The Watcher of Dead Time

by Edward Cox

  Book Three of The Relic Guild

  Edward Cox

  GOLLANCZ

  London

  For Dot and Norm, and everything you gave me.

  A Prologue

  Strange Creatures

  And then, for the longest time, he played the game alone.

  Fabian Moor had spent half a human lifespan isolated inside a cube of thaumaturgic metal, surrounded by silver light radiating from four close walls. A claustrophobic sanctuary fifteen feet high and wide and long. Mighty spells had been cast upon it by the greatest of all Thaumaturgists, Iblisha Spiral. The cube had been Moor’s haven – or prison; the hub for a universal portal which he had spent the last forty years using to search through the Nothing of Far and Deep for the House of all Houses.

  The Great Labyrinth.

  It was not meant to be this way. Spiral, the Lord of the Genii, had a grand plan that should have seen Moor returning to the Labyrinth at his master’s side. But forty years ago, the magickers of the Relic Guild had proved to be a bigger obstacle than anyone had anticipated. However, even with the help of the mighty Skywatcher Lady Amilee, the Relic Guild wasn’t powerful enough to destroy Lord Spiral’s plan, or Moor. They had only delayed the inevitable.

  At the centre of the silver cube, a strange tree-like creature grew from the floor. With a small degree of pride, Moor gazed upon its leathery, brown-green bark. Roots writhed like a nest of snakes at its base; branches grew from a solid trunk, coiling in the air and sliding over the ceiling. One of the serpentine branches pointed at Moor. He raised his index finger to meet its tip. The tree shuddered at the touch of its creator, but the branch withdrew when Moor held out the terracotta jar in his pale hands, recoiling from the forbidden thaumaturgy it held.

  There had been moments when Moor had wondered if he would ever see this jar again. It was one of four, plain and smooth, its lid sealed with wax, filled with the darkest magic. A lifetime ago, Moor had buried them in the foundations of the Labyrinth, where they had remained, waiting for the day of Moor’s return when he could reanimate the essences they preserved.

  The last of Lord Spiral’s Genii, sleeping the long sleep, and it was almost time to wake them up.

  There had been moments when the isolation of the long game had threatened to drive Moor insane. The Nothing of Far and Deep was a vast, thick cloud of primordial mist – unimaginably huge to lesser creatures – and the Labyrinth was the only House dwelling inside it. Or so others believed. Moor’s task might appear impossible to achieve, like trying to find a single diamond buried in a desert. But he had prevailed. Compromise, adaptation, patience – that was all Moor had required to carry Lord Spiral’s ultimate goal across the decades to a time when there was no one waiting to help the people of the Labyrinth.

  The Genii War was long over, the Timewatcher and Her Thaumaturgists were gone for good, and the terracotta jar in Moor’s hands was the beginning of the future. The days of isolation were at an end, and the silver cube had almost served its purpose. Almost …

  The serpentine tree stirred and writhed as a presence filtered through the thaumaturgic walls, disturbing the stolid air. A curious sensation washed over Moor. Someone had summoned him – but not with words, more with feelings that rippled through the silver cube, carrying fear.

  Moor laid his hand on the glowing surface of a wall subtly unlike the others. Immediately the thaumaturgic metal’s state shifted, changing from solid to pearlescent liquid and finally to clear, shimmering air.

  A bedraggled man stood on damp cobbles outside. Behind him, an alleyway of the Great Labyrinth stretched away into misty gloom. He was small, his clothes and skin grubby, and his feral eyes were fixed on the terracotta jar in Moor’s hands. Charlie Hemlock, they called him. It was a good name for the poisonous sort of human he was.

  ‘Hello, Charlie,’ said Moor.

  Hemlock gave a quick nod in return.

  Three golems stood in a line behind him. Deformed and withered bodies covered by black cassocks, grotesque faces hidden beneath the wide brims of their hats, these stone servants had lost every aspect of the humans they had once been. Subservient, incapable of speech or thought, they waited for orders. The power stones that energised the pistols in their hands glowed with violet light.

  Moor said, ‘I trust everything has gone to plan, Charlie? Our prey has caught scent of the bait?’

