Thief of Time

“I suppose that either he will break the boy, or the boy will break him, or it is always possible that they will break each other…” the Master mused.

“So, in the patois of the world,” said Rinpo, “there is no actual downside.”

“Would the abbot approve, though?” said the Master, testing a welcome idea for any weak points. “He has always had a certain rather tiresome regard for… the sweeper.”

“The abbot is a dear kind man but at the moment his teeth are giving him trouble and he is not walking at all well,” said Rinpo. “And these are difficult times. I'm sure he will be pleased to accept our joint recommendation. Why, it's practically a minor matter of day-to-day affairs.”

And thus the future was decided.

They were not bad men. They had worked hard on behalf of the valley for hundreds of years. But it is possible, after a while, to develop certain dangerous habits of thought. One is that, while all important enterprises need careful organization, it is the organization that needs organizing, rather than the enterprise. And another is that tranquillity is always a good thing.

Tick

There was a row of alarm clocks on the table by Jeremy's bed. He did not need them, because he woke up when he wanted to. They were there for testing. He set them for seven, and woke up at 6.59 to check that they went off on time.

Tonight he went to bed early, with a drink of water and the Grim Fairy Tales.

He had never been interested in stories, at any age, and had never quite understood the basic concept. He'd never read a work of fiction all the way through. He did remember, as a small boy, being really annoyed at the depiction of Hickory Dickory Dock in a rag book of nursery rhymes, because the clock in the drawing was completely wrong for the period.

He tried to read Grim Fairy Tales. They had titles like “How the Wicked Queen Danced in Red Hot Shoes!” and “The Old Lady in the Oven”. There was simply no mention of clocks of any sort in any of them. Their authors seemed to have a thing about not mentioning clocks.

“The Glass Clock of Bad Schüschein”, on the other hand, did have a clock. Of a sort. And it was… odd. A wicked man—readers could see he was wicked because it said he was wicked, right there on the page—built a clock of glass in which he captured Time herself, but things went wrong because there was one part of the clock, a spring, that he couldn't make out of glass, and it broke under the strain. Time was set free and the man aged ten thousand years in a second and crumbled to dust and—not surprisingly, in Jeremy's opinion—was never seen again. The story ended with a moral: Large Enterprises Depend upon Small Details. Jeremy couldn't see why it couldn't just as well have been: It's Wrong to Trap Non-Existent Women in Clocks, or: It Would Have Worked with a Glass Spring.

But even to Jeremy's inexperienced eye, there was something wrong with the whole story. It read as though the writer was trying to make sense of something he'd seen, or been told, and had misunderstood. And—hah!—although it was set hundreds of years ago when even in Uberwald there were only natural cuckoo clocks, the artist had drawn a long-case clock of the sort that wasn't around even fifteen years ago. The stupidity of some people! You'd laugh if it wasn't so tragic!

He put the book aside and spent the rest of the evening doing a little design work for the Guild. They paid him handsomely for this, provided he promised never to turn up in person.

Then he put the work on the bedside table by the clocks. He blew out the candle. He went to sleep. He dreamed.

The glass clock ticked. It stood in the middle of the workshop's wooden floor, giving off a silvery light. Jeremy walked around it, or perhaps it spun gently around him.

It was taller than a man. Within the transparent case red and blue lights twinkled like stars. The air smelled of acid.

Now his point of view dived into the thing, the crystalline thing, plunging down through the layers of glass and quartz. They rose past him, their smoothness becoming walls hundreds of miles high, and still he fell between slabs that were becoming rough, grainy…

…full of holes. The blue and red light was here too, pouring past him.