“Dieser verdammten Federantrieb brechen andauernd!”
The words were abrupt and loud enough that Irrith almost jumped from her skin, before she heard them properly. Once she did, she blinked—for that was certainly not English.
Nor was the second voice that answered him. “Aber natürlich! Ich sage dir doch, dass er soviel Zugkraft nicht aushalten werden.”
The tone was bickering, and resigned; the words weren’t directed at her. Concealing herself behind a pillar, Irrith peeked into the chamber Ktistes and the Queen did not want her to find.
Two fae grumbled over a pair of worktables strewn with unfamiliar oddments and tools. The tables would scarcely have been knee-height to a human, and even for Irrith they were low, but they perfectly suited the two, who were hob-size and thick with muscle. The implements they held were incongruously delicate in their blunt-knuckled hands, and both, she saw, had tied their long beards out of the way, the better to see the tiny things they peered at.
What were they working on? Irrith risked a longer look. The faerie lights above the tables reflected off minute bits of metal, too small to identify at this distance. But she noticed something odd: a quiet, regular rattle, underlying the humming of the blond-bearded faerie.
The chamber, she realised, was filled with clocks.
One perched atop a bracket on the wall behind the strangers. Two pendulum clocks stood in opposite corners, and a very small piece teetered on the edge of a table, a breath away from falling. A pocket-watch on the floor below it seemed to have fallen already.
Tom Toggin had brought clocks to the Vale. And Irrith had heard rumors, about the crazy German dwarves that came to England with the new German king, and now made clocks and watches for the Queen.
But what were they doing, hidden away down here?
She was still trying to figure that out when every clock in the room began to chime the hour. It wasn’t just the ones she could see; from the sound of it, the entire wall to both sides of the entrance, invisible from her concealment behind the pillar, was covered in clocks. And the two dwarves literally dropped the pieces they were working on in order to hurry to a door on the other side of the chamber.
Its face held what looked like sundial, though what use one could be in the sunless realm of the Onyx Hall, Irrith didn’t know. Its blade spun without warning, making her twitch; then the red-bearded dwarf seized hold of it, and two things happened at once: first, the bronze-bound door creaked open, and second, a sound too deep to hear shook the very marrow of Irrith’s bones.
A sound like the single tick of the Earth’s own clock.
Her teeth ached with the force of it, and her skull rang like a drum. Irrith had heard many tremendous sounds in her life, up to and including the roar of the Dragon itself, but she’d never encountered anything like this—as if she’d just heard one of the numberless moments of her immortal life tick away.
She was still standing there, jaw hanging slack, when the door finished opening and a puck stepped out and saw her.
“Hey, you! What do you think you’re doing here?”
The looks on the two dwarves’ faces would have been comical, if only she could have stayed to appreciate them. But instinct set in, as if she were running wild in the forests of Berkshire, and Irrith bolted.
She didn’t get very far. Three strides took her to the far end of the pillared vault, and then she ran full-force into something that felt remarkably like an invisible wall.
A voice came through the ensuing fog, but she couldn’t have said whether it spoke German or English. By the time she had her senses back, she was surrounded: the two dwarves and the puck stood over her, where she had collapsed on the floor. All three wore identical expressions of suspicion.
The red dwarf demanded, “Vy vere you spying on us?”
Resisting the urge to mock his thick German accent—she was, after all, caught in their trap—Irrith said, “I wasn’t spying.”
“Vat do you call it ven you hide and vatch vat others are doing?”
Could he have chosen a question with more Ws in it? Irrith stifled a laugh. Her face felt too bruised for laughing, anyway. “I call it curiosity.”
The third faerie scowled. He, at least, was English: a lubberkin, though surprisingly warlike. “Curiosity. Right. You just happened to slip past the defences because you were curious.”
Did he expect those defences would make her less curious? They just made it obvious there was something to find. The red-bearded dwarf was much more menacing. He cracked his knuckles and said, “Ve vill dispose of her.”
“Now see here,” Irrith said hastily, climbing to her feet and mustering as much dignity as she could manage, so soon after knocking herself silly. “I’m a lady knight of the Onyx Court.”
“So?” the dwarf said, unimpressed.
The lubberkin drew the blond one aside and bent to mutter in his ear. Irrith, losing a staring match with the other dwarf, could still overhear the whisper. “She might be a Sanist. Watch her; I’ll go inform the Queen.”
A Sanist? Irrith didn’t ask. The puck searched her for weapons and found none, then said, “I’ll be back soon to deal with you. Don’t try anything foolish.” Then he walked out through the same pillars that had stopped Irrith before, leaving her with two German dwarves and a suspicion that maybe she should have asked Ktistes after all.
“Interesting,” Lune said, one slender fingertip tapping against her cheek.
She said nothing more, but Galen relaxed. Family affairs had kept him from coming below for several days after his encounter with Dr. Andrews, and in the interval he’d had more than enough time to question his notion of working directly with the man. If Lune agreed, though…
“The decision is in your hands,” she said. “If you believe it would be useful to bring this man into the Onyx Court, that is within your prerogative as Prince.”
Which he knew, full well. Lune had explained it when she chose him for the position. He had authority over all matters involving the interaction between mortals and fae, including the decision to bring them below. This was the first time, however, that Galen had attempted to exercise that prerogative.
The prospect made him nervous in the extreme. There were ways to repair the mistake if someone chose poorly—but far better, of course, not to err in the first place. The watchful gaze of Lune’s Lord Keeper, Valentin Aspell, made him dreadfully aware of that. “I won’t do it yet,” Galen said, and made himself stop twisting his fingers. “I don’t know the man well enough—and it’s worth exploring his knowledge further, to be sure it’s worth the effort. But I’ll inform you before I reveal anything to him.”
One of Lune’s gentleman ushers entered the privy chamber, then, and bowed deeply. “Madam, the lubberkin Cuddy is here, but will not tell me his business. He insists it is worthy of your attention.”
The usher had doubt writ large on his feathered face, but Lune and Galen both straightened. Cuddy was out already? A quick count in his head told Galen that the timing was right; it had been eleven days, though just barely. And anything he had to tell them so soon after his emergence was certainly worthy of the Queen’s time.
Lune gestured Aspell out. “We will hear Cuddy alone, Lord Valentin. Make certain we aren’t disturbed for anything less than the Dragon itself.”