Six Hours on the Going-Train

The escapement swung its anchor across the scape-wheel, tock and tock, and Ash Merrow swept brass in time with it.

"Forty-one," he said under his breath. "Forty-two."

Minutes, not strokes. He had been counting since the night bell. The brass floor of the escapement chamber gave back the lamplight like a pan of oil, and every hour the Clock shed grit from its own teeth: filings, flakes of old grease, the fine black dust that came off the iron bearings and got into his cuffs and the creases of his scarred left palm.

"Forty-three."

"You're doing it again."

Lio stood at the top of the service ladder with half a loaf under her arm and her hood pushed back. Fifteen, all elbows and opinions, the ends of her hair still damp from the Pewter Canal fog.

"I'm sweeping," Ash said.

"You're sweeping out loud." She came down the rungs two at a time, which she knew he hated, and tore the loaf in half on her knee. She held both pieces up against each other, frowned, and pinched a crumb off the bigger one before handing it to him. "Breakfast. Don't count it."

He ate standing. The bread was yesterday's and tasted of the laundress's smoke.

"I took the Fennick route," she said. "Starts at the fourth bell, ends at the ninth. Pays a copper and a half more than the Lanes."

"You already have a route."

"Now I have two."

"Lio."

"Ten years," she said, and pointed the crust at him like a pen. "You sold ten years so I wouldn't spend mine scrubbing some magistrate's chamber pots. I'm buying them back. A copper at a time if I have to. Don't make the face."

He did not know which face he was making. He knew which number she had wrong, and he chewed and let her keep it.

"You need sleep more than coppers," he said.

"Says the boy who sleeps in a cupboard." She stood, brushed flour off her coat, and looked at the escapement swinging its great iron arm over their heads. "What does it say? Your line."

"Same as last week, less a week."

"Liar. You haven't looked yet. You look on sweeping night." She climbed two rungs and turned. "If it's lower than it should be, I'll know you've been spending."

"I don't spend."

"I know," Lio said, and that came out heavier than the rest. Then she was gone up the ladder, and the hatch clapped shut, and the Clock went on cutting the morning into pieces.

"Forty-four," Ash said.

* * *

The going-train gallery ran the length of the Clock's belly, a catwalk of riveted plate above wheels the size of carts. Down there the great train turned, slow as a tide, each tooth as long as Ash's forearm. Oil smell. Hot iron. The steady grinding rumble that got into your back teeth and stayed.

Bram the winder was on the lower walk with his key-bar, easing slack into the second barrel. Big man, red forearms, a whistle he never finished. Ash was sweeping the upper rail when the whistle stopped.

He looked down. Bram's sleeve had gone into the crown wheel.

It happened without hurry. The wheel did not snatch. It simply kept turning, the way it had turned for two hundred years, and the cloth wound once around a tooth and pulled. Bram planted his boots. The wheel took his wrist. Then his forearm, toward the gap where the crown wheel met the pinion, where the teeth closed like a vice and kept closing.

"Off!" Bram roared. "Somebody take it off!"

There was nobody else on the gallery. The brake was forty yards down the walk. Ash could run it in twenty seconds. The arm would be gone in ten.

He was already counting.

Hour-craft was arithmetic first. He knew the weight of the train from three years of sweeping under it. He knew what a stopped bridge cost, because the whole city knew. A wheel was less than a bridge and more than a bone. Six hours. Perhaps five, if he was clever and lucky. He had never been both on the same day.

He put his scarred hand flat on the rail and paid.

It went out of him like warmth into winter water. First his fingers, then his wrists, a cold that did not hurt so much as remove, as though his hands had been unscrewed and replaced with stones. The cold climbed his arms and settled behind his breastbone, and in the middle of it he felt the time go: not pain, only a sort of thinning, as if somewhere a candle had been trimmed and he was the wick.

Below, the crown wheel shuddered. The tooth holding Bram's sleeve stopped a finger's width from the pinion and stayed there, quivering against a weight that was not iron.

"Pull!" Ash shouted. His voice came out small.

Bram pulled. The sleeve tore. He went over backwards onto the plate with his arm clutched to his chest, whole, the cloth hanging off it in a long greasy rag.

Ash let go of the wheel. The train lurched forward and resumed its rumble, and he sat down hard on the catwalk because his knees had decided the matter for him.

Three hundred and sixty minutes. He felt the number in his gums. His teeth were chattering. He could not feel the broom handle he was still somehow holding.

"Merrow." Bram had climbed the ladder. He crouched in front of Ash and turned his own arm over and over in the lamplight, as if checking it was his. "You're Merrow. The sweeper."

"Yes."

"You're a Wright."

"No. I just did a thing once."

"That wasn't once. That was a man who knew what he was doing." Bram wiped his face and left a streak of oil across it. "I owe you an arm. You hear? I won't forget whose."

"Don't tell anyone," Ash said.

Bram looked at him for a long moment, then pressed one big oily thumb to his own lips, a winder's oath, and went to find the brake.

Ash sat with his hands in his armpits and tried to make them belong to him again.

"What did it cost?"

The voice came from the gallery stair. An old man stood there in a long grey coat with a Wright's bronze bell pinned at the throat, nine notches cut into its rim. One of his eyes was ordinary and brown. The other was glass, and it caught the lamp so it seemed lit from inside.

Master Osric Dane. Everyone on the Clock knew him by the eye.

"Three hundred and sixty," Ash said.

The ordinary eye narrowed slightly. "Minutes."

"Minutes."

Osric came down two more steps and stopped. He took something from his coat pocket and turned it over in his fingers, a small bronze disc, rubbing it with his thumb as if to warm it. He did not say what he thought of a man who counted his life in minutes. He did not say anything. He set the disc on the rail, a hand's breadth from Ash's shoulder, and climbed the stair again without looking back.

