The Fire Opal Mechanism

by Fran Wilde

  She was trapped.

  With the books, then. How fitting.

  Ania hunkered down in the clockroom.

  “We’ll be all right. We will,” she whispered.

  She paused again. Listened.

  The clock ticked irregularly. Unless that’s my heart?

  Whatever it was, the sound was reassuring.

  “I believe you,” she whispered.

  She ducked farther into the clockwork, bending low, then climbed into the safety of the clockwork’s winding staircase and covered her head with her arms.

  As if they were amplified by the clock’s curved glass, she could hear sounds from outside. Flint clicked. Fuses hissed.

  Her heart or the clock stuttered as more charges went off. Ania heard only muted blasts this time, as if the clockwork protected her. The library shook and dropped deeper into the sediment. The clockroom, with its thick metal gears and stays, swayed but somehow remained intact.

  She’d been right.

  Her ears popped when the building settled. Dark gray dust puffed under the door and settled across the tops of the piles. Ania held her breath. More gray dust climbed the clock face beyond the wall.

  Ania knelt on the spiral stairs, aware of her heart pounding in her ears.

  She was still alive. She felt her arms and legs in the darkness, and couldn’t find any injuries. She blinked, she felt no less aware than she had before. She started to congratulate herself on her luck, on the wisdom of the clockroom’s builder.

  But the library teetered, settling in its foundation. Before Ania could react, the clock’s glass face cracked and the lower half crashed to the floor. The staircase groaned and began to twist. She jumped free. Landed hard on the floor, where a cold, sea-salted breeze kicked up dust.

  The clockroom door didn’t shut properly against the outside any longer. The enormous clock’s gears bent when the staircase to access them finally fell.

  She wept at that loss, above everything.

  Worse, out the door, she could see the fallen half of the clock’s face blocking the steam tunnels. Ania was truly trapped.

  “You couldn’t just leave, could you.” Ania looked at the library where she’d spent her entire career, at the clock and books she loved. She leaned back against a wall, crooked now, and stared. Was everything lost?

  The books she’d kept safe from the Pressmen. Were they still all right? Check, Ania, before giving up entirely.

  The torn title page of the first book on the spilled pile was blank. So too the second book she lifted. Each book she picked up that had been touched by the dust was missing letters and words. Pools of ink ran from the piles down to the floor, leaving folios of blank paper.

  As she watched, the pool of ink began to snake up the wall and out a crack in the nearest sunken window. In the distance far above, she could see a Pressman holding up a green stone that slowly turned black.

  The clock’s base, which had fallen in the blast, suffered in its new place on the floor. The seven and eight on its face had begun running down the clock face; the six was already gone. The name of its designer, which had formed a sweeping curve below the six? Gone too.

  And with it, the Master Archivist’s name. Gone.

  “Sonoria,” Ania whispered, as if finally saying good-bye. “Sonoria Vos.” Her voice cracked on the last syllable. She held her fingers up to the blank glass where Sonoria’s ancestor had once signed her name as the clock’s designer.

  And now both were lost.

  When she drew her fingers back, she held her breath and carefully wiped the vestiges of dust—gritty stuff, like ground stones—from her skin.

  With a groan, Ania dug deep into the stacks of books she’d salvaged, carefully moving those still legible out of reach of the dust on the ground. Only those volumes at the pile’s center survived, and then only in the clockroom. If she ventured out into the library’s wreckage, in search of her food cache or water from a leaking pipe, and got the least amount of dust on her hands or clothes, touching one of these had the same consequences.

  The words ran from the page beneath her fingers, onto the floor, and away.

  “No. No, this is not safe. You said it would be safe here.” Ania jumped at the sound, then realized it was her own voice. Her own panic. Echoing through the small room, bouncing off the broken gears.

  Nothing responded to her, not even the clock. She bit her lip to keep from saying more.

  If anyone had been watching, they’d have seen Ania seeming to fold up into herself, drawing in the quiet, taking shallow, tearing breaths, as she began to set her own words aside.

