I was marched by the crook of my arm, following Conel and the girl, along twisting and shadowy corridors, until we came to a passageway terminating in a mysterious archway. Through the archway was only a thick and ominous darkness. With a mean twist of my upper arm my captor goaded me forwards until, with a clumsy shove, I was pushed staggering through the archway into the blackness beyond!
I stopped, awkwardly still for a moment, in silence and in terror, my breath quick, my heart rolling against my ribs. All around me darker shadows seemed to loom and totter like giants concealing themselves in inky cloaks, pressing in on me, only to retreat just as they threatened to crush me.
“Wha- What?” I stammered, my hands groping hesitantly before me. “What work is here?”
The giant shadows focussed into objects reassuringly inanimate as a dim glow fell from above to illuminate the chamber. The light, which to my surprise was cast from the electrical filaments of a grand chandelier, flickered brighter as my mind struggled to take in the contents of the chamber, revealed now to be filled not with menacing giants but with the towering workings of the most wondrous mechanism I had ever seen!
The room, which had once been a high-galleried ballroom, was almost in its entirety, above head level at least, packed with the intricate and complicated brass and steel workings of a gigantic clock! Fixed around the chandelier and cut into the once fine balustrades of the galleries, a mighty metal cage held a thousand golden cogs, some as large as cartwheels, others smaller than my eyes could see. Amidst the wheels hung two great balances, like the yokes of some prehistoric creature, inlaid with fantastic jewels, the like of which would not have seemed out of place in the crown of the whole world’s emperor! The mainspring, a vast serpentine coil of dark inch-thick steel, hung behind this all, utilising the entire far wall of the ballroom to hold its ratchet-wheeled barrel. Without and within all this ladders and gangways ran like scaffolds to allow the great clock’s worker to scamper hickory dickory dock into the huge workings, to fiddle and adjust as necessary.
All hung in silence. Stopped. Although I had no doubt that, at the twist of a single handle, the whole marvel could be set turning and ticking with perfect regularity. But what ever task of time-keeping could need such a monstrous engine?
In the very centre of the chamber, beneath the glowing chandelier and interconnected to the clock by a column-like working of fine springs and cogs, the function of which I could not then discern, was an extraordinary globular jewel. I had never seen its like and, in comparison those others, which I had just now thought wondrous, paled in to an insignificance like dust discarded from a diamond mine.
This jewel, a sapphire pearl held in a delicately filigreed cage of gold, was the size of a goose egg, though a perfect orb in shape. Its surface seemed to swirl with wispy coils and from within a pale glow sparkled alluringly. I almost believed I could see workings form and evaporate as quickly there in that jewel, tiny wheels and balances turning into puffs of smoke to diffuse across its lustrous surface. Was it just the way the light refracted through the thing? Just the workings of the massive clock reflected on it? What was that? No. Could it be? There!
I felt my hand inexplicably drawn to the jewel’s surface and reached out my fingers to touch its milky translucency.
“Neg!” Croaked Conel. He must have been wheeled into the chamber while I had stumbled slack-jawed and agoggle towards that beguiling jewel.
I withdrew my fingers from it as if burned.
“Not now, Mazvell. We do not have much time.”
“But what is it?”
“This,” he said, “is my Everything Clock. And that,” indicating the wonderful jewel, “is the Eye of Time!”
“And what is it for?”
“The clock’s name is misleading. It has but one function and that is to wind and set The Eye.”
“And The –“
“We really do not have time for these questions, Mazvell. You do not need to understand it now. Although, with my direction, you must make the final adjustments to the mechanism.”
“Give me a fortnight - a week perhaps,” I stammered, my eyes surveying the vast mechanism surrounding me. “You always said I was a quick learner.”
Conel raised a brass plate on the lower cage of his Everything Clock and squinted at the glazed dial beneath. He tapped a fingernail against it three times.
“We have exactly four hours, 23 minutes and 16 seconds.”