The Fire Opal Mechanism

by Fran Wilde

  “You see this extra dial? This is—” He chuckled.

  “What?” Jorit held her breath, trying to pay attention to Ania and the shopkeeper both. The man might tell them how to control where the clock went. Ania might reveal what she’d been hiding.

  “I’d been asked to construct this timepiece according to a very specific set of standards. Some I thought were completely ridiculous, and I was tempted to stop. A year bezel. A second one, on a free-rotating pin. Another set of amplifying modifications.” He ran his fingers along the clock’s sides, brushing several flanges.

  But while the shopkeeper said much, his hands said more. His fingers lingered on the clock’s case. “You aren’t from this time, are you?”

  Ania froze. “Of course we are. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  His fingers curled around the wood frame. A shocking display from a salesman.

  Ania tried to distract him. “Why did you make the timepiece? The other machines? For whom?”

  The shopkeeper kept a hand on the clock, but answered. “My father was asked to bind an emerald years ago by a stranger. He didn’t know how, but he thought he’d give it a try. I watched him work on the design. Improve it. When a woman came to the shop with this stone and her specifications, I wanted to try too.”

  “Even though you didn’t know how.” Jorit’s green eyes narrowed. She was starting to suspect. “You’re not a lapidary.”

  The shopkeeper shook his head. “I did a lot of guesswork. I’d heard rumors. I got lucky with the clock. A woman from one of the inns nearby had a book about gems with her. Showed me what to do. If only my father had the same.”

  “Who was the woman?” Ania countered. Her eyes were sharp. “What did she look like?”

  But the shopkeeper’s fingers had edged over the timepiece again, greedier now. Ania pulled it back, seemingly without thinking.

  “Binding is a skill that’s worth good money. I’m the only one in Quadril who’s tried. I practiced on synthetics until I could make a complex bezel. And I’ve made many clocks. It seemed natural to try.” He was almost murmuring to the clock now.

  Jorit frowned. Reached out to the clock.

  The man continued, “I did the work when I thought it was a lark. Now that I know? This clock is worth much more than I was paid. It was stolen from me . . . and now you’re here. You are thieves, but not the usual kind. Tell me how to make it work—”

  His fingers became claws as he tried to wrest the timepiece from Ania, who grasped at it too now, fingers slipping.

  Jorit pushed the shopkeeper off balance. “You’ve been paid for this clock. It was not stolen.” Her voice rose so the nearby market could hear her. “You cannot demand to be paid a second time.” The shopkeeper fell back as several shoppers stared at him and began to whisper.

  Taking Ania’s arm, Jorit pulled her from her seat. “Come on, Ania.” They walked as calmly as they could to the street.

  The shopkeeper watched them go. Jorit’s heart pounded as they escaped.

  7.

  Ania

  We cannot stay here, Ania thought as they walked into the street. Not in this now. But we cannot leave yet either. We need to know more. Her heart was beating faster. Would her panic spirit them away again?

  The shopkeeper. He’d bound this gem. Perhaps poorly. Dabbling. Ania felt another hitch of alarm. He should have known better than to try.

  She’d allowed herself to relax in the tea shop, the beverage’s warmth sustaining her after the barrage of the past days.

  But this here and now wasn’t any safer, neither for her nor for Jorit.

  For the clock either, it seemed. Nor was careening from time to time and place to place.

  Ania forced herself to breathe. In. Two beats. Out. Two beats. She worked to slow her heart. To keep the clock from taking them away again.

  They needed to stay here. For now.

  Think, Ania. They’d arrived in the time close to when the clock was created. Close enough to find out about the strange gems. Could they find the press the news crier had mentioned? Was that what the shopkeeper’s father had tried to bind?

  She and Jorit dodged down a narrower side street, trying to avoid dead-end alleys. Jorit led, pulling Ania along by a sleeve.

  Ania skidded to a halt as she remembered something Sonoria Vos had said about a rash of books that went missing in the past. Closer to this now. She remembered her grandmother’s stories from Quadril, about opening several favorite books to find them blank. Only a few. Library archives elsewhere had kept copies, but, in the light of future events, those mysterious disappearances made Ania clutch the clock. Had the gem been set in a Pressman’s machine?

