Chapter 98

from below. A tower taller than a mountain, its mile-wide dial gaping where the hour hand is missing. A brass sun arm sweeps past its face with a clunk.

climbing the outside of the tower on the great pendulum chain, a chain as thick as a house that swings slowly back and forth across the dark.

They swing in through a vent at the top of the pendulum's arc, perfectly timed, Drekk counting, "…three, two, NOW," and tumble onto the floor of the throne room.

The inside of the great dial: the back of the mile-wide clock-face, its numerals glowing through from outside like stained glass, with gears turning on every wall. In the centre, on a brass throne that ticks, a tall woman sits perfectly upright.

Tall and severe, in a gown of overlapping brass plates that tick softly as she breathes. Her eyes are clock faces: tiny hands sweeping round the irises. Her hair is wound in coiled springs of silver, piled high. One gloved hand rests on the arm of the throne, beside a small closed music box. Her fingertip is touching its lid.

OTUR · DRIFTING-2 · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist #611 · Empress of Urverket

not surprised. Of course not.

eyes gold, looking at the one crooked thread running from her to the music box. He says nothing yet.

her clock-face eyes ticking. She lifts one finger.

Across the throne room, the brass walkway the crew is standing on, a bridge over a shaft of turning gears, has nothing wrong with it. Rivets tight. Beams sound.

12:00:01… 12:00:02…

12:00:03. The bridge falls. Not breaking, just falling, as if gravity had been scheduled to notice it. The crew drops toward the grinding gears below.

Rougeina Swaps up to a beam, grabbing Kali. Smurjan catches a chain. Vigolas grabs Drekk and Trollmage by the collars, and the crew claws its way up onto the gear-walls.

a second finger rising.

scrambling onto a gear-tooth, hearing it, looking down at his knee.

12:00:09. CRACK. His left knee buckles sideways under him. Nobody touched it. It was appointed. He goes down screaming onto the gear.

sliding down to him.

The crew attacks, and she's already there:

Smurjan walks the Sightline toward her. "At twelve and fourteen, the three-eyed one blinks." He blinks, the line breaks, and he stumbles.

Rougeina Swaps toward the throne. "At twelve and fifteen, the assassin arrives one step to the left." She arrives one step to the left, into a gear's teeth, and barely tears free.

Kali borrows Smurjan's Wrath. "At twelve and seventeen, the borrower forgets what she borrowed." The crimson in Kali's eyes goes out mid-swing.

Kompis raises Lilla Ulv. Subtick, the world grey, a thousand versions of the shot, and in every version, at twelve and twenty, the pistol jams. Because it was appointed.

colour snapping back, the pistol jammed, his nose bleeding.

perfectly still, one finger raised.

growling up at her from beside Kompis. Otur looks down at the dog, and for one beat the tiny hands in her clock-eyes stutter.

on one knee, reading the appointments.

The crew flees, Smurjan carrying Vigolas, Drekk carrying the sleeping Trollmage (12:01:00 · the troll falls asleep, right on time), and leaps back out through the vent onto the swinging pendulum chain.

Behind them, the appointments come due, on the second: the navigator's mask slips (Drekk catches it, one-handed), Kali's sickle cracks, Rougeina's eighth blade slides out of its sheath and tumbles into the gears far below. Each one is small, exact and humiliating.

The crew slides down the pendulum chain into the dark, routed.

The Unwound patch them up: Vigolas's knee in a splint, Kali's cracked sickle bound with wire, Rougeina staring at the empty eighth sheath on her back.

flat on his back, knee splinted, staring at the brass ceiling.

quiet.

in the corner.

who has been asleep all through the retreat, opening his eyes. Wide. Violet. Very, very awake.

sitting up slowly, a lazy, enormous, dangerous smile spreading under his tusks.