“Do you think it likely?”
“Not much. The Winelderwist has too many branchings for the anarchists to guard them all. But we must be wary.”
They came to three doors and a spiral staircase at the end of the passage. Enoch took the door to the right, which opened onto a long, wooden stair leading downward, with a landing and a doorway every dozen steps. He led through the door on the third landing, down a narrow passage with doors on either side. Halfway down that hall, he took another door, which led down another stair, carved all in wood, with the heads of eagles chiseled on the posts.
“If I wasn’t before, I am wholly lost now,” Carter said.
“Fortunately, I am not. This will lead us past the Room of Statues, once I find two more portals.”
At the bottom of the stair were four doors. Enoch tried them all and found the first one locked, the second only a closet, the third a stair scarcely two-feet wide, leading upward by rickety steps, and the fourth a straight passage. He chose the third, and they plunged into a country of spiderwebs and creaking boards, railings of rough wood, the smell of mold in thick air, and no walls at either side, so that Carter’s childhood fancy of Enoch ascending a stair between the stars seemed true. The floor was soon lost to their lamplight, save for rugged support posts rising from the darkness, and the ceiling remained indiscernible. The echoes of their footsteps fluttered around them, indicating that they climbed above a great chamber; cool air wafted across their brows. Their whispers skittered all about the room, returning to them as soft sibilance.
They came to a landing, with a rusted metal door intruding out of the void, supported by a tunnel of brick. Enoch stood before it a time, hand to chin.
“Should we open it?” Carter finally asked.
“Some doors in Evenmere are best untried,” Enoch replied. “I don’t think this is the one, nor the next.”
They continued upward. It was a long while before they passed the next door, which appeared identical to the first, and even longer before they reached the third. Enoch wiped its surface with his sleeve and uncovered four marks scratched into the metal.
“Is this it? Yes!”
It was a massive door, and they struggled together to lift the heavy latch and strained to pull it open. At last, it budged with a loud groan, its hinges shrieking, and the entire chamber roared back, reverberate, like Jormungand in his attic. Once loosened, it moved freely. Within, the passage was red brick on all four sides, and tall enough for a man. They closed the door after them, its echoes muffled behind the massive plate.
“This leads to the Room of Statues,” Enoch said. “We will be safe here.”
The passage ended soon enough, and they stood within another cavernous space. At Enoch’s suggestion, they lit Carter’s lamp for additional light. As the flame sprang upward, Carter gave a start and fumbled for his pistol, for a massive face loomed out of the ebony. Enoch restrained him, and he soon realized it was the statue of a warrior, helmeted and plumed in the Roman manner, cast of black marble, armored, his sword flung outward in a gesture of vengeance.
“There are many of them,” Enoch said. “The chamber is filled, though most aren’t so tall. There are windows at the end of the room, but night has fallen. I believe I can lead us through.”
The next hours were those Carter remembered best, of all that journey to the Towers, for there was a sepulchral quality in seeing the statues rise into the circle of their lamps, faces noble, foolish, cunning, or beautiful. They were carved mostly from white stone, unlike the dark warrior, and none were as tall as he. Carter found himself giving them names as he went, so that they became the Magician, the Juggler, the Princess, the Piper, the Magistrate, the Counselor, the Beggar, and the Thief. The Lamplighter even resembled Chant a little, and the Unicorn was cut from a rare stone sparkling blue fire. Enoch used the statues to mark his way, and he turned left beside the Merchant and right beside the Gatekeeper.
They had neither eaten nor rested for many hours, and the oppressive night left them bone-weary, but need spurred them on to the Towers, lest all the ways become guarded. They halted only long enough to eat a cold meal of dried fruit and strips of meat, with lukewarm water from a flask.
At last they reached a doorway leading through a narrow corridor, with faded flowered wallpaper and wooden floors. They ascended several slender stairs, like ants climbing out of their den, and emerged onto a flagstone courtyard, built upon the highest roofs. Moonlight pierced the storm clouds, casting a pallid light across the expanse. A light mist was falling, so that a halo crept around their lanterns. Carter breathed the cool air; its sharpness drove away the torpid half sleep that had enveloped him as they walked the ragged ways. They stood at the lowest of several levels of the courtyard, each of which ran into the base of four towers, built like a candelabra, with a single supporting column. Stone trusses led up to the outermost towers, and walkways intersected the others, so there was clearly more than one entrance.
