THE CLOCKWORK CANYON

They were not after me. That was the first thing I understood.

There were twelve of them, in gray cloaks and cowled hoods, with the Senate's pale seal stitched at the shoulder: a survey party, I judged, of the sort the Republic sent into the Mistlands every decade to measure the mists and take rubbings of the old carvings. They walked in a tight column, a lantern at the head and a lantern at the tail, with a man in the middle bearing a long brass instrument on a staff. They had no notion of the Wraiths. They came marching into the gully at a steady, careful pace, with their eyes on the ground.

The Wraiths turned.

I have never seen anything move so quickly. Twenty-six pale shapes poured across the gully in a single motion, sleeves flowing, faces whirling, silent as falling snow. The nearest of the surveyors looked up with an expression of puzzled annoyance. Then a wraith's trailing sleeve brushed his face, and the annoyance went out of it like a blown candle, and he sat down in the dirt and began to cry.

The column dissolved. Men screamed. Lanterns fell and rolled. I saw a spark of Silver magic flare among them, a brief white streak, and vanish.

"Now," said the Shade.

I did not wait to be told twice. I slung my pack, grabbed Nimbus, and ran north along the lip of the gully, bent low, keeping to the rocks. Behind me the screaming rose and fell. I did not look back. I told myself that they were Senate men, that they were looking for the Relic, that they would have taken it, and me, without a flicker of conscience. I told myself a number of things.

I did not entirely believe them. But I ran.

…

We had a day's march ahead, and a canyon at the end of it.

The Shade had given me the route. A trail ran north from the gully through a region of low rubbly hills, over a pass, down a dry watercourse and into a long cleft in the land, a canyon the Doctrine called the Clockwork. It had been, he said, the Founders' last defense. When the Founders had retreated to the Mistlands, in the early days of the Republic, they had fortified the approach to the Relic Chamber with a gauntlet of their own devising: a thousand yards of machinery, built into the very walls of the canyon, designed to kill anyone who walked it uninvited.

It was still working. That was the incredible thing. After three hundred years, in the dry cold air of the mists, it was still working.

I came to the head of the canyon at dusk, and stopped, and stared.

It was a slot in the earth, perhaps forty feet wide, cut by some primeval river and then improved by human hands. The walls were sheer, black, sixty feet high. And they were alive. Great gears turned slowly in recesses in the stone, each the size of a cartwheel, meshing, grinding, with a deep ratcheting rumble that I felt in my boots. Pistons rose and fell. Chains hung in loops and drew taut. Brass pipes ran up the walls in thick parallel bundles, and from them, at regular intervals, steam hissed in white jets.

A sign had been carved at the entrance, in the old Founders' script. I knelt and read it.

Walk with care, you who come uninvited. The Fort remembers.

"Charming," said the Shade.

"It's a bit theatrical."

"The Founders were a theatrical people." He moved forward, drifting, to the very edge of the canyon, and looked down the long throat of it with an air of reluctant respect. "I have never seen it work. I had heard that it was dead."

"What happens if I walk straight in?"

"You will die in about eleven seconds."

"And if I walk carefully?"

"You will die in about forty."

"Reassuring."

"I am glad you find it so."

…

I spent an hour at the mouth of the canyon, watching.

I like to see a machine work before I trust it. I lay flat on a ledge with a pair of Hawk's old field-glasses and watched the Clockwork turn, and I counted, and I timed, and I drew diagrams in my notebook by the last of the light. Nimbus lay beside me with his chin on his paws. The Shade stood behind my shoulder and said nothing, which I had come to recognize as a form of encouragement.

By the time the stars came out I had it.

It was not random. Nothing built by clever people ever is. The Clockwork operated in cycles, a master cycle of two hundred and twelve beats, with a dozen sub-cycles layered over it. Each trap had its rhythm. The saw-blades swung out of the walls every nineteen beats. The fire-jets flared every thirty-one. The floor-plates fell away in a rolling sequence, six at a time. The crushing walls, a pair of enormous stone slabs that sprang together like a clap of hands, closed once per cycle, at a fixed point near the middle.

If one could learn the pattern, one could dance through it.

I closed the notebook. I looked at the Shade.

"It's a fugue," I said.

"A what?"

"A musical form. A theme introduced in one voice, then repeated in another, then another, each one offset from the last. It's a kind of canon." I was already writing again. "I studied music at the Academy for a year. I thought it was useless. The Founders wrote the Clockwork like a piece for five instruments, and if I can hear the score, I can walk it."

"I should like to point out that this is insane."

"Noted."

"Also that it is rather brilliant."

"I will take that into account."

…

I walked the Clockwork at dawn, in the cold, with the sun just touching the rim.

I began with a hundred yards of easy ground. The first blades swung from the wall at nineteen beats: a pair of long curved scythes, mounted on rods, sweeping across the full width of the canyon at knee height. I counted nineteen, and leapt. I felt the wind of them pass beneath my boots. I landed, and counted again, and ran.

Nimbus flew ahead, a small white arrow against the black walls. He had been appointed scout. He did not take well to it, but he took to it with great competence. Every thirty paces he wheeled in the air, and I felt his small bright thought arrive: "Fire at forty-one. The floor falls at ninety. Do not look down."

I did not look down.

The fire-jets gave me trouble. There was a stretch of canyon floor, perhaps eighty yards long, where the walls spat gouts of flame from both sides in an alternating rhythm. I danced it. I felt the heat of each one on my face, on my chest, on my hair. The Cinder in my blood burned in my fingertips and let me walk through the edges of the flames without blistering. At the end I came out with my eyebrows singed and my heart pounding.

