The Phoenix Thief

ONE

KILTER WOKE not to the sound of bells, but footsteps. He lifted his head from the notebook he'd fallen asleep over during the night, and knew at once that something was wrong. Here in his workroom above the bell chamber, dim light slid in thin yellow bands through cracks in the slanted roof, and his breath appeared as a pale cloud in the nearest. The beams of light would travel half the length of his body again on the floor before they reached the point at which the two large bells just beneath would chime, and human activity become normal in the tower and Warehouse One, the building attached to it.

Kilter kept track of all the activity. He didn't know the faces of the Watchmen that came during the day to calibrate and grease the clock mechanisms, but he knew their voices, the weight and scrape of their footsteps, and marked it all against the length of light on the floor, and the sound of the bells.

But this... this was all wrong. Wrong time, wrong footsteps, wrong voices.

He could hear the voices clearly, now. They were right underneath him, and he stiffened when the trapdoor in the middle of the workroom floor rattled. But he stayed still, knowing with a street-cat's instinct that motionlessness avoided capture as often as fleeing did.

"Ugh, we would pull this watch. How it's supposed to be a great honor is beyond me. What's so fine about sitting up in a clock tower? We can't hardly see the streets from here, anyway, and what else is worth watching, nowadays?"

"Maybe it's got something to do with what Commander Fástnik mentioned. You know, about what's going on in Warehouse One. You heard anything about that, Ikiel?"

"Heard anything? 'Course I have! What do you think I am, Dvaltri, a recluse? Just last night at mess somebody was saying he heard whatever's going on in there could change this whole ruddy war."

"Says the man climbing a bleeding clock tower that nobody's gone in for twelve years."

Two voices. Both new. This had never happened before.

Kilter had one advantage, however. They didn't know the clocktower.

In a moment he crept over to the trapdoor and found its hinges and lock panel among the sawdust, grit, and scraps of wood and canvas that littered it and the floor. The wires he'd jammed both the hinges and the lock bolts of the trapdoor with were still in place. Letting out his breath, he rested his forehead against the rough wood. The Watchmen couldn't get in. His work was safe.

Rolling over, Kilter looked up at the ceiling. Since his workroom was located in the very peak of the clock tower, the ceiling curved steeply above him. Upon first coming to this portion of the tower, he'd discovered that each of the four panels of the ceiling were hinged to open like giant shutters. One could stand here and look over the entire city with ease if those shutters were open. He'd wondered why anybody had bothered to build the tower this way. But since nobody came up this high into it, he didn't concern himself with it. There was plenty inside the workroom for him to worry about. The short walls were, in fact, almost hidden by stacks of salvaged wood, canvas, and glittering piles of mechanical shrapnel, all dug out from the wreckage of the city's lower triad. Hanging from the ceiling were the combinations of these odds and ends and a great deal of Kilter's life, each design brought to life from the notebook he'd left beside the heap of rags he slept in. The contraptions' sweeping, canvas-covered wooden frameworks reached over him like odd arms in wide, stiff sleeves – a visual to mark time and progress with, just like the sunlight on the floor. But while the sunlight gave order to the hurry of people below Kilter, the contraptions hadn't helped bring sense to anything yet. He was working on that, though. He still had time. The Watchmen hadn't ever come in, and they wouldn't today.