Enoch hastily doused both lamps to avoid detection. “They won’t expect us from this direction. Rather they think we will arrive from below the central tower, up a long stair. But all ways may be guarded.”
An overhang provided concealing shadows, and they made their way cautiously around the courtyard’s edge, pausing often to watch for the anarchists. They were halfway around when a bullet ricocheted off the brick beside them. Carter searched the skyline until he spied a figure, half-silhouetted in the moonlight, standing on the second-floor landing. He fired his pistol; dust rose up from the stones where it struck, and the man vanished behind the masonry.
The two companions bolted as gunshots erupted from two separate directions. They raced between stone columns, remaining always in the shadows. The moon shone onto the base of the Towers, with a wide, open stretch surrounding it. For a moment they stood wavering, unwilling to leave their shelter. But both knew they could not remain long; the men above would soon outmaneuver them. In wordless agreement, Enoch clapped Carter on the back and they sped toward the door at the bottom of the Towers, their guns blazing.
Despite his fear, a strange euphoria passed over Carter; as bullets bounced all around his main emotion was excitement, as if he were living the fictional adventures of some American cowboy. None of it seemed real, and he suddenly knew they would reach the Towers unscathed, heroes passing through a hail of lead. A wild, exultant cry sprang from his lips. The door was almost within reach.
Just then, a cloaked figure, which in the dimness had appeared as a pile of rags, half raised himself from before the door. Orange fire erupted from his revolver. Carter cried out involuntarily as burning pain seared his left leg. He and Enoch fired as one, dropping the assailant to the flagstones.
The door was smooth metal, without a handle, its seams bare outlines, but Enoch spoke a word, and it sprang open. A shot whizzed by Carter’s neck as they plunged into the darkness. Enoch pulled the door shut with a solid clang.
“Are you hurt?” the Hebrew asked.
“It’s my leg,” Carter said.
He heard the striking of flint, and a narrow flame appeared. “I’m getting a bit faint, old friend.”
Enoch lit the lamp and Carter saw blood running down his own arm. His head felt moist, sticky, and when he touched his hand to his temple, he found blood on his fingers as well. The world did a slow circle; his legs would no longer support him, and then Carter fell into darkness.
The Clock Tower
Carter woke to the smell of warm blankets and diffused illumination through a clear skylight that cast a dull white square on the patchwork quilt of his bed. He roused in a gradual way, as if parting layer after layer of translucent curtains. His first realization was that one of his toes was sticking out of the blankets, though he did nothing to cover it. He wondered where he was, decided it did not matter since he was safe, and drifted back into slumber.
He woke more fully sometime later, to the sounds of Enoch puttering around the room, brewing hot tea on a decrepit stov
e. Carter sat up on one elbow.
“Hello, is it morning?”
Enoch smiled, but his eyes showed he had not slept. “Closer to afternoon. How many fingers do you see?” He held up his hand.
“Four. Why are you testing me?”
“A bullet grazed your skull. I was hoping you hadn’t lost any brains.”
“Too deeply embedded for that,” he muttered, feeling his own face. There was a bandage above his left ear and a tender lump at the back of his head. “I was shot in the leg, too, wasn’t I?”
“I tended it. You won’t use it for a time, but it will heal. Is it a miracle we survived? More than a miracle. I should have planned better.”
“There probably wasn’t a better plan. We knew the Towers would be watched. We are there, aren’t we?”
“In the highest, the Tower of the Eternity Clock.”
Carter glanced around and discovered a clock face, tall as a man, in the wall behind him, beside the head of the bed. “Does it run? I don’t hear it ticking.”
“It does run. It even ticks, but so slow you could stay a hundred days and not hear it. It is called the Eternity Clock, either because it displays the pulse of Eternity or because it shows how long until midnight, when Time itself ends. I don’t know which.”
