The clock struck thirteen.
Taren Vey was certain of it because he had spent the better part of six years keeping the damned thing from striking anything at all.
He stopped halfway through tightening a brass retaining screw and looked up. The great clock of Bellwether rose above the rooftops like an accusation, its four faces illuminated by the pale blue lamps of the municipal square. Behind those faces lay three hundred and forty-seven gears, twelve calibrated hammers, a counterweight heavier than a horse, and enough badly maintained machinery to make an honest clockmaker weep.
There was no thirteenth hammer. There wasn't even room for one.
Yet the final note still hung in the night air, low and resonant, vibrating through the stone beneath his boots.
Taren held the screwdriver away from the mechanism on his bench. If he had imagined the sound, he ought to be able to say what he had actually heard: a wagon crossing the square, perhaps, or the deep pipe of the fountain beneath the ordinary twelve strokes. But the last note had been a bell. It had come after the twelfth, with the same measured interval between them. He waited for an echo to betray some other source. The vibration faded, leaving only the faint ticking of the small clock on Heddren's mantel below.
"That's new," he muttered.
From the workshop below came the reassuring sound of Master Heddren snoring beside the stove.
Taren looked back at the piece he was repairing. It was a spare release arm for the tower's striking train, scarcely longer than his hand. Heddren had meant to fit it at first light, when the square would be full of carts and someone from the municipal office could be persuaded to mind the stair. The city paid them to keep its clock reliable, but not enough to maintain it properly. Every spring Heddren asked for new bearings. Every autumn the office sent a man to ask why the clock sometimes lost three minutes in the rain. Taren had learned to save the old screws in labeled tins because replacement parts arrived only after the old ones had failed. The arm on his bench had been filed from a piece of stock intended for a mill. It would serve, provided the retaining screw sat true.
It mattered anyway. The market opened by the first bell, the flour merchants closed their ledgers by the sixth, and the gate watch changed at the tenth. A late chime could leave a baker waiting with dough gone sour or a porter locked outside the walls. Taren knew people who judged the hour by its sound rather than either of the clock's visible faces. Heddren called the tower an expensive way of telling people what their stomachs already knew, but he climbed it whenever the bells sounded wrong. Tonight those people had been given an hour no one could use. Taren wondered whether any of them had counted it.
He set down his screwdriver and crossed to the narrow window.
Bellwether slept beneath a thin autumn mist. The market square was empty except for a pair of watchmen sharing a bottle beside the fountain. Beyond them, Lantern Street curved between the baker's house and the old apothecary, its hanging lamps casting familiar circles of yellow light onto the cobbles. A wet wind stirred the nearest lamp. Its circle shifted over the paving stones and settled again. Taren leaned into the window's cold draft, glad to find something outside behaving as it ought.
At this height Taren could see only the street's near end. He knew where it led without seeing the rest: past the cobbler's shop, between the two public wells, and out at the little yard behind the dyer's. He had carried repaired clockworks along it often enough to know which paving stone tipped under a careless boot. The cobbler left scraps of leather beneath his window, and the well nearer the square had a spindle that squealed even when no bucket hung from it. In winter the lamp smoke mingled with the smell of chestnuts. Even now, with most windows shuttered, he could pick out a thin bar of light beneath one door. He had once waited there with a repaired clock until its owner finished putting a child to bed. He could not see the door from this angle, but he knew precisely where the light must be falling.
Then Taren blinked.
Lantern Street was gone.
Not dark. Not hidden by fog. Gone.
The baker's house now stood directly beside the apothecary. Their adjoining walls looked ancient and perfectly ordinary, as though the narrow street between them had never existed.
Taren stared. He counted the windows. Five on the bakery. Three above the apothecary. Exactly as before. He counted a second time, beginning at the other end. The numbers did not change, and neither did the wall joining them.
Except there had been a street between them. A street with twelve houses, a cobbler's shop, two public wells, and a woman who sold roasted chestnuts every winter.
