God of Clocks (25 page)

Iron Head turned to the two Rachels. “Stay away from him,” he said. “He'll put a knife in your back any chance he gets.”

The future Rachel said, “We reach the castle safely, Iron Head. I remember that much.”

The captain shook his head. “Don't count on it, Miss Hael. This may or may not be the same past that you remember. We've all witnessed a lot of…unusual events recently. Around these parts, history has a habit of changing when you least expect it to.”

Rachel's twin just grunted and walked away.

Ahead the land rose steadily. In a long single file they climbed the narrow trail up through the forest and over the rocky headland behind the bay. Uncomfortable in her future self's company, Rachel slowed her pace, allowing her twin to walk on ahead with Iron Head. Something about that woman unnerved her. Perhaps it was in the glances they shared, the terrible intimacy and understanding she saw in her twin's eyes, as if at that very moment they both knew each other's thoughts with utter certainty. It was like they were gazing warily into each other's souls.

One soul, or two?

Rachel didn't want to think about the metaphysical aspects of the situation. It was enough to know that the other woman felt just as uncomfortable. They both considered themselves to be the
real
Rachel Hael, the
only
Rachel Hael, and neither wanted the other casting doubt upon that belief.

As she turned to look for Mina, a shaft of sunlight lit up a patch of ground over to her left so that, for a moment, yellow lichen blazed brightly against the grey rocks. Rachel glanced up and saw the sun now shining overhead. The fog that had followed them from Coreollis was finally dissipating.

Mina was struggling up the trail below—her hooded figure
moved slowly, pausing to rest every few steps, while Basilis bounded across the rocks ahead and then turned and waited for his mistress to catch up.

From this vantage point, Rachel could see a great expanse of silver water and the curve of the bay sweeping round to Kevin's Jetty. The mists had now retreated far across the Flower Lake and formed a grey haze in the distance, intermingled with filthy plumes of black and ochre smoke from the Hericans' rafts. Wind or current had now carried those rude vessels much further to the east. She looked for Burntwater on the opposite shore, hoping for a glimpse of Dill, but the settlement remained hidden by the last of the fog.

Here the skies were rapidly clearing. Warm sunlight bathed the green forest and the pebbled beaches along the lakeshore. Birds chittered and whistled amongst the trees. It was the first time Rachel had seen real colour for a long while, she realized. There was no sign of Oran or his people, so she sat on a rock and waited for Mina to join her.

“At least it's a nice day,” Mina said, when she finally caught up. “I'd almost forgotten what the sun feels like.” She paused, rested a hand on the rock, and took a deep breath. “There was a limit to how long I could maintain the fog, and I fear this is it.”

“You did well,” Rachel said. “We're nearly there.”

Mina nodded towards the smoke clouds rising from the lake. “Those rafts aren't going to be a distraction for very much longer. Menoa's arconites will soon spot them for what they are.”

“They never were a real distraction,” Rachel said. “All that effort was a complete waste of time. Making those rafts didn't help our escape, and they didn't help Dill.
She
should have crossed the lake and warned Iron Head to expect us. Without those delays at Burntwater we'd have reached Sabor's castle by now. Dill and Hasp would then be safe.”

“I don't know,” Mina replied. “Isn't it best not to alter what has already happened if you can avoid it? Our present situation could be a lot worse.” She gazed at the smoke-filled horizon. “I think you
should do exactly what she did when it's time for you to return. Enlist the Hericans, build these rafts”—she smiled—“and don't forget to punch yourself in the face.”

“I'm not doing anything,” Rachel said. “If we reach the castle safely, I'm staying there until we can figure out a way to reach Heaven. We have a job to do. Why would I want to come back here?”

“You
did
come back here. Right now you're a hundred yards further up this same trail.”

“She's not me.”

“I'm sorry, Rachel, but she absolutely
is
you.”

The assassin snorted. “Well, then,
she
can travel back in time again. I don't see the point of any of it.”

Mina gave her a sympathetic smile. “Maybe you will… given time.”

