God of Clocks

We were being stealthy?

Anchor began to jog down the slope towards the Larnaig Field.

Soon they came upon the dead. Armoured bodies covered the killing field like some queer steel crop, harvested but then left to rot. The metal took on the dull lustre of the surrounding fog, scattered weapons and shields as grey as stone. Gas had distended the bellies of soldiers and now whistled softly through punctures in their flesh. Ravens cawed and hopped through the stink, pecking at lips and eyes. Here and there the colourful blue and gold plumes of helmets stood out like exotic birds come to feast alongside their ragged black cousins. And there were Mesmerists, too: machines of flesh and iron, jackal-like beasts, dark stains left where Non Morai had dissolved. They had been butchered in their thousands. Anchor stepped amongst them, his good mood rapidly fading.

Rys's warriors had been cruel men, but they had not deserved to die in this way. That he would soon face their souls in battle offered Anchor no consolation.

He had proceeded less than a hundred yards when he spotted Silister Trench. The First Citadel Warrior who had possessed Dill's body lay partially buried under the summit of a huge heap of Mesmerist scrap, his dead eyes staring at Heaven. He had lost most of his teeth. Something blunt had cloven in his skull.

Anchor walked up the pile and then gripped the corpse's shoulders and dragged it out. It was incomplete, for Trench's legs remained inside the crush of broken machine parts. “He fought well,” Anchor said. “There are many more Mesmerist corpses here than elsewhere. He was making a hill out of them.”

Up ahead, said Cospinol. The portal.

And Anchor saw it. It had indeed been left unguarded.

A large chamber occupied the inside of Dill's skull, yet there was so little space amongst the crowded machinery that Rachel could barely move. Banks of gears surrounded her in the semidarkness, the cogs clicking like hundreds of little black teeth. Wheels whirled inside wheels. Piston shafts heaved up and down in a sequence of irregular whooshes and thumps. Crystals hummed and threw out gouts of white light that splayed briefly across the metal surfaces. The whole room smelled vaguely like the air after a thunderstorm.

Rachel sensed all of this at the periphery of her vision, for she was staring at the glass sphere in the center of the chamber. Almost all of the illumination came from this device, or from the phantasms within it.

So many!

She counted at least a dozen of them trapped inside that sphere: human men and women, all naked, a brawling knot of figures crammed into a space hardly large enough for one or two people. All were struggling against their confinement and against each other, yet there was no substance to their gaseous forms. Their fists passed easily through each other's faces and torsos. Their lips mouthed silent cries or curses. They grinned and frowned and spat. Forks of light rippled and flashed between them like manifestations of unheard revilement. She glimpsed Dill's tortured expression before it became lost again in a tangle of elbows and legs. His mouth had been open wide, as if pleading.

But there was no sound in the room bar the persistent tick and thump of machinery, the icy crackle of crystals. The sphere grew momentarily brighter and then diminished. Wreathed in lightning, the ghosts continued their silent brawl.

Rachel had seen soulpearls, the beads John Anchor consumed to give him such great strength, and she knew that ethereal consciousness did not necessarily need body shapes to exist. With the right technology a soul could inhabit almost anything. Alice Harper's Mesmerist devices had once been alive, and still remembered fear. Yet it seemed to Rachel that some deliberate action had been taken to keep these particular figures here in their physical forms.

She wormed through the banks of machines, stepping over cables as she approached the sphere. Reaching it, she pressed her palms against the glass wall of the globe-

killed him … move to that place …no I can't do … my head, stop shouting at me …no …me …and it was so dark in there … I hate you, I hate you… I don't want to remember that… isn't me … it's you, stay away …no knives… liar, I talked to her …nothing but the dark …the murderer … don't speak, don't…

– and then jerked away, her head reeling from the cacophony of voices that had assaulted her mind. She took a deep breath. “Dill?”

The whole room gave a sudden jolt to the left. Rachel squatted instinctively. From below came the hiss of steam. The room turned again, more gently this time, in the opposite direction.

The faint sound of the young angel's voice came from the glass sphere. Rachel? Once more the chamber yawed from side to side as the arconite looked around him. She saw his face reappear amongst the struggling phantoms.

“Dill, I'm not outside. I'm… in your head.”

There was a pause, and then Rachel heard her friend whispering inside the glass. You can hear my thoughts? He sounded worn out. Your voice is… odd.

“Can you see me?”

I see fog, he said. Trees down below.

Inside the sphere the angel's lips moved, but his glazed eyes stared inwards, betraying no awareness of her.

Gingerly, Rachel touched the smooth surface of the sphere once more, but the voices in her head remained silent. “I'm with your soul,” she said. “I can see it before me. It's trapped in a sphere of glass like a huge soulpearl.” She hesitated. “Dill, there are other souls in there with you.”

The lights within the glass prison erupted in a frenzy of gold sparkles, and then dimmed and became white again. Twelve others, Dill explained. They were the people in Devon's elixir. They're angry because they don't want to be here and now they're trying to hurt me. He paused. Rachel, they can see you.

Rachel realized that the other figures inside the sphere were all staring at her. Their faces moved into and out of each other, the different expressions merging and flowing between them. A young woman pressed a hand against the inside of the glass. Rachel recoiled. The phantasm appeared to smile, but there was an ugly twist of madness in her expression.

“They're not connected to this automaton in the same way that you are,” Rachel said. “You can see through its eyes, move its limbs, but they can't do anything. These people have nothing but this sphere.”

Can you release them?

“I don't know.” Her thoughts tumbled as she stared at the jostling figures. “Dill, I can't break this glass. Not yet, do you understand?” She needed him in his current form if they were to have any chance of escaping their pursuers.

She felt the chamber tilt forward suddenly and then right itself. The automaton had nodded.

He was silent for a moment longer, and then he said, Rachel? What's happening to the forest?

“What do you mean? Right now?”

No… The chamber trembled as though Dill had started to shake his head again, but then caught himself in time. It happened soon after we left Coreollis. The trees turned to stone.

“What trees? Dill, I don't know what you're talking about.” Anchor and Mina had made no mention of any sorcerous events taking place while Rachel had been spying on Coreollis.

The fog dissolved and the forest turned to stone, he went on. It looked like those petrified woods we used to see in the Deadsands whenever the shifting dunes uncovered them. Do you remember?

An age had passed since she'd last visited the desert around Deepgate. As a Spine adept, Rachel had once traveled through those thousand-year-old petrified forests, across lands poisoned after Mount Blackthrone had fallen from the sky. Yet here the forest remained verdant and alive. Was Dill confusing his memories with reality?

Or had the thaumaturge been up to something secretive and sorcerous during Rachel's absence?

Mina's calling you, Dill said suddenly. She wants us to leave now. We have company.