The Gilded Wolves

by Roshani Chokshi

  It was a feast for both a symbolist and a historian. It was not an ordinary clock, though it had a face and numerals and hands that pointed to various hours of the day. Twisting symbols stretched around the clockwork. Carved maidens who drew veils over their faces. Grinning beasts that disappeared beneath silver foil foliage. Sepulchers that opened and closed in the space of a blink, forcing one to wonder whether there was something that had crept out of their hollow spaces. At first, Enrique had thought the Forged symbols were intentional. But after hours of observation, he had become disillusioned. Symbols meant something, but they could also exist to confuse the eye. Something that he was not willing to share just yet with Hypnos.

  All his life, symbols had been a source of comfort. They felt like stories that reached out beyond the confines of time. And yet, everything about this clock felt like a taunt. To make it worse, every time he looked at it, he was forced to reckon with the hours sliding past. Every hour that went by with Tristan’s life hanging in the balance.

  A loud huffing sigh broke through his thoughts.

  “How am I supposed to think under these conditions?” demanded Hypnos. “What happened to the wine?”

  “You could always try water for a change,” said Séverin from the doorway.

  “Water is boring.”

  To an outsider, Séverin looked no different than he normally did. Dressed in an elegant suit. Irritable, but restrained. As if this minor glitch were nothing to worry about. But the closer he got, the more little details popped out. The slope of his shoulders. The creases under his eyes. Ink stains on his fingers. The threads on the cuffs of his sleeves unraveling.

  Séverin was coming undone.

  Séverin took two steps inside the stargazing room before stopping.

  “Can’t find a seat?” asked Hypnos.

  Enrique righted himself. Of course, Hypnos had spoken in jest. There were a number of empty seats, but to Enrique they felt like unsteady ghosts. There was the black cushion on the ground where Tristan should be sitting, hiding Goliath in his pocket. The green, velvet chaise lounge from where Laila would be brandishing her teacup like a queen’s scepter. The high stool with its ragged pillow where Zofia would be leaning forward, a matchbox twirling in her hand. And then Séverin’s seat, the black-cherry armchair where Hypnos currently sat.

  In the end, Séverin chose to stand.

  Enrique looked behind him to the door. “Where are the girls?”

  Séverin fished around in his pocket and held up a note. “Laila and Zofia went to investigate something at the Forging exhibition.”

  That made Enrique sit up straight. “What? That place is crawling with security guards. And if there’s someone from the Fallen House there, then—”

  Hypnos started laughing. “Oh, mon cher. Did you want them to ask for permission?”

  “Of course not.” Enrique blushed.

  “Ah,” said Hypnos, his gaze narrowing. “Then perhaps you’re nursing a bit of a wound for not being invited along with them. Which girl, I wonder, has laid claim to some corner of your imagination…”

  “Can we just get back to work?”

  “Laila, I wonder? The living temple goddess?”

  Enrique rolled his eyes. Séverin, on the other hand, went entirely still.

  “Or is it the little ice queen?”

  “Neither,” he said sharply.

  But even as he said the words, he couldn’t help remembering that one of the last times he’d been in this room was with Zofia. Together, they had cracked the code on the Sator Square. Together, they had found something. He’d just thought they made a good team. Yet even as he remembered it, he saw Zofia in the train compartment. The light catching on her candle-bright hair. Her pale fingers tracing the neckline of her velvet dress as she practiced, of all things, flirting.

  Enrique shook himself. His head was a snarl of too many impressions. Tristan’s closed eyes, the dead stare of the figures on the bone clock, the peppery scent of Hypnos’s skin, and light catching on Zofia’s hair.

  “When will they be back?”

  “In an hour,” said Séverin. “Where are we on the clock?”

  “Nowhere,” grumbled Hypnos.

  “Have you tried taking off the glass covering?”

  “What would that do?” demanded Enrique. “It’s far too delicate as it is. Maybe that’s why it’s called a bone clock in the first place. Fragile bones and all that. I lifted the covering once and examined it with kidskin gloves, and the silver immediately started flaking.”

