the sons of Ayen be killed in this world, their souls would be lost in the endless reaches of Hell. Clearly the king wished them nearer to hand.

Rys must have recognized this offer for the lie it was. He turned his back on the angel and gazed through the balcony doors. And for an instant Rachel thought she spied another archon within the building, an armoured figure identical to Rys himself. It must have been a reflection in the glass doors. Rys inclined his head. His cape of roses ruffled and lifted in a hot updraft from the burning city. He stepped suddenly from the balcony, back into his own chambers.

As the sun's lowest edge touched the rim of the world, Rys's palace imploded, evaporating into white powder before that great motionless, kneeling observer. The concussion that followed seemed to crack the air apart and left Rachel's ears ringing. The falling bastion and its sentinel towers became ghosts of themselves that bent leeward in unison, and began to drift away in the breeze.

Rachel spread butter on a hunk of bread. Had she truly observed the last clash of gods in the world of men? Those deities whom the ignorant claimed to be fallen stars had seemed to her to sacrifice their souls too easily. She sensed trickery here. The glimpse she'd caught of Rys's own reflection had looked… odd. Something about it troubled her, but she couldn't say exactly why. Had Cospinol sent her forth from his fogbound skyship to deliberately witness this very display?

The kneeling arconite now stood and joined its eleven fellows. Sulphur fires clung to the shins of two of these automatons, and yet they appeared to be untroubled, perhaps even unaware of the flames. The Twelve moved north towards the walls of Coreollis, over which the haze of Cospinol's fog glowed dimly in the final light.

King Menoa had at last turned his attention to the Rotsward.

Rachel stuffed the hunk of bread into her mouth, gathered the remains of her picnic into her satchel, and then descended the log steps from the motte rampart, jogging down a further set of steps to the bailey, where she unhitched her horse's reins.

The animal tried to bite her, but she slipped past its neck and, grabbing its mane and placing a foot in the cloth stirrup, swung up into the saddle. She pressed her heels into the beast's flank, whereupon it snorted and sidestepped.

“Natch.”

The horse blew and stamped a hoof.

She whipped the reins. “Natch.”

Her mount began to walk backwards.

“Natch. Natches. Forward, you obstinate Heshette…” She dug her heels in sharply. “You know the command I'm trying to say. Ha!”

The beast lurched towards the bailey gate.

But time was against her, for the arconites now shared her destination and Cospinol's scouts would have noted as much. To reach the Rotsward before her foes she would have to ride quickly. She urged the horse into a gallop and clung on for her life. It bolted down the earthen track, throwing up clods of muddy grass, its worn hide sliding over ribs gripped between Rachel's knees. The path rounded a conical grass mound, the remains of some earlier fortification now overgrown with birch and black brambles, and veered northwards again towards a gloomy tunnel in the misty broadleaves. With long, slow strides, the arconites traversed swaths of ground at a pace Rachel's mount could not hope to match, but she had half a league's start on them-and she had the help of a thaumaturge waiting onboard the Rotsward.

Or so she hoped. Now would be a really good time, Mina.

From the battlefield to the west arose a new mist. It poured from the mouths of ten thousand slain men and demons like a final cold exhalation. A little blood yet remained in those warriors and, aboard the Rotsward, Mina Greene had used this to her advantage. Tendrils of fog intermingled above the corpses to form a thin grey pall that swelled and heaved and then rolled out over the Larnaig Field like a seawater tide. It consumed the slopes and the railway buildings and the lake and plains beyond in sorcerous mist. It billowed against the walls of Coreollis and swamped the forest where it merged with the Rotsward's own shroud of fog.

Rachel rode into the misty gloom of the forest. The sound of the horse's hooves grew duller as it thundered down the arboreal tunnel. A faint nimbus of light defined the gap in the trees through which she had entered the woodland, but the fog ahead hoarded a deep and varicose darkness. She could not see the path clearly, and her flight into those grey and flinty shadows felt like a plunge through the borderlands of delirium. Black branches intertwined with the mist around her, limp with dank brown foliage and lines of gossamer. The boles of oak and elm leaned over the narrow track like leering youth or stood back in the greyness like sullen old men. Twigs stabbed at Rachel's eyes, and the rushing air felt cold and damp against her face. The horse blew and huffed; its unshod hooves bore down upon a carpet of sodden mulch, kicking up leaves that smelled of worms and spiders.

From somewhere behind came the long low drone of horns. Rachel urged the horse on faster and, to her surprise, it responded. Perhaps that hunting call had finally given the beast the wits to share its rider's urgency, for it now thundered along the track like the true Heshette warhorse it once must have been.

They leapt over a collapsed tree clad in plates of white fungi, like the armour of a fallen Icarate. Rachel felt herself begin to slip from the saddle. She clung to the steaming animal's neck. The rich odour of its hide filled her nostrils. Its breathing came in hot quick gusts. But, rather than bucking, the horse eased up a little and allowed the assassin to drag herself back upright in the saddle.

“Thanks,” she whispered.

The beast surged forward again, almost throwing her a second time. She gritted her teeth.

The track skirted a huge lichen-spattered boulder and then opened into a glade of beer-coloured ferns, young hazel and grass flourishing amongst granite outcroppings. Rachel heard singing. She reined in.

John Anchor was sitting on a rock in the center of the clearing, muttering a tune while he sharpened a stick with a short sword that, in his big hands, looked to be no larger than a simple knife. In the forest gloom he looked like a huge black bear.

The great hemp rope that tethered him to his master's airship rose skywards from the harness on his back, but otherwise there was no evidence of the Rotsward's presence here, nor of the many passengers floating in the fog above him. He was quite alone. He looked up and grinned.

“Rachel Hael.”

“I thought you abhorred blades,” she said with a glance at his handiwork.

“Only when they are used in battle,” he replied. “The Heshette gave me this weapon as a parting gift. It