Apex Magazine Issue 17 Read online

  “Truly marvelous,” said Valentine. “Thank you for this dance, Timesmith.” With a wink, a bow, and a kiss, he returned to his place beside the queen.

  Tink’s feet ached. Her lungs pumped like bellows. Her skin wasn’t quite as smooth as it had been when their dance began. She had aged twenty years in twenty minutes. But it was a small price for the key to somebody’s heart.

  She returned to her shop, deep in thought. And so she did not notice how the hands of every clock bowed low to her, like a bashful admirer requesting a dance. Time had seen how she had laughed with joy in Valentine’s arms. It yearned, desperately, to dance with her.

  Tink spent months (measured, as always, by the thumping of her heart) holed up in her shop. She labored continuously, pausing only for food and rest. And, on several occasions, to climb a staircase of carved peridot and dip a chalice in the waters atop the aqueduct.

  Far above the city, craftsmen and courtiers built an effigy clock atop the Spire. Valentine, Tink knew, was there. She wondered if he ever gazed from that aerie upon the Briardowns, wondered if his thoughts ever turned from queen to clockmaker.

  When the Festival of the Leaping Second returned to Nycthemeron, and a crowd again milled outside Tink’s shop, they found it locked and the storefront dark. Her neighbors, the algebraist and the cartographer, told of her forays along the aqueduct and of strange sounds from her workshop: splashing, gurgling, the creak of wooden gears.

  By now, of course, the queen had grown quite fond of Tink’s wonderments. And when she heard that the clockmaker had arrived, promising something particularly special for the Festival, she ordered a new riser built for Tink’s work.

  There, Tink built a miniature Nycthemeron: nine feet tall at the Spire, six feet wide, encircled by a flowing replica of the river Gnomon, complete with aqueducts, waterwheels, sluices, gates, and even a tiny clockmaker’s shop in a tiny Briardowns. There, a model clockmaker gazed lovelorn at the Spire, where a model Valentine gazed down.

  When the revelry culminated in the advance of the effigy, Tink filled the copper reservoir on her water clock. And everybody, including the queen and lovely Valentine at her side, marveled at Tink’s work.

  The water flowed backward. It sprang from the waterwheels to leap upon the aqueducts and gush uphill, where special pumps pulled it down to begin again.

  It was a wonder, they said. An amazement. A delight.

  Only time, and time alone, understood what she had done. Tink had given the people of Nycthemeron something they had lost.

  She had given them their past.

  Tink went home feeling pleased. Just a few more clocks, just a few more stolen moments, and Valentine would express adoration. But she couldn’t work as many hours at a stretch as she had in her youth. She had to unlock his heart before time rendered her an unlovable crone.

  But there were interruptions. People peppered her with strange requests: vague notions they couldn’t express and that Tink couldn’t deliver. The fellow in the scarlet cravat returned, seeking a means of visiting “that place.”

  “What place?” Tink asked.

  “That—” he waved his hands in frustration, indicating some vague and distant land “—place.” He shrugged. “I see it in my head. I’ve been there, but I don’t know how to return. It’s here, and yet it’s not here, too.”

  Tink could not help him. Nor could she help the baroness who requested a clockwork key that would open a door to “that other Nycthemeron.” At first they came in a slow trickle, these odd requests. But the trickle became a torrent. Tink closed her shop so that she could finish the next sequence of birthday clocks for Queen Perjumbellatrix.

  Valentine invited Tink for another spin around a ballroom filled with motionless revelers. He was, of course, as handsome as ever. But when he doffed his mask, Tink saw the crease of a frown perched between his cerulean eyes. Her metronome heart did a little jig of concern.

  “You look troubled,” she said as he took her hand.

  Valentine said, “Troubled? I suppose I am.”

  “Perhaps I can help,” said Tink. “After all, my skills are not inconsiderable.” She added what she hoped was a coquettish lilt to these words.

  Valentine wrapped his arm around Tink’s waist. They waltzed past a duchess and her lissome lover. “I find my thoughts drifting to a new place. A different Nycthemeron.”