“I hope it isn’t the latter,” Carter said, for the clock read 11:50. “How long to make a minute?”
“Three seconds have passed during all the years I have served the High House. I brought you to this room because nothing can harm you here; even sound can’t cross the threshold from outside. Also, wounds heal faster beneath the clock. No one knows why. Your leg requires recuperation.”
Carter nodded, not yet ready to face a paradox. He glanced around the chamber, made homey by an odd assortment of furniture. There was even a linen tablecloth on the short table.
“Did you bring all this?” he asked with a wave of his hand.
“A little at a time. After winding the clocks I usually stay the night. No one else ever comes here; probably only I know the word to open the doors. Would you like some hot tea? Something to eat? You should eat. I have soup and bread.”
“Yes, please, I am hungry.”
Carter ate the soup and bread across from the pleasant crackling of the fireplace. His leg ached where it was bandaged above the knee. He found himself ravenous, and when he was done, the torpor had lifted from his brain. “Now that we are in, we will have to find a way out again,” he said.
“Yes. They will try to detain us, for there are other clocks to wind in the house. And in thirty days I must return here again.”
“We barely made the journey this time. Glis will retake the path to the Towers as soon as he receives reinforcements from the White Circle, but we don’t know how long that will be. Perhaps I could use the Word of Secret Ways to find a new exit, if there is one. Otherwise, we will have to wait for him to catch up with us.”
“He’s a good man. If he says it, he will do it.”
“Yes, but I intend to do more, myself. I can’t simply return to the Inner Chambers, not without my father’s things. Do you believe Jormungand spoke true? Is my father in Arkalen?”
Enoch looked unusually bleak. “Do not hope too much. Ten years gone! What but death could keep him so long? Yet, it is uncertain; he might be imprisoned, or ensorcelled. Perhaps his memory has been stolen from him. As for his sword and his mantle, they surely still exist; they were cast of sterner stuff.”
“Would you counsel me to go, Enoch? Should I leave the house when it needs me most?”
“On its face, it seems foolish. But the thing most foolish is often wisest. No one can see everything. If your heart says go, then go. Perhaps you are led to do so.”
“Yet, if I am wrong …”
“Then you are wrong, as your father was wrong more than once. But think it through! Your position is grave. The whole house depends on your decision.”
“Yes. I learned how tragic consequences could be the day I took the Master Keys. I want no more mistakes.”
“That was a hard lesson, not yet paid. But looking back in remorse, blaming yourself—senseless! Have you learned that as well?”
“I’ve tried. But it’s hard to get it under the skin.”
* * *
Carter’s wounds did not heal quickly and he remained always anxious. Enoch kept busy cleaning the mechanism of the Eternity Clock, oiling its gears with precise care, but Carter could not help with that. He found a copy of MacDonald’s Phantastes and spent a few happy hours, but it was soon done and there were no other books. The tower above the clock room had seven windows, and he spent many hours sitting in a gray, stiff-backed chair watching the anarchists skulk in the courtyards below, beneath the stormy sky. As the days wore on, he began to wonder if his old friend was deceiving him about the recuperative powers of sleeping in the chamber of the Eternity Clock, lest he become too impatient of his recovery.
He learned the truth one night when he could not sleep. A long stair swept down from the clock room to the lower levels, and since his leg was already much improved, he decided to exercise it upon the steps in the hopes of growing drowsy. No sooner did he cross the threshold when he heard a rapping on the door situated on the landing immediately below the chamber, a door leading outside the Towers. He descended the steps slowly because of his injury and peered through the spy-hole, where he saw a ruined face, ash-gray beneath the candle the figure held, suffused with an anger made horrid by the liquid quality of the whole visage, that changed like dripping wax even as Carter looked. Without opening the door, he called out, “Who are you? What do you want?”
The voice, too, had a quality of insubstantiality. “Let me in, let me in! The Dogs of Doom! The Open Mouth, the Clinging Face! I must come in!”
Except for the stranger’s bizarre appearance, the urgency of the request would have sent Carter’s hands speeding to the lock. “Why do you want entrance?”
