It would be easy to stay turned away, to go out through the pillars and never look back. But that would mean letting her fear win. And if this boy of a Prince could face the clock, then so could she.
Irrith disengaged gently, squared her shoulders, and turned back to the doorway.
This time she was prepared; this time, it wasn’t so bad. She was able to drag her attention away from the terrible inexorability of that pendulum and up to the clock face above it. Flawless gold gleamed in a disc the height of a giant, its face marked with twenty-four hours. Behind it lay an incomprehensible mass of gears, ruled over by a device like an inverted V, and a sharp-toothed wheel. Actually toothed, so it seemed to Irrith—or were those claws? The mechanism was much too high up for her to be sure.
And then there was the pulley, a massive cylinder wrapped with a cable unlike any she’d ever seen. From it hung an absurdly little ball. “As it falls, it helps drive the clock,” he said over her shoulder. “Once a year, they pull it up to the top again.”
Against her will, she turned back to the pendulum. It hung, not from a cable, but from a softly glowing pillar of light, that vanished into the darkness above. “And where does that go?”
“To the moon.” Galen spread his hands when she eyed him suspiciously. “If it’s a lie, Dame Irrith, then they’ve lied to me, too. It has to do with the mechanics of the clock. They had to hang the pendulum from something very far distant, and so they drew down a beam from the moon.”
Irrith shivered and turned elsewhere. The rest of the room was ordinary by comparison: tables, shelves, every flat surface crammed with books and paper and bottles of ink and flocks of quill pens. She tried to imagine staying here for days, let alone years, and shuddered again.
Unnerving—but also fascinating. Faerie magic was a familiar thing. This, with its gears and pulleys and calculations, was unlike anything she’d seen before. A collision of two worlds, with results she could only imagine.
And I thought it strange when fae began carrying guns.
Galen bowed her out of the room as she exited. “So now you’ve seen it. I expect the Queen will put a guard on this room, to prevent any interference by others… but if you’d like to assist with our efforts against the Dragon, I am certain I can arrange for you to be permitted back here.”
Irrith wasn’t sure she wanted to set foot across that threshold again. She wasn’t even sure she didn’t want to run back to the Vale, where there was earth instead of the Earth, and the fae lived as they had for ages. The Prince meant so kindly, though, that she said, “Thank you, Lord Galen. I—I’ll think about it.”
He bowed again, and offered his arm. “Then let me guide you back to the rest of the Onyx Hall.”
In the dark of night on September second, they moved the last components into place.
Gold drawn from the sun itself, hammered into a perfect disk fifteen feet in height, its face marked with twenty-four engraved hours. The hands were starlight, glittering and cold. Behind it, gears of metal, catching pinions of stone, riding arbors of wood, all taken from every corner of Britain. The toothed escapement wheel was the stuff of nightmares itself, for this theft would happen while most of the kingdom slept: every human who lay at rest when the hour passed midnight would add eleven days to the total stored in this room.
And that hour had almost come. The von das Tickens hauled on a rope, snarling German curses to each other, lifting the pulley into place. The block was a tree trunk, perfectly circular, its rings marking off a hundred years. The tree was native; the cable wrapping it was not. Lune had bargained hard with the svartalfar for it, a length woven from the roots of a mountain, the noise of a cat’s footfall, the breath of a fish. Nothing less could hold the stupendous burden of the driving weight: a sphere of old age, heavy all out of proportion to its size. The Welsh giant Idris stood ready to wind the pulley for the first time. He would return every year on this date to wind it again, as long as the Queen could persuade him, for only a giant’s strength could achieve it.
“Hurry,” Hamilton Birch, Prince of the Stone, whispered under his breath. His pocket-watch lay clutched in one sweat-slick hand. If they missed their moment, there would be no second chance.
The pulley was slotted into place. The giant bent to the crank, grunting. The driving weight began to rise from the floor.
And the Queen of the Onyx Court stood, dressed in silver, waiting with both healthy and crippled hands outspread.
The driving weight reached the top of its drop and hung there, too heavy to sway, while Idris braced himself against the crank. “One minute,” Lord Hamilton called out, glancing through the sundial door to check his pocket-watch against the more accurate regulator in the dwarves’ workshop.
Lune tilted her chin up and raised her arms toward the black ceiling above.
Far, far above; the dwarves and Ktistes had altered this chamber, raising its ceiling to make room for the clock. And there was something in the stone now, not quite an entrance, more like a hatch, that would permit only one thing through.
Moonlight.
The quarter moon hung low in the sky above. Its light struck a lens placed at the top of the Monument to the Great Fire, then a mirror behind; the silvered metal reflected it downward, through the hollow shaft of that great pillar, into the chamber at its base—and then still farther. Obedient to Lune’s call, the light passed through, and shone down into the chamber of the clock.
Onto the second stone waiting on the floor, just in front of the Queen.
As the pocket-watch’s hands reached midnight, and the regulator outside struck the hour, the dwarves dragged the wooden supports free. The pendulum bob, a sarsen stolen from Stonehenge, hung in midair, suspended by only a beam of moonlight.
And then it began to move.
Idris had let go of his crank, releasing the driving weight to begin its imperceptible drop. Lune stepped back, hands dropping to her sides. Hamilton watched, breath held tight in his chest.
When the regulator began tolling, it was September second in the world outside this room. When it struck the final chime, the date was September fourteenth.
And all the days in between, the dates never lived by a single soul in Britain, came flooding into this room. Hamilton felt them come, slipping past like the wasted days of his youth, scented with the experiences that might have been. An enormity of time, and none at all, shivering him to the core of his soul.
When the last of them had passed, Niklas von das Ticken hauled the sundial door shut, and spun its inner face to lock the mechanism.
Leaving the five of them alone with the clock.
“Vell,” his brother Wilhas said, “ve have eleven days, before ve may open it for the first time. Who vould like to play chess?”
For the most part the economy of the St. Clair household was the province of Galen’s mother, who did her best to reduce expenditures while still presenting a respectable face to the outside world. There were a few points, however, upon which his father had strong opinions, and one of them was the greater expense of a hired carriage over a sedan chair. But Islington was a miserable distance to go on such a cold day, and so Galen paid for the greater shelter of a carriage, riding with foot-warmer and heavy cloak past the grasping edges of the city and through the still-green fields to the village north of London.
He came this way every month to spend an afternoon in the company of the two people he trusted to teach him what he needed to know, without censure for his ignorance.