The trail passed over the headland and then meandered down into a shallow valley before the landscape began to rise ahead of them again. For another hour they climbed up through dense, centuries-old pine forest. On either side of them the thick canopy sheltered verdant, cathedral-like spaces carpeted with mats of brown needles. The path itself had been cut into steps to form a steeply sloping ravine between the trees. Rachel did not find the going particularly taxing, but Mina continued to struggle. She accepted Rachel's arm with gratitude.

Despite the brightening sun, the air became steadily cooler. Eventually they crested a rise and stepped into the teeth of a mountain gale. Here the forest ended at a plateau of blasted rock. The landscape beyond soared to vast heights in a bleak vista of glassy black bluffs and sheer cliffs, all fractured as if by some terrible cataclysm. Tumbles of obsidian scree glittered like anthracite in the mountain fissures.

And there, on a ragged promontory in the center of the plateau, stood the castle of the god of clocks.

It was like no fortress Rachel had ever seen: a maze of interconnected
blocks, square towers, and spheres all extending up and outwards from its massive rock foundation. These queer extrusions appeared to be entire buildings in themselves, clamped to the main mass in an ad hoc fashion so that the whole structure had the look of a bizarrely geometric tree. The castle had been built from the same local obsidian that was strewn around it, though inset with metal girders and lozenges of brightly blazing glass. It was truly monstrous in size, and yet its exact limits defied explication, for the surrounding air blurred and shimmered as if the gales that howled around its structure were bending the very light itself.

A chill ran through Rachel as she watched parts of the great dark castle evanesce and then clarify. Whole towers and facades existed and then ceased to be. Sudden bursts of red, pink, and mauve scintillations trembled around its edges. Then it shrank… and, in utter silence, the structure became brutally massive again. It towered over them, vapourous and uncertain, like some hideous desert mirage.

Rachel's twin grimaced and clutched her stomach, then she hurried towards an arched portal in the front of the fortress.

But Rachel herself hesitated to follow. For all its dazzling colours, the fortress exuded a deeply disturbing aura. Its impossible facades induced a feeling of vertigo in her, while its gemstone lights irritated her eyes and froze her skin like liquid aether. The surrounding air tasted unnatural, strangely glassy, as though devoid of some element whose absence distressed Rachel's lungs. All of her senses felt oddly jumbled, somehow
askew,
as if her nerves had been subtly rerouted.

Unable to gaze upon the shimmering fortress any longer, she turned her eyes away.

“The sensation goes away once you get inside,” Iron Head said. “You're probably feeling it doubly in the presence of another one of yourselves.”

“What's causing it?”

“The castle's engines warp the space around it. It exists simultaneously
in different pockets of time, which means that the building must be here
and
elsewhere in space, and that cannot be permitted. Sabor requires massive amounts of power to keep it rooted to this mountain.” He beckoned to her. “Come on, Miss Hael, let's get inside quickly.”

The castle's engines?

Rachel stole another glance up at the building's delirious facades. The stonework blurred like ten thousand storm-blown flags, a riot of colour that contracted and then expanded to such heights that it seemed to reach beyond the surrounding mountains themselves.

The god of clocks dwelling within now expected her to enter his domain and, by some temporal trickery, travel back ten hours to meet her own self. And then? To force another Rachel to return here once more? To travel back through those same ten hours? Would some part of her soul remain forever trapped here in a loop of Sabor's devising? Rachel's head spun with the consequences of it all. She felt angry and tired and sick.

She swallowed hard and followed Iron Head inside the massive building.

The River of the Failed would not be beaten, but neither would Carnival. She dragged her wings through its bloody waters and used her demon sword to hack down the foes it raised against her.

There was no end to them.

They came at her in endless waves, thousands upon thousands: simulacrums of Cospinol's gallowsmen, warriors from unknown continents and ages past, crimson giants and angels made after her own image, and queer bestial things of the river's own devising. They shrieked and howled. They bullied and taunted her and tore at her with claws and teeth and bloody weapons formed of the crystallized fluid itself. She should have flown above their reach and smashed her way back into Hell.

