Sometimes, little snippets of memories would swim up from the murky depths of his mind, fuzzy kirliotypes of past that he thought he’d forgotten. They were never did more than border on the significant. He remembered the Dragon Isles campaign, but the memories that floated up were images of learning to use the bolt-action on his rifle, or Fletcher sitting in the front of the boat, smoking a cigar. Beckett saw images from his childhood, too-the day his father patched a pair of Beckett’s boots. Some Armistice from decades ago, when he walked to school carrying a weathered little primer that had been used by generations of students before him. Listening to a record in his office at Raithower House.
None of these memories meant anything, as far as Beckett could ascertain. They just flickered through his head, as though some trapdoor had been carelessly left open to emit a deluge of trivial incidence. Or as though, now that Beckett was at the end of his life, his granite-hard personality was slowly coming undone. The long years of building filters to sort the meaningful from the irrelevant were unspooling, the filters were breaking down, one day he’d be drowned in a flood of his own pointless experiences.
Not for the first time, Beckett considered an early leave from the mess. The spectre of an old age dominated by senility and physical anguish was not appealing. Nor was the prospect of a retirement spent drugged into oblivion, letting the fades gobble him up inch by unrelenting inch while he let his mind drift among hallucinogenic fantasies of black water and brass cities. Surely there was no shame in punctuating a life such as his-one with accomplishments that any reasonable human being could be proud of, one in which a difference was made, however small-with a clean and honorable exit, to forgo the inevitable humiliation of decrepitude?
A gentle chill crept into his body, and he could not feel himself shiver. His vision began to slowly contract, the plaster details of the ceiling blurred. Beckett blinked something from his eye and turned his head. His red scarf hung over the sill of the window, which was buttoned up tightly against the raw spring air. For a moment, Beckett was seized with a desire to snatch the scarf up and rip it to pieces, or toss it into the fire.
The moment passed. Beckett got up instead, glimpsed briefly at himself in the small mirror above his vanity. Dressed in his shabby smallclothes, body gruesomely marred by the fades, he looked like a man with one foot in the grave. Which Beckett supposed he must be. He dressed in his charcoal-colored suit, wrapped his red scarf around his mouth and nose, and decided it was not too early to go to work, after all.
Because of Trowth’s notoriously inclement weather, its rapid fluctuations in temperature, and its perpetually salty air, it was practically impossible for any large machine to function with any kind of reliability. Discrepancies in function were often small, but could be compounded in an engine that was required to run all the time. Nowhere was this more apparent than the clocks of Trowth.
With every passing second, the massive brass machines sitting atop office buildings and churches and bourses grew ever more slightly away from synchrony. A small army of mechanics, employed by the Committee on Chronography, a sub-division of the Ministry of Civic Well-Being, worked tirelessly throughout the week in order to keep them running smoothly, efficiently, and, most importantly, accurately-but their task was ultimately futile. There were simply too many clocks, and the differences in time were often close to imperceptible.
This was all further compounded by the fact that, according to royal decree, the clock at the top of Vie Abbey should be the clock from which all others took their measurements. The clock at Vie Abbey was primarily an astronomical clock, seated beneath a vast astrolabe. It was very well able to mark the changing of the seasons, the orbits of sun and moon, and the passage of the planets-but it was not accurate for ordinary, civil time beyond an hour. There were no minute or second hands on the clock at Vie Abbey. So the army of mechanics who tuned the clocks, and who lost time as they traveled from church to office to market, were forced to make their best guesses as to precisely what time it was.
All of this yielded a strange wave of clock chimes throughout the city. The four-o’clock-hour, which is the hour that found Beckett on his way back to Raithower House, began with the heavy bronze thunder at Vie Abbey. Shortly after it began, the clocks nearby, with their orchestra of bells, took up the tolling, and passed it along to those clocks that were nearest to them, and so forth. The entire process, including the strange pockets of early chiming, the clocks that were hopelessly delayed, and the clocks that seemed to be under the misapprehension that it was actually eight o’clock in the evening, took well over twenty minutes, even for as modest an hour as four o’clock. During Second Winter, when the clock-tuners were much less able to effectively tend to their charges, the noon bells were sometimes known to toll for the entire hour until they began again at one.
Beckett reached Old Bank just as that neighborhood’s venerable clocks began to take up the clanging of the hour. He passed without delay through one of the many checkpoints he’d insisted on; local gendarmes, accompanied by a therian sniffer, searched passers-by for explosives on the chance that Anonymous John might take it into his mind that he should attempt some kind of reprisal. The therians, peculiarly, were unusually sensitive to the presence of the oneiric regeants used in heretical munitions. They were employed much the same way dogs were-a fact that Beckett found more than a little disgusting, but he was willing to accept it if it meant putting a stop to the attacks.
Old Bank was replete with such checkpoints, all the way into the tangled Arcadium beneath it, and it was beyond consideration that anyone might attack Raithower House with an oneiric weapon. Beckett remained fairly comfortable, then, as he walked towards the Raithower courtyard. A tall, rangy-man in a long dark coat preceded him to the gates-another early-riser, perhaps. Beckett called out to him, but his voice was drowned out by Old Bank’s clocks. The noisiest of these clocks, which had just begun to toll at Beckett’s arrival, was called Goursehead Clock; it rang four brass clangs, of varying pitch and tone, for every one great iron bong that tolled the hour.
The man entered Raithower House. Shortly thereafter, the building exploded.
The sound and force of the blast were muffled by the old stone walls of Raithower House itself, so the wave of pressure and heat presented Beckett with only a moment of pain and confusion. It gave way to the old coroner furiously berating himself as he saw blue-white light boil out of the windows, and turn almost immediately to the red and orange of burning wood.
Fifty men looking for oneiric munitions, Beckett thought, And not one checking for regular, old-fashioned phlogiston bombs. The wave of chiming clocks passed by, to the sound of men shouting for help, the crackling roar of the fire, and the jangling clatter of the fire brigades.
Twenty-Six
Word of the fire spread quickly-so quickly that a throng of citizens had arrived to support the fire brigades before the five o’clock bells began to ring. The citizenry, ever since the devastation of Mudside during the Sharpsie Riots, was extremely sensitive to the possibility of widespread fire. Fortunately, the rain made that unlikely, but the explosion had caused Raithower house and the adjoining property to collapse, and spare hands were needed to clear away the rubble. The bulk of Raithower House actually extended well below the street line and into the Arcadium, and probably remained largely intact-it’s neighboring edifice was not quite so lucky. That house had the misfortune of being built on top of another, smaller house, which too had collapsed from the shock of the explosion, leaving a gaping pit into the city’s underside. Stone and brass slid like an avalanche into the hole, but Trowth had seen enough of misery and destruction these last few years, and if there was anyone trapped in there, the people were determined to effect a rescue.