  “Fine, fine,” said Séverin, although he didn’t sound very convinced. He turned to Hypnos. “What about any headway on the Fallen House?”

  “There’s nothing here that we haven’t already discussed. The Fallen House believed it was their sacred duty to rebuild the Tower of Babel. They sought to do that by”—Hypnos paused, squinting as he held a piece of parchment to his face—“‘harnessing the power of the dead.’ I have no idea what that means. It sounds both sinister and terribly unfashionable.”

  “Well, they were always cryptic,” said Enrique, gesturing at the famed bone clock.

  At the height of their power, the Fallen House had never once revealed where they held their meetings. Only their infamous bone clocks, their Forged objects of communication, could reveal the meetings’ location. Supposedly, the clock also contained a failsafe method allowing a non-House member to locate them in case of emergency, but Enrique was starting to think that was nothing more than rumor.

  “How do we know Roux-Joubert is even at the Fallen House’s original meeting place?” asked Enrique.

  Séverin turned over the honeybee chain in his hand. “He’d consider it a point of pride. As if he were intentionally continuing a legacy.”

  Hypnos snorted. “Him and who else? You told me that man kept saying ‘we,’ but the Order has tightly controlled anything even resembling recruitment to the Fallen House. They had the leader executed, and the rest of them were given the choice of death or a strong mind affinity alteration that would wipe out any recollection of the Fallen House.”

  “But so many of those members must have been with the Fallen House for most of their adult lives, wouldn’t mind affinity make them—”

  “—a shell of their former selves?” finished Hypnos. “Yes. Which is why a shocking number of them chose death. Fanatics.”

  “Some must have escaped both death and punishment, though,” mused Séverin. “Perhaps they were driven deep underground.”

  “My guess is that it’s a clever, deranged man and his hench person with that blade hat you mentioned. The Fallen House loved to travel in packs, like they were wolves or some such. Trust me, if he had more than one person on his side, he would’ve brought them all for that little showdown in the greenhouse,” said Hypnos. At this, even Séverin nodded in agreement. “Also: Who wears a blade hat? What if it slips and then you end up slashing your face? Detestable.”

  Enrique shuddered, crossing himself. “At this rate, we’re not going to find Roux-Joubert or his henchman. Nothing on this clock is helpful. Not even the notation.”

  He pointed at the one word scrawled just beneath the sixth hour marking: nocte.

  Midnight.

  “It’s just the name of the clockmaker,” said Séverin.

  “I wouldn’t be too sure … It might be a directive, a rule of some kind meant to inform us how to look at the clock.”

  “Can I just see the clock without the protective covering?” asked Séverin.

  “Only if you promise you won’t smash it.”

  “I promise I won’t smash it.”

  Enrique narrowed his gaze and then nodded in the direction of the bone clock. Gingerly, Séverin lifted the glass covering. He considered the bone clock beneath, the silver foil clinging to the exquisite statues.

  And then he shoved it over, where it toppled to one side.

  Hypnos squealed. Enrique leapt out of his chair.

  “What did you do?” he demanded.
/>
  “I did what I wanted. It’s my clock.”

  “But you promised!” wailed Enrique.

  “True, but my fingers were crossed.”

  Hypnos faked a gasp. “Oh no! His fingers were crossed!”

  Enrique shot Hypnos a scathing glare. “Séverin, you could have damaged a symbol, some critical piece of information, and now we’ll never find Tristan—”

  “I gave you nearly four hours,” said Séverin. “You’re brilliant. If there was anything to find, you would have sniffed it out by now. That you didn’t is proof enough to me that, in the clock’s current state, there is nothing worth finding.”

  “I…” Enrique hesitated.

  Truthfully, he was both flattered and insulted. But looking at the place where the bone clock had toppled over, mounting horror replaced all that. Silver dust now spangled the air, a consequence of the delicate foil that had covered the symbols on the clock. Evening light glanced off it, creating sharp and slender shadows on the face of the machinery.

  “Now you’ve done it,” said Hypnos. “He’s lost the ability to speak!”

  “Oh, shut up, Hypnos—” started Séverin.

