‘In there?’ Steven was sceptical.
‘Come on,’ Gilmour said, ‘or wait here. This doesn’t really concern you.’
‘Oh, really? You meeting some woman? Because if you are, I can wait in the car. Or give me a couple of bucks, and I’ll take in a movie down the street.’
‘Trust me.’ Gilmour ducked through the broken frame. The empty room was a hall of sorts, with several doors off it leading to unseen rear chambers and, Steven guessed, stairs to the upper floors. There was no furniture; it, along with most of the floorboards and panelling, had been stripped, probably stolen by intrepid builders from nearby farms. A thick layer of dust moved in the air, disturbed by their arrival.
‘Lovely place you’ve got here.’
‘Like it? I call it Minimalist Grime.’
‘If I run into any homicidal maniacs looking for a quiet summer hideaway I’ll send them to you.’
Gilmour reached the rear wall and tried one of the doors. ‘This one’s latched inside.’ He moved to the next; that was blocked as well. ‘Curse it all,’ he said, ‘I hate to do this.’
‘What? Force the door? Stop joking, Gilmour, just blast the thing off its hinges and let’s get going. Just try not to knock down the whole building.’
Gilmour stepped back and whispered a brief spell; the door collapsed into a pile of kindling. A tremendous cloud of choking dust arose, momentarily blinding them both.
Coughing, doubled over, Steven said, ‘Oh yes, great idea – that’s much better!’ He pushed past Gilmour into the darkness beyond the ruined doorway, saying, ‘Better let me go first – who knows what might be waiting for us now that we’ve rung the bell?’ Two steps in and he disappeared into the dark.
‘I’ll get some lights on,’ he said after a bit and reached above his head. A pleasant glow filled the chamber, a room larger than the entryway, with a high ceiling and a polished stone floor. ‘It’s a damned cavern,’ Stephen said. ‘This one room must take up most of the building.’
‘I thought you might find it interesting,’ Gilmour replied.
Without speaking, Steven waved his open hands towards the ceiling, still invisible in the shadows above, and with each gesture, a fireball, glowing with a warm, bright light, leaped from his palm and floated off to brighten another corner of the massive chamber. There were several bulky, irregularly shaped structures arranged in a desultory pattern on the floor. ‘What the hell?’ he whispered, brightening the orbs with a nod. ‘Gilmour, what is it?’
‘This? I’m not sure; it looks like a pile of wreckage, probably dumped in here when they closed the school. What I need used to be stored along that rear corridor. Wait just a moment; I’ll be right back.’ He crossed to an antechamber behind the debris and slipped quietly inside.
Gilmour closed the door, cast a small flame toward the ceiling, and examined the gloomy storage closet. As expected, it was empty. He sat on the dusty floor, lit his pipe, and waited.
Steven circled the mountain of trash.
He called toward the corridor. ‘Okay, well, then I’ll just wait in here. That’s fine. I don’t mind cold, damp, dusty, creepy, and dilapidated. It’s kind of like my first apartment, only bigger… Gilmour?’
The debris was actually a stack of variously sized cogged gears, the smallest no larger than a bicycle tyre, the largest a huge wood-and-metal wheel with a circumference of half the cavernous chamber. It looked like the gears had been dropped, one atop the other, in an upside-down pyramid, smallest at the bottom. A polished metal rod was attached to a single cog on each gear.
‘There’s no rust,’ Steven said to himself.
He knelt beside the largest wheel and ran a hand up the silvery metal spike. ‘This might have been something once, but it’s just a pile of rubbish now – this big one has got to weigh two tons, though. And those loose cables up there – what are they for? Hold on a minute, just a minute… they’d have to be attached by-’ He took another lap around the pile, muttering, ‘Eight… eight to thirty and thirty to sixty, but that can’t be right… one is to four, but then there’s a switch, but there’s no switch in here…’ He searched the walls, the ceiling and the pile of cogged wheels, looking for a missing piece that might bring his ruminations to a tidy conclusion.
Stephen lectured to the empty room. ‘It wouldn’t work on the walls, and the rods are vertical… they don’t interlink – the cogs are the wrong size – but they do turn in a pattern; so what’s the denominator for the ratio? One to four to eight to thirty to sixty toChrist in the jungle, that’s not right: one to four has to be a mistake, unless- unless it’s on the floor… Sonofabitch!’
In the closet, Gilmour laughed silently into his fist, relit his pipe and leaned against the doorframe, listening. He gave it half an aven, then brushed the dust from his cloak, pocketed the pipe and reentered the chamber.
The cogged wheels were suspended, seemingly of their own volition, above a series of coloured tiles cemented into the floor. A matching set of tiles was affixed to the ceiling, just a short distance above the largest gear, which wobbled and wavered dangerously as it hovered above them, parallel to the floor.
‘Good gods! ‘ Gilmour feigned surprise. ‘What have you been up to?’
Now stripped to the waist, his lean frame shiny with sweat, Steven jumped, his apparent reverie broken. ‘Shit, Gilmour, don’t do that!’
‘What is it?’
‘You don’t know?’ He wiped his eyes on the back of his hand.
‘I’m hanged if I have any idea.’
Steven gave a self-satisfied grin. ‘Do you know what day it is?’
‘Of course not.’
‘When was the last time that you knew – for certain – what day it was?’
‘I’d have to say it was about-’
‘Nine hundred and eighty-two Twinmoons ago?’ The excitement was plain in his voice.
‘Give or take a handful of avens, yes.’
Steven focused his attention on the floor beneath the smallest wheel. ‘What you need, Gilmour, is a mathematician, and more than that, you need a mathematician who can tell you what Twinmoon it was when a miner named William Higgins walked into the Bank of Idaho Springs, now known as the First National Bank of Idaho Springs, home of the lowest-interest small business loans on the Front Range, and opened a basic interest-bearing account with more than seventeen thousand dollars in refined silver.’
‘And where would I find one of them, then?’ the Larion Senator asked, smiling.
‘It’s a clock,’ Steven broke in, too excited to banter any more, ‘but it doesn’t use a wound spring or a counterweight.’
‘If you say so,’ Gilmour said, sounding nonplussed. ‘Remember your telephones and calculators? I’m not one for higher-order maths quandaries.’
‘Well, this is one of the best, my friend. Because this clock uses the rotation of the world, the actual movement of Eldarn through the heavens, to determine the Twinmoon. It even charts them, up there. See those couplings, and those wires?’
‘Aha.’
‘It uses magic – although I bet I could get it to work with an electromagnet – because these wheels look like interlocking gears, but they actually hang here, just like this, completely independent of Eldarn’s rotation. They interact with one another, but they only interact with Eldarn on the aven.’
Steven interrupted himself, ignoring the gigantic ruined timepiece for a moment. ‘Have you really lived the last thousand Twinmoons without knowing the exact time of day or the exact day of the Twinmoon?’
Gilmour shrugged. ‘There are a few tally-fanatics out there who claim to have maintained an accurate count, but their sum totals all conflict with one another, so none have any real credibility.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Exactly how old? I don’t know.’