God of Clocks

PROLOGUE

In the dark heart of Cospinol's great wooden skyship they boiled a demigod. Her wings and legs had been broken with hammers to fit them inside the iron cooker-a witchsphere now strengthened to resist steam at high pressure. It was clamped in a mighty vise set upon a brazier. A lead pipe fed carbolic water in through a nozzle in its paneled shell. Another pipe channeled the demigod's spirit to a glass condenser, for collection.

For fifty days the slaves had pumped water and stoked the brazier while red shadow-figures loomed over them like some infernal puppet show. Steam issued from valves and moiled the tarry bulkheads, but the workers neither perspired nor complained. They moved with the mute efficacy of men long used to a task. All around them the Rotsward shuddered and pitched, her joints sorely tested by her captain's desperate flight westwards.

The slaves observed as sparkling liquid gathered in the condenser flask like a colloid of starlight, then crept up the glass and cascaded back down in furious scintillations. It seemed to whisper to itself in voices edged with madness. They paused to study the vise clamps each time the cooking sphere rattled or boomed. Yesterday they'd brought their hammers and laid them out on the floor where they could be reached in a hurry, poor weapons as they were. And then they added more coke and curried the furnace with blasts of air from bellows. The booming sounds intensified as Carnival continued to kick within her pressurized prison.

A boy with hooks for fingers watched the stewing process from a crawl space above the chamber ceiling, his small red face afloat in the gloom up there. Why didn't the demigod just die? He had never seen Cospinol's workers take so long over a boiling. Only after the light had bubbled clean out of her would they tip out the water from the sphere and let him fill his kettle. The black tin vessel was the only one of his meager possessions that he had not stolen, and he glared at it now accusingly. It remained mournfully empty.

He looked on for a while longer then scratched another line into the ceiling joist, joining up four vertical gouges with a long diagonal. Then he turned and wriggled back down the passage in the direction he had come.

Smoke from the burning city below the skyship had leached freely into her tattered wooden hull. Air currents buffeted her endlessly. She rolled and creaked; she sounded as though she would not survive for much longer. The boy hummed a fragment of a battle march he had once heard, repeating the same notes over and over again just to block out the other frightening sounds. He blinked and rubbed his eyes with his sleeve. His shirt smelled of brimstone. He crawled onwards, deeper into the maze of filthy ducts and passageways.

Urgent voices came from the stern: the god of brine and fog himself, clearly angry, and a woman with a strange soft accent. The hook-fingered boy wormed around another bend and found a place where he could peer down through one of the many chinks in the floor.

“…The assassin saw everything,” Cospinol was saying. “Coreollis is leveled, Rys's palace reduced to ashes by some unknown cataclysm. Are my brothers dead or simply scheming?” He paced before a bank of windows at the far side of the room, his crab-shell armour clicking with each step. Lank strands of grey hair fell back from his noble face and rested in the hollow between his wings. Behind him the windows framed nothing but fog, crosshatched by the dim lines of the Rotsward's gallows. “All Rys's Northmen are now slain or have fled,” he went on. “Pollack's Outcasts, too. The war was over when King Menoa released his arconites.”

A female voice responded: “The war is not over, Lord Cospinol. Have some faith in providence.”

The hook-fingered boy adjusted his position over the hole to see who had spoken. Directly underneath his hiding place sat a woman in a cowled grey robe, glittering red gloves clutching a tiny scrag of a dog to her chest. But then the boy peered closer and saw that the gloves weren't gloves at all: The woman had glass scales for skin.

A Mesmerist witch?

Cospinol halted his pacing, his pinched expression evidence of this verbal lash against his pride. “Whose providence? My mother Ayen's?” he snapped. “Or were you referring to my missing brothers? Are they truly lost? It matters little. Mirith is a mad coward and knew nothing of warfare. Rys, Hafe, and Sabor possessed some skill on the battlefield, but they were all in Rys's bastion when it fell. Likely their souls are now lost in Hell. And Hasp is useless to us.” He looked away from the woman. “No offense intended, Hasp.”

From up here the boy could not see the room's third occupant, but the reply sounded gruff and fierce. “I am well aware of my value to you, Cospinol.”

The woman glanced back at the hidden speaker before returning her gaze to the old sea god. “Your own providence, Lord Cospinol. You must seize control of this wayward situation. Many of Rys's Northmen fled the battlefield at Larnaig. Hafe's troops are now leaderless and there are militia abroad. Tens of thousands of men, armed and ready to fight.”

Cospinol threw up his arms. “To what end? Menoa's arconites cannot be killed. We learned that in Skirl.”

“If you do not recruit them, Menoa certainly will.”

He snorted. “Menoa will simply disband them-or murder them.”

“He's not that much of a fool. Rys's disappearance has robbed these warriors of their leaders, their purpose, and their income. How will they earn wages to feed their families?”

“You really think these soldiers would actually turn traitor and fight for their sworn enemy?”

“They will unless they prefer to starve.” She set the dog down on the floor, whereupon it pissed and then sniffed at the pool it had made. “Menoa uses lies and persuasion on people. In Hell he turned the dead to his purposes, and he will do the same in this world. Lord Cospinol, if you yourself do not recruit these men, the king's arconites will soon acquire a formidable foot army. We do not need any more foes.”

The sea god shook his head. “How can I be expected to maintain an army? They will devour the Rotsward's stores like an infestation of weevils, and then empty my coffers of gold. And when we're out of turnips and coins they'll come looking for soulpearls, mark my words.” He gave a short bitter laugh. “Yet you ask me to employ these purposeless men simply to prevent them from being used against me-legions of combatants who are entirely useless against my real enemies.”

“They cannot fight Menoa's arconites, but they can still fight.”

“Fight who?” he exclaimed.

The witch's dog growled, and nudged her leg. She picked it up again. “Since we are defeated, ill-equipped, and presently fleeing for our lives, I propose we pick a fight with a new foe.”

Cospinol just stared at her, but a great gruff laugh came from the back of the cabin. The boy heard Hasp's deep voice booming out: “I think I see where this is going. Oh, Mina, you've offered us an end that will shake history!”

The conversation went on, but the boy had lost interest. He was watching a beetle crawl along the dank wooden passageway. He stabbed his steel fingers down around it, trapping it in a cage.

The beetle tested its prison. The boy watched its antennae moving. He scooped it up and ate it, then slouched back a bit and began to scratch a maze into the passageway wall. Bored with that, too, he crawled further down the rotting conduit into deeper gloom, and on through a ragged hole that snagged his sailcloth breeches. He found Monk waiting for him in a narrow gap between an inner bulkhead and the Rotsward's cannonball-chewed outer hull.

Monk claimed to be an astronomer, but he wore an old musketeer's uniform and looked like a grave-digger's apprentice. He squatted there with his filthy knees poking through the holes in his breeches, like partially unearthed skulls. His eyes were as fat and moist as globes of frogspawn, their black pupils trembling as he searched the shadows. He clutched a wooden bowl and spoon. “Who's that?” he said. “Boy? Don't skulk in the dark. Where is my soup?”

The boy shrugged. “They're still boiling her,” he said.

“After twenty days?”

“Fifty days. She's still kicking at the inside of the pot.”

Monk frowned and set down his bowl and spoon. “You could kill me a gull,” he muttered.

“Ain't any gulls here,” the boy replied. “The air's too smoky. There's crows, though, down there on the battlefield. You can hear them from the lower gallows.”

Monk said, “I wouldn't go to the gallows, not to hear no birds cawking.”

The astronomer had been dead for a hundred and fifty years, or so he said. He wouldn't return to the Rotsward's gallows, not ever. Not after all the time he'd spent hanging out there on a gibbet next to that wailing filibuster from Cog. Besides, they were liable to just string him up again if he went outside, weren't they? No, it was best to hide in here, stay quiet, and keep his head down. Work with the boy and share all the beetles and birds' eggs they found between themselves.

But Monk never found any beetles or birds' eggs. He never left his hiding place, never got up except to stagger down to the big hole in the hull where he kept his musket and his battered old sightglass.

Monk followed the boy's gaze. “No stars last night,” he said bitterly.

“Maybe there aren't no stars no more,” the boy replied. “Maybe they all fell down like Cospinol did. What if Pandemeria is now full of gods, and the skies above are black and empty?”

“I don't think we're in Pandemeria anymore,” Monk said. “Last I saw of the world was when they cut me from my gibbet to fight at Skirl.” His gaze now focused inwards on his own memories. “Needed us old veterans to stand against the Maze King's first giant,” he said. “Guaranteed freedom for those who took up arms against that thing.” His tone became animated and mocking. “ ‘No more gins or nooses and that's a promise.’” He spat. “Fat lot of use, anyway. You can't kill a thing that can't be killed. And we couldn't even see to shoot at it in this damn fog.”

Monk had been in Pandemeria during the uprising, attached to Shelagh Benedict Cooper's Musketeers. He said he'd read the stars for Shelagh herself, and shot seven Mesmerists, too.

“Never saw the stars neither,” he went on. “None of us could leave the fog without just melting away into Hell. We started to fade as soon as they lowered us from the Rotsward's deck, and when our feet touched the ground we were nothing but ghosts on the battlefield, spectres dragging muskets we could hardly lift. We were about as effective against the Skirl arconite as a fart blowing round its heels.”

“Because Cospinol ate your eternal souls?”

Monk nodded. “He stole the stars from me.”

“I don't want to leave anyway,” the boy said. “I like it here.”

“You like tormenting the god of brine,” Monk observed. “He'll chop your head off if he catches you.”

The boy just grinned. “Then I'll make myself a new head, a metal one.”

“ Shape-shifters.” Monk sighed. “You all think you can do what you like. How are you going to make yourself a new head if you don't have a mind to imagine the shape and feel of it, eh? It's not like forging those fancy new fingers of yours.” He made a chopping motion with his hand. “One deft shnick and that'll be the end of you. Cospinol won't be bothered about losing one soul to the Maze, not when he has so many hanging from his gibbets already.”

The boy shrugged. He hadn't thought of that.

“Don't see why you can't change yourself into something useful for once,” the astronomer said. “Something to help your old friend Monk pass the time.” His eyes narrowed, the pupils like peepholes into some cruel realm of night. “A weapon, maybe…or something softer.”

“I'm not a shiftblade!” the boy cried. “I'm not like them.”

The old man chewed his lip. “No, you're a good lad who brings his friend Monk kettles of soup. Except there's no soup because that scarred angel just won't die in her cooker. Fifty days? What the hell is wrong with her?” He looked at the boy. “You wouldn't be holding out on me?”

“No.”

“You wouldn't be lying to your old friend Monk?”

“No.”

“So you won't mind if we go take a look together?”

“But…” The boy took a moment to assemble his jumbled thoughts. “You don't go anywhere.”

“And you were counting on that?” The old man surged forward and grabbed the boy by the nape and dragged him back down through the sloping inner space of the hull, his grey hair as wild as a busted cord of wire.

The boy panicked and began to change his shape, willing his bones to wilt and flow out of the man's grip.

Monk punched him in the face. “None of that,” he growled. “You'll keep the bloody body you were born with, for once.”

The shock of admonishment emptied the young shape-shifter's mind. He scrabbled against the inner bulkhead, his fingers scraping gouges in the wood. But Monk simply stuffed him back into the narrow conduit and pushed the boy ahead of him like a clot of rags. “Which way now?” he demanded. “Larboard or starboard?”

Not knowing, the boy turned left, and they bumped and shuffled onwards in a noisy brawl of knees and elbows.

Once they reached the crawl space Monk shoved the boy aside and peered down through the spy hole. The brass buttons on his epaulettes shone dully in the light of the brazier below, while the hooked tip of his nose glowed like a torch-heated spigot. He was silent for a long time.

The boy looked at the kettle on its hook above the spy hole, and then he looked at the astronomer's head.

“A witchsphere,” Monk whispered. “And they've reinforced it.” He frowned. “Witchspheres don't open from the inside and they don't break. They were designed to contain a whole world of torment.” His frown deepened. “So why bother to reinforce it?”

From the chamber below came a mighty boom. Steam blasted up through the gap. The astronomer flinched.

“That's why,” the boy said.

Monk stared into the shadows for a moment. “She just kicked like a babe in a womb.”

“Told you,” the boy said.

The old man rubbed condensation from his brow. With a grim expression he went back to studying the cooker below. “The vise plates have been arranged to keep pressure on those core panels,” he said. “But those braces set against the top curve haven't been welded properly. Witchsphere metal won't take welds. That's the weakest point. Come here, boy, look where I show you.”

The boy did as he was told. He saw the witchsphere clamped in its vise over the brazier, the hot coals, the pipes, the wheel valves, and a whole nest of steaming iron braces. Cospinol's slaves were shoveling coke and pumping in air through leather bellows. White light boiled inside the condenser flask and threw long mechanistic shadows across the floor.

“Those plates are held together by bolts through opposing corners. You can see where they fused the nuts into the flanges. That's just normal steel.” The astronomer scratched his chin. “But the braces are only fixed at their outer ends, and those joints have already started to rust in this steam. A good whack with a hammer would break through them quick enough.”

“But she'll get out.”

Monk looked back down at the witchsphere for a long moment, chewing his lips again. “The sphere will leak enough for us to fill our kettle, before the slaves reinforce it again. That's all.” Then he shrugged. “But if she gets out, she gets out.” He grinned. “That's what they call someone else's problem.”