The High Astronomer's thumb touched the winder of the dark watch, and the light in the great hall shivered.
It was a small movement, no more than a clockmaker makes to wind a watch before breakfast, but Corin felt it in his teeth. The sun that had risen through the floor of the Observatory — the true sun, white and gold, the sun that had turned Meridia to gold — trembled in the dome above them like a candle flame in a draught.
"Stop," Corin said. "You will kill them all."
The High Astronomer did not look at him. He looked at the sun, the way a jailer looks at a prisoner who has slipped his chain.
"I will not kill them," he said. "I will keep them. That is what we have always done. We kept the sun, and the city lived in the Long Light, and no child froze in the dark. We kept the night as well, clockmaker, because the night is the other half of the bargain, and a bargain is only kept when both halves are held."
Maren's hand tightened around Corin's. "What night?" she whispered. "There has been no night in Meridia for three hundred years. Only the Long Light, and the lamps."
"Exactly," the High Astronomer said. His voice carried across the hall the way the Observatory bells carried across the city. "There has been no night, because we kept it. We took the night from the sky the same day we took the sun, and we locked it away, hour by hour, year by year, in this watch. Three hundred years of nights, pressed into a single movement, waiting for the day the sun was freed."
He lifted the dark watch higher. Its face had no numbers, only a single black hand pointing at a single word, engraved in black iron: NIGHT. As Corin watched, the hand began to move — not forward, but backward, toward a place where there was no word at all, only darkness.
"The sun is free," the High Astronomer said, "but the sun is only half the sky. The night was never freed. We gave you a light that never failed, and you forgot what darkness was for. You forgot, and so you let us keep it."
He turned the winder one click.
The click was soft, no louder than the tick of a watch, but the whole Observatory heard it. The light in the dome dimmed, just a fraction, just enough for the citizens to turn their faces upward, toward a sun suddenly not quite so gold as it had been.
"One click," the High Astronomer said, "for one hundred years of night."
Then he turned it again, and the light faded further. The Wardens stood still. The citizens who had been weeping and singing stood still. Corin felt the watch in his own hand grow cold, ticking faster now, its balance wheel spinning like a frightened heart, the thirteenth hour spinning backward toward midnight.
"Master Anselm knew," Corin said. "He made this watch to undo it. To give the city back its stolen hour."
"The hour," the High Astronomer said, with contempt, "was the smallest thing we stole. A single hour, taken from every dawn, so the Long Light would hold a little longer, and no one would notice the days growing shorter. Your master found the smallest theft, and built a key for it, and died believing he had found the whole crime. He never understood that the hour was only the lock on the door. The vault behind it was full of nights."
Maren stepped forward, her veil fallen away, her face bare to the hall, young and plain and fierce, with her father's eyes.
"My father drew sunrises," she said, loudly, so the whole hall could hear. "He drew them for forty years, because he could not remember what one looked like. And you told the city the Long Light was a mercy, and the sun was gone, and the night was gone, and there was nothing to remember. You lied."
"I did not lie," the High Astronomer said. "I kept. A lie is told to deceive. A keeping is done to preserve. Now your clockmaker has broken the keeping, and the sun is loose, and the night is loose in this watch, unless I do what I have always done."
"What is that?" Corin asked.
"Keep," the High Astronomer said. "I will keep the night, by giving it back all at once."
He turned the winder a third time.
The third click was a sound like a door closing in a house with no windows, a sound Corin felt in his chest rather than heard. And with that sound, the light went out of the dome. It did not fade. It went out, all at once, as if someone had snuffed the sun like a candle. The gold drained from the black marble floor. The great orrery stood still and black, its amber sun dark as a stone.
Then the night came in.
It came through the dome, through the doors, through the cracks in the floor, pouring into the Observatory like water into a sinking ship — not the ordinary night of a city, with lamps and windows, but a night kept for three hundred years, grown thick and hungry in its keeping, a night that had forgotten what it was to end.
Corin could not see his own hand. He could not see Maren, though her hand was still in his. He could hear the citizens crying out, the Wardens shouting, and beneath it all, soft and steady, the ticking of the dark watch, ticking backward, toward a midnight that would never come.
"Light a lamp," someone shouted. "Light a lamp, for the love of the sun!"
But there were no lamps to light. The lamps had been lit by the Long Light, and the Long Light was gone, and the oil had gone cold in the sudden dark, and the whole hall was black as the inside of the vault.