  Shifty and nervous, Hemlock wrung his hands together and looked at a young woman lying unconscious at his feet. ‘It won’t be long before Marney comes looking for her.’ His voice was slightly distorted through the wall of air.

  Moor studied the smooth surface of the terracotta jar. ‘Perfect.’

  The unconscious woman, the bait, unwashed and dressed in oversized clothes no better than rags, had short blonde hair streaked with red dye. Such a small and innocent-looking thing, but deceptive in her appearance. Her name was Clara, her clients called her Peppercorn, and she had been touched by magic.

  ‘Marney will be here soon,’ Hemlock stressed, anxiety lacing his voice. The prospect obviously disturbed him, as it should. Marney, an empath, one of the last magickers of the Relic Guild … and the keeper of secrets. She was dangerous and clever, concealing herself well among the denizens of Labrys Town. Moor had found Marney practically impossible to locate, but with Peppercorn Clara’s unwitting assistance, the empath had finally been enticed out of hiding.

  ‘So,’ Hemlock said, eyeing the peculiar tree behind Moor. ‘If that’s everything, I’ll just take my money and be on my way.’

  ‘On your way?’

  ‘If it’s all the same to you.’ Hemlock spoke brightly, casually, belying the fear beneath.

  Moor clucked his tongue. ‘I understand how you feel. I’ve shown you things that frighten you, and now you’re wondering if you have bitten off more than you can chew.’

  After a quick glance at the golems behind him, and the woman at his feet, Hemlock shrugged at the Genii. Moor resisted the urge to wrap his thaumaturgy around the venal idiot’s body and crush the life from him.

  ‘We need to discuss the next phase of the plan, Charlie.’

  Hemlock licked his lips nervously. ‘I didn’t know there was a next phase.’

  ‘Indeed. Come inside, please.’

  Hemlock didn’t move. ‘Look, I’ve done everything you asked of me, but I’m through with this now. I’m in over my head.’ He frowned at the serpentine tree’s coiling branches. ‘I’ll just take my money and leave.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Moor said. ‘The part you are about to play is surprisingly important, given that you are a human.’

  ‘But—’

  Hemlock’s words choked off. Moor had used his thaumaturgy to pulse a command to the golems. In unison, they aimed their pistols at Hemlock. With a yelp, Hemlock skipped away from them, through the veil of shimmering air, into the silver cube. As soon as he had crossed the threshold, Moor commanded the golems to guard Peppercorn Clara and then returned the wall to its solid state.

  His face paling, Hemlock stuck close to the wall. His eyes, wide and panicked, darted from Moor to the jar to the tree creature, and back again.

  ‘Charlie, you are too young to remember the Labyrinth before the Genii and the Thaumaturgists went to war.’ Moor waited for Hemlock’s fear to acknowledge that he was being spoken to. ‘You think of the Timewatcher as an all-loving Mother, yet She abandoned you cold-heartedly. Abandoned us all. This is a dangerous time, for you and me both.’

  ‘W-what do you want?’

  The Genii faced the tree. A few more of its leathery branches reached for him. He stroked each of them
one by one.

  ‘You know the tale of Oldest Place, yes?’ He returned his attention to Hemlock. ‘The prison House in which the Timewatcher incarcerated the Lord of the Genii?’

  Hemlock stared.

  ‘Marney knows the tale, too, Charlie. Better than most, you might say. She is very important to me. And to the future. But here’ – he held up the terracotta jar – ‘I want to introduce you to a colleague of mine. Her name is Hagi Tabet.’

  Confused, afraid, Hemlock said, ‘What?’

  ‘Lady Tabet is to be the new Resident of Labrys Town.’ Moor ran his finger around the jar’s wax seal. ‘And I need you to deliver her to the Nightshade.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Hemlock whimpered. ‘No one can get into the Nightshade. Not even you.’

  ‘That’s not entirely true, Charlie. I know of a way, you see. Unfortunately, it will cost you your life.’

  Hemlock’s simmering panic boiled over. Pathetically, he reached into the sleeve of his coat for a concealed weapon, but Moor stopped him in his tracks. The Genii bound the human in higher magic, rendered him immobile, strangled the voice from his throat. His eyes staring, body and limbs boneless as a rag doll’s, Hemlock’s feet slid over the cube’s silver floor as thaumaturgy dragged him forwards.