  Tink faltered. The dancers blurred into a new configuration. Another precious year had passed.

  Valentine danced mechanically. His movements were flawless, but devoid of the grace that had made Tink swoon when first they had danced together. And for her part, her whirring mind couldn’t concentrate on one thing or the other; she stepped awkwardly, without poise or balance.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Her gift was meant to impress Valentine, not confuse and distract him. But she had her pilfered minutes and intended to use them.

  She rested her head on his shoulder, enjoying his scent and the fluid play of muscles in his arm. “What sort of place?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a place I’ve been, someplace close, even, but I don’t know how to get there.”

  The revelers snapped into new arrangements; another year lost. Valentine led her in a swooping two-step around the ballroom. There was, it seemed, more room to move.

  “Is it here in Nycthemeron? A forgotten courtyard? A secluded cloister?”

  “I can’t say. I feel like it may be ... everywhere. Strange, isn’t it?” He shook his head and smiled. “No matter. Once again you have done a magnificent thing.”

  But Tink barely heard his praise. She had given the people of Nycthemeron their past. But what did that mean to timeless people in a timeless city? Nothing. They were afflicted with strange thoughts they couldn’t comprehend: memories of times past. To them, the past was a foreign place they couldn’t visit.

  They waltzed. Tink’s feet ached, twinges of betrayal from her aging body. Blur. They danced a sarabande. Her back ached. Blur. Her lungs burned. Blur.

  Tink saw the thinning of the ballroom crowd.

  “Valentine, have you noticed there are fewer people in this ballroom every year?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are they going?”

  “They’re trying to leave Nycthemeron,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” she said, and crashed to the floor.

  “Timesmith!” Valentine leapt to her side, cradled her head in his hands. “Please forgive me. Are you hurt?”

  The ballroom floor was hard and her body less resilient than it had been minutes and years ago. But she disregarded her bruises, because Valentine was sopping wet. His slippery hands had lost their grip on her. He smelled of river grass and mud.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “The queen sent me to stop her half-brother from trying to swim his way out of Nycthemeron. That’s where they’re going. To the river.”

  But, of course, nobody could leave Nycthemeron. Not even Tink. The luminous fog was chaos, its touch deadly.

  In a tiny voice, she asked, “Did you save him?”

  “No. He entered the fog before I was halfway across.”

  And at that moment Tink realized her gift, bestowed upon the people of Nycthemeron with love and intended to win love in return, was killing people.

  Tink’s clock chimed midnight. Their stolen time had lapsed. And when Tink saw herself in the golden mirrors of the ballroom, she saw that her hair, once a lustrous silver, had tarnished to grey. She had aged another twenty years, but had gained nothing from it.

  Tink returned to the Briardowns and her lonely, narrow cot, unaware of the clocks that capered for her attention. Time ached to comfort her, to console her. It sang her to sleep with a lullaby of ticks and tocks.

  She’d been so foolish. She might as well have given a penny-farthing bicycle to the koi in the fishponds. The people of Nycthemeron couldn’t comprehend her gift. Right now they had the past bearing down on them like a boulder
rolling toward a cliff. But that time had nowhere to go, no safe landing. It was disconnected. Meaningless.

  She could salvage this. She could cure the malady she had created. She could still win Valentine. She could fix everything. All it required was a simple pendulum clock.

  Tink paid a visit to the smithy in Nycthemeron’s Steeltree district. There, she commissioned the finest double-edged blade the smith could forge. No hilt—only the blade, with a tang for fastening it. A strange request. But it was considered no small honor to help the clockmaker create one of her fabled wonderments.

  Thus, when she returned to his forge, he presented her with thirty inches of gleaming steel. It was, he proclaimed, the finest and sharpest blade he’d ever forged. Sharp enough to shear the red from a rainbow.

  She thanked him. But it was not sharp enough.

