Chapter 96
On the horizon, a sound, faint and enormous: tick… tick… tick…
at the wheel, head tilted.
A planet that is one giant clock, hanging in the starlight. Its continents are gears, vast toothed wheels of brass and iron the size of countries, turning against each other with a grinding that shakes the sea. Its cities tick: towers like escapements, streets that rotate on the hour, bridges that swing open and shut on schedule. Over it all, a brass sun on a long arm sweeps across the sky with a mechanical clunk at each degree.
On the largest continent-gear rises a Clocktower taller than a mountain, its face a dial a mile wide, and its hands are missing one: the hour hand that's stuck in the Marka's deck.
at the bow, staring at the missing clock-hand, then at the one in his deck.
on the rim of a coastline-gear. Ships in neat rows, arriving and departing at exact intervals, tick, tick. A gap in the schedule, a berth no ship is due to use, and the Marka slides into it.
Every person on the dock stops. Dockworkers mid-lift, a woman mid-step, a child mid-bite of an apple. They stare at the Marka the way you'd stare at a fire in a church.
on a pole. Its face spins wildly, unable to find the Marka on any schedule, and then flashes a word in red enamel: UNSCHEDULED.
horrified, whispering.
Every clock-face on every tower in the harbour turns toward the Marka. Clicks echo across the city.
Bells. From every street pour Timekeepers: men and women in brass-buttoned black coats, with clock-faces for badges and long brass batons that tick in their hands.
RANK PLATE ×20: TIMEKEEPER · K-II MARKED · Urverket
a short, stiff man with a precise moustache and a pocket watch on every finger of his left hand.
SEKUND · CHIEF TIMEKEEPER · K-I UNMARKED
stepping down onto the dock, grinning.
consulting three watches.
Twenty Timekeepers move at once, perfectly in step, batons ticking.
The batons:
Vigolas swings a lightning fist, and a baton taps his elbow. TICK. His arm stops mid-swing, frozen for exactly one second, while the Timekeeper steps around it.
Rougeina Swaps toward a lamp-post, and a baton taps her ankle mid-Swap. TICK. She hangs half-arrived for one second, a silver-rose ghost stuck in the air.
Smurjan's Sightline strikes, and a baton taps the line itself. TICK. The crimson line stops for a second, and the Timekeeper has already moved.
Kali swings her sickle, TICK, stopped. Bakasura bites, TICK, jaws stopped open, and three Timekeepers walk calmly out of his mouth.
watching, and Lust-sight shows him the threads between the Timekeepers: perfectly straight, perfectly parallel, like the lines on ruled paper. No love, no fear, just schedule.
third eye on the batons.
A baton taps Drekk's axe-arm, TICK, and a second baton taps his chest in the frozen second. He goes down.
Mingus, a golden blur, grabs the end of a baton in his teeth and runs with it. The Timekeeper, still holding it, is dragged across the dock. Nobody scheduled the dog.
outraged, flipping through a little brass schedule-book.
But there are too many. One by one the crew is tapped, stopped and chained in brass manacles that tick. Vigolas last, laughing, with his arm frozen mid-punch for the third time.
snapping a manacle shut on his wrist.
the crew being marched in chains between rows of ticking houses. Citizens stand frozen in their doorways, staring. A clock on every wall.
holding a basket of bread, staring at Vigolas with something that isn't horror. Something like wonder.
chained, Mingus walking free beside him because nobody can schedule a dog to be arrested.
The procession crosses a bridge over the edge of a continent-gear. Below the bridge, the enormous teeth of two gears grind together, and between them, where the teeth don't quite meet, small dark gaps, shifting, opening and closing as the gears turn.
as it slides open beside the bridge for a single heartbeat. In the dark inside it: a face. A girl of twelve, grease on her cheeks, a little brass cog for an earring, eyes bright.
A grease-black hand shoots out of the gap and grabs Kompis by the hoodie. He's yanked sideways off the bridge into the dark between the gears, Mingus leaping after him, as the gap closes.