  It would be so easy to give up. To climb from the library and let the Pressmen outside take the remaining books away. Take her away, too.

  From the now-quieter library.

  But something inside the clock—a beautiful marbled thing wound with gold wire that gleamed now in the shadows—kept ticking softly. She knelt closer to the clockwork, the sound comforting her until she calmed and started to think logically. She had water from the cistern. A cache of food still remaining from what she’d laid in when the trouble started.

  The clock might be broken, but the fact that a part of it was still ticking made Ania feel better.

  Then, a groan came, near the broken glass by a half-buried window. Far from where Ania stood.

  Someone else was in the clockroom.

  A shadow played against the wall.

  “Who’s here?” Ania called. Another Pressman?

  “I got caught here,” a woman’s voice answered. A foot stepped on broken glass.

  “Stay back,” Ania cried. She reached for a shard of the clock’s arm. Wondered whether this intruder would disappear like the others, if they got too close.

  “Necessity,” she whispered. “Get away from me. From my books.”

  The figure who rose from the shadows was smaller than Ania. Younger. Her skin gleamed with dust and sweat. She sheathed her knife with a dramatic gesture. “I’m a student here. Trapped like you. I won’t harm you.”

  Ania blinked. No one was a student here any longer. Or everyone was. She squinted at the woman. “I don’t recognize you.” Her jaw tightened. Had she seen the young woman at the meeting? Was she with the Pressmen now? “What’s your name?”

  “Jorit Lee. Came to the mining department after discovering that all the gems I’d studied were lost or broken, like the old gems. Not one real valley gem to be found any longer.” Jorit rambled, her hands stuck in her pockets—perhaps out of shock at finding someone else here, or because she’d hit her head during the fall. Ania thought her smile was that of someone who’d seen their studies meet the real world and be crushed by it. Who had lost something. “Not that it matters.”

  Ania shook her head, confused. Would this person disappear too?

  “How long have you been down here?” Jorit asked, moving closer.

  Ania knew dust clotted her braid alarmingly. Her clothes smelled rank and smoky. Dirt lined the creases in her olive skin, and the loose librarian’s robe, second tier, might have once been parchment toned but now was a mottled mushroom color, no matter whether she turned it inside out or not.

  “A few days. Since the trouble started.”

  Jorit ran her fingers through her dark hair. Her hands came away smudged with black. “You came down here to guard the books.” Surprise echoed into the stacks, a little louder than it should have been. On the back of one hand, Ania saw a pale scar. A thief’s mark.

  “I had to protect them, and the students,” Ania said in a warning tone. She would continue to protect the books. She tried to look fierce. There is absolutely nothing more to explain.

  She thought she saw a glimmer of understanding in the thief’s eyes.

  Jorit’s fingers brushed a small, glittering leather-bound book beside her that rested on a stack of books. She didn’t look at the broken, erased clock face at all.

  “Leave that alone,” Ania said.

  To her surprise, Jorit lif
ted her hand from the book. Ania pulled it to her, carefully.

  There was a long pause as the two sized each other up. “What are you doing here?” Ania finally asked again.

  “Looking for anything I could sell to escape the Far Reaches,” was Jorit’s quick response. It was also an honest response, Ania felt. “If you’ve found anything good, we can try to get you out too, before the Pressmen come here again. Now that they know there are still books in here, they will.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Ania said. She was sure of it now. The clockroom would protect her. “And I’m not a thief.”

  She gripped the book tighter in one hand, the piece of the clock’s sweep hand in the other.

  “We are all thieves now.” The other woman—the thief—looked at her carefully. “Are you injured?”

  “I’m not injured,” Ania replied steadily. “And you’re not stealing these. Any of them.” She tightened her fingers around the sharp metal.

  “Who’s going to keep them? Where would you hide all these books?” Jorit scoffed, ignoring Ania’s threat. “There’s nowhere anymore. The Pressmen are glad to have them, more than anything. Supposedly their Compendiums require paper that’s been used before, and ink too.”