  And so, in the months before the next Festival (measured, as always, by the thumping of Tink’s broken heart), she spent every moment in her workshop. Things took longer these days. Her eyes strained at the tiniest cogs; her grip quavered as it never used to do.

  People again reported odd noises in her shop. At first, the grinding of a whetstone. Later, a rasping, as of sand on steel. Then, the susurration of cotton on steel. And finally, if they pressed their ears to her shop, they might have heard the whisper of breath on steel.

  And those who stayed until Tink emerged might have noticed something different about her. For where before there had always been the phantom tickticktick that followed her like a devoted puppy, now, when she carried the pendulum blade, there was sometimes only a phantom ti-ti-ti, and other times a ck-ck-ck, depending on how she held it.

  Tink loaded her cart with a crate the size of a grandfather clock, then drove to the Spire. By now, of course, she was one of the queen’s most favored subjects, and so the ballroom had a place of honor reserved for Tink. There, she assembled her contribution to the Festival.

  The revelers advanced the effigy. Tink wound her clock; the pendulum swung ponderously across its lacquered case. It was silent. Not even a whisper accompanied the passage of the pendulum. It sliced through the moments, leaving slivers of ticks and tatters of tocks in its wake.

  At Tink’s request, the queen posted guards around the clock, for the pendulum blade was a fearsome thing. Its edges were the sharpest things that could ever be, sharp as the now that separates past and future.

  But only time, and time alone, understood what she had done. Tink had given Nycthemeron something it had lost.

  She had given it the present: a knowledge of now.

  Tink returned to the Briardowns. Her body would be eighty years old at the next Festival, while Valentine would still be a stunning twentysomething. How many lovers had he charmed since his visit to Tink’s shop? How many stolen kisses, how many fluttering hearts? Her life had none of these things. Her pillow never smelled of anybody but Tink.

  What chance had she of winning him now? It was a foolish hope. But she had spent her life on it, and couldn’t bear to think it had all been for nothing.

  She tried to concentrate. But time’s desperation had become jealousy, so it had imbued the pendulum blade with a special potency. Anything for Tink’s attention.

  The man in the scarlet cravat returned. He asked Tink for a trinket that would “set him moving” again. She couldn’t help him. Nor could she help the pregnant woman whose belly suggested imminent labor and whose eyes were the most sorrowful Tink had ever seen. She’d been that way, Tink realized, since time had lost its interest. Since the moment Nycthemeron had fallen from the calendar.

  Tink was passing beneath the aqueduct, on her way to the Palazzo, when a man in a cobalt-colored fez crashed onto the street before her cart. The wind of his passage ruffled her hair, and he smashed the cobbles hard enough to set the chimes in Tink’s clock to ringing. Plumes of dust billowed from between the paving stones. She screamed.

  Not because he had perished. He hadn’t, of course. Tink screamed because his sorrow had driven him to seek death, the ultimate boundary between past and future. And because he’d never find it.

  He shambled to his feet, for his body was timeless. But when the poor fellow realized that nothing had changed, that he hadn’t bridged the gulf between was and will, he slumped to the ground and wept. He waved off Tink’s offers of a ride, of conversation, of commiseration.

  A quiet gasp of dismay reached her ears. She looked up. People lined the tallest edges of the aqueduct.

  The pendulum blade carved a personal now for every soul in Nycthemeron. And drove them mad. Tink had shown them they were entombed in time, and now they were suffocating.

  Tink rushed to the Palazzo. The ballroom was emptier than she had ever seen it. Couples still danced, but just a fraction of those who had toasted the queen in pageants past.

  The ribbons on Valentine’s arms still fluttered; his shapely calves still flexed and stretched when he waltzed with the queen. But was it Tink’s imagination, or had his eyes lost their sparkle? Was it her imagination, or did he seem distracted and imprecise in his movements?

  An earl in an owl mask requested a dance, but she declined him and all the others who sought a few steps with the famous clockmaker. She might have been flattered, but now, with age weighing upon her, she lacked the energy for much revelry. She saved herself.