  Enrique tuned out both of them. He crept forward slowly, his heart hammering. There was a new pattern on the body of the bone clock, like ink sluicing between grooved wood. Words hewn out of light and silver and shadow. Where the silver had peeled away, a flat paleness revealed itself. Off-white. Like … like …

  Hypnos scuttled backward on his hands. “Dear God, is that clock actually made of bone?”

  At the same time, Séverin squinted. “There’s writing on that clock.”

  It hadn’t been clear until now. The hand that had cleverly disguised the words on the clock was cramped and narrow, the words barely legible Latin that Enrique quickly translated:

  I have been with you all your life

  Though I appear only in strife

  My quantity will let you see

  All this world was meant to be

  Enrique moved closer to the clock, his fingers hovering over the words that now appeared.

  When Enrique looked up at him, there was a renewed light in Séverin’s eyes. Something that hadn’t been there until now. The three of them sat once more on the ground. Hypnos with his knees pulled to his chest. Séverin, legs crossed, arms crossed. And then Enrique, who was now happily sprawled out, a pen and notebook beside either hand as he began to transcribe the riddle’s words. This was the first breakthrough they’d had in hours, and he could feel the strength of it like an unaccounted for burst of sunshine in the veins.

  “My quantity,” mused Séverin aloud. “That suggests the answer is twofold. Both the answer to the riddle and how it relates to the clock. Perhaps the quantity has something to do with the numbers on the clock face?”

  “Yes, but the clock only goes to twelve,” said Hypnos. “What’s in your body that there’s only twelve of that shows up in times of strife?”

  And thus began the most excruciating hour of Enrique’s life. At first, there was talk of teeth which Séverin instantly dismissed. “Who only has twelve teeth?”

  Together, they combed through different riddled answers but nothing fit. The minutes stretched by. Not one of them had disturbed the bone clock where it lay. Hypnos had gotten up and started to wander in circles, moaning for wine. While Séverin had turned inward once more, his fingers worrying the tassels on Tristan’s cushion.

  “Stupid clock that may or not be made of bone.”

  Séverin lifted his head. “What did you say?”

  “I said the clock may or may not be made of bone.”

  “Bone.”

  Hypnos muttered, “I could use a quick one.”

  Enrique ignored him. “Could that fit? As an answer?”

  “‘I have been with you all your life,’” read Hypnos aloud. “True. Or that’d be deadly terrifying. Though some people, I honestly believe, are born without spines. And next we have, ‘though I appear only in strife.’ What? I don’t think that fits.”

  Enrique fell quiet. The strife bit had thrown him off too, at first. Bones didn’t appear in strife, floating before someone like ghosts. But they certainly showed. He had seen it in the Philippines, when he accompanied his father on rides through the provinces of Capiz and Cavite to check on the rice production of the paddies they owned. On the road, leaned up against whitewashed churches and houses that looked like a strong breeze might make them fold over in defeat, crouched the beggars. Young and old, it didn’t matter. Their eyes were all the same: flat and vacant. The faces of those whose hope had hardened and shrunk from too much of life. There, he saw the children with their too-sharp ribs ridging their shirts. Knobbed elbows stained with dirt. Eyes unsettlingly wide in faces sculpted by starvation.

  “I think ‘bone’ fits,” he said quietly.

  Hypnos cast him a strange look. Enrique had no desire to be the focus of that attention, so he said, “The last two lines fit as well. We know that the Fallen House had some macabre interests. It’s possible that meant using bone. In which case, that line, ‘all this world was meant to be,’ might fit with their own interests and not all humans’ everywhere. Which leaves the second-to-last line—‘my quantity will let you see’—as the final hint. Maybe it means the number of bones found in a human body. How many are there, anyway?”

  “Two hundred and six,” said Séverin instantly.

  Enrique frowned. “Do I want to know why you had that answer immediately?”

  Séverin’s smile gleamed wolflike. “I doubt it.”

  “But how do we get 206 to show up on a clock?”

  Séverin let out a soft laugh. As if he were remembering something. “Six minutes past two. Two-oh-six. Two hundred and six.”

