God of Clocks

Head snatched the vessel from his brother's hands and filled his cup himself. “I won't have you serve me, Eli,” he declared. “It isn't right.” Then he turned to Sabor. “She couldn't allow the castle to exist in Heaven?” He paused. “With all these doors leading into the past, and who knew how many multiple versions of yourself living within, she would never feel safe.”

“Precisely,” Sabor said. “She moved the Obscura Redunda into this world, and by doing so moved the entire history and future of the castle out of her realm. It no longer exists in Heaven, nor has it ever existed there.”

Hasp hunched over the table, ripping meat from a bone with his teeth, then rubbed one of his greasy glass gauntlets against the tablecloth. “Took a lot of power,” he mumbled.

“The effort exhausted her,” Sabor explained. “In that one instant of fury, she created a door inside her earthly temple, and through it she expelled every hint of our presence from Heaven. Our armies, our archons, our weapons-all were expunged from her sight. We had no idea she could summon up so much… wrath.”

“But why?” Rachel asked. “What did you do to anger her?”

Hasp snorted into his wine cup.

The god of clocks smiled thinly. “We are her lawful sons,” he said. “Ulcis, Cospinol, Rys, Hafe, Mirith, Hasp, and myself, all born of Ayen and her husband, Iril. By rights we should have inherited Heaven.” He took a sip of wine. “But she never loved us. Never doted on us like she did her favourite child.”

“Ayen had another child?” Rachel said.

He nodded. “A bastard, a half-human boy conceived after Iril had already taken our mother as his bride. She betrayed our father in the most unconscionable manner. She bedded a mortal, and you can imagine how Iril reacted to that.”

Hasp gave another snort of derision, and then held out his wine cup for one of the Garstones to fill.

“Not well, I take it?” Mina said. She sniffed at her cup. “Is this wine off?”

Two Garstones appeared beside her at once. “I am terribly sorry, Miss Greene. It is so hard to keep track of the vintages in our cellar. Please let me replace it.” One of him snatched the offending cup out of her hand and drifted away with it, while the other disappeared to find a fresh bottle.

“Not well,” Sabor agreed. “Iril slew our mother's mortal lover and ate him. He would have murdered the bastard son, too, if she hadn't hidden the child away. Our father demanded that she give the boy up, but Ayen refused. And so began the War in Heaven.”

“So the child lived?” Rachel said.

“For a short while,” Sabor said. “Ayen was vulnerable after the war, you see? She had used every scrap of her power to expel us. So her bastard son left Heaven, sacrificing his own life to seal the doors behind him. He damned himself to Hell just to protect her.”

Iron Head grunted. “Some folks might regard that as a noble gesture.”

Sabor and Hasp both shot him a dark look.

“Some folks,” Iron Head added. “Fools and traitors and such.”

“But Iril ruled Hell,” Rachel said. “What happened to the bastard there?”

“Our father had never seen Ayen's illegitimate son,” Sabor explained. “None of us even knew his name. By the time we discovered the youth's identity it was already too late. In Hell the bastard rose through the ranks of Iril's followers. He distinguished himself, becoming one of our father's elite. But all the time he was plotting Iril's downfall.” The god's lips thinned to a grim line. “Ayen's eighth, and favourite, son is Alteus Menoa, the creature who now calls himself Lord of the Maze.”

A hush fell upon the room, only to be broken a moment later by the arrival of one of the Garstones from the kitchen.

“Pudding!” the small man announced.

“We didn't ask for any,” Mina said.

“You will, Miss Greene, once you've tasted it.”

They ate in silence for a while, but then Rachel had a thought. “If the doors to Heaven are impenetrable,” she said, “why don't you just go back in Time and stop Menoa from sealing them in the first place?”

Sabor simply glowered at his pudding.

Hasp guffawed, and drained more wine.

After a long moment, Garstone said, “Shall I tell them, my lord?”

The god of clocks nodded.

Garstone turned to Rachel. “That has already been attempted,” he said. “Lord Rys used the labyrinth of Time to return to the exact moment Alteus Menoa left Heaven. He tried to prevent the bastard from killing himself in his mother's temple.”

“He failed,” Sabor said. “But by leaving this castle, Rys corrupted our timeline and put the whole cosmos in danger. His meddling with history gave birth to a second universe running parallel to this one.”

“And now both of them are failing,” Garstone added. “You can see the evidence of it everywhere-glitches and bubbles in Time wherever the two streams overlap.” He shrugged. “We've made adjustments here and there to try to keep our timeline from collapsing entirely, but the damage was done three thousand years ago.”

“You don't get out of debt by borrowing more money,” Sabor muttered. “I tried to explain that to Rys, but he wouldn't listen. The fool wanted to return to the source of the problem a second time, to try to capture Menoa again!”

“So you killed Rys?” Rachel said.

The god of clocks grunted. “The farther back one travels into the past, the more profound the consequences of one's actions. A third attempt to stop Menoa could destroy the entire cosmos.”

Mina frowned. “Is the Lord of the Maze aware of all this?”

“Yes and no,” Sabor said. “In this timeline, Menoa was not accosted when he spilled his blood in my mother's temple. But in the other timeline-the one Rys created-he understands what has happened. In that universe, his arconites have already reached the Obscura Redunda. If he conquers us there, he'll gain access to the labyrinth of Time, thereby allowing him to wander through both his own past, and ours.”

Garstone cocked his head suddenly. “Did anyone else feel that?”

Rachel had felt it too: a tremor through the floor. No sooner had it passed, than another, stronger, vibration succeeded it. And then another.

For the most part, Hell's Ninth Citadel seemed to be constructed of people. There were no doors or windows here. Mouths set into the floors and ceilings shouted at her, and the walls… a mass of grey eyeless torsos reached out from those walls. They gnashed their teeth and groped at Carnival's wings, mewled and sniggered and spat at her, before she began to kill them.

After that they howled. Screams of terror and panic ran through the whole mad fortress as Carnival butchered a path through the writhing figures. Her demon sword flashing, she broke through into a second room, and then a third and a fourth…

The naked figures clawed at each other in their frantic attempts to flee, but they were already so knotted together that escape was impossible. And so they gibbered and died under the scarred angel's blade. She hacked off arms and heads and carved out chunks of flesh to make the openings through which she passed.

In this manner she reached a much larger room where the brawling figures reached to dizzying heights above. Many clutched slabs of pale stone that formed a rude and crooked stairwell arranged around the interior void of this tower. Others waved tin lanterns, bathing the scene in shifting yellow light.

Was this the center of the citadel?

She heard a trickling, rushing sound and turned to see the River of the Failed seeping up through cracks in the floor behind her. It quickly filled the rooms she had previously occupied, but it did not come any closer. Defying nature, the wall of water trembled at the rough-hewn entrance to this larger chamber, as though waiting for Carnival to proceed.

Carnival couldn't have explained why she was here. She had merely followed the river's current. But reason or motive did not matter while the blood in her veins screamed for battle. Everything around her had become an enemy. She needed to hurt this place.

The figures within the walls hissed and wailed. And then a terrible ripping noise issued from all those massed bodies. They parted in places, forming portals in the three undisturbed sides of the room.