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…”
“Where are the others?”
“The timelocks are all barred, sir… except this one, of course. Please come with me to the Obscura Hall. You have guests.”
The galleries were deserted, every door jammed by a cross-beam, as Garstone had said. Eight men waited for them in the center of the Obscura Hall. Their leader was much older than Rachel remembered, but she recognized the scar running across his forehead. “Oran.”
“You owe me for what you did,” he snarled.
The other woodsmen leaned on their swords and axes and laughed. Rachel recognized most of them from her time in the Rusty Saw tavern, but she couldn't put names to their faces. They were large and bearded, still wearing the same lacquered wooden armour.
“How did you get back here?”
Sabor interrupted Oran's response. “These are not the men you knew, Miss Hael,” he said. “These people are from another reality.”
Oran snorted. “So said the king's arconites, but it all looks the same to me.” He leered at Rachel. “You cost me a king's ransom. I'd all but delivered that giant of yours into his hands until you did what you did. I've walked a long, long way to find you and earn back his favour. Now that I have you again, we'll see if Menoa wants to reinstate his offer.”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” Rachel said. She had refused to pay this bastard his gold, but that was all. How he could have delivered Dill to Menoa was beyond her.
“They said you wouldn't remember. You'll be coming with us up to the temple now. The king wants to meet you after all these years.”
Hasp growled. “Yes, we're going there, but not with you. Stand aside, woodsman, or I'll take that sword and sheathe it in your arse.”
Dill smiled faintly and strolled out from behind the god.
Oran shot an uneasy glance at Garstone.
“You won't harm anyone until we tell you to,” Sabor's assistant remarked. “You'll keep that mouth shut until we reach Ayen's temple.”
Hasp cried out in pain and clutched his head.
Sabor wheeled on his assistant. “You're th
e shape-shifter,” he said.
“No, sir,” Garstone replied. “I am just as human as always. But, like my brother here, I have sworn myself to the Mesmerist cause. The parasite recognizes the scent of Hell on us.”
Oran barked a laugh. “And it actually works,” he said. “Go on, Hasp. Kneel before your betters.” When the god did not respond, he yelled, “Bend the knee!”
The Lord of the First Citadel snarled, struggling to resist Menoa's parasite, but then he collapsed on his knees and let out a terrible wail.
Dill moved forward, but Rachel held up a hand to stop him. They exchanged a glance, during which she gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Wait until we reach, the temple.
Garstone warned his brother, “Be more specific, Oran. Hasp doesn't recognize you as his better. He would never have followed that first instruction.”
The woodsman grunted. “We'll try this, then,” he said. “Take the assassin's sword. Kill her if she resists.”
Hasp groped for Rachel.
“No!” Garstone cried. “Take the sword, but do not kill her. Do not kill anyone until the Lord of the Maze commands it.” He scratched his head. “But please do kill Sabor if he tries to fly away.” Then he nodded. “Yes, that about covers it.”
Rachel had felt disinclined to resist anyway. She let Hasp snatch away her sword.
Garstone breathed a sigh of relief. “Do not toy with him, Oran,” he said. “King Menoa specifically asked us to deliver them alive.”
“When did you turn against me?” Sabor asked.
“A long time from now, sir.”
“Just you? Or all of you?”
The little man smiled. “More of me every day, sir. I am busy recruiting even as we speak.”
“Then some are still loyal?”
“It's hard to believe I was once so naive, sir.”
Surrounded by woodsmen, the small party left the castle and set off up the mountain, under the soft luminance of the aurora in the skies. A steep trail zigzagged up the fractured black rock, and the worn steps suggested to Rachel that the temple had been here much longer than she had previously imagined. Had it always been a temple dedicated to Ayen? Had the door to her domain always remained open during that time?
She found the idea both terrifying and exhilarating, for the world of man had not yet been severed from the realm of Heaven. Would good souls be allowed to pass through that door? Curtains of light shimmered over the black peaks, hinting at a greater world beyond this one.
“It's the aftermath of the War Against Heaven,” Mina said. “Burning skies, rising seas… Sabor and his brothers have just been expelled from Ayen's realm. Their original selves are out there somewhere right now.”
“Shouldn't that Sabor be in his castle?”
“I was,” said the god of clocks. “And these turncoats weren't. None of this happened in my universe.”
“So the Mesmerists have changed them all?”
He nodded. “Countless futures stem from this moment in Time—and all of them are now bad, I fear. Our original timeline has now been overwhelmed by the morass of Menoa's bastard universes. When the Lord of the Maze kills himself, he'll go to Hell, but he'll leave his Mesmerists in control of my castle. They'll have access to all of Time, while this doomed continuum continues to exist.”
As the sun beat down upon them, Oran's men swore and complained. Sabor opened his wings as if to bathe his feathers in the warmth. Rachel's own reflection peered back at her from the black glass rock below her. She recalled similar geology in the dark abyss beneath Deepgate, so long ago: herself and Dill staring at themselves as though they were the only two people left in the world. Would that chained city ever come to exist now? Would Rachel herself ever be born? Or Carnival? Or Dill?
Dill's ghost walked up the mountain path beside her, dead three thousand years before his birth: an event that might now never happen. He caught her eye and smiled.
Below them spread the lands of Herica and Pandemeria, their green hills and plains interspersed with silver lakes, but no settlements, no roads, nothing to suggest that man had ever been here.
They crested a rise and came at last to the summit of the mountain. And here stood Ayen's temple.