Ash waited until the footsteps were gone. Then he picked it up.

A proof-hall token. The guild's mark on one side, a bell with a keyhole for a clapper. On the other side, stamped small: Admit one, at the bearer's cost.

He put it in his pocket with his numb fingers and did not decide anything about it.

* * *

The Ledger hall opened at the evening bell for sweeping and closed at the ninth.

Brooms stayed at the door. That was the rule, because a stiff bristle could scratch a numeral and a scratched numeral had once sent a man to the Exchequer for a year he had not spent. Ash leaned his broom against the corridor wall, under the lamp bracket, the way he had every week for three years, and went in with the soft goat-hair brush and the polishing cloth.

The hall was a forest of brass columns, each as tall as three men, each banded with rows of numerals that turned on their own. Every life in Varrow, district by district, ticking. The sound of it was like rain heard through a roof. It smelled of metal polish and the cold stone underneath.

Ash worked the base of the first column and kept his eyes on the brass.

Osric Dane was already there, at the far end, by the Ninth District stacks. As Ash watched, the old man took a square of black cloth from his sleeve and draped it over one band of numerals, carefully, the way you might cover a birdcage, and only then leaned in to read the columns beside it. He wrote something in a small book. He did not lift the cloth.

The door opened again.

A man came in with a clerk at his heels. He was slight and neat, in an Exchequer coat the colour of dried ink, and he walked as if the floor might be keeping score of his steps. He stopped at the first column and took out a pocket watch. He opened it, glanced at it, and wound it, and Ash, sweeping, saw the second hand moving the wrong way round.

"Auditor Pell," the clerk announced to nobody.

"Thank you, Hesk." Pell's voice was soft, almost apologetic. "The Clock district, please. Every line, the last nine nights. Opening figures and closing."

"Nine, sir? The flag was raised on the fifth."

"Then four nights before it." Pell closed the watch. "If a thing is rising, I'd like to see where it began."

Hesk unrolled a ledger scroll on the reading desk and began copying numerals in a quick cramped hand. Pell walked the columns. He did not touch the brass. He read the way a tailor reads a seam, close, unhurried, his lips moving slightly.

Ash moved to the Clock district column, because that was where the sweeping took him, and because to go anywhere else would be the one thing a sweeper never did.

His line was on the third band, low, at chest height. It always had been. He found it without looking for it.

Merrow, A.

He polished the band next to it first.

Last week's figure was chalked on his closet wall and burned into his head. Three years, two months, nine days, fourteen hours. Seven days of living since. Six hours spent this morning on a wheel. He did the subtraction as he worked the cloth in small circles. It should read three years, two months, two days, eight hours.

He let his eyes pass over his own numerals the way they passed over everyone's.

3 · 2 · 2 · 15

He polished the next band down.

He did the arithmetic again, slowly, the way he had done it every night for three years. Seven days off. Six hours off. Eight hours left in the last place. The brass said fifteen.

Seven hours over. One for every night since his last check.

The cloth kept moving. He made it keep moving. A sweeper who stood still in front of his own line was a sweeper with something to hide, and there was an auditor eight columns away reading every number in the district with his lips.

"Boy."

Ash did not stop polishing. "Sir."

Pell was looking at him. Not at his line. At him, at the cloth, at the brush in his other hand.

"You keep these well," Pell said. "Most sweepers leave smears on the low bands. Too much bending."

"I don't mind bending, sir."

"No." Pell watched a moment longer, then turned back toward the desk. "Good. Order is easier to read when somebody keeps it clean."

At the far end of the hall, Osric Dane lifted his head from his notebook. Ash felt the glass eye on him across forty yards of brass. Then the old man folded his black cloth, tucked it away, and walked out through the side door without a word to anyone.

Ash finished the column. He did the next one. He did all of them, at the same pace as every other week, and he did not look at the third band of the Clock district again.

When the ninth bell rang he went out to the corridor and picked up his broom.

* * *

The closet behind the escapement was a cupboard someone had once kept oil drums in. It still smelled of them. A straw pallet, a blanket, a nail for his coat, and through the plank wall the tock of the anchor, so close it set the water in his cup trembling.

He lit the stub of candle and held it to the wall.

Three years of chalk. Columns of figures, one row per week, his whole life in a neat descending ladder. He had always been proud of the neatness. Tonight he stood in his doorway and thought how anyone who opened this door could read it like a page.

He wrote the new figure at the bottom. 3 · 2 · 2 · 15. Beside it, smaller: +7.

Nobody in Varrow gave time away. You sold it. You bought it back dear. You signed for it with your own blood in a sealed contract, or you took it without one and they emptied your line in the square while the bells rang. There was no third way. There was no such thing as a gift.

He sat on the pallet and turned the broom across his knees.

The handle was ash wood, grey with handling. Eight days ago he had noticed the first nick near the top, a short clean scratch, and blamed the new wire bands the Clockmaster had put round the bristle heads. They had sharp ends. They caught on things.

He held the candle close and counted.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.

Seven little cuts, evenly spaced, in a neat row down the handle like marks on a prison wall. The same number as the hours.

And below them, an eighth.

He touched it with his thumbnail. The wood inside was pale and clean, not yet darkened by his hands, and a single curl of shaving still clung to the edge where the blade had lifted it. Cut tonight, in the corridor outside the Ledger hall, while his broom leaned under the lamp and he polished his own numbers ten feet away.

The escapement went tock through the wall.

He looked at the eighth mark, and then at the chalk figure he had written, and understood that tonight's hour had not yet arrived.