  Once he was close enough, Moor switched places with Hemlock, watching as the sinuous, leathery branches of the serpentine tree reached out and captured him. They coiled around his legs, removed his dirty, patched coat and ripped open his shirt. Popped buttons bounced off silver walls. Hemlock expressed a scream with his eyes as a branch slid around his midriff and two others encircled his wrists, holding him prone and defenceless before the Genii.

  ‘Calm yourself,’ Moor said. ‘You have a little time to live your life yet.’

  Holding up the terracotta jar again, Moor left it floating in the air, slowly spinning. Hemlock’s eyes welled with tears as Moor laid cold hands upon his chest and summoned his power.

  ‘It’s a small mercy, Charlie, but you won’t remember what I’m about to do. For now, brace yourself. This is going to cause you agony beyond belief.’

  Chapter One

  Prescience

  Samuel felt as though he was walking along a mile-high tightrope without a safety net beneath him.

  He led his Aelfirian colleagues along an old and abandoned tunnel beneath the mighty clock tower called Little Sibling: the parliament building in the Sisterhood of Bells, the Aelfirian capital House. Behind Samuel came Namji. Hillem and Glogelder brought up the rear. The light from Samuel’s lamp danced upon the tunnel walls; the power stone in his revolver glowed pale violet.

  Van Bam and Clara were missing. The avatar, for reasons Samuel couldn’t fathom, had split them from the group, and who knew where they were now? Samuel felt lost without his fellow magickers by his side. Making matters worse, his magic had been anaesthetised; the shock wave from an explosion of anti-magic had sucked his prescient awareness from his body and he didn’t know how long it would take to return.

  In Van Bam’s absence, Namji had inherited leadership over the group. The occasional glassy chink came from the satchel hanging over her shoulder, filled with the paraphernalia of a magic-user.

  In silence, the old bounty hunter led them out of the tunnel into a chamber of black-bricked walls, cold and gloomy, unused for years. Water dripped from the dark ceiling and slapped on the floor, making the cobbles slimy and treacherous underfoot.

  Tall and slim Hillem deactivated the power stones on his pistols and slid them into the holsters at his hips. Glogelder was less sure of his environment. As tall as Hillem but much thicker set, he kept his clunky spell sphere launcher in his hands. On his back he carried a duffel bag filled with spare weaponry and ammunition.

  ‘This must be the entrance to the dungeons,’ Namji said, standing over a trapdoor set into the floor. Hillem and Glogelder joined her.

  Samuel placed the glow lamp down. His eyes were drawn to the remnants of a staircase at the back of the chamber. At one time it had led up to a doorway set high on the wall, but the staircase was rotten and broken now and the doorway had been bricked up. Samuel shifted his gaze to the ceiling and felt a knot tighten in his gut.

  Soon, in the council halls of Little Sibling far above this chamber, an assembly of the Aelfirian governing bodies would occur. The Panopticon of Houses was convening to decide the fate of the one million humans living in Labrys Town; to decide whether or not it was time to destroy the last remaining portal to the Labyrinth. Without that portal, no supplies could get through to the denizens. Without that portal, the inhabitants of Labrys Town would die. But in reality, the decision wasn’t really up for debate or vote. It had already been made.

  Manipulating the situation, pulling the strings behind the scenes in the Panopticon of Houses, was a covert, power-hungry band of hierarchs known as the Sisterhood. They blamed humans for the Timewatcher and Her Thaumaturgists’ decision to abandon the Aelfir after the Genii War. They wanted to cut the last tie to the Labyrinth, eradicate the Aelfir’s lingering faith in the Timewatcher. Destroying the last portal was their goal, and the Sisterhood always got what it wanted.

  The one person standing between the machinations of the Sisterhood and the ruin of the Labyrinth was Tal, an elderly Aelf, a veteran of the Genii War and a discredited councillor. He was the Relic Guild’s agent in the Panopticon of Houses, a self-proclaimed champion of the Labyrinth, and he alone would take the voice of reason into the assembly. Samuel prayed that Tal could convince the Houses to spare the denizens, to make them see the truth – that the Genii had returned and planned to free Spiral from Oldest Place. But even if Tal was successful, it could still be a hollow victory. Unless the Relic Guild stopped the Genii the Labyrinth would fall anyway, and the Houses of the Aelfir would soon follow.