It was a rather unimpressive grey stone cairn, barely larger than a worker's hovel. Twin columns of rough-hewn granite flanked a small, dark doorway. Piled-up stones formed the roof.
“This is it?” Mina said. “All the gods and their armies, the ancient technology… it's all spawned from this?”
“Why would Ayen choose to draw attention to the place?” Sabor explained. “A grander structure might have been seen from afar.”
Hasp glared at that dark portal with terror in his eyes. He clenched the sword in his fist so tightly that Rachel feared he would crush his own glass gauntlet. He seemed to try to speak through his clenched jaw, but then simply gave a low moan.
“Inside, please.” Garstone indicated the doorway.
They ducked inside a small, roughly conical chamber formed of dry stones. Another exit occupied the opposite wall, this one barred by an ill-fitting door made of loose planks, and rope cord binding the whole flimsy thing together. Daylight shone through the gaps in the boards.
Beside the door waited Alteus Menoa.
He was extraordinarily handsome, with amber eyes and silvery-grey hair hanging loose over his shoulders. A fine jaw tapered neatly underneath high cheekbones. He was barefoot but otherwise dressed, in a shirt and plain white linen breeches. He smiled with broad, soft lips.
Mina exchanged a glance with Rachel. Basilis curled around her foot and growled. Dill's body seemed to darken, but his eyes remained calm.
“One of you will kill me shortly,” Menoa said, “but I'll bear whoever does it no grudge. Tell me, Sabor, how many times has this moment happened?”
“You asked me the same question last time,” Sabor said.
“Forgive me if I'm a bore. Do you always reply?”
“This is the second time that I'm aware of, Alteus.”
“But this time is different, isn't it? I have allies here. Men from my own future.”
“From many futures.”
“Then ultimately all the gods fail?” His gaze fixed on Hasp for a long moment, before returning to Sabor. “Will you tell me—?”
“They're dead, Alteus. Your half brothers, Rys, Hafe, Mirith, Ulcis, and Cospinol, all dead.”
Menoa nodded. “I see. How dreary for you to have to keep explaining it all to me. These temporally removed agents of mine have proved enlightening, but they lack any real depth of knowledge.” His gaze returned to Hasp, who was standing directly behind the god of clocks. “Kill Sabor,” he said.
“Wait!” Sabor threw up his hands.
Hasp cried out in protest, but his sword swept upwards in one stroke with enormous strength behind it.
Dill leapt suddenly at Hasp, but his ghostly body passed straight through the Lord of the First Citadel without resistance. Bewildered, he wheeled back round just as Hasp's blade tore through Sabor's mail and into the flesh of his back.
The god of clocks started forward, as though he had been punched, his mail shirt hanging in bloody ribbons from his back. Pale-faced, he half turned towards his glass-skinned brother. Nobody moved. Even the traitor Garstone wore a look of shock.
Hasp next thrust the weapon into Sabor's neck.
The god of clocks fell.
Hasp was breathing hard, his broad chest rising and falling rapidly. His red eyes stared wildly out of his dirt-streaked face.
Menoa said, “Now kill the thaumaturge.”
Rachel had been waiting for this moment for three thousand years. She focused.
The world around her slowed until even the light seemed to hesitate, pushing in vain against the motes of dust trapped in its rays. Her heart and lungs stopped. She saw Mina's brows rise a fraction, Hasp's feverish gaze swinging towards the thaumaturge. The hairs on Basilis's back moved slowly erect, even as his jaws twisted into a g
rowl.
How to move Mina out of danger without breaking that glassy skin of hers?
Rachel considered Hasp. She could shatter his armour in an instant, trading the god's life for that of her friend. Or she could risk Mina while trying to save both of them…
A sliver of drool began to drip from Basilis's jaws. Could the Penny Devil act in time to save his mistress? Rachel didn't know the answer, and she didn't understand thaumaturgy enough to rely on it.
Hasp was slowly raising his sword.
Better to disarm him first and buy the others some time. Let Mina meanwhile conjure another one of her ghastly forests. Or Dill…?
Why had he not been able to possess Hasp?
Because Hasp was a god? Because he had already consumed so many souls during his long life? Or did his Mesmerist armour simply protect him from incorporeal attack? Rachel didn't know, but she couldn't count on her friend.
She walked forward and pressed the palms of her hands against the flat of the blade, steering it, pushing it gently sideways out of his fist. His grip was ferocious. Too much force and she would break his fingers.
She took her time.
Near the top of Hasp's swing, she managed to pry the sword free. The hilt moved outwards from his palm, and hung for a moment in the air.
Now Mina.
Basilis had coiled himself to pounce, and Mina was only now starting to flinch away from the anticipated blow. Hasp himself had yet to notice that his sword had left his fist.
Rachel turned and pushed Mina backwards, applying as much force as she dared. At normal speed, she hoped it would represent little more than a hard shove.
She turned back to Hasp.
His arm was still rising. The sword had begun to turn in the air. Rachel took the weapon firmly by its hilt and eased it back towards her, careful not to move so quickly as to break her own bones. She steered the blade past Mina's ear, turning it, and brought the edge of the blade across Oran's neck. The woodsman's carotid artery parted. Blood would flow in just moments.
But Rachel had another destination in mind for the sword. She had so little time available while focused that she couldn't afford to wait. She wrapped both hands around the weapon's hilt, now steering it past Menoa himself, and then clove it down through the thin wooden door beside him. The rope and planks gave way without any resistance. Pieces of the door began to slide to the ground.