Chương 32: A Clock With Teeth

Ch 32: A Clock With Teeth Trigatia hadn't changed. That was the first thing that felt wrong about it. The same gilded rooftops. The same noise, the same smell of bread and horse and river mud drifting up from the lower districts. The same students spilling through Baskerville's gates in loose, laughing clusters, none of them carrying anything heavier than exam results and gossip.

I stood at the edge of it all for a long moment before I made myself walk in, and understood, with the particular clarity that only comes after kneeling in front of something that can unmake you without effort, exactly how thin the whole picture actually was. A single sheet of glass stretched over something enormous and patient, and everyone underneath it going about their day as if the glass had never once been anything but solid ground. I knew better now. I'd heard the ground speak. Two years.

It didn't sound like much, said out loud. It sounded like considerably less once you started subtracting the parts of it that wouldn't actually be usable the weeks lost to recovery after every technique that tried to kill me on the way to making me stronger. The months a search for a sanctuary with no known location would inevitably cost.

The unknown, unpriced hours the Nightsky Sect intended to spend on their own agenda, somewhere out of sight, patient in a way that had nothing to do with the Choir's patience and everything to do with an old man's wounded pride. Two years wasn't a number. It was a countdown with teeth, filed down just enough that I couldn't feel the bite yet. I intended to feel it eventually. I simply didn't intend to be unprepared when I did.

Ember rode my shoulder through the gates, considerably larger than the trembling, half-formed thing that had faceplanted into a cloth on my bedroom floor months ago still small, still ridiculous, wings a little steadier now, but with something new sitting behind those golden eyes that hadn't been there before. It watched the crowd the way I did. Cataloguing. Weighing. Deciding, silently and privately, which of these ordinary, laughing strangers might one day matter and which never would.

I hated that it had learned to do that so young. I understood, exactly, why it had. Dororo found me before I'd made it halfway to the dormitories, emerging from a side corridor like he'd been waiting there on principle rather than coincidence.

"You look," he said, studying me over the rim of those absurd dark lenses, "like a man who spent his recess discovering something considerably worse than he expected to find."

"That's generous phrasing."

"I'm capable of generosity. Rarely, and usually by accident." He fell into step beside me without being asked, robes trailing dust from wherever he'd actually spent the last three weeks.

"Tell me." I told him. Elder Fen. The altar. The Choir, in full, all five of them at once, and the verdict they'd handed down with a Divine Realm elder standing at my shoulder to make certain it landed the way it did. Dororo listened the way he always listened silent, sharp, filing every detail away behind those glasses like a man cataloguing a weapon he intended to eventually understand well enough to wield himself.

"Two years," he said finally, once I'd finished.

"For a Rite this old, at a sanctuary nobody currently living has ever properly located." He exhaled slowly through his nose.

"That is not generosity, child. That is a countdown designed by something that fully expects you to fail it, dressed up to look like mercy so you spend the next two years grateful instead of furious."

"I noticed."

"Good." Something sharpened behind his voice, old and patient and entirely unamused.

"Then let's make certain their expectations are wrong." This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon. The lecture halls felt smaller than I remembered them. Not physically nothing about Baskerville's architecture had shifted an inch in my absence but everything inside them now sat at a strange remove, like watching a play from behind glass thick enough to mute the sound. A professor droned through Formation theory.

Students copied notes, whispered about summer courtships, complained about the weight of a new term's expectations. Ordinary noise, ordinary worry, and none of it touched the part of me that kept one careful ear turned toward every shadow that lingered a half-second too long at the edge of a doorway. I caught myself doing it three times in the first hour alone. Counting exits.

Marking which of my classmates sat close enough to shield and which sat close enough to be caught in whatever eventually came looking for me instead. It wasn't paranoia, exactly. Paranoia implied the danger wasn't real. Something patient enough to wait generations for a bloodline to finish diluting itself didn't strike me as the kind of threat that respected an academic calendar.

The rumor reached me before lunch, passed student to student in the particular hushed, half-thrilled tone reserved for things people wanted to be frightened by from a safe distance. A second-year from the Nightsky Sect's own delegation a boy I'd never spoken to, never so much as noticed in a crowded hall hadn't returned from the recess at all. No note. No explanation.

His belongings still sat untouched in his room, according to whoever had started the story, as though he'd simply stepped out mid-thought and never come back to finish it. Ordinary people vanished for ordinary reasons. Debt. Cold feet before a difficult term. A family emergency nobody bothered explaining to classmates who barely knew his name. I didn't believe it was ordinary.

Not with a Choir out there recalibrating its patience around a bloodline that had just cost them a season of quiet listening, and not with a Nightsky Sect elder somewhere plotting how to deliver a problem to people who apparently sat above even him. I filed the name away without asking anyone for it directly, the same instinct that had once traced a thread through a storehouse wall now turning itself, quietly, toward an empty dormitory room three floors from my own.

Watch your kingdom as closely as you intend to watch us, the Choir had said. Mortal greed rarely waits politely. I intended to take that warning considerably more literally than whoever had first spread the rumor over breakfast. Ellia found me between lectures, dropping into the seat beside mine with none of her usual teasing warm-up, just a long, careful study of my face that made something in my chest tighten before she'd said a single word.

"You've got that look again," she said quietly.

"The ghost one."

"Good ghost or bad ghost," I asked, echoing her own question back at her from a lifetime ago, "you tell me this time." She considered it, longer than the question strictly deserved.

"Bad," she decided finally.

"Worse than before. You're doing the thing where you sit facing the door." I hadn't realized I'd chosen the seat for that reason until she said it out loud. I didn't bother denying it.

"Something happened at home," she said. Not a question.

"Something you're not planning to tell me the full shape of."

"Not yet."

"You keep saying that." Something flickered behind her eyes not hurt, exactly, though it lived close enough to it that I felt the edge of it anyway.

"One day that list I'm keeping is going to run out of patience before you run out of secrets to fill it with." I didn't have an answer for that. I wasn't certain, sitting there with a countdown ticking somewhere behind my ribs that I couldn't yet explain to her without unraveling everything else alongside it, that a good one existed.

"Soon," I said instead, and hated, this time, exactly how much that word had started to cost every time I reached for it. That night, alone in my dormitory, I laid the bracelet flat on the desk in front of me and studied it the way Dororo studied his oldest, most stubborn texts patient, exhausted, and entirely unwilling to look away first. One fragment. Somewhere out there, others.

A gate with no known location, guarded by a Rite my own grandfather had never lived long enough to fully describe, sitting at the far end of a countdown built by something that had already decided, quietly, that failure was the likelier outcome. Ember curled against the bracelet's edge, small and warm, one eye cracked open and watching me the way it had watched the crowd at the gates cataloguing, weighing, deciding.

"Two years," I said, to the empty room, to a dragon too young to understand the number and a fragment of metal too silent to answer it.

"Let's see if that's actually enough time to become something they regret waiting this long to decide about." Somewhere beyond the dormitory window, the capital's lights burned on, warm and oblivious, a single sheet of glass stretched thin over everything I now knew was underneath it. I didn't sleep well. I hadn't, really, in longer than I wanted to admit. I got up anyway, and started training before the sun did.