  “No. I keep them safe. And they are not just paper and ink.” Ania lifted Jorit’s bag from her shoulder and looked inside. “Including these.”

  “No.” Jorit reached for the bag. But loud footsteps clattered across the outer library hall. Both women fell silent and stared back where Jorit had come from.

  “I’m telling you, thieves! Here, and worse. I can hear them. They survived the collapse. Down there.” A young man’s voice.

  The clockroom held its breath. “You led them here!” Ania finally whispered as the footsteps kept coming closer.

  “I didn’t—” Jorit groaned. She rubbed at the mark on her hand, her head turned. Listening.

  Thieves and worse. “You recognize a voice?” Ania certainly recognized it.

  This Jorit had succeeded where all the others had failed—luring her out, bringing danger with her. Ania knew that whatever it had done to the Pressmen, the clockroom couldn’t protect her from a crowd.

  A softer voice wound down the hall like fear. “The boy says we’ll find the librarian down in here somewhere. And a thief with a book-filled knapsack.”

  “Xachar,” Jorit groaned. “Why?”

  Ania did the same. Though she’d been right about the voice, she couldn’t get over her surprise. Her own student. Why indeed? “You didn’t lead them here,” she finally acknowledged. “But one of my former students, a Pressman now, has traded your kindness for a badge.” She hissed.

  “He’s not a Pressman. He was trying to help his brother.” Jorit sounded so sure.

  “Xachar once told me he had no family to speak of. That he was alone. That the university was all he had.” Ania saw Jorit’s face fall.

  The librarian made a fast decision and put the sweep hand down. She grabbed a few more books and put Jorit’s stack back in her arms. If Jorit was in danger, perhaps she could be enticed to help hide books in exchange for a place to hide.

  “Come on. Hurry. Be careful.” Ania pointed deep into the clockwork as the guards shouted back and forth across the library’s ruins. The thief looked at her, then down at her armful of books.

  “Here’s a food cache!” one guard shouted, much closer than Ania wanted.

  “A cot. And a pile of books with print still on all the pages,” another cried.

  “Grab those.”

  “No,” Ania whispered. “Not more words lost.” But she couldn’t save them alone. She didn’t want to count on this woman—a thief!—but she needed the help. “Please,” she said.

  “I’m with you.” Jorit held the books in her arms tighter and followed Ania into the clockwork. “Where are we going?”

  Ania smiled, grateful despite herself. Perhaps until the danger passed, it would be all right to let one person in.

  “Somewhere safe.” It was an uneasy truce. A thief and a librarian against the Pressmen. Would it be enough?

  Against her better judgment, Ania pulled them both as close as possible to the clock’s smaller case. The one that still ticked softly.

  She remembered now.

  They hid behind the small case, which she’d seen the Pressmen touch before everything went dark and a Pressman had disappeared.

  * * *

  Inside the clockwork, broken gears that had once ticked minutes, hours, and days stuck at odd angles.

  Special bezels for lunar and solar calendars, and another for ancient harvest that meant nothing to the Far Reaches but must have once, were also still. From the back, these gears and bezels bore the handwritten notes of another watchman who had tended the clock: the previous Master Archivist.

  But the clock was cracked. Once, Ania had held its broken sweep arm like a sword. She set her books down and eyed the broken casing. If she touched it, would she disappear too? Her hand wavered.

  One tiny component continued to tick a familiar pattern inside the small room.

  With the broken gears bent the way they were, Jorit stared at a brass casket deep enough in the workings that it was usually out of reach. The clock’s heart glowed, exposed. Still ticking.

  From the casket’s back, connecting wheels had run to the larger clock, providing it with power.

  Still glowing. Wrapped in a clockwork of its own.

  “Is that a jewel?” When Jorit came too close, Ania moved to stand in front of it, still brandishing the sweep arm. “If this can help the two of us defend against the Pressmen”—Jorit pointed at the glow—“give it to me or grab it yourself!”

