A Star Shall Fall

This time she was prepared; this time, it wasn’t so bad. She was able to drag her attention away from the terrible inexorability of that pendulum and up to the clock face above it. Flawless gold gleamed in a disc the height of a giant, its face marked with twenty-four hours. Behind it lay an incomprehensible mass of gears, ruled over by a device like an inverted V, and a sharp-toothed wheel. Actually toothed, so it seemed to Irrith—or were those claws? The mechanism was much too high up for her to be sure.

And then there was the pulley, a massive cylinder wrapped with a cable unlike any she’d ever seen. From it hung an absurdly little ball. “As it falls, it helps drive the clock,” he said over her shoulder. “Once a year, they pull it up to the top again.”

Against her will, she turned back to the pendulum. It hung, not from a cable, but from a softly glowing pillar of light, that vanished into the darkness above. “And where does that go?”

“To the moon.” Galen spread his hands when she eyed him suspiciously. “If it’s a lie, Dame Irrith, then they’ve lied to me, too. It has to do with the mechanics of the clock. They had to hang the pendulum from something very far distant, and so they drew down a beam from the moon.”

Irrith shivered and turned elsewhere. The rest of the room was ordinary by comparison: tables, shelves, every flat surface crammed with books and paper and bottles of ink and flocks of quill pens. She tried to imagine staying here for days, let alone years, and shuddered again.

Unnerving—but also fascinating. Faerie magic was a familiar thing. This, with its gears and pulleys and calculations, was unlike anything she’d seen before. A collision of two worlds, with results she could only imagine.

And I thought it strange when fae began carrying guns.

Galen bowed her out of the room as she exited. “So now you’ve seen it. I expect the Queen will put a guard on this room, to prevent any interference by others… but if you’d like to assist with our efforts against the Dragon, I am certain I can arrange for you to be permitted back here.”

Irrith wasn’t sure she wanted to set foot across that threshold again. She wasn’t even sure she didn’t want to run back to the Vale, where there was earth instead of the Earth, and the fae lived as they had for ages. The Prince meant so kindly, though, that she said, “Thank you, Lord Galen. I—I’ll think about it.”

He bowed again, and offered his arm. “Then let me guide you back to the rest of the Onyx Hall.”

Memory: 2–14 September 1752

In the dark of night on September second, they moved the last components into place.

Gold drawn from the sun itself, hammered into a perfect disk fifteen feet in height, its face marked with twenty-four engraved hours. The hands were starlight, glittering and cold. Behind it, gears of metal, catching pinions of stone, riding arbors of wood, all taken from every corner of Britain. The toothed escapement wheel was the stuff of nightmares itself, for this theft would happen while most of the kingdom slept: every human who lay at rest when the hour passed midnight would add eleven days to the total stored in this room.

And that hour had almost come. The von das Tickens hauled on a rope, snarling German curses to each other, lifting the pulley into place. The block was a tree trunk, perfectly circular, its rings marking off a hundred years. The tree was native; the cable wrapping it was not. Lune had bargained hard with the svartalfar for it, a length woven from the roots of a mountain, the noise of a cat’s footfall, the breath of a fish. Nothing less could hold the stupendous burden of the driving weight: a sphere of old age, heavy all out of proportion to its size. The Welsh giant Idris stood ready to wind the pulley for the first time. He would return every year on this date to wind it again, as long as the Queen could persuade him, for only a giant’s strength could achieve it.

“Hurry,” Hamilton Birch, Prince of the Stone, whispered under his breath. His pocket-watch lay clutched in one sweat-slick hand. If they missed their moment, there would be no second chance.

The pulley was slotted into place. The giant bent to the crank, grunting. The driving weight began to rise from the floor.

And the Queen of the Onyx Court stood, dressed in silver, waiting with both healthy and crippled hands outspread.

The driving weight reached the top of its drop and hung there, too heavy to sway, while Idris braced himself against the crank. “One minute,” Lord Hamilton called out, glancing through the sundial door to check his pocket-watch against the more accurate regulator in the dwarves’ workshop.

Lune tilted her chin up and raised her arms toward the black ceiling above.