A Star Shall Fall

Or perhaps it was just meant to seem that way.

Some of the pucks in the Vale adored this charm, disorienting a traveller so that he wandered into a stream or a bull’s enclosure. But there were ways around such tricks—if it was indeed a trick.

Irrith squared her shoulders and began walking backward, searching for the floor with her toes, one careful step at a time.

She felt the unease—the vertigo—but this time it was like rain, slipping off an oilcloth cloak. Irrith grinned in satisfaction. Caught you.

Then the floor gave way beneath her and she fell.

Her chin smacked against the lip of the hole and she tasted blood, but she managed to stop her fall, fingers straining along the edge of the black stone. Irrith waited until her head cleared, then dragged herself painfully upward until she could fling a leg onto the floor and roll to safety.

She lay panting for a moment, then spat out the blood and peered over the edge. The bottom of the pit was well-padded with cushions. Definitely the Queen’s work. Most of the people who keep secrets in this place would fill it with spikes instead.

The pit crossed the corridor from one side to the other, but it wasn’t so wide that an agile sprite couldn’t leap it. Irrith took the precaution of a silencing charm before she made her attempt, and tucked into a tidy somersault on the other side. Two obstacles cleared, and she was careful as she went onward, lest she run headlong into a third. But the remainder of the passage was clear, and then it turned a corner, into a short, pillared vault with old-fashioned round arches, the antechamber to a larger, well-lit room beyond. From that room came an angry voice.

“Dieser verdammten Federantrieb brechen andauernd!”

The words were abrupt and loud enough that Irrith almost jumped from her skin, before she heard them properly. Once she did, she blinked—for that was certainly not English.

Nor was the second voice that answered him. “Aber natürlich! Ich sage dir doch, dass er soviel Zugkraft nicht aushalten werden.”

The tone was bickering, and resigned; the words weren’t directed at her. Concealing herself behind a pillar, Irrith peeked into the chamber Ktistes and the Queen did not want her to find.

Two fae grumbled over a pair of worktables strewn with unfamiliar oddments and tools. The tables would scarcely have been knee-height to a human, and even for Irrith they were low, but they perfectly suited the two, who were hob-size and thick with muscle. The implements they held were incongruously delicate in their blunt-knuckled hands, and both, she saw, had tied their long beards out of the way, the better to see the tiny things they peered at.

What were they working on? Irrith risked a longer look. The faerie lights above the tables reflected off minute bits of metal, too small to identify at this distance. But she noticed something odd: a quiet, regular rattle, underlying the humming of the blond-bearded faerie.

The chamber, she realised, was filled with clocks.

One perched atop a bracket on the wall behind the strangers. Two pendulum clocks stood in opposite corners, and a very small piece teetered on the edge of a table, a breath away from falling. A pocket-watch on the floor below it seemed to have fallen already.

Tom Toggin had brought clocks to the Vale. And Irrith had heard rumors, about the crazy German dwarves that came to England with the new German king, and now made clocks and watches for the Queen.

But what were they doing, hidden away down here?

She was still trying to figure that out when every clock in the room began to chime the hour. It wasn’t just the ones she could see; from the sound of it, the entire wall to both sides of the entrance, invisible from her concealment behind the pillar, was covered in clocks. And the two dwarves literally dropped the pieces they were working on in order to hurry to a door on the other side of the chamber.

Its face held what looked like sundial, though what use one could be in the sunless realm of the Onyx Hall, Irrith didn’t know. Its blade spun without warning, making her twitch; then the red-bearded dwarf seized hold of it, and two things happened at once: first, the bronze-bound door creaked open, and second, a sound too deep to hear shook the very marrow of Irrith’s bones.

A sound like the single tick of the Earth’s own clock.

Her teeth ached with the force of it, and her skull rang like a drum. Irrith had heard many tremendous sounds in her life, up to and including the roar of the Dragon itself, but she’d never encountered anything like this—as if she’d just heard one of the numberless moments of her immortal life tick away.

She was still standing there, jaw hanging slack, when the door finished opening and a puck stepped out and saw her.