“This was always the only way for us to be sure. It's too dangerous for either of us to exist here.” She turned the blade over slowly in her hands. “I'll make it quick. Neither of us will suffer.”
“But the Rachel on the lake manages to escape, doesn't she?”
“Dill won't stop the arconites' advance now. He doesn't know that that Rachel escaped, because you are here. As long as Menoa has one of us hostage, he'll obey the Lord of the Maze. This timeline is a dead end for us.”
“But we must survive elsewhere?” Rachel insisted. “The universe where I met myself out on the lake… that still exists, doesn't it? That other version of me is still in Sabor's castle.”
The other Rachel nodded. “She's you,” she agreed. “And she does survive, and grow older. And one day she realizes that no world deserves to suffer, not even a doomed one.” She smiled sadly. “Doesn't make it any easier, does it?”
Rachel rubbed tears from her eyes. “No,” she said, “it doesn't.”
“Good-bye, sis.”
“ Good-bye.”
11
Rachel felt finally relieved. The room into which her former self had stepped was now empty. The Greengage Suite had undergone another temporal shift, and now looked out upon a different Time altogether. She peered through the porthole to see a moonlit room.
A younger version of Garstone appeared, wearing a crushed brown suit. He tilted his head to his brother Iron Head, and then to Sabor. “You asked for me, sir?”
“You're late, Garstone,” the god of clocks replied. “I needed you to accompany Miss Hael ten hours into the past, but you've missed your opportunity. She's already gone.”
The small man took out a map from his inside jacket pocket and unfolded it. “Ten hours, sir? Hmm…” He frowned. “That does present us with a little problem, doesn't it?”
He scratched his head and then sighed. “There
Sabor raised his nose. “Fourteen years is nothing. You'll still be fit enough when you emerge. Ah, thank you…” He snatched an envelope from the hand of a second, much older, Garstone, who just
“Those decoys were a waste of time,” Rachel said, “and we're wasting even more time here. Dill needs our help right now.”
Garstone accepted the documents from his master. “Thank you, sir. Now if you'll excuse me, I'd better be going. The first suite fails in”-he glanced at his timepiece-“fifty-three seconds.” He hurried away and disappeared into one of the many doors.
Clocks chimed all around them as if in celebration of his departure.
“Now let's go.” Rachel turned away without waiting to see if the others followed. Too many minutes had passed since they'd crowded around Sabor's obscura table and witnessed Dill crawling from the lake-an image that had already been seventeen minutes old. Anything could have happened to her friend since then.
The group assembled beside a glassy basalt outcrop at the edge of the plateau surrounding the Obscura Redunda. A freezing wind shrieked past their ears, while the walls of the castle flickered and throbbed behind them. From up here Rachel could see for leagues in each direction along the Flower Lake's northern shore: peninsulas and crescents of silver beach; the smudge of smoke over Kevin's Jetty; the green wooded hills rising up in banked mounds from the water's edge to the dour Temple Mountains; and, half a league further down the slope below, the arconite Dill.
He was using his one good arm to drag his huge body up through the forested slopes. A clutter of pipes and bones and wire-snagged machine parts scraped along the ground behind his broken pelvis. In his wake he left a trench full of oil and broken trees.
Rachel ran towards the path that would take them back down the mountainside, but Sabor called after her, “You can't help him.”
“I have to help him,” Rachel replied.
“He's too big,” the god of clocks said. “You can't carry him up here, and you can't repair him. He has to make it on his own.”
“He might have to drag himself,” Rachel said, “but that doesn't mean he has to make the journey alone.” She wheeled away and sprinted down the track.
She had barely covered two hundred yards before Iron Head caught up with her. She heard his leather armour creaking, and the thud of his boots behind her, and looked back to find him grinning.
“You gave Sabor a lesson in compassion,” he said.
“I've never met a god who didn't need one,” she replied. “Except for Hasp, and he tried to kill me.”
A yelp came from somewhere behind. Rachel glanced back up to see Mina struggling down the steep trail a short distance away, her glass-sheathed feet slipping in the loose dirt, while her little dog sauntered along beside her. There was no sign of Sabor-apparently he had decided not to come.
They remained on the path for an hour before Rachel heard the arconite's enormous body smashing through the forest. She turned in the direction of the sounds and led her two companions through densely packed trees. All was silent except for the regular crunch of the canopy breaking up ahead, and the rhythmic thud of bone striking earth.
He stopped moving when he saw them. His massive arm collapsed to the ground with one final crash, and his jawless skull simply settled upon the hillside and lay there, staring.
Rachel burst into tears. She scrambled over to his skull and pressed her body against it. The dead bone felt coarse and hard under her hands, utterly cold. The arconite's great skeleton stretched far down the slope below in a mess of twisted metal, pipes, and ribs.
Rachel felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find Mina standing beside her.
“He can't speak,” she said. “Let's find his soul.”
The narrow passageway leading into Dill's soul chamber had been left exposed by his missing jaw, and they had little trouble finding it and crawling inside. The chamber within remained gloomy, only partially illuminated by dim shafts of daylight falling through holes in the arconite's cranium. In the very center, the glass sphere containing the angel's spirit rested amidst piles of broken machine parts and blue crystal shards.
A hooded figure was slumped on the floor with his back against the sphere, an empty whisky bottle in his hand. He looked up and groaned.
“Hasp!” Mina shouted, rushing towards him.
The Lord of the First Citadel clutched his head in his hands and groaned again. “Stay away from me, thaumaturge,” he said. “I don't know where I am or what I might do. It seems I've been in a battle, but I have no recollection of it.”
“You're hungover,” she said.
“That, too.” Hasp tilted his head back and closed his eyes.
Rachel stepped over debris and placed her palms against the glass sphere. The ghosts inside drifted through each other like dreams, passing in and out of Dill's own spectre. Their voices assaulted her mind:
“Dill?”
His voice sounded faint.
“It's not far now.”