  Where in the Timewatcher’s name were Van Bam and Clara?

  ‘Samuel?’

  Namji was standing at the trapdoor between Hillem and Glogelder, dwarfed by their size. All of them were looking at Samuel. Their pointed ears, large eyes and small noses and mouths gave their faces the triangular appearance of the Aelfir. But where Namji’s face was subtly heart-shaped and Hillem’s expression always studious, Glogelder looked like a brute. Old wounds had left so many scars and craters on his hairless head and face that Samuel was reminded of a beaten moon. His broken nose had never been set and his ears were battered.

  ‘We need to carry on,’ Namji said. ‘We can’t afford to hang around.’

  Samuel joined the Aelfir. The wooden slats of the trapdoor were damp and rotten, appearing too unstable to bear any weight. This proved to be true when Glogelder grabbed its metal ring and tore half of the wood away with one yank. Throwing the rotten mass aside, he quickly removed what remained.

  Hillem retrieved the glow lamp and lowered its light into the hole, illuminating the first few steps of a spiralling staircase of stone.

  Unconsciously, Samuel slipped a hand into his coat pocket. His fingers closed around the big, black iron key that rested there and he pulled it out, turning it over in his hands. The bow was cast in a diamond shape. At the end of the long shaft were three blocky teeth. Uncertainty was an unfamiliar state for Samuel and he didn’t care for the way it felt. The key had been a gift from the mysterious avatar. It opened a cell in the forgotten dungeons far below Little Sibling, but what the avatar wanted the Relic Guild to find down there was anyone’s guess.

  Namji, Hillem and Glogelder were looking at him again.

  ‘Samuel,’ urged Namji, ‘the Toymaker is still in the Sisterhood of Bells.’

  The Toymaker, Samuel thought bitterly. An assassin left behind by the Thaumaturgists who had been hunting the Relic Guild ever since they escaped from the Labyrinth. But you never saw the Toymaker himself, only his army of hand-sized insectoid automatons and the deadly thaumaturgic stings at the end of their tails. The same a
nti-magic that had anaesthetised Samuel’s prescient awareness had deactivated the Toymaker’s toys. But, again, for how long?

  ‘Has your magic come back at all?’ Namji said. ‘Do you feel anything?’

  Samuel could detect the first signs of his magic’s return but it was only a vague stirring in his blood, like the tiniest of embers still alive in a fireplace full of dead coals. It wasn’t enough to warn him of any danger lurking at the bottom of those spiralling stairs.

  Stuffing the key back into his pocket, Samuel shrugged at Namji. ‘Unless you know some spell that can detect danger, we have to go down blind.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Glogelder half-joked, casting a wary glance into the dark stairwell. His battered face split into a grin. ‘Personally, I’m thinking of ditching the lot of you.’

  ‘I do have my detection crystal,’ Hillem offered. ‘It won’t sense danger, but it will alert us if anyone’s down there.’

  ‘No, I’ve got something better,’ Namji said. ‘But if we have to do this without prescient awareness, then I’m not doing it unarmed.’

  She motioned to Glogelder, who shrugged the duffel bag from his back. Dipping inside, he produced a slim box, roughly six inches thick, twelve wide and eighteen long. The big Aelf passed it to Namji.

  Laying the box on the cobbled floor, Namji unclasped it and flipped back the lid to reveal two shallow, padded halves connected by three little hinges. Compartments cut out of the padding held the polished silver parts of a weapon. Namji began pulling the components from the box one by one, quickly and methodically connecting them together, each piece attaching to the next with a crisp click.

  ‘She’s not a fan of firearms,’ Hillem whispered to Samuel. ‘She won’t carry this thing unless it’s absolutely necessary.’

  At first, Samuel supposed Namji was constructing a handgun of some kind. The butt had a coarse grip, the trigger a circular guard; but instead of a barrel, the weapon had a length of flattened metal with a groove down its centre. And when Namji finished the piece by connecting a short prod with little wheels at its ends and a thin bowstring of steel cable, Samuel realised it was a pistol crossbow, ornately designed from silver metal, not much longer than his revolver.