  Had they found the point in time where the Pressmen began?

  Could they fix it? Could they save the affected books? Maybe change something?

  Behind them, the shopkeeper hadn’t pursued them. The two women stopped for breath. The clock’s ticking stayed even.

  “What if,” Ania began, the idea forming in her mind as she spoke, the words coming out jumbled, “it’s not the clock but the fire opal hidden inside the mechanism that’s able to skip around in time?” It certainly felt like that was what had happened. “And he mentioned two other mechanisms. A loom and a printing press. What if, instead of being bound and controlled correctly, according to The Book of Gems, the mechanisms have magnified their power? In the same way a lever or a pulley lets a person do more work?”

  “The Universal Compendiums of Knowledge have capacities that the Pressmen won’t explain—the words revise and update themselves. No book does that. What if—” Jorit couldn’t go on.

  Ania knew all the fears that could fill that quiet: What if there are still more gems? What if they’re as dangerous and powerful as the myths? What if the Pressmen really do have one?

  Worse, what if we have another?

  “The shopkeeper said his family was asked to set the gems,” Jorit panted, staring at the ground. “Who asked him to do it?”

  “No,” Ania said. “We can’t return to the market to ask him. He’ll try to take the clock again. He could have us arrested. We need to stay off the street.” She pointed to another inn’s sign, swinging from a metal pole over a faded green door.

  They knocked, and when the door swung wide, they stepped inside the dim entry, looking over their shoulders. The low-ceilinged room, the din of conversation, closed around them like shadows. “We’ll figure this out. We’ll find our way back home,” Jorit said, hoping it was true. “Or at least we can find some food.”

  Inside the inn, they asked for the owner, hoping there would be work for them. When a woman came to help, two empty tankards in her arms, her hair cropped as short as Jorit’s, Ania stared.

  “Master Archivist! Sonoria?” Ania cried. “How?” She threw her arms around her mentor, while Jorit looked on guardedly. A tankard clattered to the floor.

  The serving woman peeled Ania’s arms from her shoulders. “What happened?” She stared at the clock they carried. “Why is that here with you? Is it damaged?”

  Ania shook her head. “We were attacked in the library—the Pressmen—”

  The Master Archivist winced as the inn’s noise quieted. “Careful!” She looked at the women a long time. “You need a room.”

  “We have no money,” Ania said.

  “It’s no charge. I want to hear what happened, and you look exhausted.”

  Jorit took the key Sonoria held out, but Ania stared. “That seems like a loss for the inn.”

  Sonoria, her face drawn and worried, shook her head. “Not nearly. I’ll repay it. It’s far too easy to live here, knowing what will affect market prices. The innkeeper is a widower and was happy to have me to help out.” She handed them each several coins. “I’d hoped, one day, to find my way home. You can take these safely, buy some clothes. But with a warning. You mustn’t try to change too much. You cannot stop the Pressmen here. Or any other time in the past.”

  “Why not?” Ania held on to
the Archivist’s hand, as if she didn’t believe the woman was real.

  “Because I tried, here, to break the press before it became too powerful. I pushed one of their leaders, and he fell against the machine.” Sonoria’s eyes glazed with the memory. “And once I’d caused his death, though it was an accident, time cannot forget an event that big. I can never move farther in the future than that last moment I was in the library before I am sent back. The past has already happened, and because I made it happen, I have to be here.”

  She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “Listen to me, Ania. You can’t change the past, no matter how much you want to. It’s already happened. Trying to do so overmuch will trap you here.” The Master Archivist spread her arms wide to encompass the inn. “Like me.”

  Ania stared, trying to comprehend. “Trapped?” A customer greeted the Master Archivist by an unfamiliar name. “You mean you can’t come with us?”