Her name was Mistress Alwen. She had given him an apple that morning. He could still taste it.
It had been a bruised apple, the last of a basket she had been trying to sell before the afternoon rain. Taren had gone to collect a kitchen clock from a house beyond the second well. She had pressed the fruit into his hand when he stopped to set a loose pin back in the clasp of her stall awning. She had refused to let him call it payment. The clasp, she said, was scarcely worth charging for; Taren had said much the same about the apple. She won by putting it in his hand while his other hand held the awning steady. He had eaten it on the way home and thrown the core to a bird that followed him halfway across the square. The fruit had tasted sweeter on the unbruised side. He remembered turning it to take the next bite.
None of that proved anything about the wall below. Yet the smallness of it made his stomach turn. He could have invented a street in a fever. Why invent an apple with a rotten patch he had cut out using his work knife? Why remember the impatient sound Alwen had made when he tried to give it back?
Taren gripped the windowsill. The stone felt solid and cold. Across the square the joined houses held their places. He tried looking away and back again, as though his eyes might be failing in some particular way. The street did not return. Its lamps were gone too. Even the uneven row of roofs he had watched from this window for years ended neatly against the bakery chimney. He searched for the space they ought to have occupied and found himself measuring with his hands against the glass: this much width for the near houses, more for the street itself. From the workshop window it had always looked narrower than it felt underfoot. He lowered his hands. There was nowhere to set the measurement now.
Someone shouted in the square below. One of the watchmen had dropped his bottle. His companion laughed, bent to retrieve it, and carried on as though nothing remarkable had happened.
Neither looked toward the vanished street.
Taren leaned farther out. The first watchman rubbed his hand on his coat; the bottle must have spilled on him. He did not turn toward the baker's house. The other took a drink, handed the bottle back, and settled against the fountain. They had been facing the street a moment before. Had they seen it go? Taren couldn't tell from here. He could only see that neither behaved like a man who had watched twelve houses disappear. He opened his mouth to call down to them, then stopped. At this distance, over the fountain and the wind, he would have to shout a claim even he could scarcely put into words. He needed Heddren beside him first, looking at the same wall.
A cold sensation settled beneath Taren's ribs.
He ran down the workshop stairs, nearly tripping over a coil of copper wire. He caught the railing before the last step. A fall would be an ordinary disaster, and he had no patience left for one.
"Master Heddren!"
The old clockmaker stirred beneath his blanket. His slippers stood beside the stove, placed heel to heel as neatly as any matched pair of tools. He had fallen asleep with a list of repairs in his hand. It slipped onto the floor when he pushed himself upright. Taren had seen him sleep there through busy weeks before, insisting he was only resting his eyes until the stove needed feeding. The familiarity of the scene slowed Taren. Heddren looked exactly as he had an hour ago, before a whole part of Bellwether ceased to be.
"What?"
"Lantern Street."
"What about it?"
"It's gone."
Heddren opened one eye. "Then perhaps you should stop leaving your tools there."
"I'm serious!"
"So am I. Those files cost money."
Taren caught his master's shoulder. He had meant to pull Heddren toward the stairs, but the old man was still half tangled in his blanket and Taren could not make the request come out plainly.
"The whole street. The houses. The people. It was there a moment ago, and now it's not."
Heddren regarded him for a long, uncomfortable moment. Sleep left his face. He glanced at Taren's hand on his shoulder, then at the open workshop door, as if checking whether the boy was fleeing some danger outside. Taren wished he would ask which people. He had their names ready, or some of them.
"Boy," he said finally, "there's never been a Lantern Street in Bellwether."
Taren let go.
The old man wasn't joking. That was the worst part. His expression held no fear, no surprise, no trace of concealed knowledge. Only the exhausted irritation of someone awakened by an apprentice who had apparently lost his mind. Taren had heard him sound that way over mistakes: a reversed pin, a spring wound too tight. Those mistakes could be laid on the bench and corrected. This one filled the space between the bakery and the apothecary, and Heddren could not see it.
