It was…acolumn. A massive brass column, maybe fifteen feet tall and wide enough that four people couldn’t link arms around it. The surface was covered in plates, bolted on, riveted, welded. Almost every single one of them was aslightly different color, a different metal, like each had been added in a different era. Brass and copper and iron and steel, all patched together like armor. Some plates were polished to a dull shine while others were green with corrosion and others black with burn marks, warped from the inside.
Nothing at all like what I expected or what I’d imagined before whenever we’d talked about this place in school or at home.
Around the top of the column was a thick metal band that jutted outward, extending maybe six feet in every direction. The underside of it was lined with hundreds of small openings—nozzles, I thought at first, except they weren’t precise or uniform. Some were round and some oval, and some were just cracks in the metal that had been widened and reinforced with brackets to keep them from spreading further.
Time’s Teeth, this was it.
Thiswas where the bursts happened. Where our lives were guaranteed, in a way. That very column gathered the hour’s worth of temporal energy from the Great Clock above it, compressed it, held it—and then that ring expelled it outward at once, in every direction.
A shockwave of raw time blasting from the center of the room and out through the walls and all the way to the edges of the realm.
This was where life happened.
So difficult not to feel…small.
Others talked, whispered among themselves, but my eyes were still hungry to see more. The base of the column was wider than the rest, sitting directly on the polished floor. Panels covered its surface, each one bolted shut with heavy brass fittings.
They all looked about the same, except for one panel, larger than the rest, which had a gear-lock on it—this circular mechanism set into the metal, its brass teeth visiblethrough a small glass window smudged with fingerprints and grime. The glass was cracked right through the middle (surprised it had held through the bursts so far, to be honest), but the mechanism inside was still turning. Slowly, but it was turning.
And Master Talik was already in front of it with his Timekeeper Clock in his hand.
“Fifty-six minutes,” he said, and this I heard, if only because the room threw the sound back a million times. “Startingnow.” And he kneeled in front of the panel.
He pulled out three tools from his belt and set them down on the floor near his knee. The first was the long hooked pick he’d used in the Horologist’s study, and he inserted it into a slot beneath the glass window and turned it slowly.
We all heard the mechanism click.
“First tumbler,” Master Talik murmured.
And Russ started to ask, “How many?—”
But that’s as far as he went.
“Do notspeak to me, boy.” We all closed our mouths. “If I’m talking out loud, be sure that I amnottalking to any of you.”
No, he wasn’t. He was talking to himself—or his tools.
His eyes closed. His lips moved, this time in a whisper that we couldn’t hear if we tried.
Then he dropped his tool and raised his hand, and a tiny ribbon of teal slipped out his palm and disappeared into the gear-lock. Timekeeper magic.
After that, Master Talik pulled tool after tool from his belt—a second flat key of some sort, this thin glass rod filled with amber liquid I couldn’t identify, and then he used his magic again, this time the teal brighter.
“Psst!Guys, over here!” Erith called from behind us, and we all turned at the same time.
She’d wandered to the far side of the room while the restof us had been focused on Master Talik, and she was standing near a section of the wall where the stone had crumbled. Possibly years ago, if not decades, but it definitely didn’t look recent. A good chunk of the outer wall had fallen away, leaving a gap roughly the size of a window.
A gasp escaped me when I looked through, and I wasn’t the only one.
Suddenly we were all pushing one another to get closer, to see better,drawn in by that broken wall like moths to lanterns. To seethe realm.
The view was the closest thing toimpossiblemy eyes had ever witnessed, so much more so than a talking, grinning cat.
Holy Hour, you could really seeeverythingfrom the top of the Great Clock tower. The Clockrealm spread out below us in every direction, lit by moonlight and the scattered glow of distant towns. Neverwhen was directly below us, a cluster of lights, dense and bright, the streets and buildings and plazas laid out like a map drawn on a piece of paper. Verylargepaper.
Beyond it, the courts fanned outward, each one fading gradually from the brightness of the center to the dimness of the edges.
Then there was the Spill—where the world ended and thenothingbegan.
