Chapter 102

The brass sun hangs stopped on its arm, halfway up the sky, where it froze at nine. The gears are still. A strange soft light lies over everything.

People everywhere, Timekeepers and Unwound side by side, standing around the base of the great sun-arm, a brass pillar rising to the sky. Nobody knows what to do.

Hundreds of people throw their shoulders against the giant crank at the base of the sun-arm: bakers, Timekeepers, children, the crew. Vigolas pushes on his crutch, Bakasura with his jaw, Mingus with his head.

The brass sun creaks upward along its arm, slowly, late, the latest sunrise in three hundred years. A cheer goes up across the whole planet.

Drekk sits on the dock with the bucket in his lap, peering in at the tiny cube at the bottom.

Vigolas reaches into the bucket, takes out the soaking cube and tosses it out over the empty berth. Unfold.

The Marka unfolds in mid-air, hull and masts and sails springing back along green creases of light, and lands in the water with an enormous SPLASH that soaks everyone on the dock. The brass clock-hand is still stuck in her deck. The Kettle's bell rings once.

dripping, mask askew.

The crew climbs aboard. Vigolas pats the mast.

A long, deep GROAN from under the planet, like iron bending. The dock tilts. Water sloshes. On shore, people stagger.

The coastline-gear, the continent the harbour sits on, is slipping. With the great clock stopped and nothing holding it in its rhythm, it's sliding sideways off its axle, a country-sized wheel of brass tipping toward the void at the planet's edge, with a city on top.

white.

staring at the slipping continent.

Everyone holds it together:

The Unwound pour into the gaps with crowbars, wedges and beams, jamming them between the teeth.

Bakasura sinks into a gap and bites a gear-tooth, holding it like he held the jaws of the world.

Smurjan walks the Sightline to the axle's weakest pin and strikes the exact point, seating it.

Rougeina Swaps wedges into gaps nobody can reach, seven blades flashing.

The crow flies wedges to the hard places.

It isn't enough. The continent still slides, slowly, grinding, and people scream on the city streets above.

on the slipping dock, watches gone, holding his brass baton, the baton that stops a thing for one second. He looks at it.

and he does something he has never done: he swings it without a schedule. At the slipping gear-tooth in front of him. TICK. The tooth stops, for one second.

turning, shouting through his brass horn to every Timekeeper on the planet.

confused.

Silence. The continent sits crooked but steady on its axle. The city on top cheers. Timekeepers and Unwound collapse on top of each other, laughing.

sitting on the dock, panting, looking at his baton.

handing something up to Rougeina: a thin mirror-steel blade, scratched, greased, but whole. Her eighth blade.

sliding it back into the empty eighth sheath. Eight again. A tiny, real smile.

Trollmage stands at the wooden bench for a last time. Otur's body has been laid on the bench, her gown silent, her hands folded over the music box. The Unwound have covered her with a quilt of a hundred patches, every one sewn at the wrong hour.

setting the paper bag of wrong-hour bread beside her.

from a crooked clock-planet under a crooked sun. The crew on deck, battered, waving to Kugge and Sekund on the dock. The brass clock-hand still stands in the deck. Nobody wants to pull it out now.

on the rail. He tips the pot. The coffee pours down too fast, heavy, splashing up out of the cup.

The ship's compass needle is not spinning. It's bending, the metal itself curving downward, toward the sea, as if something enormous far below the Current is pulling on it. The whole ship creaks, heavier. And from below, through the hull, a voice like a mountain settling: