Mark shifted in his chair. Old Grunbaum had the worst chairs, the kind that connected to the desk with a curved bar of what was, at one time, polished silvery metal. Now, forty years later, those desk-chair connectors were corroded rust barely holding the shape, with exposed bolts on each end. Mark scraped his arm on a jagged corner and wondered if the school board knew about the condition of Herr Grunbaum’s classroom furniture. I’ll have to ask Mom if my tetanus vaccination is up to date. Even Gerry O’Donnell, Mark’s curmudgeon of a calculus teacher, had new desks; the whole county had them, all except for Grunbaum, the venerable Kraut, here forty-one years and still teaching German I through V, the advanced placement class for the bright kids or the kids from Bakersfield, who had German or Jewish grandparents. Many of them knew a good bit of the guttural language long before coming to lessons in ninth grade. But the desks had to be some kind of retribution on the part of the Massapequa Public Schools Division, for four decades of Herr Gerrold Grunbaum’s Teutonic dictation: horen und sagen. Jetzt, fanger wir an… eins, zwei, drei, vier… and all the time his sparklingly clean wingtips clicked in perfect rhythm on the scuffed tile floor.
This was German II, non-honours, a general education class for college-bound tenth graders, exceptional ninth graders and those who needed a spare foreign language credit. Save for a pair of Hungarian kids who spoke some German at home, the class was not a hotbed of talent. Mark was amongst the brightest in the room, and he periodically had to pinch himself – or slice my goddamned arm open on the desk – to stay awake.
Today, there was a snake on the floor, one of the colourful ones he and Steven had seen on the Discovery Channel, a coral snake: a nasty little bastard with plenty of the Crayola ringlets the tiresome narrator with his now-you-hear-it-now-you-don’t British accent had called ‘nature’s way of saying danger’.
Steven had paraphrased: Stay back, meathead, or I’ll sting you where it hurts.
That wasn’t right; Mark wouldn’t meet Steven Taylor for seven years.
The snake was coiled up and motionless, watching and waiting; Mark tried not to step on it – that would piss it off – while he shifted uncomfortably and tried to follow Herr Grunbaum’s lesson.
Heute mu?en wir… blah, blah, blah.
Somebody knock me senseless for the next twenty-two minutes.
Jody Calloway was sitting next to him. Mark wanted to check her pulse; she hadn’t moved in ten minutes. She might be dead, bored to death. And my mother said that was impossible. He craned his neck to see if she was breathing or if there was a puddle of drool pooling on the desktop. I’d get interviewed by the paper. They’d ask what happened, and I’d tell them she was fine, looking normal, chatting with friends, but then Old Grunbaum started in on the differences between Viennese and Bavarian German, but I wasn’t really listening; I was trying to see if Jody was still alive because I thought it might be entertaining if she would, you know, move around a bit, maybe lean back once or twice before the end of the period. She’s no dairy princess, but at least there’s something there to see.
On the board, Grunbaum had drawn one of his famous sketches. Mark’s Uncle Dave had gone to Massapequa Heights as well, twenty-seven years earlier, and he’d had Grunbaum for German I and II. Even then, back in the sixties, the old bastard had been drawing bad sketches of castles, battlefields, rivers, and all manner of architectural styles: Gothic this and Baroque that; Mark wondered how he didn’t manage to improve over time. He’s been drawing the same shit for four decades; you’d think he’d eventually get better, he thought. How many times do you have to draw the Stephansdom before it begins to look like a cathedral? Jesus, there he goes again.
1742, Maria-Theresa von Hapsburg…
What did he say? How many kids did she have – God Almighty, lady, read a book or take in a movie or something – just get off your back!
She loved this muted yellow colour… used it for many of her architectural projects, including her summer home, the Palais Schonbrunn. Kyle, why don’t you tell the class what that means, auf Englisch…
Good, good, on the hill south of the palace… the Gloriette, which members of the Hapsburg family used, amongst other things, for shade -
‘What was that?’ Mark said aloud, ‘What did you say?’ Without warning, he was back within himself, trapped inside the swamp with the marble-reflecting pool and the neo-classical columns. The lights flickered for a moment, flashing off the pool, then dimming into darkness. Outside the thick canopy of swamp foliage, the sky was blue. That’s where he was going, across the bridge, over the reflecting pool, whatever it was, and then up that hill. Things would be different up there; he’d have more control.
At his feet, the coral snake shifted slightly, as if sensing a change in Mark Jenkins.
The Gloriette, in Vienna. That’s where he had seen these columns and this odd, rectangular structure, like a stone building’s skeleton with the skin peeled off. In tenth grade, he’d gone on the spring break trip to southern Germany with old Gerrold Grunbaum, and they had taken two days to visit Salzburg and Vienna. Jody Calloway had gone too. She and Mark had made out in the hotel that night after Billy Carruthers and Jamie Whatshisname had sneaked all those bottles of beer back inside Billy’s raincoat – though they could have wrapped them in fluorescent paper and tied them with bows; Herr Grlinbaum couldn’t see a thing by that time. He had to have been well over eighty by the time he led that trip.
But this was the place, the Gloriette, Maria-Theresa von Hapsburg’s private shady spot, overlooking her private zoo. Lovely.
Mark remembered Jody sneaking him behind one of these columns and kissing him hard, then leaving him to finish the tour looking like he was smuggling bananas in his jeans. He’d tried to grab a feel, but she’d been too fast, spinning away and rejoining her friends; she had been a track star, too damned fast for a horny, boob-grabbing sophomore.
Nice to see you’ve figured it out.
‘Figured what out?’ Mark took a wary step along the marble coping. If they were talking, he might be permitted to move closer to the bridge and safe passage across the dangerous water.
The Gloriette. It’s a nice touch; don’t you think? Although I prefer it there on the hill behind Schonbrunn. It’s too humid in here.
‘I don’t get it,’ Mark said. ‘What’s your point?’
Your trip to Vienna, my friend. Think back; think hard. You’re focusing on the wrong things… again. Forget Jody Calloway’s tits; they were never much to speak of, anyway.
Mark slid along the coping side of the nearest column, careful to avoid slipping into the water. It was dark, and he wasn’t supposed to move when it was dark, but as long as they were talking, the snake might leave him alone. ‘A detail? I’m supposed to remember some detail from a spring break trip when I was fifteen – and then what, I get to go free? Or maybe make it across this puddle? Fuck you, chief, I’ll take my chances wi-’
The snake bit him, then bit him again.
Mark winced, wanting to run, but knowing it would be worse if he did. He shouted and swore, rooting around in the muck, waiting for his fingers to pass over the snake’s slippery body.
It bit his wrist. Mark howled in shock more than pain, but at least now he had it. It tried to strike him and slither free at the same time, but Mark would have none of it. He slid his free hand along the wriggling body until he reached the tail, which he clenched it in his fist, then he spun the creature like a bolo, faster and faster, until he snapped the snake like a bullwhip against the column, breaking its bones and paralysing it. He repeated the action until he felt it go entirely limp. It splattered against the stone with a wet splashing sound.
Finally sure it was dead, Mark tossed it away. It landed with a rustle in a patch of ferns.
Mark couldn’t feel the poison working, but he’d been bitten three times, and he was worried that he might die, if he could die in here. While the mutant tadpoles with their bulbous tumours and the monster serpents that had pursued them all seemed benign, he understood that the coral snake had been real – it was real enough to die, and therefore real enough for its venom to be deadly.
Happier now? The voice was amused. It laughed and said, I’m not doing this to you, Mark.
‘Yes, right, I know, it’s all me. I put the bridge there, I conjured up the snake, and I went back to high school for the Hapsburg family Gloriette.’
Exactly. And you’re so worried about me, all the time, me, me, me and what’s happening with me. You’re focusing on the wrong things, Mark; you need to think back – it’s your favourite way of solving problems, isn’t it? I know it’s how you figured out that worthless bastard Lessek was trying to tell you something about your family and Jones Beach and all that rubbish about your father and his beer. And I know it’s how you alleviate stress. Well, Mark, here’s a dilemma for you: I’ve been honest. I’ve told you that you’re doing this to yourself, and I’ve said, at least once, that I preferred you in the dark, in the first room. You recall that room, don’t you?
‘Yes,’ Mark said, feeling for the twin puncture marks on his wrist and trying to squeeze as much blood from them as possible, hoping he might also squeeze out a bit of the venom.
And you don’t want to go back in there.
‘No,’ Mark said, ‘it was worse in there.’ He pulled up his jeans and tried to squeeze the bites on his leg as well. It was difficult to assess how well it was working so he decided to try tightening his belt around his calf as a sort of tourniquet; it might stem the flow of venom around his body, buying him a few valuable minutes in which to reach the top of the rise and the blue sky. Everything would be fine if he could just reach that clearing.
So I will be honest with you again. I cannot keep you in there if you choose to be out here. How do you like them mangos, my boy?
‘It’s apples, dickhead.’
You eat what you like, and leave me alone.
‘So, what now?’
You deal with your new dilemma.
‘And what’s that? Vienna?’ Mark tugged his belt a bit tighter; his wrist and lower leg throbbed. ‘What am I supposed to remember?’
Not remember; infer.
‘Oh, grand,’ Mark said. ‘And what happens in the interim, while I’m here in the dark, inside a four-hundred-year-old Austrian gazebo, inferring something from a trip I took fourteen years ago when all the German I could manage was “How is the soup today?” – are you going to send more snakes, or are you content to watch while the venom already in my blood kills me or drives me mad or makes me piss mango juice?’
That would be a neat trick.
‘Again-’
Enough insults. It was irritated now. You’re forgetting again, Mark – great lords, but you didn’t strike me as this stupid. I expected more from you, truly. You’re as stupid as Nerak.
‘Well, I can be disappointing.’
Everything is coming from you. The only snakes, homicidal killers, venereal diseases, whatever, are those you bring in here. I have nothing to do with that.
Mark didn’t know why, but he wanted to believe that was true. ‘I won’t invite any more snakes in here to bite me, and I won’t give myself crabs, but if I do get bit again, I’m blaming you, sh-’ Now back to work.
The lights flickered again, just long enough for Mark to see the coral snake, its head torn open and its body twisted into knots, slithering out from beneath the ferns to resume its post between Mark’s feet. When the lights faded again, Mark screamed.
‘So what is this place?’ Steven tethered Gilmour’s horse to the sturdiest post left upright on the porch. He walked along the warped boards, looking uninterestedly through the broken windows. The packed earth of the road was now a strip of frozen mud and snow. ‘It must have been someplace important to have a three-storey building. Although I don’t suppose anyone has been here in a long time.’ They were alone and hadn’t encountered anyone riding down from the grassy meadow south of the village.
‘Most of my life, anyway.’ Gilmour leaned in through one of the windows, then backed out quickly, peeling invisible cobwebs off his face.
Steven wandered onto the road, knocking off an icicle as he passed. It slid across the mud. ‘This is another university, isn’t it? I get the same sort of feeling as the last one – although I’m pleased that there don’t seem to be any acid-clouds or starving almor here. That definitely gets this place an extra star in the Barron’s Guidebook to Eldarni Colleges.’
‘Good guess.’
Steven continued, ‘And judging by the general disrepair, I’d guess that this was one of the first schools our friend Prince Marek closed after meeting Nerak back in the day.’
Gilmour leaned against a post and blew a smoke ring. ‘Marek Whitward was a pleasant young man, one of the nicest of the Remonds, and it was quite tragic about him and Nerak – but don’t let me interrupt. Please, go on.’
‘If this university is like those back home, I’d wager that stone building over there with the collapsed roof is the library – but I don’t expect we’ll find any books in there today.’ He pointed to an even larger, sprawling structure, standing at the centre of what might once have been the university common.
‘Correct again, Steven,’ Gilmour said. ‘Any surviving manuscripts would have been taken to Welstar Palace, or destroyed, but we haven’t come here for books.’
‘All right, you have my attention. Why then have we come out of our way to visit a derelict, abandoned and obviously off-limits former institution of higher education?’
The old Larion Senator wearing the chubby soldier’s body smiled, the same boyish grin Steven had seen on both of Gilmour’s previous hosts. ‘I need to look for something, something that’s been missing in Eldarn for some time.’ He started towards a set of double wooden doors, one of which hung crookedly by a single hinge.
‘In there?’ Steven was sceptical.
‘Come on,’ Gilmour said, ‘or wait here. This doesn’t really concern you.’
‘Oh, really? You meeting some woman? Because if you are, I can wait in the car. Or give me a couple of bucks, and I’ll take in a movie down the street.’
‘Trust me.’ Gilmour ducked through the broken frame. The empty room was a hall of sorts, with several doors off it leading to unseen rear chambers and, Steven guessed, stairs to the upper floors. There was no furniture; it, along with most of the floorboards and panelling, had been stripped, probably stolen by intrepid builders from nearby farms. A thick layer of dust moved in the air, disturbed by their arrival.
‘Lovely place you’ve got here.’
‘Like it? I call it Minimalist Grime.’
‘If I run into any homicidal maniacs looking for a quiet summer hideaway I’ll send them to you.’
Gilmour reached the rear wall and tried one of the doors. ‘This one’s latched inside.’ He moved to the next; that was blocked as well. ‘Curse it all,’ he said, ‘I hate to do this.’
‘What? Force the door? Stop joking, Gilmour, just blast the thing off its hinges and let’s get going. Just try not to knock down the whole building.’
Gilmour stepped back and whispered a brief spell; the door collapsed into a pile of kindling. A tremendous cloud of choking dust arose, momentarily blinding them both.
Coughing, doubled over, Steven said, ‘Oh yes, great idea – that’s much better!’ He pushed past Gilmour into the darkness beyond the ruined doorway, saying, ‘Better let me go first – who knows what might be waiting for us now that we’ve rung the bell?’ Two steps in and he disappeared into the dark.
‘I’ll get some lights on,’ he said after a bit and reached above his head. A pleasant glow filled the chamber, a room larger than the entryway, with a high ceiling and a polished stone floor. ‘It’s a damned cavern,’ Stephen said. ‘This one room must take up most of the building.’
‘I thought you might find it interesting,’ Gilmour replied.
Without speaking, Steven waved his open hands towards the ceiling, still invisible in the shadows above, and with each gesture, a fireball, glowing with a warm, bright light, leaped from his palm and floated off to brighten another corner of the massive chamber. There were several bulky, irregularly shaped structures arranged in a desultory pattern on the floor. ‘What the hell?’ he whispered, brightening the orbs with a nod. ‘Gilmour, what is it?’
‘This? I’m not sure; it looks like a pile of wreckage, probably dumped in here when they closed the school. What I need used to be stored along that rear corridor. Wait just a moment; I’ll be right back.’ He crossed to an antechamber behind the debris and slipped quietly inside.
Gilmour closed the door, cast a small flame toward the ceiling, and examined the gloomy storage closet. As expected, it was empty. He sat on the dusty floor, lit his pipe, and waited.
Steven circled the mountain of trash.
He called toward the corridor. ‘Okay, well, then I’ll just wait in here. That’s fine. I don’t mind cold, damp, dusty, creepy, and dilapidated. It’s kind of like my first apartment, only bigger… Gilmour?’
The debris was actually a stack of variously sized cogged gears, the smallest no larger than a bicycle tyre, the largest a huge wood-and-metal wheel with a circumference of half the cavernous chamber. It looked like the gears had been dropped, one atop the other, in an upside-down pyramid, smallest at the bottom. A polished metal rod was attached to a single cog on each gear.
‘There’s no rust,’ Steven said to himself.
He knelt beside the largest wheel and ran a hand up the silvery metal spike. ‘This might have been something once, but it’s just a pile of rubbish now – this big one has got to weigh two tons, though. And those loose cables up there – what are they for? Hold on a minute, just a minute… they’d have to be attached by-’ He took another lap around the pile, muttering, ‘Eight… eight to thirty and thirty to sixty, but that can’t be right… one is to four, but then there’s a switch, but there’s no switch in here…’ He searched the walls, the ceiling and the pile of cogged wheels, looking for a missing piece that might bring his ruminations to a tidy conclusion.
Stephen lectured to the empty room. ‘It wouldn’t work on the walls, and the rods are vertical… they don’t interlink – the cogs are the wrong size – but they do turn in a pattern; so what’s the denominator for the ratio? One to four to eight to thirty to sixty toChrist in the jungle, that’s not right: one to four has to be a mistake, unless- unless it’s on the floor… Sonofabitch!’
In the closet, Gilmour laughed silently into his fist, relit his pipe and leaned against the doorframe, listening. He gave it half an aven, then brushed the dust from his cloak, pocketed the pipe and reentered the chamber.
The cogged wheels were suspended, seemingly of their own volition, above a series of coloured tiles cemented into the floor. A matching set of tiles was affixed to the ceiling, just a short distance above the largest gear, which wobbled and wavered dangerously as it hovered above them, parallel to the floor.
‘Good gods! ‘ Gilmour feigned surprise. ‘What have you been up to?’
Now stripped to the waist, his lean frame shiny with sweat, Steven jumped, his apparent reverie broken. ‘Shit, Gilmour, don’t do that!’
‘What is it?’
‘You don’t know?’ He wiped his eyes on the back of his hand.
‘I’m hanged if I have any idea.’
Steven gave a self-satisfied grin. ‘Do you know what day it is?’
‘Of course not.’
‘When was the last time that you knew – for certain – what day it was?’
‘I’d have to say it was about-’
‘Nine hundred and eighty-two Twinmoons ago?’ The excitement was plain in his voice.
‘Give or take a handful of avens, yes.’
Steven focused his attention on the floor beneath the smallest wheel. ‘What you need, Gilmour, is a mathematician, and more than that, you need a mathematician who can tell you what Twinmoon it was when a miner named William Higgins walked into the Bank of Idaho Springs, now known as the First National Bank of Idaho Springs, home of the lowest-interest small business loans on the Front Range, and opened a basic interest-bearing account with more than seventeen thousand dollars in refined silver.’
‘And where would I find one of them, then?’ the Larion Senator asked, smiling.
‘It’s a clock,’ Steven broke in, too excited to banter any more, ‘but it doesn’t use a wound spring or a counterweight.’
‘If you say so,’ Gilmour said, sounding nonplussed. ‘Remember your telephones and calculators? I’m not one for higher-order maths quandaries.’
‘Well, this is one of the best, my friend. Because this clock uses the rotation of the world, the actual movement of Eldarn through the heavens, to determine the Twinmoon. It even charts them, up there. See those couplings, and those wires?’
‘Aha.’
‘It uses magic – although I bet I could get it to work with an electromagnet – because these wheels look like interlocking gears, but they actually hang here, just like this, completely independent of Eldarn’s rotation. They interact with one another, but they only interact with Eldarn on the aven.’
Steven interrupted himself, ignoring the gigantic ruined timepiece for a moment. ‘Have you really lived the last thousand Twinmoons without knowing the exact time of day or the exact day of the Twinmoon?’
Gilmour shrugged. ‘There are a few tally-fanatics out there who claim to have maintained an accurate count, but their sum totals all conflict with one another, so none have any real credibility.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Exactly how old? I don’t know.’
Steven looked shocked, then said, ‘Do you know the role that the mechanical clock plays in a culture? It’s one of the first steps in socialisation, centralisation and industrialisation. Business, city life and urban development, education, medicine and research, they all hinge on people agreeing upon what time it is and what time things happen.’
‘I know; I was there.’
‘Why didn’t you come back and start this thing up again?’ Steven asked.
‘I didn’t know how.’
Steven smirked. ‘I did.’
‘Show me.’
‘You see, if Eldarn has a north pole – and based on the construction of this clock, the orbit of your twin moons, the motion of your tides, the changing of your seasons, and a rack of other variables, we must assume that it does – anyway, if Eldarn has a north pole and you could suspend yourself above it for a full day with a writing instrument in your hand, what would you draw if you left its tip on the pole for eight avens?’
‘A very small circle?’ Gilmour guessed.
‘Top marks, but an even better answer is a dot, a spot, a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree speck. The north pole, the south pole, too, for that matter, would rotate around the tip of your pencil, quill, whatever, forming a dot on the page.’
‘All right, I’m with you so far,’ Gilmour said.
‘Now, imagine you’re suspended above Eldarn’s centre point, its widest point: the equator. What would you draw?’
‘A huge circle?’
‘Right, the biggest circle you could draw and still be in Eldarn, and everywhere in between the dot and the gargantuan circle fits in the ratio between the tiny and the massive.’
‘Why don’t you forge ahead without me?’ Gilmour suggested, looking blank.
‘That was the tough part,’ Steven said, ‘and, as luck would have it-’
‘Good luck, or our luck?’
‘Good luck, for once! So as good luck would have it, all the work here has been done: the ratio has been calculated, and the mechanism put into place. I just had to figure out how to get it all back where it belongs.’ He cocked a hand on one hip and took in the strata of overlapping gears. To Gilmour, he looked like a grimy ditch-digger taking a break.
‘And it all hinges on that little wheel, there on the floor? What is that? An aven?’
‘Four, actually.’
‘Why four?’
‘These engineers were frigging brilliant – they knew how to measure avens exactly, and they did it every day, but they checked themselves twice during every four seasons, at the winter and summer solstices. You see, no one knows how long an aven is until someone measures it exactly. Whoever built this clock knew the longest day and longest night, and by using those lengths, dividing the full day by eight, and then knowing where this room was in relation to the pole and the equator – they knew exactly how far apart to space the cogs on this little wheel and the metal rods on this floor.’
‘So they didn’t measure an Eldarni day in eight avens?’ Gilmour asked.
‘Nope, they could be more accurate by measuring four avens and then repeating the process.’
‘So the floor moves with Eldarn’s rotation, but the wheels don’t, and the metal rods in those tiles on the floor move the cogs in this small wheel, the aven wheel, and the aven wheel completes two revolutions in one day…’
‘And Bingo was his name-o!’ Steven did a little dance.
Gilmour frowned. ‘And once each day, that rod sticking up there turns the next largest, the day wheel? And then the day wheel’s vertical rod turns one cog on the Moon gear every thirty days and the Moon wheel turns a cog on the Twinmoon gear every second time it rotates, because there are two Moons in every Twinmoon.’
Steven quoted his Larion mentor, saying, ‘You get it all started and it will go on for ever, like the Twinmoons.’
‘What about Ages and Eras?’ Gilmour asked.
‘I don’t have those figured yet, but I think they’re calculated by the interaction of those cables up on the wall near the ceiling. That’s a tough one, because Ages and Eras are specific to Eldarni time and I don’t know anything about them – I was only able to figure the clock mechanism, because I have some knowledge of maths and…’ Steven’s voice trailed off. ‘You old sonofabitch…’
‘What?’ Gilmour suppressed a grin.
Steven glanced at the door through which Gilmour had disappeared almost an aven earlier. His voice boomed to the rafters as he jogged towards it. ‘You tricked me! You knew!’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ Gilmour followed. ‘Wait, Steven, wait! You shouldn’t go in there. It could be dangerous.’
Ignoring him, Steven threw open the door and cast a small light inside the empty closet. A cloud of aromatic pipe smoke billowed out. ‘Just as I thought: you did this on purpose.’
‘I knew you could do it,’ Gilmour beamed. ‘Magic is about knowledge. You deciphered the timepiece. No one in Eldarn could have done that, Steven, not me, Kantu, not even Nerak.’
‘Because I knew when William Higgins opened his account? It was October 1870; I’m not sure which day, but you could have come close, hell, even if you had guessed.’
‘But I don’t know the maths, all the calculating you’ve been doing, comparing your time to Eldarni time.’
‘I’ve tried to account for as many unknowns as I can. I’m embarrassed to admit I don’t know exactly how many minutes there are in an Eldarni day even after I’ve been here this long.’
‘You’ve had a lot on your mind,’ Gilmour excused him. ‘What’s your guess on the Twinmoon?’
Steven used his cloak to dry his sweat, then pulled his tunic on. ‘Based on a starting date of October 15, 1870, and something just over twenty hours in an Eldarni day, which is damned close, I’d call this next Twinmoon, the northern Twinmoon, nine hundred and eighty-five Twinmoons since Higgins opened the account.’
‘So be it,’ Gilmour said. ‘You used your knowledge and your magic together. That’s how the Larion Senate worked. I wanted you to experience this without my coaching. This day, this exercise will make you more powerful, Steven. Now, set the clock.’
The magic began as a faint tingling. To Gilmour, Steven said, ‘Eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty hours in a year. That’s over four hundred and thirty-three days in an Eldarni year, more than seven Twinmoons. How many days until the next one?’
‘I think eleven,’ Gilmour said, ‘eleven – or maybe twelve…’
‘Eleven.’ Steven went back to his murmuring; the orb constellation grew brighter with the burgeoning magic. ‘That’s about fifty days in this Twinmoon so far. Fifty days. And we’re just past the midday aven today.’
As if hearing him, the aven gear rotated halfway around, pivoting on each metal rod in turn. After passing over the fourth, the entire wheel spun around the rod and returned to its position over the first tile, ready to repeat the morning process. ‘Look at that,’ Steven said. ‘I was right.’
‘Yes, you were,’ Gilmour whispered.
At the clock’s centre, magic radiated between the tiles on the floor and the ones in the ceiling, a powerful current of energy. Steven revelled in it, sensing its response even to his most insignificant commands. This was how magic was supposed to feel, not flailing wild gestures or bombastic explosions, but careful, controlled and powerful – the very energy he had used to heal Garec’s lung, and to locate the almor above Sandcliff Palace.
Now he used it to start time in Eldarn. This was precision, accuracy and skill, and coupled with compassion, Steven felt there was nothing he couldn’t do. This is what the spell book had been trying to tell him; this was the power Lessek’s key had used to trip him on his way into the landfill, and this was how he had managed to defeat Nerak in the glen below Meyers’ Vale. The world around him blurred; it was all inconsequential. He was focusing on the right things: the gears, the cogs, and the rotation of the world itself. Looking towards the Moon wheel, he said, ‘Eleven days until the next Twinmoon.’ The gears complied, rotating until eleven cogs remained on the daily wheel and one bigger cog on the Moon wheel: it would rotate the Twinmoon gear once, and Eldarn would be back to marking her own time.
‘In what Twinmoon did Sandcliff fall?’ Steven called.
‘Third Age, third Era, Twinmoon one hundred and sixty-one.’
‘In eleven days, it will be the third Age, third Era and the one thousand, one hundred and forty-sixth Twinmoon of Eldarn.’
Gilmour was silent for a moment, then he surreptitiously wiped his eyes and whispered, ‘It’s been a long time.’
Beneath the clock, Steven sighed and felt the magic strengthen the bond between the tiles, ensuring the Eldarni timepiece would continue spinning along its inexorable path for ever. He said, ‘They were in that pile when we arrived because they had dropped. They landed in a heap and sat there for almost a thousand Twinmoons.’
‘I like to think there was enough magic left in here to know that eventually someone would get time started again; it was hopeful that one day you would show up.’
Steven pursed his lips. ‘Perhaps.’ He paused, then said, ‘Thank you for an excellent workout… and I think I understand much better what you were trying to tell me earlier.’
‘Powerful feeling, isn’t it?’
‘I just wish I knew as much about other things as I know about maths. Look at what I did today.’ He stood back, admiring the clock and wishing Hannah or Mark, even Howard Griffin, could have been there to see it.
‘You know Mark Jenkins pretty well, don’t you?’
Steven blanched. ‘Yes,’ he whispered.
‘Then this may prove useful in another arena too.’
‘You must have been a good teacher, back in your prime.’
Gilmour forced a smile. ‘I think I might have been.’ He followed Steven out through the dusty antechamber and into the street. ‘We should probably push on. With any luck we’ll find a farm between now and nightfall.’
‘I hate to leave this place,’ Steven said, looking around. ‘For once it feels like I’ve done something important, something permanent, and I’d like to be around it for a while.’
‘Ridding Eldarn of Nerak was something important and permanent.’
‘Yes, but this is tangible. I can go in there and look at it – and I earned this one, in countless maths classes, and countless hours studying the nature of numbers. This one was in my blood.’
‘I understand entirely, my friend, but sadly, the stomach must rule the heart. If we want to eat, we need to get going. This was a good learning experience for you, and if we lost a day, well, we still have eight to reach the rendezvous.’
Steven looked embarrassed – he had forgotten. ‘All right, let’s go.’
‘Actually,’ Gilmour said, ‘I want to see the library again, just out of curiosity.’
‘Again? So you’ve been here before?’ Steven followed him across the street.
‘Long before your grandmother’s grandmother was born. One of my former colleagues was in charge of keeping time for the Larion Senate and the Remond family. He was actually more a maths professor than a sorcerer.’ He led the way up cracked stone steps to the library doors, which were still firmly on their hinges, unlike the clock room.
A teacher instead of a magician,’ Steven mused. ‘Mark would have been proud of him.’
‘Mark’s a good teacher, I assume?’
‘I’ve only seen him teach once,’ Steven said, ‘when I was guest-speaking on the Great Depression and its impact on the banking industry, but his students-’
There was a brief rustle and then a loud squeak, wood on wood, from one of the chambers off the main hallway. Holding up a hand for silence, Gilmour pointed to the dusty corridor, where scores of footprints ran the length of the hall and passed in and out of adjoining rooms.
‘What do we do?’ Steven whispered. ‘I don’t think they’re soldiers.’
Gilmour nodded agreement, then whispered, ‘Let’s go.’
The door was shut but not latched. Gilmour looked at Steven, then knocked.
‘Come in,’ called a hesitant voice, surprising them both.
The room looked like it might once have been a reading room, or maybe a chamber for a small collection. There were six rectangular tables, several wooden benches and a smouldering brazier that lent a bit of warmth to the room. There were no tapestries for insulation, but a few threadbare rugs softened the floor. Fourteen people, men, women and a few young adults, no children, were seated around the tables. They were obviously not occupation soldiers. Some had stacks of paper and parchment; others appeared to be reading from crumbling books. A few were gathered around the brazier. They all wore woollen tunics over thick shirts; their shoes and boots were tattered, some worn quite through. Most had heavy cloaks draped over their shoulders, but even these outer garments looked torn, patched and patched again. They all stared, mute with terror, at the two strangers.
Finally an older man with a distinctive roadmap of bulging veins criss-crossing his wrists got up to greet them. He had a pinched nose in a narrow face, and his scraggly beard was flecked with grey. His eyes were sunken. To Steven he looked simultaneously wise and insane.
