God of Clocks

Even her old leathers and lightweight boots had returned. The armour clung to her lithe figure in all its battered and rotten glory, and she welcomed the smell of decay.

Yet there was more.

Had she been quite this tall, quite this strong? The muscles on her arms and legs seemed much larger and better defined. Her leathers felt tight around her thighs and upper arms. Was this merely subconscious vanity, or a reaction to her present instinct to smash her way out of here?

Four white walls enclosed her. She had no other way out but brute force.

She slammed the heel of her boot against the outer wall, aware that even the stone itself was an amalgam of living sentient souls. The barrier would be as strong as it believed itself to be, and she suspected that Menoa would have convinced it thoroughly. Her kick made no difference to the smooth surface.

Carnival took a step back and examined the wall, realizing she could not defeat this barrier in her current physical form. So she concentrated hard, willing greater strength and endurance from somewhere. She felt her wings grow, her muscles expand unnaturally, her very bones become heavier and denser. Her armour creaked and split around her new, bulkier frame. Her skin darkened to become a dull ironlike patina.

All a matter of will.

The scarred angel threw another savage kick at the wall. It shuddered. A crack appeared in the stonework from floor to ceiling. She lashed out again with her foot, and chips of white stone crumbled before her eyes.

The wall moaned.

She punched a heavy fist right through it. Masonry fell away in great chunks, revealing a turbulent red sky and the vast expanse of the Maze beyond.

The prison cell was near the summit of the Ninth Citadel. From this new rent in its outer wall, Carnival gazed down. Canals had flooded the thoroughfares within King Menoa's strange living metropolis: crimson slough skirted canted angles of black stone, glutted entire quadrangles, stained the brickwork. And yet the scene looked busier than ever. Hundreds of creatures in bulky armour darted here and there, sloshing through the thick mire, pushing, carrying, or rolling strange machines before them. Those canals… there was something odd about them.

Red figures stood in the waters.

The River of the Failed had encircled Menoa's fortress like a moat, and then flowed out to encompass all the streets around it. Even now tributary rivulets of it were leaching into the surrounding territory, flooding acres of dry passages. It was defending its master's home.

But from what?

And then Carnival noticed the approaching army-already so near the citadel that it defied her powers of observation. At first she had simply swept her gaze over it without even identifying it as such. If she hadn't now spied movement, she would just have glanced over it a second time. Whole cities, after all, were not supposed to crawl across the landscape.

A vanguard of mysterious machines moved at the forefront of this bizarre, creaking, and jostling army. These vessels looked vaguely like airships, though their tapering hulls appeared to have been forged from metal. They slid across the surface of Hell, smashing through the myriad walls, gouging out paths for the creeping rear guard to follow. Carnival spied two figures standing atop the leading vessel, a red-haired woman and a huge, dark giant, still wearing his wooden harness.

While the remaining survivors of Hulfer's Hundred marched back inside the Obscura Redunda, Mina instructed Hasp and Rachel to wait with her outside until they could be sure their future selves had duly departed.

Rachel had half a mind to burst in there and tell her other self the truth. But she knew that Mina had been right in a sense. To avoid corrupting this timeline any further, they must ensure that historical events happened exactly the way they ought to.

If the Sombrecur had been allowed to take Sabor's castle, then Rachel would have found herself in a new branch of the multiverse, facing a very uncertain future.

Yet Mina's meddling had likely caused the deaths of five thousand men, and for no apparent reason other than to inspire Hasp to struggle against his hellish parasite. Of course none of this troubled the thaumaturge, who seemed to be as morally flexible as a starving vulture in a nest of its sister's chicks.

After the sun had swept its long red rays below the horizon, they entered the castle and found Sabor waiting in the Obscura Hall. Rachel was vaguely relieved to find that this was the original Sabor, although she couldn't be entirely sure why. All versions of him were the same god, after all, and she couldn't bear a grudge against one without bearing a grudge against all of them. The god of clocks accepted another map from one of the many Garstones in evidence here. The galleries above were also bustling with Sabor's assistants, and timelock doors clicked open and closed constantly overhead. The pattering of footsteps produced sounds more numerous than all the ticks and chimes from the castle's clocks.

“My other self has now departed for earlier times,” Sabor announced, with just the merest flicker of a glance towards Mina. “Our Riot Coast friends are taking their supper in the dining room.”

Rachel glared at Mina, who clumsily pretended not to notice. Had the thaumaturge already told Sabor to rouse the Sombrecur? Was that unnecessary battle doomed to have always happened?

Nevertheless her machinations appeared to have had the desired effect, for Hasp was clearly in vigorous good spirits. Still plastered in dry mud, he beamed and said, “Well, 442 was a good year, but we've that many more of them left to traverse. Let's move on before the bastard king causes any more mischief.”

Mischief? Rachel felt sick, but she had to agree that they should move on soon, if only to prevent Mina from causing any more problems.

Sabor consulted his map to locate a suite that would take them back a full six years before the battle in which they had just fought. He looked up and around at his numerous assistants, many of whom were now leaving through the castle doors, presumably to create space while they waited for a future timelock. The god of clocks nodded with satisfaction.

“Making your own army here, Sabor?” Hasp asked.

“Hardly,” Sabor replied. “This has ceased to become a multiplication procedure. Now, rather, it is a rescue operation, as Menoa's bastard universe continues to grow around us. The Lord of the Maze is creating thousands of branches from his own timeline, and many more of the Obscura's suites now lead into these warped realms.” He grunted. “Garstone has orders to locate as many of his selves as possible and bring them into this timeline. They have orders to converge at year zero by any route available. Ergo, the closer we get to our destination, the more of Garstone's selves you will see.”

“Your castle is going to get very crowded.”

“Indeed.”

But as the numbers of Sabor's assistants increased, it soon became evident that another force was working to ensure that they didn't. In the next suite they found three more corpses. Again the victims were all versions of that diminutive rumple-suited man. All had been slain with a wide blade, the wounds suggesting that they had been cut down while trying to flee. Whatever had killed them had simply piled the victims in the center of the room.

As soon as they made this grim discovery, Rachel rushed to the timelock door and peered through. Crowds of Garstones passed outside the porthole window, seemingly oblivious of anything untoward.

Mina crouched by one of the bodies, and slipped its time piece from its breast pocket. “It's the correct time,” she said. “He was killed here not long ago, and his body hasn't been moved.” The other corpses' pocket watches told the same story. Whatever had slain these men had done so in this universe, with a thousand alternate versions of his three victims outside this very door.

And yet a hurried conference with Garstones passing outside soon revealed that none had seen anything. The killer had gone unnoticed.

Sabor's brow creased in a deep frown. “Either the killer was invisible,” he announced to the assistants now gathered on every balcony above the Obscura Hall, “or one of you has betrayed us… and thereby betrayed yourself.”

A moment's stunned silence was followed by shocked protests and denials from every level of the castle. They couldn't conceive of such a thing. The murderer could only have been a shade, a phantasm, a shape-