Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Her gift was meant to impress Valentine, not confuse and distract him. But she had her pilfered minutes and intended to use them.

She rested her head on his shoulder, enjoying his scent and the fluid play of muscles in his arm. “What sort of place?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a place I’ve been, someplace close, even, but I don’t know how to get there.”

The revelers snapped into new arrangements; another year lost. Valentine led her in a swooping two-step around the ballroom. There was, it seemed, more room to move.

“Is it here in Nycthemeron? A forgotten courtyard? A secluded cloister?”

“I can’t say. I feel like it may be…everywhere. Strange, isn’t it?” He shook his head and smiled. “No matter. Once again you have done a magnificent thing.”

But Tink barely heard his praise. She had given the people of Nycthemeron their past. But what did that mean to timeless people in a timeless city? Nothing. They were afflicted with strange thoughts they couldn’t comprehend: memories of times past. To them, the past was a foreign place they couldn’t visit.

They waltzed. Tink’s feet ached, twinges of betrayal from her aging body. Blur. They danced a sarabande. Her back ached. Blur. Her lungs burned. Blur.

Tink saw the thinning of the ballroom crowd.

“Valentine, have you noticed there are fewer people in this ballroom every year?”

“Yes.”

“Where are they going?”

“They’re trying to leave Nycthemeron,” he said.

“Oh, no,” she said, and crashed to the floor.

“Timesmith!” Valentine leapt to her side, cradled her head in his hands.“Please forgive me. Are you hurt?”

The ballroom floor was hard and her body less resilient than it had been minutes and years ago. But she disregarded her bruises, because Valentine was sopping wet. His slippery hands had lost their grip on her. He smelled of river grass and mud.

“What happened?” she asked.

“The queen sent me to stop her half-brother from trying to swim his way out of Nycthemeron. That’s where they’re going. To the river.”

But, of course, nobody could leave Nycthemeron. Not even Tink. The luminous fog was chaos, its touch deadly.

In a tiny voice, she asked, “Did you save him?”

“No. He entered the fog before I was halfway across.”

And at that moment Tink realized her gift, bestowed upon the people of Nycthemeron with love and intended to win love in return, was killing people.

Tink’s clock chimed midnight. Their stolen time had lapsed. And when Tink saw herself in the golden mirrors of the ballroom, she saw that her hair, once a lustrous silver, had tarnished to gray. She had aged another twenty years, but had gained nothing from it.

Tink returned to the Briardowns and her lonely, narrow cot, unaware of the clocks that capered for her attention. Time ached to comfort her, to console her. It sang her to sleep with a lullaby of ticks and tocks.

She’d been so foolish. She might as well have given a penny-farthing bicycle to the koi in the fishponds. The people of Nycthemeron couldn’t comprehend her gift. Right now they had the past bearing down on them like a boulder rolling toward a cliff. But that time had nowhere to go, no safe landing. It was disconnected. Meaningless.

She could salvage this. She could cure the malady she had created. She could still win Valentine. She could fix everything. All it required was a simple pendulum clock.

Tink paid a visit to the smithy in Nycthemeron’s Steeltree district. There, she commissioned the finest double-edged blade the smith could forge. No hilt—only the blade, with a tang for fastening it.A strange request. But it was considered no small honor to help the clockmaker create one of her fabled wonderments.

Thus, when she returned to his forge, he presented her with thirty inches of gleaming steel. It was, he proclaimed, the finest and sharpest blade he’d ever forged. Sharp enough to shear the red from a rainbow.

She thanked him. But it was not sharp enough.

And so, in the months before the next Festival (measured, as always, by the thumping of Tink’s broken heart), she spent every moment in her workshop. Things took longer these days. Her eyes strained at the tiniest cogs; her grip quavered as it never used to do.

People again reported odd noises in her shop. At first, the grinding of a whetstone. Later, a rasping, as of sand on steel. Then, the susurration of cotton on steel. And finally, if they pressed their ears to her shop, they might have heard the whisper of breath on steel.

And those who stayed until Tink emerged might have noticed something different about her. For where before there had always been the phantom tickticktick that followed her like a devoted puppy, now, when she carried the pendulum blade, there was sometimes only a phantom ti-ti-ti , and other times a ck-ck-ck , depending on how she held it.

Tink loaded her cart with a crate the size of a grandfather clock, then drove to the Spire. By now, of course, she was one of the queen’s most favored subjects, and so the ballroom had a place of honor reserved for Tink. There, she assembled her contribution to the Festival.

The revelers advanced the effigy. Tink wound her clock; the pendulum swung ponderously across its lacquered case. It was silent. Not even a whisper accompanied the passage of the pendulum. It sliced through the moments, leaving slivers of ticks and tatters of tocks in its wake.

At Tink’s request, the queen posted guards around the clock, for the pendulum blade was a fearsome thing. Its edges were the sharpest things that could ever be, sharp as the now that separates past and future.

But only time, and time alone, understood what she had done. Tink had given Nycthemeron something it had lost.

She had given it the present: a knowledge of now.

Tink returned to the Briardowns. Her body would be eighty years old at the next Festival, while Valentine would still be a stunning twenty-something. How many lovers had he charmed since his visit to Tink’s shop? How many stolen kisses, how many fluttering hearts? Her life had none of these things. Her pillow never smelled of anybody but Tink.

What chance had she of winning him now? It was a foolish hope. But she had spent her life on it, and couldn’t bear to think it had all been for nothing.

She tried to concentrate. But time’s desperation had become jealousy, so it had imbued the pendulum blade with a special potency. Anything for Tink’s attention.

The man in the scarlet cravat returned. He asked Tink for a trinket that would “set him moving” again. She couldn’t help him. Nor could she help the pregnant woman whose belly suggested imminent labor and whose eyes were the most sorrowful Tink had ever seen. She’d been that way, Tink realized, since time had lost its interest. Since the moment Nycthemeron had fallen from the calendar.

Tink was passing beneath the aqueduct, on her way to the Palazzo, when a man in a cobalt-colored fez crashed onto the street before her cart. The wind of his passage ruffled her hair, and he smashed the cobbles hard enough to set the chimes in Tink’s clock to ringing. Plumes of dust billowed from between the paving stones. She screamed.

Not because he had perished. He hadn’t, of course. Tink screamed because his sorrow had driven him to seek death, the ultimate boundary between past and future. And because he’d never find it.

He shambled to his feet, for his body was timeless. But when the poor fellow realized that nothing had changed, that he hadn’t bridged the gulf between was and will , he slumped to the ground and wept. He waved off Tink’s offers of a ride, of conversation, of commiseration.