‘Are you here for the class?’ he asked, his voice cracking. He clasped his hands behind his back to hide their trembling.
‘No,’ Gilmour replied with a reassuring smile. Steven nodded to a few of the others, hoping to put them at ease as well. ‘Who are you?’
The thin man made a faint gesture towards the assembled group. ‘This is my class.’
‘They’re adults,’ Gilmour said.
‘Yes,’ the outlaw professor confessed.
‘That’s good,’ Steven interjected. ‘You’re a teacher?’
‘I am.’
‘You’re teaching adults?’
‘Teachers.’
‘You’re teaching teachers?’ The magic warmed him, bubbling up with Steven’s adrenalin. ‘How many of you are there?’
‘We have one hundred and twelve altogether,’ the professor replied. ‘We mean no harm,’ he pleaded, ‘we just want to be able to instruct-’
‘No,’ Steven interrupted.
The little man gave a reflexive jerk and shrank bank.
‘No, no,’ Steven said quickly, ‘you misunderstand me. I think this is wonderful. It’s a damnable shame that you have to meet here in squalor. That’s what’s wrong.’
A sigh of relief passed through the classroom.
The professor looked around. ‘You’re right, young man, but the neighbouring farms are not always safe. Patrols come through frequently, oftentimes just looking for food, but we cannot risk being discovered so we meet here.’
‘But they must patrol the university as well, surely?’ Gilmour asked.
‘They’re gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘The soldiers are all gone; most rode south towards Orindale a few days ago. Some looked to be heading for Wellham Ridge, but wherever they were bound, there are none left out this far.’
‘That’s impossible,’ Gilmour said.
‘It’s true,’ said a woman near the brazier. ‘I saw them march past my farm. It had to be an entire brigade; they were making for Orindale.’
Steven leaned over one of the tables and was paging through a textbook. ‘How old are these?’
The professor joined him. ‘Nearly a thousand Twinmoons. I keep them in as good condition as I can, but they’re falling to pieces. Time and overuse, there’s nothing I can do.’
‘There are no newer texts?’ Steven asked.
Gilmour said, ‘Everything printed since Prince Marek’s takeover is nothing but-’
‘The party line,’ Steven felt growing anger meld with his magic in a flood of crimson and black. He wanted badly to find and kill Nerak all over again. To the professor he said, ‘I want you to keep going. I don’t want you to worry about the soldiers. I want you to keep teaching. I want you to find more students, more literate adults, and I want you to teach them economics and democracy, parliamentary government and language skills. Can you do that?’
‘Yes, I suppose we can use what little-’
‘Good,’ Steven interrupted again. ‘I want you to find them and teach them, and I want all of you to tell your students – I don’t care if you’re teaching in a barn, a wood or a university classroom – I want you to tell them all that they have to get ready. One more Twinmoon, that’s all it will take.’ His voice was rising, but Steven didn’t care. ‘I want you to tell them that in one Twinmoon Eldarn will be free, and a fair, compassionate, democratic prince will return to Riverend Palace. You need to get ready. Tell them. We’ll need teachers, leaders, economists, business managers and-’ he looked around the sparse, cold room, ‘-at least one mathematician.’
No one moved. Whatever relief they had felt at the discovery that Gilmour and Steven were friendly was dissipating: this was obviously a madman.
Steven went on, still too angry at what these people had suffered to lower his voice, ‘Which one of you is a mathematician?’
A frightened woman near the wall hesitantly raised her hand. ‘I am.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘That clock across the street, it’s working again.’
This news shocked them all. A few of the rag-tag students looked as though they might bolt, dive out the windows.
Steven asked, ‘Can you learn to read it?’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said, beginning to look less worried.
‘Good,’ he said, and then to the entire room, shouted, ‘Tell them to get ready! If you’re teachers, then you understand how important this moment is for Eldarn. One Twinmoon more. Then this world will be in your hands. If you know of outlaw classrooms elsewhere, in Praga or Rona or Gorsk, wherever they are, get word to them. I want it spreading like a prairie fire: Eldarn will be free in one Twinmoon.’
‘Excuse me, sir.’ The little professor with the pinched nose took Steven by the forearm and dropped it as quickly as if he’d been shocked with a bolt of electricity. His eyes widened and he backed a few steps towards the brazier.
‘What is it, professor?’
‘Sir, who are you?’
Steven looked at Gilmour and then grinned. ‘We’re the Larion Senators.’