  Sonoria frowned. “I never traveled with the clock; I adjusted its settings to move back and forth in time for a certain period.” She lifted a small pendant with a cracked, pale piece of opal set in a small bezel. “From the back of the gem. When my time was up, it would return me to the library. But when I made my mistake, trying to interfere with the Press’s past instead of its future, the piece of gem I traveled with cracked. And then I found I was stuck.”

  All those times Sonoria had vanished. All the times she’d refused to meet with the deans. “You were trying to keep the Pressmen at bay?” Ania grasped Sonoria’s hand, tears filling her eyes.

  “I felt I had to. I’d finally discovered what was powering their campaign to unify knowledge. It’s a gem, Ania. A fake gem that wants—needs—ink in order to continue to exist.”

  Ania was quiet while Sonoria’s words sank in. A gem. Like the shopkeeper had said. “A real gem and a fake gem.” The three books she carried in her satchel from the library felt even heavier now. “And you tried to destroy one with the other.” Her face lit up. “I should have seen it before,” she whispered.

  If she’d learned nothing from antiquity, it was this: the hardest changes to see are those happening all around you, until it’s too late. “There must be a way to help.” She had a second opportunity to rescue the library, and maybe Sonoria as well.

  The Master Archivist watched her carefully, eyes searching Ania’s. She pressed her lips together before she spoke. “I thought so too, once I realized what was happening and I discovered the clock’s peculiarities. The gem can only travel where it’s been before. Now the same is true for me. I’ve spent a lot of time wandering. But I failed to destroy the press. Failed to bind its gem. And trying to break it? Trapped me here.”

  “How might you be freed from this?” Jorit asked. She’d seen Ania’s face.

  “I don’t know if I can be,” Sonoria said. Ania didn’t let go of Sonoria’s hand, not until Sonoria pulled away. “When you return home, be sure to remember me somehow. Time doesn’t forget events, but memory, especially for time travelers, is less precise.”

  “We don’t know how to return home!” Jorit said. “Show us how the clock works.”

  Ania looked at her companion sharply. “Jorit!” But she wondered. Could they take Sonoria with them?

  “It’s all right,” Sonoria said. “I’ve had plenty of time to consider my fate. It really is fine.”

  She reached for the clock. “You tell it to go by turning the harvest knob. At least that’s how I did it. Set a span of time you want to be gone for.” Her fingers pointed at the dials. Hovered. “According to an old book, you can try talking to it too, but that never worked for me.”

  Ania nodded, saying nothing about her heartbeats and the clock’s pace.

  Sonoria continued. “Do this for me: for all the books, for those of us who cultivate learning and debate, not just facts.”

  “What is it?” Ania said. “Anything. If it will help you.”

  “Find the Pressmen’s gem and the printing press. In your present, not in the past. Destroy the press. Change the future before that disappears too.”

  Sonoria’s fingers shook. She reached for the clock, then hesitated as if she was trying to hold back. “Remember when I told you that books started disappearing?” she said.

  Ania nodded. “I was thinking about that. It happened in this era. There are references to texts, but not the texts themselves, mostly from Quadril, around the same time as the Pressmen began marching.”

  “I apprenticed at the library while trying to find one of those books—one my great-grandmother often cited in her diary—that never made it through to the modern era. A dictionary of gems.”

  “The Book of Gems?” The copy Ania had found was in her knapsack.

  Sonoria nodded. “That was one of the first books I rescued. There are only two copies left, and no one else has seen it.”

  I’ve seen it, the clock whispered. I’m in it.

  Ania jumped. But, thank the hordes, Jorit and Sonoria didn’t notice her jitters. “Does nothing last?”

  “Not even gems—look at how many are left from the Jeweled Valley. . . . One? Two?”

  Two, came the whisper.

  Ania shook her head as if a bug sang in her ear. “The shopkeeper said several. The Pressmen’s record says none are left. The list of destroyed gems—contains almost all.”

  “But some survived,” Sonoria said. She was gripping the clock now. And the clock’s ticking had slowed to a crawl. “I wonder.”

  Be careful, we could be trapped if she breaks the mechanism. The whisper grew louder.

  Ania tried to pull the timepiece away, her face pained. “You can’t.”

