God of Clocks

And Rachel's heart froze.

A moment passed in which nobody spoke.

“I can see the resemblance,” Mina said.

Rachel couldn't speak. She was staring into a face she knew intimately. The woman who had claimed to be her sister could easily have been Rachel's identical twin: the shocking green eyes, the gaunt face, the fair hair tied back so severely. The Spine leathers were not just similar, but practically indistinguishable from Rachel's own. A partially healed wound traced a line above the woman's ear-exactly matching the path Abner's bullet had scoured through Rachel's flesh. Even the twin's jaw was swollen, still bruised from the punch Hasp had delivered.

“You were right about Sabor, Rachel,” Mina said. “Clearly he's been meddling in Time. This woman is you …. returned to us from the future.”

Rachel could spot only one difference between herself and this mirror-image woman. The twin had an extra bruise-a soft yellow smudge under her left eye. That single blemish was the only thing that differentiated them; without it, a stranger might never manage to tell the two apart.

“You're me?” she asked, incredulously. “A future me?”

The twin narrowed her eyes. “Hardly,” she said. “I'm the original. You, little sis, are the earlier version of me. About ten hours earlier to be exact. I stood where you are now and said exactly the same things you are about to say.”

“But this can't be…”

“Yes, that's more or less what I said.”

Rachel's thoughts tumbled wildly. “No… I won't… You can't be me. You're an impostor, a fraud. The bruise on your face…”

The twin snorted. “They told me it was necessary to help me understand. It's called a paradox, and this is how it happened.” And then she lashed out a fist and punched Rachel hard under the left eye.

9

IN THE CASTLE OF THE GOD OF CLOCKS

The rafts had been built with the help of the Hericans, the future Rachel explained, to act as a distraction and so confuse their arconite pursuers. Iron Head had apparently given this alternate Rachel the idea, after he'd first seen the craft used here today. Not that she could explain that paradox, either.

“Sabor's castle bends logic,” she said. “He claims it allows temporally distinct versions of a person to exist in the same moment.” Then she sighed. “I don't completely understand it, but Sabor says it has something to do with collapsing universes. You can ask him yourself shortly.”

“We're that close?” Rachel asked.

“It's not far from the shore, sis.” She pointed.

A beach of metallic shingle had appeared out of the fog. Conifers crowded the bank behind it, tightly spaced and so dense as to seem impenetrable, while white boles of some long-dead deciduous variety-perhaps the remains of an earlier forest-bent over the silver-grey grass of a bank rising abruptly behind the beach. After a moment Rachel perceived a track partially hidden by this sun-bleached wicker. It divided the pine forest as precisely as a knife cut.

Iron Head's men beached their boats all along the shore, the hulls scraping the pebbles with a sound like growling cats, and soon the entire party had disembarked. There were more than forty craft of all sizes, their dark shapes strewn along the water's edge. Rosella and Abner stayed close to the captain, Rachel, and Mina, but Oran and his woodsmen herded their people over to one side, evidently to maintain a structure of authority amongst their own.

The thaumaturge let her dog jump down onto the beach, and then strolled over to where Rachel's temporally removed twin stood peering into the mists that shrouded the Flower Lake. Dark patches of smoke lingered here and there, wherever the rafts drifted.

“You didn't have to hit her, did you?” she said.

“She had it coming, Mina.”

“How?”

The twin shrugged. “A future version of her got me into this whole mess. Or maybe it was a past version, I don't know. Trying to unravel these paradoxes gives me a headache. I haven't slept, and I just spent the last ten hours up to my knees in the freezing lake, lashing logs together with the bloody Hericans.” She snorted. “We built every single one of them by hand-and for what? Did you see any arconites back there? They're still slugging it out on the other side of the lake. All that effort wasted, and it's her fault. Or another version of her self's fault. There was no reason for me to come back here at all.” Her eyes met Mina's. “I'm sorry for striking her; I was annoyed at myself, I suppose. Now you're going to tell me that I gave myself this bruise.”

“Well, you are her,” Mina said. “Ten hours from now.”

“She's me,” the twin insisted, “ten hours ago. I'm the real Rachel… the definitive one. I left your side less than half a day ago… or I will leave your side-gods, this is confusing-and now you look at me like I'm a stranger.”

“You're both the same person.”

The assassin shook her head in frustration. “I don't like the idea of there being two of me. It's creepy. And she has a job to do. Apparently, now she needs to go back into the past and do all the pointless backbreaking labour I've just done before she'll really become me…” She ground her teeth together. “At least I think so… You see how mad this situation is? I should have ignored Sabor altogether.”

“I'm itching to see this castle of his.”

The future Rachel grunted. “It isn't quite what you think it is. It surprises you, and it disappoints you-I remember that well enough. Time travel is much harder work than you'd expect, because it involves a hell of a lot of walking.” Then she hissed in frustration and turned to stride up the beach. “Come on!” she exclaimed. “The castle is this way.” She stole a glance back at Rachel. “And don't ask how I found my way there in the first place. I simply followed me after me socked me in the eye…and that makes no sense whatsoever. Paradoxes! Just thinking about it is enough to drive you insane. Let the god of clocks explain it all again!”

Mina opened her mouth to speak, but Rachel's twin lifted her hand and, without even looking round, said, “Sabor will explain that too, Mina. We can travel that far back, but there are problems, as you'll see.”

Rachel caught up with the thaumaturge as the party climbed the loose gravel bank behind the beach. “What were you going to ask her?”

“I was going ask you why Sabor, or an agent of his, couldn't simply travel far enough back in time to prevent the battle at Coreollis. If we'd stopped the slaughter, the portal would never have opened. Then the king's arconites would still be in Hell.”

Rachel just shook her head in confusion. The logic was entirely unfathomable to her, and she began to understand her future self's miserable mood. But did she really have to return and confront herself again? What if she elected not to?

The Burntwater refugees slowly moved in single file along the narrow track. Dense woodland hemmed them on either side, and hoarded a deep grey silence that seemed entirely devoid of life. The ground rose steadily before them, till soon the group was climbing between well-worn boulders. The air became cooler, fresh now with the scent of mountain rain.

Rosella and Abner Hill stayed close to Iron Head's soldiers, while Oran's militia followed some distance behind. This latter group seemed content to sulk silently, but their whores muttered and complained. Despite the family ties between Iron Head and his brother, the two men and their respective troops had little contact with each other. No one spoke outside their own party. Even Rachel's temporal twin kept her head down and her mouth shut.

No more than a quarter of a league into the forest, the track came to another shoreline, with a similarly