God of Clocks

shifter.

A shape-shifter?

Rachel saw Hasp's expression turn sour at this news. If a shape-shifter was here in the castle, then the Mesmerists had gained access to this timeline. The future they had left behind must already have been altered.

Sabor called for silence and, grimly, ordered the lights dimmed and the camera obscura activated. With a thousand pairs of eyes watching from the galleries above him, the god of clocks switched between the lenses of each of his suites in turn.

A bleary orange sun against a smouldering purple sky … bones adrift upon the Flower Lake… a great black building amidst an unknown village on the opposite lakeshore, puffing red smoke from its funnels … darkness, with the stars obscured by greasy fumes…the light of dawn falling upon ashen plains… machines waiting in the lakeshore thickets… a solitary giant standing godlike against a scorched heaven.

All but four of the lenses he tried revealed these similar poisoned universes, places where Menoa's newly altered pasts had come to fruition in chaotic ways. The Maze had come to the world of men before Heaven had even been sealed.

“How is he doing this?” Rachel asked.

“He gained control of the Obscura Redunda in his own bastard universe. Now his Mesmerists have spread back through the labyrinth of Time like an infestation, transporting chaos back with them into the past. Each time he changes history, he creates yet another universe that puts greater pressure on our own. Our own timeline may already have collapsed behind us. Our future, the very one we left, might no longer exist as we know it.”

He snatched up his map and cried, “Hurry!”

They ran from timelock to timelock in an increasingly complex and desperate route back through the labyrinth of Time. Six months. Three days. Two hours. Twenty years. A solitary leap of two and a half minutes, and they kept running, pushing, through crowds of Garstones to make a seven-year connection. Rachel was exhausted, Hasp grim-faced in his filthy armour, Mina clutching Basilis to her breast as she raced along the gallery. Even Dill seemed to have faded as a result of the constant exertion. Up stairs and down again. The whole Obscura Hall was packed with rumple-suited assistants.

They made the connection with just seconds to spare. Two and a half thousand days, gone in a heartbeat. They hurried onwards, backwards, throwing themselves into the past with fierce abandon.

Sabor called out to announce the years: “… Three fifty-five… Two ninety-six… One hundred and forty- two…”

Year ninety-nine.

And here they found a suite full of bodies. Forty Garstones slain, the room painted with arcs of blood. “No time,” Sabor cried. “No time to look for the killer. Leave the dead and run.”

Year eighty-one.

The Obscura Redunda was bursting with humanity, all countless versions of the god's clock-winder. And still more of him poured from other suites, from other universes that had been blighted by their unseen enemy. They came staggering into the Obscura Hall, wounded or dying or burned. The air thickened with the smell of sweat, smoke, and blood.

Year fifty.

This time most of the suites were now filled with the dead. The doors of the castle had been flung wide open, and Garstones poured out to assemble on the mountainside beyond, waiting for their chance to travel back to year zero. Rachel heard a cry issue from above. A clash of steel? She couldn't stay to find out.

Year eighteen.

Now Sabor's assistants clambered over their own corpses in the Obscura Hall in their haste to reach the appropriate timelocks. Others carried other wounded selves. Smoke poured into the castle from the main doors, boiling up over the obscura columns, till it filled the hemisphere in the ceiling. Howls and cries sounded from outside, and Basilis's barking, and shouts: “We are attacked… Men outside.”

Not Mesmerists? Rachel wondered if that was a good sign or not. Perhaps the land had not yet been bloodied enough for King Menoa's own creations. Hasp interrupted her thoughts by grabbing her arm. “Move.”

Year zero.

Silence.

The timelock door had slammed behind them as they piled into yet another musty suite with another pointlessly grandiose name. There were no bodies here, no smoke or damage. The window looked out upon a cloudless blue sky. By the angle of the sun, Rachel judged it to be morning, and yet auroras danced across the heavens beyond the glass, shimmering curtains of pale green and purple. She approached to get a better view.

The Temple Mountains shone like polished jet, the colourful skies reflected as if burning deep within countless dark and glassy facets. A few patches of snow clung to the higher abutments, but the landscape below basked in pristine sunlight. All trace of the forest was gone, for here the foothills swept down to the lakeshore in a series of soft humps, every inch of them covered in wildflowers.

Rachel had never seen such a riotous carpet of blossoms: bursts of gold and red mingled with lavender whorls; dabs of white and cerise amongst streaks of indigo, copper, and umber. The overall effect was so intense upon the eye that it seemed to blur together like the bands of a rainbow.

Dill stood at the window and the flowers shone through him. It's beautiful, he said.

Hasp joined him. “I'd never thought I'd see this again,” he said.

“But it can't be natural,” Rachel said. “Why are there no trees here? No bush or scrub?”

“It's Ayen's garden,” Sabor explained. He was looking apprehensively at the door, as though trying to work something out in his mind. “The castle is very quiet.”

“No Garstones,” Mina replied. “There should be thousands of them gathered here. Millions.”

But then a face appeared briefly at the timelock porthole. The outer door swung wide, and then the inner one opened to reveal a familiar face. A middle-aged Garstone stood in the doorway, dressed in a rumpled brown suit. “Glad you could make it, sir.” He gestured with his arm. “If you will just come with me…”

“Where are the others?”

“The timelocks are all barred, sir… except this one, of course. Please come with me to the Obscura Hall. You have guests.”

The galleries were deserted, every door jammed by a cross-beam, as Garstone had said. Eight men waited for them in the center of the Obscura Hall. Their leader was much older than Rachel remembered, but she recognized the scar running across his forehead. “Oran.”

“You owe me for what you did,” he snarled.

The other woodsmen leaned on their swords and axes and laughed. Rachel recognized most of them from her time in the Rusty Saw tavern, but she couldn't put names to their faces. They were large and bearded, still wearing the same lacquered wooden armour.

“How did you get back here?”

Sabor interrupted Oran's response. “These are not the men you knew, Miss Hael,” he said. “These people are from another reality.”

Oran snorted. “So said the king's arconites, but it all looks the same to me.” He leered at Rachel. “You cost me a king's ransom. I'd all but delivered that giant of yours into his hands until you did what you did. I've walked a long, long way to find you and earn back his favour. Now that I have you again, we'll see if Menoa wants to reinstate his offer.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Rachel said. She had refused to pay this bastard his gold, but that was all. How he could have delivered Dill to Menoa was beyond her.

“They said you wouldn't remember. You'll be coming with us up to the temple now. The king wants to meet you after all these years.”

Hasp growled. “Yes, we're going there, but not with you. Stand aside, woodsman, or I'll take that sword and sheathe it in your arse.”

Dill smiled faintly and strolled out from behind the god.