  “I need to . . . ,” Sonoria whispered, staring at the clock, “try. Once more.”

  Jorit and Sonoria both gripped the clock. Ania pulled at the Master Archivist’s sleeve, then grabbed the clock’s thick base and pulled. The three of them fought in the inn to gain a firm handhold on the clock.

  There was a loud crack as it slipped from their fingers and crashed to the ground.

  Oh no. Jorit dove to scoop up the splintered case. She pressed pieces of wood back to the box. The harvest knob broke off and rolled free.

  The inn’s customers stared at the scuffle.

  Meanwhile, the fire opal glowed inside the cracked gearbox, the twisted gears.

  “I might go home!” Sonoria Vos’s fingers scrabbled for the gem behind the clock face.

  But the opal became brighter, as if it caught the setting sun’s light. The Master Archivist pulled her fingers back. Stuck them in her mouth, even as she teetered on her heels. “Hot.”

  The gem seemed to whisper, words, names. Sonoria reeled and toppled, disappearing even as her arms reached out for Ania. And then she was gone. Just like—Ania remembered now—the Pressman had disappeared from the library.

  Ania bit her lip to keep from screaming, though she could not hear herself over the roaring in her ears. Sonoria. Again. Lost.

  The inn was too quiet. The customers staring at them, mouths gaping, focused on her. On the broken timepiece. On the space where Sonoria—their friend—had been.

  This time, Ania felt the loss in her fingertips and her heart. She felt something else too. She felt the pulse of the gem, the ache of it. As if the opal was hurting as well. The whisper came again. I tried to help.

  Ania swallowed hard.

  That voice. So familiar, from the library. Now here too. The opal whispered to her.

  What was more likely? That an opal tried to send Sonoria back to the library? That it was talking to her? Or that she was going mad?

  As Jorit gingerly lifted all the clock’s pieces that she could hold, Ania said, “We can fix it.” The inn’s clients turned back to their food.

  Jorit handed the clock to Ania as the inn resumed its normal hum and churn.

  Ania cradled the opal in its nest of bent gears, saying again, “We can fix this. I know it.” We can find her, we can rescue the books. We can save the opal. Her words ticked like a clock, s
truggling to stay regular.

  Breathe. You cannot change time.

  She closed her eyes and heard the opal’s whispers, faint but there. The words shifted and ran strangely, as if the opal’s thoughts—but how could an opal think?—were cracked also. “Shhhh,” Ania whispered, trying to loop calm thoughts around herself and the gem both at the same time.

  She felt a tug on her thoughts, as if she was being pulled into the gem. The tug was familiar, like being pulled through time, a thread through a needle. Ania did not want to go, not yet. She struggled, fighting the pull. The gem whispered a single word: “Lapidary.” Then retreated into itself, and the pulling ceased.

  Silence, for the first time since—Ania realized it had been since she had come to work at the library for the Master Archivist.

  The gem. This whole time, it had been the gem whispering to her. Not some memory of Sonoria Vos.

  Once more, Ania sucked in her breath at the loss of her friend. It felt like fire. As hot as the opal had. Jorit put a hand on Ania’s shoulder. She didn’t say anything, but the warmth of her fingertips through the fabric was comforting.

  Lapidary. What did that mean? The shopkeeper had said she had the look of one. The opal—no, she’d imagined it. “Speak again,” she whispered.

  But the opal was cooling now, its colors fading to pale reflections. The gem was cracked—was it breaking? Not dying. It couldn’t die, could it?

  Like people couldn’t disappear, lost in time. Books couldn’t suddenly go blank.

  Ania stifled a low groan. A whispered no.

  They would be trapped here—and now—forever if the gem was broken.

  * * *

  The two women retreated to their room. The innkeeper had grumbled about not being able to keep staff when Sonoria’s absence was noticed. Then he’d watched with curiosity as she and Jorit had tried to repair the broken clock.

  “Can you fix it?” Ania looked at Jorit.

  “With tools, and time.” Tools they had. Jorit opened her lock-picking kit. There were tweezers and pliers in the felt roll. But did they have time?