"But Mistress Alwen—"
"Who?"
"The chestnut seller."
"No idea who you're talking about."
Taren backed away. Heddren knew most of the traders in Bellwether. He complained about their prices, fixed their latches and scales, and remembered which ones still owed him a copper. Taren could hear the old man making that complaint about Alwen's chestnuts as clearly as he could hear him now. Last winter Heddren had bought a paper twist from her and grumbled all the way home that half the chestnuts were burnt. Taren had eaten the burnt ones. It was no use offering the memory as proof. In Heddren's face, Taren could see that the complaint had gone with the street.
"Come to the window," Taren said. "The bakery and the apothecary—"
"Stand beside each other." Heddren pulled the blanket from his knees. His tone was patient in a way that frightened Taren more than anger would have. "They have since before you were born. I helped replace the bakery clock when its east wall settled against the apothecary's. You held the ladder for me."
Taren remembered holding that ladder. He remembered the job, the grit in his eyes, and Heddren cursing because the bakery owner had offered stale buns as part payment. But the east wall had faced Lantern Street. Taren had stood beside the well while Heddren worked. He could picture the rope wound around its wooden spindle. He had shifted the ladder twice to let people pass, and Heddren had told him to mind the feet, not the traffic. The baker had brought out the buns through the street door. Taren was sure of that too, though he could no longer point to where the door had been.
For an instant, the ease with which the two memories could almost be made to fit was worse than the impossible wall. Heddren had named a real day, not invented a vague assurance. If Taren asked him where the ladder had stood, his master would give an answer. He might even believe it.
"You remember the ladder," Taren said.
"Of course I do."
"There was a well beside it."
Heddren's brow drew together. "There wasn't."
Taren looked at the old man's hands. The skin across the knuckles was scored with shallow cuts from the same stubborn machinery that had occupied them both all week. Those hands had steadied the ladder. They had taught Taren how to feel a gear catch before it broke a tooth. When he was younger, Heddren had made him take apart a simple clock three times rather than guess why it ran slow. An answer, Heddren said, was only useful if you could show where it came from. Taren wanted him to be wrong in some ordinary way—a forgotten turning, a confused name—but Heddren's certainty left no space for it. Taren had no part he could lift out and place in those hands.
"It's late," Heddren said. "You have been working too long. Put the arm aside before you strip its screw. We can look at the clock in the morning."
Taren nearly told him about the thirteenth bell. Heddren would ask him to count the hammers, and Taren would say that he already had. It was a conversation he knew how to have. Yet there was no reason to think it would end differently from this one. The clock might sound twelve strokes for his master. Perhaps it already had. Taren wanted to ask what Heddren had heard at midnight, but feared how readily an answer might take away even the bell. He looked toward the stairs instead. The release arm waited above, half tightened, as if the night's only trouble were a screw that might strip.
He knew, with a certainty that frightened him more than the disappearance itself, that Heddren believed every word.
Taren returned to the stairs. The workshop seemed smaller now, the lamplight weaker. Behind him Heddren picked up the fallen repair list and made a show of folding it, though he did not lie down again.
Taren put one foot on the bottom step and stopped. He had seen things fail in ways a customer swore were impossible. A stopped clock could show the right hour twice a day; a loosened hand could point straight down while its mechanism ticked faithfully beneath the face. The remedy was to find something that had not changed and measure from there. Heddren would start with the simplest piece that still moved. Taren tried to do the same, standing on the stair with the workshop around him. The stove gave off heat. The mantel clock ticked. Heddren breathed behind him. None of those things could tell him where twelve houses had gone.
The bakery had five windows. The apothecary had three. Those numbers had not changed, but they told him nothing about the space between. The stone under his boots was real. So had been Alwen's apple. He rubbed his thumb against the side of his work knife, still hanging at his belt, and found no stain or clinging bit of peel. He had cleaned the blade after cutting away the rot. He could remember washing it in the workshop basin, then drying it because Heddren objected to water left on steel. Even the absence of a stain had an ordinary explanation. It was an explanation only Taren could give.
