I would call the armory, more officially known as the Xue-Fang’s Tick Tock Armory, a marvel if not for the pall cast over the moment by our being led to certain doom. A complement of Sorry Troopers, perhaps a dozen, was called to escort us through the facility. I think the group would have fought them if that were all, but no fewer than four Ohmpressors clomped down the hall to watch our movements as well, step by preprogrammed step.
By far the architecture with which I have the most experience is Lisa’s home in Airy Zone. Its off-white drywall finish is smooth but soft enough to scrape with claws, although I know it houses tougher substances beneath. The rest of the house is mostly couches and chairs, with relatively few hard surfaces to speak of.
The halls of the Armory were nothing of the sort. The hall from the prison was a great tunnel where bronze-colored banged out a percussion, staccato and regular. Steam valves spat sibilants and plunging pistons disappeared and reappeared from behind protective covers. Through the halls reverberated a rhythmic tick tock of a clock, systole and diastole, strophe and antistrophe. There was somehow violence at the core of this building, a cold striking rather than the contractions of a living heart. The edifice was artifice.
I was led not on a leash but behind troopers across the noisy catwalk (a word I find offensive for obvious reasons). The ceilings were too high, the walls to far apart, and yet our walkway too narrow. I wished I could be walking beside my human to comfort him during this time, but he was a few feet behind me, still holding the conch shell. He was whispering nervously with Helmgarth.
“You’re sworn to carry my burdens,” he said. “You take it!”
Helmgarth whipped his shoulder-length hair. “My backpack has been confiscated, love.”
He turned his head back to Addrion, who was very obviously complying at gunpoint only until she could think of a sensible course of action. She shook her head. “No inventory.”
“Quiet!” said one of the troopers, poking Commander Zideo with a baton. At least, I think that’s what she said.
I bumped the railing and nearly fell while craning my neck back to see them, one paw sliding right off the edge of the loose metal mesh. There seemed to be two parts of the Armory which—much like Zideo’s potatoes and peas—preferred not to touch one another. The exterior shell of moving plates and clanking gears gaped around the slim, rigid catwalk blackened by footfalls. It was as though all the architectural genius had gone into the superstructure, and at the last moment someone remembered that people needed to use this place.
Not only that, but the air was warm with oily activity, heated by the friction of lubricated metal sliding against itself. I did not truly recognize the heat until we passed by a port window, and a slightly less warm air tickled the moisture gathering in my fur, although it refused to dry it. The port window was a little too far for Addrion to reach for an escape, I thought, though her eyes snapped to it as she wargamed escape scenarios. Certainly it was too far for Helmgarth or myself. Zideo could have made it, I believe, utilizing the full array of his aerial skills in combination with one another. If I could have told him to run, to save himself, I would have. Such is the grim calculus of captivity.
Through the port window we saw veins of lava lighting up a craggy, barren landscape.
We passed through chambers tall and wide—I hesitate to call them “rooms,” rather open spaces where the superstructure retracted away from the inner fixtures like a dog’s lips to bear his teeth. The timbre of the reverberating pulse came in differently in this spacious junction where several catwalks disappeared back into their respective tunnels. But there was one direction from which it was loudest, sonorous like a church bell that never ceased tolling just on the other side of a wall.
I wondered if the intrusive sense of the path would aid us in an escape attempt, and watched for it–listened, as it were, for notions of convenient A-to-B-to-Z routes that showed promise. Nothing came to me. In the so-called New Rampage City, the uncanny sense had abandoned me and, I presume, Zideo just as wholly. Here, I had to wonder about something that DuChamp had said before he gave his life for our cause: that Bosses brought with them their own rules. Given the significance of this place, were we under the influence of various Bosses and their own mechanics? Or had the critical path deserted us because we were at its ultimate destination?
They led us to a central hub lined with twelve evenly spaced hallways. The room itself was an inverted ball, a rough and roughly spherical chamber in which was suspended a throne of brass, or some alloy of similar tint and luster. The veinlike walkways ended abruptly over an abyss of a different kind. Below the equatorial catwalk providing access between adjoining tunnels gaped a new sort of abyss filled with turning gear teeth and twisting axles, crushing crenelations intertwining like the zippers of Hephaestus’ fly. (Listen, I’m a dog. My references aren’t always going to be home runs. I believe I deserve some credit for knowing who Hephaestus is at all… which, to be fair, I do not.) Every kind of discordant mechanical noise issued from the pit, creating a very industrial bed of sound: clanging, clacking, cranking.
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A long-haired man with gray-green eyes sat in the throne, cross-legged and toying with the same scepter that the false Princess had shot at me in the Trackin’ Fields. We gathered at the edge of the walkway, where there was a break in the guardrails. I saw then that a great scaffold swept in a circular motion over the pit, centered beneath the throne dais like a single propeller arm. A second, wider one did the same, oriented a little lower and having recently past our break in the guard rails at a pace the fraction of the other. The third moved so slowly it could almost have been stationary. The arrangement was remarkably similar to the clock in Lisa’s kitchen, only many times larger and much louder, and the swinging arms made for a regular pattern of access to the throne. I knew that this must be the Court of Clocks of which Siz’l had spoken.
