Alan Campbell - God of Clocks

“Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

Rachel recognized Mina's voice, and then she recognized her surroundings. Caskets of coins, an old table and chairs, a rug. The room was indeed moving, after all. She was inside Dill's mouth again. A wall of teeth separated her from the grim daylight outside, and the crump of his great footsteps sounded far below. Mina sat with her back against the leftmost incisor, her glass-scaled face floating, hazy and red, above the shoulders of her robe. She was stroking her devil pup, Basilis.

Rachel winced. Her jaw felt bruised and tender. She lifted a hand and touched it gingerly and located some swelling. “The good news, please.”

“You're alive.”

“That's the best you could come up with?”

“Sorry,” Mina said. “I tried to think of something better to offset the bad news, but there really wasn't anything else.”

“Don't tell me the bad news,” Rachel said.

“Okay.”

Rachel sighed. “What is it?”

“Hasp tried to beat you to death. Then when Oran's woodsmen realized what you'd done to their friends, they tried to kill you, too. And that just pissed off Hasp even more. We're only alive because I dragged you out while they were hurling abuse at each other. Now this miserable cave is the only safe place left. Oran is threatening to burn the inn if we don't come down to face their justice. He won't do it, though, because it's the only shelter they have. But he'll probably find some other leverage soon enough. The whole situation could get quite messy.”

“How did I get up here?”

“I asked Dill to intervene. He lifted the building rather quickly, and we made our grand escape. Your head made really weird knocking sounds as I dragged you down the inn's front steps.”

“Thanks.”

Mina looked down at her hands. “I'm afraid I had to kill one of them… Well, Basilis…”

“You?” The assassin shook her head, and then regretted it immediately, as she groaned again. “I don't want to know. Needless to say, you're now an outlaw, too?”

“The bastards fired arrows at me.”

Rachel got to her feet and moved over to peer through the arconite's teeth. Down below she glimpsed the tops of evergreen trees sliding past in the mist. The inn still rested on the cleaver Dill had taken from the fallen arconite, but its log walls looked even more lopsided and battered than before. Part of one eave had fallen away, and the timbers comprising it now rested on the automaton's huge bone wrist. The earthen island on which the building sat had all but disintegrated. A ribbon of smoke rose from a hole in its shingled roof. Nobody was outside.

She faced the thaumaturge. “You said Oran would probably find some new leverage soon? I assume that's why we haven't just told Dill to abandon those bastards in the forest. We don't need Abner's inn that much.”

Mina nodded. “Hasp is still down there.”

Now Rachel understood. The woodsmen might use the Lord of the First Citadel as a hostage, as soon as Oran figured out that Rachel didn't actually want Hasp dead.

Or did she? The bruise on her jaw throbbed evilly. “That glass bastard deserves to be used as a hostage. Why did he react like that? I was only trying to protect him.”

“He's not himself.” Mina let her dog jump down from her lap. “Hasp can't come to terms with what Menoa did to him. The parasite in his head will force him to betray his friends, and for an archon of the First Citadel there can be no greater crime. When the king's arconite attacked Dill, it became brutally evident to Hasp that he couldn't resist its influence. He thereby lost his honour, and turning on you was just a reaction to that loss. I think he deliberately angered Oran's men because he truly wanted to die. You denied him that escape by intervening. In his eyes, you diminished him.”

Rachel sighed. “Spine have never been very good at reading people,” she admitted. “I really should just stick to murdering peo-ple in dark alleys.”

“There aren't any dark alleys here.”

The assassin grunted. “I think I need to speak to Dill.” She left the rest of her thoughts unvoiced. She needed to speak to someone human and, absurdly, Dill's voice was the most human one she knew.

A dark blue radiance filled the inside of the skull chamber. The tiny motes trapped within the crystals set into the ceiling appeared to be unusually active. Agitated, Rachel reckoned. She eased her body between the banks of shining machinery, leaning for support against a metal panel as the chamber lolled like a ship at sea.

Dill's ghost still shared the glass sphere in the center of the room with thirteen others. The phantasms floated through each other and shoved and brawled silently. White light pulsed faintly inside that huge bauble, occasionally erupting into glimmering fits that seemed to correspond to moments of conflict between its gauzy prisoners.

She laid her hand against the sphere.

… back … she's back … Murder on her … Don't let her see your thoughts… The agony … I was once within a room and then… Stop screaming! Who are you …?… in that place …men in the river… Shush … Quiet, quiet, quiet… Who …?

“Dill?”

The voices faded, then she heard her young friend. Sorry, Rachel.

“Sorry? For what?”

They almost killed you.

She pretended to laugh, but failed even to convince herself. She shook her head, thinking their situation was already dire enough without Dill's angst. “You got us out of there, Dill. Now Oran and his would-be avengers are in the palm of your hand. I'm actually pleased you've resisted the urge to crush them.”

Not entirely. Mina yelled at me to stop once I started to squeeze. I think I cracked one of the walls. He paused. They were so fragile. Everything seems so fragile now.

“But you're not.”

Tell that to the other eleven arconites. The big ones.

This time she gave a genuine laugh. “That's one fewer than there were two days ago. Who taught you how to fight like that?”

Hasp.

Hasp? Ayen's youngest son remained an enigma to Rachel. The goddess's other sons had adopted grandiose titles for themselves: the god of chains, the god of clocks… But not Hasp. They knew him only as the Lord of the First Citadel-ruler of a mere stronghold, a human position-and now he seemed to have wholly embraced this comparatively diminutive status. He was currently as drunk and suicidal as any mortal man.

That meant he'd given up.

Mina had once informed Rachel how Hasp had gone willingly to Hell. While his brothers raised armies and harvested power from the world of men, Hasp accepted the role of looking after the dead. The First Citadel belonged to mortal archons, the bastard descendants of gods and men.

Rachel. Dill's voice interrupted her thoughts. I've been seeing more strange things… Visions, or waking dreams. I don't know exactly what they are, but they're becoming more frequent.

She recalled his nightmare of the stone forest, soon after they'd left Coreollis. “What sort of things?” she asked.

A crack appeared in the world, stretching all the way from one horizon to the other. It was full of… emptiness. Not darkness, but emptiness, as if something fundamental was missing from the world.

Rachel frowned. Mina had experienced a similar vision, she recalled. And Rachel herself had witnessed a number of strange happenings since leaving Coreollis: those two identical versions of Rys inside his bastion, moments before it fell; the inexplicable change of the steam tractor's and Rosella's hair colour; Oran's strangely repetitive conversation. As isolated incidents, she had dismissed them as nerves, dizziness, or confusion. But now that she thought about it, couldn't these glitches, when put together, be the result of some greater force at work?