“I’m afraid I don’t see,” Petri said as he got down from the coach. The palace lay on a break in the slope of the mountains, white stone walls and black slate roofs arching far above him, little turrets that looked back down over the road at every corner. Behind the high wall, more white towers, seeming almost as tall as the mountains. It didn’t seem like a palace as much as a town.
A man ran up, whispered into the driver’s ear and ran off again.
“Looks like you’ll be getting the full treatment, sir. If you’ll just get back in? It’s a marvel and no mistake.”
The clockwork, of course. Since the rebirth of the Clockwork God, anyone who had a scrap of clockwork on their property was proud of it, and the king’s summer palace was renowned, second only to Reyes in the complexity of its mechanisms. It was all the Castans had left behind in Reyes when their empire fell – clockwork everywhere, a few names and a tendency for children in the northern areas to be born with springy black hair and burned-copper skin. That and a dead god.
The carriage rattled through the now open main gates, and a warning bell followed by a series of clacking thuds had Petri looking out of the window. They’d entered a wide courtyard paved in black stone. At each corner a turret wound upwards – the clockwork sent them slowly spinning, growing taller with every turn. Each turn also brought arrow slits into view, along with strange markings and pictures burned into the stone. Below them, other things turned and moved, some hidden, some plain. Windows slid away or came into view. Alleys disappeared and reappeared, paving slabs slipped up and over to the other side of the palace, making the courtyard treacherous in many places and the horses snort and prance and roll their eyes.
No one knew why, or how exactly, most of the old clockwork worked in the province. No one knew anything except it was all old, from the time of the Castans and part of their glory. People had forgotten the hows and whys, and just accepted it, tried to ignore it. But things had changed since Bakar brought the dead god back to life, and people’s curiosity had grown with his rise. Most of the clockwork was hidden, or dangerous to play about with without risking the buildings that moved along on it, so no one knew much about the really old mechanisms, the huge ones that twisted palace and city into new shapes. No one except prelate Bakar, and that rankled the king no end because, after all, knowledge was power.
The king had been trying to find his own power in knowledge by the looks of it. Most of Reyes’s clockwork ran on water power, they knew that – waterwheels lined the banks of the river for miles after it entered the city, and those powered the lesser, newer clockworks. Rumour was strong that it was something similar that drove the greater mechanisms like the changing o’ the clock, when all Reyes moved along hidden rails and twisted itself into new combinations. Yet the palace here had barely a stream across the valley and a well in the courtyard for water. But something powered the clockwork, and piles of crumbling earth and shattered stones lay at intervals around the courtyard by the walls.
Three mud-covered men stood by a new hole, looking into it uncertainly with spades at the ready. Petri wondered if the king had found out how it worked yet, and thought not – if he had, no doubt he’d have made use of that knowledge the first chance he got.
A footman trotted out to greet Petri and turned not a single wigged hair at how he was dressed. Instead he inclined his head and led Petri inside.
The inside was no less a wonder than outside. A great atrium fronted the palace, filled with clockwork that had been dismantled – automatons in a hundred pieces, a clock set into the floor that had been carefully pulled up, all the cogs numbered and set in sequence along one wall. An orrery, a mechanical model of the sun and planets and stars, twin to one the prelate kept in splendour, lay in a different kind of pieces. Cogs lay bent and broken, gears scattered carelessly across the floor like petals. The model sun winked from within the leaves of a glossy plant; planets lurked