  Her clock chimed. Once more, Tink and Valentine were alone together in a private minute. He took her hand.

  “You look worried,” he said.

  “How are you? Are you well?” She studied his face.

  “I am the same as ever,” he said, a catch in his voice.

  He was silent for what felt like eternity. Blur. Blur. Blur. It broke her heart, every wasted instant. This was her last chance. It wasn’t meant to be like this.

  “Something is bothering you,” she said. “Will you tell me about it? You’ll never have a more devoted listener.”

  That, at least, elicited a slight sigh, and a weary chuckle. “What is it like?”

  “What is what like?”

  “Aging.”

  Tink said, “My body aches. I can’t see or hear as well as I could. My mind isn’t as sharp, my fingers not as nimble.” She paused while he gently spun her through a pirouette. “But I am more wise now.”

  “More wise?”

  “Wise enough to know that I’m a foolish old woman.”

  Grief clenched her chest, ground the gears in her metronome heart. The years had become a burden too heavy for her shoulders. She faltered. Valentine caught her.

  He asked, “Are you ill?”

  She shook her head. “Just old. Will you sit with me?”

  “Of course.”

  They watched motionless dancers blink through the celebrations. Tink rested her head on his shoulder. She wanted to remember his scent forever. That was all she’d ever have of him; her efforts to win his heart had failed. Worse than that: she had transmuted his joy into melancholy.

  “May I ask something of you, Valentine?”

  “Anything, Timesmith.”

  “Your ribbons. I would like to take one, if I may.”

  “Allow me,” he said. He removed a vermilion ribbon and tied it into her grey hair. “Remember me, won’t you?”

  That made her smile. She would remember him until the end of her days. Didn’t he realize this? Had she been too oblique in her bids for his affection? Blur.

  Tink turned to thank him for the token, and to tell him that he was ever on her mind. But she didn’t. His shirt was tattered, his ribbons were frayed. Feathers had come loose from his cormorant mask. He was dusty.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “I... I fell,” he whispered.

  “Oh, Valentine—” She reached up to touch his face. His changeless, beautiful face. Her stolen time came to an end. It left her very old, very tired, and very alone.

  Valentine’s heart would never be hers; she could accept that. But it would never be pledged to anybody ever again, and that she c
ouldn’t bear. It was broken. Because of her.

  If Tink could do one final thing before she succumbed to old age, she wanted to mend him. Mend everybody. But though she knew what that would require, she did not know how to do it. The future was an abstract thing, built of possibilities and nothing else. It was impervious to cogs, springs, pendulums, blades, sand, beeswax, and water.

  She paced. She napped. She ignored the urgent knocking of would-be customers. More napping. More pacing.

  And then she noticed the model castle-city she had built years earlier. Her water-clock Nycthemeron sat in a corner, draped in cobwebs and dust.

  Tink looked upon the Spire, and the surrounding gardens, and knew exactly what to do.

  First, she paid a visit to the stonemason. He welcomed her. But when she told him what she needed, he balked. It was too much work for one person.

  But Tink had not come alone. For she was famous, and drew a small crowd when she ventured outside. Some followers, such as the fellow in the scarlet cravat, had been waiting outside her dark and shuttered store, hoping to wheedle one last wonderment from the aging clockmaker. Others had followed the siren call of her tickticktick, hoping it would lead them to a novel experience.

  Next, Tink called upon the gardeners who maintained the parklands along the river. Their objections were similar to the stonemason’s. But she solved their concerns as she had those of the stonemason: she presented the gardeners with strong and beautiful volunteers.

  She supervised as best she could. But often the volunteers found her dozing in her cart because she had succumbed to weariness. They took turns bringing her home and tucking her into bed.

  The changes to the outskirts of Nycthemeron drew more volunteers, and more still, as people abandoned their decadent delights. But nobody knew why Tink needed so much granite carved just so, nor why she needed the gardens landscaped just so.

  Only time understood her plan. Only time, which had felt first confusion, then jealousy, then heartbreak while she squandered her short life yearning for Valentine.