“Don’t you know? The Red Rose in the Blue Stained Glass! I’ve seen the Ancient Sea, the Sea No Man Can Sail. I was there with him. I saw him!”
Carter’s heart beat faster. “With who?”
“Your father! Lord Anderson! I sailed with him. I’ve been Over the World’s Edge. I can tell all!”
It was more than Carter could bear. He unlocked the door quickly, but it opened less than six inches before a weight slammed against it, and a grotesque claw slipped through the aperture, black and slimy, like lizard leather. Even as it reached into the room, it reshaped itself, its palm becoming a face, with black eyes fixing a predator’s gaze on Carter, and a thin mouth with spiked teeth. It seemed to enlarge itself, almost as if it sprang at him by growing, the mouth expanding, the fingers extending like tentacles, seeking to grasp and draw him into its maw.
He would surely have died because of its swiftness, had an axe blade not severed the hand at the wrist. The monster howled and withdrew; the amputated member scampered back through the crack in the door like a spider, and Carter and Enoch put their weight against the door, slamming and locking it.
The Windkeep dropped the gory axe to the ground.
“What was it?” Carter asked.
“I should have told you. Why didn’t I tell you? I didn’t want you to worry. It has knocked every night for the last week; you didn’t hear it in the clock room, which exists in another time. It is a servant of Chaos, sent by the Bobby.”
Together, they climbed back up the stair. Carter threw himself on the edge of his bed. “What did it want? Why would it aid the anarchists?”
“Are Chaos and Order living creatures? No. Forces of nature. The Master of the High House must maintain a balance between them, lest all be overcome by Entropy. Like any force, they can be harnessed, and the anarchists have no scruples against doing so. Once inside it could have killed us both.”
Carter sighed. “You saved my life, and I am grateful, but you mustn’t keep things from me. You can’t protect me that way.”
“Are you right? You
are right. I am sorry. You still seem young to an old man. Once I dangled you on my knee. But that’s the past. I should remember. I will remember.”
* * *
Thereafter, when Carter crept from bed each night, he heard the voice of Chaos and the hammering at the door. Sometimes it spoke in Enoch’s voice, and sometimes in Chant’s; once it used the warm timbre of his father, bringing tears to his eyes, sending him fleeing back to his room. He never stayed to listen long, for it had a wheedling quality, an air of shared secrets, which he thought dangerous to heed.
As he became stronger, he wandered among the four towers, but there was little to see. Most of the rooms were empty, as if they had been sacked, and the remaining furniture was ruined by water and age. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling in parts.
Several days passed before he felt strong enough to use the Word of Secret Ways. It strained him more than he expected, and when he was done, he crawled back into bed and slept a day and a night. When he finally awoke, he found six separate exits scattered about the Towers. He decided to try each in turn.
Enoch accompanied him on his first journey, out a sliding panel into a series of chambers that promised excitement, but proved unrewarding; they were empty, arranged in a square block, all connected by halls, with no other exit from them. It was a place to hide, but nothing more.
The second way led by ladder down a trapdoor into a lower chamber secured by a smooth, white marble door. Carter looked through its spy-hole and saw it opened directly onto the courtyard guarded by the anarchists. Likewise, the third way was but a secret compartment, but the fourth and fifth opened to long halls and dim passageways that Enoch was certain would lead them from their enemies. Since an escort would lessen their danger, and because Carter was not fully recovered, the men agreed to wait five days more for Captain Glis to arrive before setting out alone.
For Carter, the sixth secret way seemed the most interesting. Hidden behind a false bookcase in the chamber above the clock room, it opened upon an attic space, with dust on the wooden floors and the wall studs bared. It had a deserted feel, so he little feared meeting the anarchists, and he resolved to exercise along its paths. To one who had spent his childhood alone, poking amidst the nooks of desolate spaces, it held a warmth and wonder unknown to those who find no joy in solitary things. There were narrow, gabled windows to admit the dim sunlight, with borders painted faded green, and worn carpets scattered upon the floor, with yellow tulips stitched in rows. There were many doors, set in disarray, scattered at random against corners and outcroppings.
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