  “I’ll not give it to you. Jewelry? In a library? You’re a thief, not a defender of words.” Ania sounded surer than she felt. But she tried to block the brass casket anyway. She didn’t want another person to disappear.

  Her elbow jostled the casing. She didn’t disappear.

  Like the clockroom door, the casket swung open slightly at Ania’s touch. While Jorit glanced between the clockwork and the barricade, Ania pulled the casket open to view the smaller clock—contained in a metal box the size of a large man’s hand—hanging from a chain. A wheel connected at the back ran through the casket and into the clockwork.

  This still turned.

  Ania touched the worn metal case of the smaller timepiece, and the clock dropped out. Right into the thief’s hands.

  The librarian gasped and reached for the clock. Jorit gripped it tightly, and then they both held it, the metal momentarily slick against their fingers even as the movements beat regular in their grasps.

  “You broke it!” Jorit worried.

  “It was already broken,” Ania replied. “The Master never told me what drove the clock, and I never thought to ask. I guess this is it.”

  The shouting grew louder as the soldiers finally entered the main hall and began pressing on the broken door. Ania heard a dog snuffling, then a whine.

  “Here!” a guard shouted, her voice twisted by a Far Reaches lilt.

  The guards peering around the door wore the same gear as the Pressmen Jorit had spotted outside. Helmets, blue and white uniforms. Batons drawn and hands laden with bags of dust.

  “Come out!”

  “Immediately!”

  Jorit grasped Ania’s hand as the Pressmen pushed against the door. Ania recoiled at first—the gall of this stranger, this thief—and then clutched Jorit’s hand back. They were in this together, at least for now. The clock glowed brighter.

  Jorit almost dropped the small clock as it became warm, but Ania steadied that too.

  It isn’t safe here, the clock seemed to tick.

  In their fingers, the timepiece that had long driven the entire mechanism for the library’s clockwork ticked quietly, a comforting few seconds. Those ticks spread out like ripples, each one taking longer. Sweeping up against the broken brass gears.

  “It’s not safe here,” Ania said, echoing the clock.


  The ticks from the timepiece drowned out Jorit’s reply.

  They became louder, a road of them, a trail down which her mind was drawn, a tunnel, an escape hatch.

  “Are we dying?” Ania whispered. “Is my heart giving in? Am I—” Panic built, and the clock no longer calmed her.

  Jorit’s scarred hand held steady against hers and the clock’s warming metal.

  And the library—the library was dissolving into swirls of dust and shadow all around them. The broken brass door and the gears were the last to go.

  Beyond where they stood, there was nothing. No guards, no passages of toppled books skewed through the stacks. Ania bit a scream between her teeth.

  The dust thickened to a cloud that closed around everything, and the clock’s ticking went on for what seemed like one long minute, then another, before the minutes seemed to pile upon one another and skip around.

  First Jorit, then Ania tripped on uneven ground and landed in thick river mud.

  Behind them, flames danced across the walls of a palace built in a very old style. There was a beat of drums unlike anything Jorit had ever heard.

  “Where are we?” Jorit had time to gasp. An arrow flew past Ania’s head.

  4.

  Xachar

  When the two women in the library disappeared, Xachar Oubliant searched desperately through the bent gears, the tumbled shelves.

  He’d promised his squad leader he’d find the last academics hiding in the university, as well as books. The senior Pressmen would tire of him if he wasn’t useful, he knew. And Xachar wanted to be useful, to gain a better position, as he’d been promised.

  But he’d failed at being a guide. His squad of students hadn’t found as many professors as they’d been assigned. They hadn’t found many books either, until the library. And none of his group had been willing to go inside the library once people started disappearing. They were so easily frightened. Some were even spooked by the Pressmen on the square with their strange green stone.

  So Xachar had gone alone, leaving his group on the square.

  “Good for nothing, wet behind the ears, easily distracted, all of you,” he muttered. “You’ll stay in the Far Reaches.” He’d proven he was better.