  The three of them stared at the clock. Some crackling energy that had not been there before now wafted out of it. Enrique had the bizarre notion the clock could now sense that they knew how to drag out its secrets.

  Slowly, Enrique pushed the hour and minute hand. Hypnos and Séverin had moved closer without him noticing. He saw the scene, suddenly, in his mind’s eye, as if from afar: three boys kneeling around a clock made of bone, the light behind them rendering them sharp shadows brought to life, and he felt that thread of hunger sewing them all together in the moment, so that when it came right down to it, perhaps their souls would have been indistinguishable.

  Enrique waited.

  He waited for the Forging power to unravel into the air, to push back. But he felt nothing.

  “It’s not working,” said Hypnos. “Did we get it wrong?”

  Enrique’s heart seized. He hoped not, but then—

  “We didn’t follow directions,” said Séverin, pointing to the little script on the clock’s crescent: nocte. Midnight.

  “But midnight is hours away!”

  Séverin’s gaze shuddered. He rubbed the scar on his palm, then reached for his tin of cloves. He chewed one thoughtfully, ignoring the tension building up with everyone else.

  “At least by then, the girls will be back.”

  Séverin left not long after that to attend to L’Eden business, which left Enrique and Hypnos alone in the stargazing room. Enrique wasn’t sure what he should do. In the end, both of them returned to what they had been doing before—poring over the shredded documents of the Fallen House. Searching for clues in the detritus. The shadow of evening stretched over them. Food had been called up and eaten without either of them lifting a head from their research. Always, the bone clock stared back. Waiting. Smug. When Enrique looked at the room, he saw the strange pall over it. The cushions upturned. Tristan’s pillow shoved under a chair so no one could sit in it.

  “Why are you helping us?” Enrique realized the words were out of his mouth before he could even think them.

  Hypnos looked up, his face unguarded. “Is it so strange to think I might have reasons of my own for wanting the Babel Ring found?” he asked.

  “That’s not an answer. You could be doing
this work from home. I’ve heard the House Nyx library is the envy of scholars. You don’t have to be here.”

  Hypnos was quiet for a moment, and then he folded his hands on his lap. “If I had someone on my side … someone of equal standing to me, then maybe life in the Order would be … easier.”

  Enrique processed this. “You want Séverin to become a patriarch?”

  Hypnos nodded. “When we were little, I thought we’d grow up and be kings or something. A whole kingdom to divide between us.” He glared at Enrique. “Do not tell him I said that.”

  Enrique mimed a zip over his mouth, and Hypnos relaxed once more. He looked so young, so unlined, and yet his ice-colored eyes looked ancient.

  “The truth is I need someone on my side,” said Hypnos. He wrapped his arms around his knees. “Someone who might understand what it means to live in two worlds as I do. I have tried and I have failed. I cannot be both the descendant of Haitian slaves and the son of a French aristocrat, even if that is what I hold in my heart. I had to choose, and perhaps the Order forced my hand in this. But what no one tells you is that even when you decide which world you will live in, the world may not always see you as you would wish. Sometimes it demands that you be so outrageous as to transcend your very skin. You can change your name. Your eye color. Make yourself a myth and live within it, so that you belong to no one but yourself.”

  Enrique’s mouth felt dry. He knew exactly how that felt. The feeling like his own skin betrayed him. That his own dreams didn’t match his face and would therefore never come to pass. “I understand.”

  Hypnos snorted. He dropped his head back against the couch, and the light caught on the long line of his throat. Hypnos looked like a seraph who spent his whole life in ripe sunshine. He had always been beautiful, but now the light gilded his beauty into something unearthly. Enrique used to feel a twinge of shame when it came to his feelings … He used to pray that when it came to attraction, his body would just choose between men and women, and not both. It was his second-oldest brother, bound for priesthood, who told him that God made no mistakes in crafting their hearts. Enrique still hadn’t quite parsed out his own relationship to faith, but what his brother said had made him stop hating himself. It made him stop turning from what lay inside him and embrace it. But it wasn’t until he arrived in Spain for university that he started doing more than just looking at beautiful boys. He was reminded of it now, staring at Hypnos … and he was far too distracted to realize the other boy had noticed.