“Xue-Fang,” said Zideo. A smirk went across the magician’s face, and I felt I had seen it before, on the countenance of the impersonations of DuChamp and Helmgarth both. He slouched insouciantly sideways across the throne, one leg draped over an arm rest, across which the end of a green sash dangled.
Addrion tensed and balled her fists.
“Your true for–”
He held up a hand for silence, and Zideo yielded to it reflexively. He winced, and said, “Pssshht!”
Xue-Fang pointed about a quarter of the clock away, where a solitary Sorrow Trooper stood, his nervousness plain even at this distance. The soldier nodded at the master’s acknowledgment, then had to wait a full twenty seconds for the fastest clock “hand” to swing past his break in the guardrails. He hopped on and approached the throne, riding the second hand around the room, and bowed. “Sir,” said the trooper, and his tinny voice was nearly washed away by the cacophonous sounds of the grinding abyss below. “I have an update on your latest shipment of lava from the magma quarry.” The soldier waited to proceed. And waited. After a moment, he lifted his head. There was a nonplussed look on Xue-Fang’s face, and he let the moment linger. The second hand traveled in a great arc around him and back into his view, nearly a full minute.
“Rise,” said Xue-Fang. The soldier did so.
“We’ve lost cont–” began the trooper. A tongue of ice licked at him, and his body was replaced by a misting, translucent crystal. Xue-Fang lowered the scepter.
“If you have an update,” he said, “then you don’t have the shipment. Evilfied Bianka!”
The small, golden-furred bear came out from hiding behind the throne. Xue-Fang jumped to his feet. “Gods,” he said. “Don’t do that.”
“Sorry!” said the meek voice. She was nearly as cute as a pengoon, a gardener bear a little taller than myself and wearing a plaid skirt. She gripped a shovel that reflected the light like a mirror, giving it the impression of a sharp and well-maintained edge.
“Please dispose of this,” he said, indicating the crystal-ice statue sailing around the room on the second hand. “It showed a lack of ingenuity, and does not belong among the ranks of Bosses.”
She nodded, the bun in her hair bobbing. Bianka walked out onto the moving platform and tapped the end of her possibly-extremely-sharp shovel against the shoulder of the trooper statue, gripping the tail end and thrusting it through her other paw like a pool cue. The statue tipped easily over the edge and dropped like a rock. The devouring maw of the clockwork abyss choked violently on his crystalliced body, like a chorus of pterodactyls belching. It snapped the perfect ice-sculpture into shards, then processed the smaller chunks in a cloud of icy dust. Bianka returned to her place at Xue-Fang’s side, and I thought I saw a spark of recognition in Zideo’s eyes.
“Here in the Court of Clocks, we value brevity,” said Xue-Fang, with a wave. “Time, as you can see, is of the essence.”
“You under the gun, Xue-Fang?” Addrion sneered. She was struck in the back of her head by one of the batons for her insolence.
“Easy,” admonished Xue-Fang. “We need her mental capacities intact. And yes, to answer your question. His high eminence the Emperor of Sorrow is coming here this very evening. As you can imagine, we would like to ensure we have all of our things accounted for.”
“Where is Nereus?”
He released a single syllable of laughter, but there was no mirth in it that I could discern. “First,” he said, “give me that.” He pointed with the scepter at Zideo, who still held the conch.
My human looked like a turtle with no shell to pull its head inside. His eyes darted around the room, looking for a solution.
“Come take it.”
Xue-Fang rolled his eyes and spun fingers in the air as if to say “hurry up.” One of the troopers hit him in the ribs. I crouched to leap, but a sound from Xue-Fang halted me. “Ah-ah,” he said, pointing the scepter. “Smart dog,” he said, seeing that I understood. “Now, here is what will happen. You will bring me that instrument and place it in my hand, and you will return to your place. If you try anything funny, or otherwise do anything deviating even one iota from these instructions, you will be crystalliced. I want to be very clear on this: I’m letting you know that I am in a hurry because my ass is on the line. Therefore, your asses are that much more on the line.”
“Okay, okay,” wheezed Zideo. “So just so I understand. I’m walking over there, and I give you my conch?”
The trickster nodded.
“And I get to live? After I come over there and give you this conch?” He bit his lips. Xue-Fang did not respond, but glared at him. “Should I bring deez nuts, too?” He did not last the full question before he broke down laughing. “Ha ha ha ha! Lolololol lmao.” Then his mirth disappeared instantly and he stood up straight. “Nah bro. You go get it.”
He tossed the conch shell into the gear pit.
A blast of wind gusted up and around the room, and I heard the crunching of shells. Whatever lived in the shell, which I think Zideo had forgotten about, said “Meep!” Two gears rattled nearly off of their tracks below, but resumed their rolling and gnashing below.