But she didn't. She stayed in the river because the butchery was here, and her rage would not otherwise be sated.

She fought tirelessly, not knowing or caring if she truly damaged the river, for those she slew died shrieking, only to rise again and confront her in new forms. They were cunning and fast, but Carnival was faster and more treacherous than all of them. She murdered with a terrible efficacy honed by aeons of survival.

Yet their numbers were vast, and sometimes those watery blades nicked her flesh. The scarred angel was well used to that pain and returned tenfold the wounds she sustained.

She fought just for the sake of the battle, without any motive other than a desperate and unquenchable need to hurt the world around her. Cold rage steered her hand, but she had no final destination in mind. In the grip of war, she strode wherever the river currents took her, and murdered everything she encountered in her path.

Hell loomed above, like a sky of brick and iron and glass, and through its myriad bright windows the souls of the damned watched her pass below. She glimpsed them shudder and turn away, but felt nothing for them. The damned did not concern her.

How long she fought she could not say. It seemed like many days and nights. The river was endless, the creatures it birthed uncountable. This army had no limits, and neither did the angel who walked amongst them.

But the demon sword began to fail.

A low wail issued from the weapon. The shape-shifter was tiring, his steel edge growing dull. Carnival put more muscle behind the cuts she made. She didn't question or demand more from the sword; she simply fought harder. Her anger rose to meet the demon child's failings. And the red figures fell in even greater numbers than before. She drank in their screams as she carved through them.

Soon she noticed changes in her opponents. Now the great majority of her foes had assumed winged forms. Was this done in mockery of the scarred angel herself? Carnival didn't understand
the river's motives, nor did she care. Her own brutality exceeded any violence these crimson forms could inflict, and so she used them as a necessary anathema toward which to direct her thirst for destruction.

In time the sword lost its edge entirely. The shape-shifter had reached his limits, and he could no longer sustain the sharpness such a blade required to cut through flesh. The metal moaned woefully in her fist. In mortal hands the failing weapon would have now merely broken bones. Carnival simply put more of her strength behind each blow. The sword cried out in agony, but Carnival ignored it. A million enemies still waited to be slain.

By degrees the attacks against her lessened. Her winged opponents hesitated. Often they held back entirely, reluctant to be the next to meet her blade.

Carnival's fury bucked again inside her, and she threw herself amongst them. If they would not bring the fight to her, then she would take it to them. She leapt at them and spun, and hewed them down. Arcs of blood followed her wailing sword. Dragging her wings through the weakening currents, she moved ever onwards, now grinning desperately as she tried to incite bloodlust from her reluctant foes.

Suddenly they stopped altogether.

She rushed at them, and they collapsed back into the bloody waters. She wheeled and threw herself at new foes, but those also dissolved into nothing.

“Fight me,” she cried.

But they would not. The myriad figures around her returned to the bloody river. The waters receded, draining into nearby channels as they drew back from her thighs. Soon Carnival stood alone on a slick red riverbed. “Fight,” she insisted.

But the River of the Failed had rejected her.

She felt the sword tremble. The demon weapon sighed and then flowed out of her fist, as the shape-shifter resumed his human form.

He became a child once more. He crouched by her feet, seemingly unable to stand. He looked boneless, partially dissolved. His thin metal fingers splayed across the moist ground. One of his eyes swiveled round to meet her gaze. The other followed a moment later. “It was testing you,” he said.

Carnival just stared at him.

“Why else would it keep fighting?” he added. “It can't be destroyed. You can't even really hurt it. It was just testing you.”

“Why?”

The shape-shifter appeared to shrug, but his shoulders moved in odd directions. “Cospinol said the river was an infant,” he said. “He said that it doesn't know what it is, that it is still learning what to become. I reckon that's why it formed itself into all them angels. It was trying to copy
you.”

Carnival gazed out across the subterranean realm. Twenty paces away the red waterways flowed all around, but they came no nearer. Standing in this shallow depression, she had the impression that the river was waiting for something.