“Your castle is going to get very crowded.”
“Indeed.”
But as the numbers of Sabor's assistants increased, it soon became evident that another force was working to ensure that they didn't. In the next suite they found three more corpses. Again the victims were all versions of that diminutive rumple-suited man. All had been slain with a wide blade, the wounds suggesting that they had been cut down while trying to flee. Whatever had killed them had simply piled the victims in the center of the room.
As soon as they made this grim discovery, Rachel rushed to the timelock door and peered through. Crowds of Garstones passed outside the porthole window, seemingly oblivious of anything untoward.
Mina crouched by one of the bodies, and slipped its time piece from its breast pocket. “It's the correct time,” she said. “He was killed here not long ago, and his body hasn't been moved.” The other corpses' pocket watches told the same story. Whatever had slain these men had done so in this universe, with a thousand alternate versions of his three victims outside this very door.
And yet a hurried conference with Garstones passing outside soon revealed that none had seen anything. The killer had gone unnoticed.
Sabor's brow creased in a deep frown. “Either the killer was invisible,” he announced to the assistants now gathered on every balcony above the Obscura Hall, “or one of you has betrayed us… and thereby betrayed yourself.”
A moment's stunned silence was followed by shocked protests and denials from every level of the castle. They couldn't conceive of such a thing. The murderer could only have been a shade, a phantasm, a shape-shifter.
A shape-shifter?
Rachel saw Hasp's expression turn sour at this news. If a shape-shifter was here in the castle, then the Mesmerists had gained access to this timeline. The future they had left behind must already have been altered.
Sabor called for silence and, grimly, ordered the lights dimmed and the camera obscura activated. With a thousand pairs of eyes watching from the galleries above him, the god of clocks switched between the lenses of each of his suites in turn.
A bleary orange sun against a smouldering purple sky … bones adrift upon the Flower Lake… a great black building amidst an unknown village on the opposite lakeshore, puffing red smoke from its funnels … darkness, with the stars obscured by greasy fumes…the light of dawn falling upon ashen plains… machines waiting in the lakeshore thickets… a solitary giant standing godlike against a scorched heaven.
All but four of the lenses he tried revealed these similar poisoned universes, places where Menoa's newly altered pasts had come to fruition in chaotic ways. The Maze had come to the world of men before Heaven had even been sealed.
“How is he doing this?” Rachel asked.
“He gained control of the Obscura Redunda in his own bastard universe. Now his Mesmerists have spread back through the labyrinth of Time like an infestation, transporting chaos back with them into the past. Each time he changes history, he creates yet another universe that puts greater pressure on our own. Our own timeline may already have collapsed behind us. Our future, the very one we left, might no longer exist as we know it.”
He snatched up his map and cried, “Hurry!”
They ran from timelock to timelock in an increasingly complex and desperate route back through the labyrinth of Time. Six months. Three days. Two hours. Twenty years. A solitary leap of two and a half minutes, and they kept running, pushing, through crowds of Garstones to make a seven-year connection. Rachel was exhausted, Hasp grim-faced in his filthy armour, Mina clutching Basilis to her breast as she raced along the gallery. Even Dill seemed to have faded as a result of the constant exertion. Up stairs and down again. The whole Obscura Hall was packed with rumple-suited assistants.
They made the connection with just seconds to spare. Two and a half thousand days, gone in a heartbeat. They hurried onwards, backwards, throwing themselves into the past with fierce abandon.
Sabor called out to announce the years: “… Three fifty-five… Two ninety-six… One hundred and forty-two…”
Year ninety-nine.
And here they found a suite full of bodies. Forty Garstones slain, the room painted with arcs of blood. “No time,” Sabor cried. “No time to look for the killer. Leave the dead and run.”
Year eighty-one.
The Obscura Redunda was bursting with humanity, all countless versions of the god's clock-winder. And still more of him poured from other suites, from other universes that had been blighted by their unseen enemy. They came staggering into the Obscura Hall, wounded or dying or burned. The air thickened with the smell of sweat, smoke, and blood.
Year fifty.
This time most of the suites were now filled with the dead. The doors of the castle had been flung wide open, and Garstones poured out to assemble on the mountainside beyond, waiting for their chance to travel back to year zero. Rachel heard a cry issue from above. A clash of steel? She couldn't stay to find out.
Year eighteen.
Now Sabor's assistants clambered over their own corpses in the Obscura Hall in their haste to reach the appropriate timelocks. Others carried other wounded selves. Smoke poured into the castle from the main doors, boiling up over the obscura columns, till it filled the hemisphere in the ceiling. Howls and cries sounded from outside, and Basilis's barking, and shouts: “We are attacked… Men outside.”
Not Mesmerists? Rachel wondered if that was a good sign or not. Perhaps the land had not yet been bloodied enough for King Menoa's own creations. Hasp interrupted her thoughts by grabbing her arm. “Move.”
Year zero.
Silence.
The timelock door had slammed behind them as they piled into yet another musty suite with another pointlessly grandiose name. There were no bodies here, no smoke or damage. The window looked out upon a cloudless blue sky. By the angle of the sun, Rachel judged it to be morning, and yet auroras danced across the heavens beyond the glass, shimmering curtains of pale green and purple. She approached to get a better view.
The Temple Mountains shone like polished jet, the colourful skies reflected as if burning deep within countless dark and glassy facets. A few patches of snow clung to the higher abutments, but the landscape below basked in pristine sunlight. All trace of the forest was gone, for here the foothills swept down to the lakeshore in a series of soft humps, every inch of them covered in wildflowers.
Rachel had never seen such a riotous carpet of blossoms: bursts of gold and red mingled with lavender whorls; dabs of white and cerise amongst streaks of indigo, copper, and umber. The overall effect was so intense upon the eye that it seemed to blur together like the bands of a rainbow.
Dill stood at the window and the flowers shone through him. It's beautiful, he said.
Hasp joined him. “I'd never thought I'd see this again,” he said.
“But it can't be natural,” Rachel said. “Why are there no trees here? No bush or scrub?”
“It's Ayen's garden,” Sabor explained. He was looking apprehensively at the door, as though trying to work something out in his mind. “The castle is very quiet.”
“No Garstones,” Mina replied. “There should be thousands of them gathered here. Millions.”
But then a face appeared briefly at the timelock porthole. The outer door swung wide, and then the inner one opened to reveal a familiar face. A middle-aged Garstone stood in the doorway, dressed in a rumpled brown suit. “Glad you could make it, sir.” He gestured with his arm. “If you will just come with me…”