I laughed. I couldn't help it. It was exhilarating.

"Concentrate," said the Shade.

The floor-plates came next. I walked across them in the cold blue light, counting, my arms out for balance, with a hundred feet of nothing yawning beneath me when each one tipped. I heard the machinery grind and clank beneath my boots. I found a rhythm, a long lilting syncopation, and I rode it, step and step and leap.

And then, a quarter of a mile in, I made a mistake.

…

It was a small one. I miscounted by a single beat.

I had come to the great saw: a vast wheel of blades, thirty feet across, spinning in a recess in the right-hand wall. It turned on a slow cycle, and at the seventh beat it swung out, across the path, with a screech that set the teeth on edge. I had timed it. I was certain. I leapt on the sixth beat, to clear it, and the wheel swung early.

I saw the blades coming. I saw each tooth. They were the length of my hand, and bright as mirrors, and the whole wheel, hissing, was bearing down at the level of my waist.

I had perhaps half a second.

I could have used the Cinder. I could have burned the mechanism, in a wave, and ended it. I thought of it, and discarded it. The Clockwork was not a spell. It was iron and brass and steam, and Cinder eats structure of the arcane kind, not the mechanical. It would have taken a minute to burn through a single gear. I did not have a minute.

I could have called for help.

The Shade stood on a ledge forty feet away, in plain sight. He had seen it. He had seen the whole thing. His pale eyes were fixed on the blades. His hand had half risen. For an instant he seemed to lean forward, as though he meant to cross the space between us. His lips parted.

He did not move.

I promised, said his face. I promised, and I will keep it, even if it kills me.

I went down.

It was not elegant. I threw myself flat on the stones, and the saw-wheel went over me with a scream, a sheet of white light, a gust of air. I felt a tug at my hair. I felt a hot line across my shoulder, and a sudden wetness. Then it had passed, and I lay there with my cheek on the cold iron, panting, and the wheel was swinging back.

I rolled. I came up on my knees. I got my back against the wall, and when the wheel swung out a second time I was no longer in its path.

I counted. Seven. Nineteen. Thirty-one. I understood.

The wheel was not on the same cycle as the others. It was on half a cycle. It swung early every other time. A trick; a fugue within a fugue. I had heard the score, but I had misread the voice.

I got up. I checked my shoulder. It was a shallow cut, long and clean, bleeding steadily. I bound it with a strip of cloth torn from my sleeve. I looked up.

The Shade was still standing on the ledge, perfectly still. His hand had dropped.

"Don't," I said.

"I did not."

"I know."

"I wanted to." His voice was rough. "I want it to be known that I wanted to."

"It's known." I tightened the knot with my teeth. "I would have been angry."

"I know that too."

"Well, then." I straightened. "We're both disciplined. Shall we continue?"

He looked at me for some time. And then he inclined his head, very slightly, in something that was almost a bow.

…

It took the rest of the day.

I will spare you the details. There were the saws and the flames and the falling floors. There was a stretch of narrow causeway, a hundred yards long, over a pit of whirling spikes. There was a chamber where the walls closed in, as I had been warned, the great slabs of black stone clapping together with a boom that shook dust from the ceiling. I timed it. I dashed through the gap with a quarter of a second to spare, and the slabs closed behind me so close that my coat was caught and torn.

By the time I stumbled out of the far end of the canyon, the sun was low and orange, and I was covered with soot and blood and sweat. I was shaking. I had a long cut across my shoulder and a dozen small burns. My hands were raw. Nimbus landed on my head and sat there, panting, in a state of outraged triumph.

I sank down onto the rock. I looked back.

The Clockwork Canyon rumbled in the dusk, grinding on, untouched.

The Shade joined me, gliding across the stone. For a long moment he did not speak. When he did, his voice was quite different from any I had heard from him.

"Tamsin," he said.

"Mm."

"That was very well done."

I looked up at him. His face was in shadow. I could not read it.

"You nearly broke your promise."

"I did not."

"You wanted to."

"I did." A pause. "I find, to my considerable surprise, that I should have regretted it. Not for the promise's sake. For yours."

I looked at the canyon.

I thought about it for a while. About the saw-wheel and the shadow on the ledge. About a hand half-raised and a mouth that did not speak. It was an odd thing to realize that a person could be moved by a refusal. That the silence of a man who loves you can be louder than any rescue.

I realized, with a small shock, that I trusted him.

Not as a friend. Not as anything so warm. I trusted him the way one trusts a law of physics: with complete certainty that he would do exactly what he said, and nothing more. In a world of liars and flatterers and soft-spoken thieves, it was the most solid thing I had ever leaned on.

I did not say so. I merely nodded, and rose, and slung my pack.

"Come on," I said. "We're nearly there."

…

We came to the Relic Chamber at nightfall.

It lay at the far end of a short stone corridor, at the foot of a flight of broad steps, and it was lit. That was what alarmed me. In three hundred years of dark, there was a light in the Relic Chamber: a clear, steady, golden light, shining through the half-open door. And on the steps, in the doorway, in the shadows on either side, there stood five figures.

They were motionless. They wore the long dark coats of travelers, and the hoods were drawn up. They had come from five directions, and they had been waiting.

On the breast of each coat, caught in the gold light, a small silver emblem gleamed: a slim blade, point down, with a crown.

I knew it. I'd seen it in the last life, on a stranger in the Menagerie's undercroft, on the night before I died.

"The Gilded Knives," said the Shade, softly.