The small party hurried after Sabor, who led them up a metalwork staircase that curved towards the first tier of his castle.
“This fortress,” Sabor said as he ran up the stairs, “offers one the opportunity to explore paths back through Time.” He indicated the many doors situated on the tiers of galleries above him. Iron steps rattled under his feet. “Each of these doors leads to a timelock, and behind each timelock is a suite. And each of those suites exists in a separate moment in the past: whether one hour ago or three hours, two days in the past, a year, a month-it all depends on the suite's current cycle. The Obscura's engines keep the whole thing ticking.” From a pocket under his mail shirt he withdrew a chart, quickly unfolding it to many times its original size. “Each room's temporal reach changes with the passage of Time. They cycle through various set permutations. It has been my life's work to map them all.” He stabbed a finger at the huge sheet of paper. “Right now, for instance, the Larollen Suite on the thirteenth floor looks out upon the new moon of four months ago. But when it finishes its cycle, a year from today, it will only be able to take a traveler back five days.”
They reached the first gallery. A walkway with a smooth dark wood banister encircled this level of the giant chamber, with a second staircase then rising up to the next gallery. A dozen or so doors led off this platform, each one boasting a round glass window like a ship's porthole as well as a tarnished gold dial similar to the locking mechanism found on a safe. Some of the portholes were dark, while light shone through others. Tubes from Sabor's camera obscura ran into the adjacent walls.
Here were the clocks Rachel had heard from downstairs. On the walls between doors hung every sort of timepiece, from the modest to the ostentatious. Hands ticked around faces in short halting steps past numerals and dates and diagrams of suns and moons.
As they hurried past the first door, Rachel glanced through its porthole. Beyond the timelock she glimpsed a comfortable room full of many more clocks, handsome furniture, and bookcases stuffed with ancient tomes, cabinets of astrological instruments, and an enormous brass device set upon a tripod before the exterior window. This, she thought, must be one extension of Sabor's obscura, and it was currently looking out through an outer window upon a dark and starry sky.
“How is that possible?” she said.
Sabor glanced back at the dial on the door, and then checked his map. “That particular room exists forty years ago,” he said. “The temporal register appears to be in accordance with the clocks inside. This therefore remains part of our current timeline, our actual history.” He raised his head. “Garstone? Where are you, Garstone?”
Rachel gazed back at the porthole in awe. “So stepping through that door would take you back forty years?” She found herself racing to catch up with the others again. “Why don't you go back and change the past, stop the portal from opening at Coreollis?”
“It's too late for that,” Sabor replied. “This castle was intended to be an
“If it's so dangerous, then why am I going back?”
Sabor threw up his arms. “Because our own timeline has already been corrupted,” he cried. “It's failing, rotten. The universe outside these walls is dying a slow death, and nothing we do now is going to make it any worse. It might last another hundred years-or ten, or a thousand-but the cancer has already spread out of control. All we can do is hack at it with a knife and try to buy ourselves some more time. Right now, you are that knife.”
Just as they reached the second staircase, one of the doors on the first level flew open and a stooped old man, wearing a garishly striped brown and red suit, stepped through it. He had his nose buried in a book, but when he noticed the group he nodded to Sabor and then to Iron Head before disappearing through the neighbouring door. A heartbeat later a third door on the opposite side of the circular gallery opened, and the same old man stepped back onto it. This time he was wearing a plain blue suit and scribbling notes in his book. He spotted the group again, nodded two times more to the captain and the god of clocks, and then vanished through an altogether different door.
“Who were they?” Rachel said.
Iron Head grunted. “That's my brother, Eli. Just call him Gar stone. He's the only one of us who still uses our old man's name.”
“Indeed,” Sabor concurred, glancing at his pocket watch again. “However, that is not the version of Garstone I was looking for. For the work to come we require a much younger man.”
“But how can he be two different ages?” Rachel enquired.
“Not just two ages,” Iron Head said. “Travel back ten minutes in this place and you'll meet yourself before you step into the timelock you've just used. And if there's no longer any reason for your original self to step inside the timelock, then there's suddenly two of you. My brother is every age from now until his death. He keeps overlapping himself.”
“Garstone winds the clocks,” Sabor added, “but it's becoming hard to keep track of him all.”
The god of clocks now urged them up the next set of steps, to the second gallery. It was identical to the first in every way except for an even greater variety of clocks set upon the walls. Garstone was here, too, albeit in greater numbers. Rachel counted three separate versions of the stooped old man, all winding clockwork, opening and closing doors as he moved between different rooms. He went about his business quietly, frowning over the books he carried, but with unfailing politeness, for each copy of him nodded to Sabor and Iron Head-and even to his other selves-in passing.
“How many of him
“There must be several billion of him by now,” Sabor replied. “He has worked here, in this labyrinth of Time, for more than thirty of his own years.” He shot another glance at his pocket watch, and then quickened his pace. “Three minutes until the cycle change.”
Rachel stared after him in confusion, but then Iron Head took her arm, urging her on. “That's how long we have until the particular window you need to take into the past ends,” he explained, as their boots rattled up the metal stairs. “All these rooms change their positions in Time. They reorder themselves to allow for the celestial movement of this planet.”
Somewhere below, a large timepiece began to chime, its loud clangs resounding throughout the vast chamber. Several smaller clocks answered with a chorus of silvery notes, like songbirds responding.
“Too much stress in space-time would tear the fortress apart,” Sabor called back over the ruckus. “Thus, to maintain balance in the cosmos, the Obscura's engines make constant temporal adjustments to certain rooms-cycle changes. You!” He halted, and made a gesture at one of the galleries above. “Come down here at once.”
A head appeared over the banister of one of the levels high above them, peering down. This version of Garstone appeared to be much younger than the others. “Me, sir?” he replied. “I'm on my way, sir.”
“Two minutes,” Sabor said to the group. “Hurry. We have one more level to climb.” He ducked under a brass lens tube and set off again around the curve of the gallery, one of his wing tips brushing the banks of ticking, whirring clocks against the wall.
Rachel felt dizzy and uncertain now, suddenly unable to decide if she was doing the right thing. The whole group seemed intent on shoving her back into the past for no good reason.
But then she realized how foolish she was being. This was an opportunity to be seized, a ten-hour window during which time she could alter the course of recent history.
She might still be able to save her friend.
“What else do I need to know?” she said to Sabor.
“You need to know how to chop wood and lash logs together,” the god replied.
“No, I mean about Time… about this castle.”
