Was it really possible thatIcould do that with such ease, too?
“Careful, though—it took almost a full minute out of my Clock,” Erith was saying—but what did we care right now when we had plenty to spare?
Shivers rushed down my spine as I resisted the curiosity to sit down and try just to see what happened.Later.I would do that later.
For now, I continued toward the edge of the clearing, eyes wide open for a clockbeast carcass that wasn’t too badly cut or bleeding. The sight of all that blood was getting harder and harder to ignore, and every time Inoticedhow thick and dark and slimy it was, I got those flashes again—of myself covered in it. Of teeth snapping in front of my face.
The others had all decided to stay together, it seemed. March was there, too, on the other side, his spear stuck in the soil, standing upright like a miniature tower. He’d gotten one of the lanterns from the branches and had hung it at the very tip instead of trying to magic light with his hands.
That was exactly what I did as well.
It was easier than I thought to climb a tree. The branches were low and thick, and there were plenty of holes on the bark for my feet. With the lantern that burned with a smokeless fire in my hand, I was able to find the least mutilated carcass of a clockbeast in a minute, and the clock on the side of its head wasn’t too damaged, either. I grabbed it by the back legs and dragged it under the canopy—something about being in that clearing under the open sky. The canopy would protect me if something were to fall on us all of a sudden.
This was a game, after all.
A game full of blood and clockbeasts carcasses, that is, but I wasn’t going to allow myself to think at all. I could look at this as if it were an object, nothing else. A clock in need of fixing.Easy,just like the queen said.
Time’s Teeth, keeping myself from wanting to throw up as I analyzed the carcass was much harder than I expected, but I managed. With the chatter of the other Hands in the back of my mind, I analyzed the clockbeast—the short patchy fur the color of the soil underneath us, the pointy ears, half of one missing where the Timekeeper Clock as big as the palm of my hand had been inserted on the side of its head. I couldn’t tell what kind of an animal it had been before, but now it looked like some kind of a twisted dog with a long muzzle, sharp, crooked teeth, and a gray underbelly that looked to have been made out of rubber, not skin. It was big, too, its legs long, just like its neck. If I had to guess, I’d say it came up to my arm at the shoulders—andthatwas terrifying on its own.
But I believed what Reggie said—they wouldn’t attack us, not once we fixed them up. Their clocks held their lives, and once those were fixed, the wounds on their bodies would heal. Then they’d run back to where they came from—just like the sound had indicated earlier. It had beentheirs,the sound of footfalls, or an echo of the original, I thought. And just like it, these clockbeasts would run as soon as they were alive again.
I hung the lantern on the closest branch, and put the head of the clockbeast on a raised root where I could see the clock better—don’t throw up, don’t throw up, don’t throw up—when…
“Hey! Hey, Spade!”
I turned.
Reggie was waving at me with both hands.
“What in Time’s Trousers are you doing there all by yourself?!”
The others watched me, too. Not all but some.
The look in my eyes would be enough answer for him, I hoped. It clearly said,don’t talk to me again.
The glass of the clock on the clockbeast was broken, the hands and the side of the clock’s face dented in. It took me a moment to open the case and look inside.
The mainspring was wound tight like the thing had been holding its breath for all of time. With my loupe in front of my eye, I cleared the debris with a tiny brush, then released the tension on the spring. The gears trembled—a good sign. The pouch didn’t give us extra parts, though.
Even so, I adjusted the balance wheel—just a nudge—and straightened out the hands with my fingers as well as I could, then cleaned up the parts some more until I knew for sure what was missing: a tiny gear-pin that must have been broken. Without it, no clock could move through time.
“Fuck,” I said to the forest.
My heartbeat sped instantly and I had to force air down my throat to slow it back down.
The way things were looking, I had two options here—either go find another carcass with a less broken clock, or take this opportunity to try out my luck with magic.
Since I’d rather doanythingthan have to drag another carcass all the way here, the choice was easy.
I pulled out my own Life Clock, six-hours convinced that I was wasting time. It wasn’t going to work. Magic and I didn’t get along well, never had, and that was okay.
Still, it was worth a try.
A completion spell is what I needed. I knew the theory behind it, knew it was meant to replace and create any broken or damaged object in a clock’s gear. We’d learned about it in Clockmaking, and the trick was, our teacher said, that you had to knowexactlywhat you wanted the magic to make. It could not create blindly.
I was about to find out for the first time exactly what that felt like.
Spades were rarely clockmakers, but there were plenty of them back home. Our magic tied endings, loved balance, so itcouldwork well in clockmaking. It could end a ruined cycle just like it could end any magic gone wrong, or close loops. For all we knew, the original Spade sentinel had been Time’s accountant himself, indeed.