Corin did the only thing a clockmaker could do in the dark. He listened.
He listened to the watch in his hand, the small brass watch Master Anselm had made. It was still ticking, faster than ever, and as he listened, he understood what it was doing. It was counting the night, the way it had once counted the stolen hour, measuring the darkness the High Astronomer was pouring into the city, because a clockmaker's watch keeps the count even when the sky forgets how.
And Corin understood what Anselm had really made. The watch was not only a key. It was a balance, made to hold the sun on one side and the night on the other, the way a regulator keeps a clock true. The Astronomers had broken the balance when they locked the sun away and kept the night. Corin had broken it further when he freed the sun without freeing the night. Now the High Astronomer was breaking it altogether, pouring three hundred years of night into a city that had forgotten how to bear even one.
Unless Corin could put the balance back.
"Maren," he whispered. "The orrery."
"What?" Her voice was close, frightened, steady. "I cannot see anything."
"It was a lock, and the watch was its key. But a lock has two sides. The same key turns it both ways. If I can wind the thirteenth hour forward while he winds the night backward —"
"You are guessing."
"I am a clockmaker," Corin said. "Guessing is what I do when the movement is strange and the sky is dark and there is no one left to ask. Hold my coat. Do not let go."
Her hand closed around the back of his coat, tight and sure. He stepped forward in the darkness, toward the base of the orrery, toward the keyhole where he had freed the sun. His foot found the base. His hand found the small brass panel, low down where no one would think to look. His fingers found the round hole, no bigger than a fingertip, matching exactly the winder of the pocket watch.
Above him, the High Astronomer was turning the dark watch again. Corin could hear the clicks, one after another, steady as a heartbeat, each pouring another year of night into the hall, each making the darkness a little thicker, a little more certain it would never end.
Corin fitted the winder of his own watch into the keyhole. He thought of Master Anselm at his bench, and of Maren's father drawing sunrises he could not remember, and of the sun, low and white over the rooftops, and the whole city weeping in the light.
And he turned the winder forward.
For a moment, nothing happened. The darkness did not lift. The hall was still black as the inside of the vault, and Corin thought he had guessed wrong, that the key turned only one way, that the night would never end.
Then the watch in his hand grew warm.
It was a small warmth at first, but it spread up through his fingers, and the watch was ticking, not fast now, but slow and steady, like a heart finding its rhythm. The hidden dial began to turn — not backward, the way it had turned when he freed the sun, but forward, steadily forward, past the thirteenth hour, toward a place beyond the numbers, where the engraving was so fine he had never been able to read it.
He could feel the dial turning beneath his thumb, and he could hear, very faintly, beneath the ticking of the dark watch, another sound — a sound like a door closing gently on a room that had been open too long.
"Clockmaker," the High Astronomer's voice called down, and for the first time there was something in it that was not cold and patient and certain. There was surprise. And beneath the surprise, fear. "What are you doing?"
"Balancing," Corin said.
He turned the winder again. The watch grew warmer. The hidden dial turned further, past the numbers, and Corin felt the movement inside catch, and hold, and then — with a click so soft he almost missed it — turn over, into a movement he had never seen, a movement Anselm had hidden even deeper than the thirteenth hour, waiting for someone to wind it far enough to find it.
And in the darkness, at the top of the stairs, the High Astronomer screamed. Not a scream of pain. A scream of recognition, the scream of a man who has opened a door he thought was locked and found, standing on the other side, something he had locked away himself, long ago.
"Stop," the High Astronomer shouted. "Stop, clockmaker — you do not know what you are winding —"
But Corin did not stop. He turned the winder one more time, and the watch gave a soft click, and the hidden dial stopped turning, and the warmth spread from his hand into his chest, and for the first time since the light went out, Corin could see.
Not the hall. Not Maren, though her hand was still tight on the back of his coat. He could see the face of his own watch, glowing faintly in the darkness — and on the hidden dial, where the thirteenth hour had been, where the numbers had ended, there was a new number now, engraved in fine black script, glowing faintly in the dark.
XIV.
A fourteenth hour.
And beneath it, in letters so small he had to hold the watch close to read them, were words he had never seen before, words in Master Anselm's hand, words that made the blood run cold in Corin's veins, because they were not a warning, and they were not a blessing.
They were a name.
And the name was his own.
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