He wished he had not.
Then something moved against his chest.
Beneath his shirt, hanging from a leather cord, was a small brass key. His mother's key. He had worn it for ten years. It had never opened anything. Heddren had examined it once and pronounced it decorative, the sort of useless trinket sentimental people insisted on preserving.
Taren had kept wearing it because there had been little else of hers he could keep close. Its teeth were too shallow and oddly spaced for any lock Heddren had shown him. As a child, he had tried it in the workshop cupboards, the kitchen door, and a small locked box Heddren used for clock springs. It had caught in the box's keyhole, earning him a lecture about breaking things he did not know how to mend. After that he had stopped trying locks at random. Over the years the brass had dulled where it rested against his skin, while the narrow grooves near its bow collected dust he could never quite scrape free. He knew its weight well enough to notice when it shifted.
Now it was warm.
No, not warm. Hot.
Taren pulled it free. The cord dragged across his neck; he caught the key by its bow before it could fall back beneath his shirt. Heat pressed against his fingertips, sharp enough that he almost dropped it. In the same instant, the workshop lamps seemed to dim around its polished edges. He glanced toward Heddren, who was turning the repair list over as if the other side might tell him what to do with an exhausted apprentice. Taren held the key away from his shirt. He could not have said whether it had stirred first or whether he had felt its sudden heat and moved without knowing. The skin beneath the cord prickled. He kept his fingers on the bow.
Tiny markings shimmered along the key's shaft, appearing and disappearing like reflections on moving water.
Letters. He had never noticed letters before.
He angled the key toward the nearest lamp. The marks held still just long enough to read, then broke apart when he shifted his hand. It took him three tries to follow them from the bow to the teeth. No new cut had appeared in the metal. The letters seemed to occupy grooves he had mistaken for wear. Taren tilted it the other way, testing whether lamplight alone had made a pattern out of scratches. The marks returned in the same order. His fingers trembled enough to make reading harder.
They formed a single sentence.
What has been removed is not always lost.
Taren read it again. His first impulse was to call Heddren over: here was something they could both hold, a change neither of them could dismiss as a view from a window. But the key had lain against Taren's skin for ten years without showing a word. If the letters vanished before his master reached him, he would have only another impossible claim. He could call Heddren anyway. The old man was a few steps behind him, awake and worried, and Taren had never been afraid to show him a broken thing before. Taren drew breath. He wanted his master to see the letters, but the thought of watching him look at the key and find nothing held the words in Taren's throat.
The heat began to ease. Taren closed his fingers around the key, afraid to lose the sentence even though he knew it by heart already. Removed. He thought of the gap that was no longer a gap, of Alwen's stall and the twelve houses, and could not make himself think of any of them as lost. Lost things left an empty place to search. The sentence offered no place, no way to reach anyone. He did not know whether it referred to the street at all. Still, it had appeared on the one object he carried from his mother at the moment he most needed something in Bellwether to agree with him. He stood on the stair until the brass no longer hurt his palm.
Behind him, high above the city, the great clock began to strike again.
One.
Heddren's chair scraped across the workshop floor. Taren turned his head, but the old man had only risen to bank the stove.
Two.
Three.
This time, Taren counted aloud. He kept his hand shut around the key and listened for each hammer's clean, familiar note. Whatever had happened to Lantern Street, he knew the clock. He knew how long it took the striking train to turn and how much silence ought to fall after the last stroke. Each note came through the workshop walls and settled before the next. Heddren paused at the stove, the iron door open in his hand, but Taren could not tell whether he was listening to the count or merely waiting for Taren to finish. Taren went on, giving each number its proper place.
And somewhere between the twelfth and thirteenth bells, someone whispered his name.