Siran vanished into the colonnade before Anahid could speak, leaving behind only the bitter drift of nightshade and the scrape of slippers retreating across flagstones. She barely had time to shut Davit's book before heavy bootfalls rang through the vaulted corridor. Levon appeared, flanked by two guards in steel gorgets. He carried no lantern, relying on the cold blue phosphor rods fixed into the stone pillars. His face was set in granite, lines of exhaustion carved deep beside his mouth. "Get up," he said. No preamble. No inquiry into why she hovered by the genealogy alcoves. Anahid stood, wiping her ink-stained palms against her coarse woolen skirt. She wanted nothing more than to curl under the bench, pull her shawl over her head, and let the stone swallow her until this nightmare burned itself out. "The hour is late, Lord Makarian." "Time does not wait on your languor, Barseghian." He caught her wrist—the one bound in the dull leaden cuff—and jerked her forward. The dampening seal hummed against her pulse, a heavy thrum that kept her horological senses locked behind a fogged pane of glass. "My father's armillary has begun bleeding seconds into the lower vaults. You will fix it tonight, or you will spend the dawn in the brine cells." The great hall of the Karsian Archives smelled of ozone and powdered copper. Dominating the chamber stood the Voskan Sphere: an interlaced cage of brass hoops, fifteen feet wide, suspended over a pool of dark, inert quicksilver. It was the masterwork of Levon's father, tuned to the local Anchor that kept the city's calendar true. Right now, three of the five counterweights jerked irregularly. The central armature didn't spin; it spasmed, groaning like an iron beast with broken ribs. "The escapement is bent," Anahid murmured, her voice flat despite the prickle of danger singing across the skin of her neck. "The gears are slipping three hundred pulses every turn. Forcing it now will crack the crown wheel." "Then do not force it. Align it." Levon stepped behind her, unclasping the key from his belt. He touched it to her cuff. A cold snap clicked through the metal. The dampening band loosened, sliding down her arm. Her perception flared open. The room rushed back to her in three overlapping strata: the older brass gleamed yellow, the current alloy showed tarnished green, and a ghost-layer of cracked crystal lingered where Siran had brushed the housing hours before. Anahid froze. There, laced between the pinions of the outer ring, coiled an ultra-fine hairspring made of black arsenic-glass—House Surenian’s signature method for delayed spring-loads. Siran had planted a chronal fuse. "Lord Makarian," Anahid said, stepping back from the brass framework. "Move away. The core isn't merely jammed. It's—" "Do not stall," he snapped, stepping closer until she could feel the heat radiating off his wool tunic. His hand hovered over his saber hilt, iron fingers ready to suppress her if she tried to run. "You broke my family's legacy with your family's poison. You will piece it together, cog by cog, or so help me, I will take every second back from your own flesh." "Listen to me for once!" she shouted, turning to face him, the sudden spark of volume shocking even herself. The clock answered before he could strike her down. A muffled chime, like lead bells ringing underwater, pealed from the belly of the sphere. The arsenic-glass hairspring snapped with the crack of a pistol. The central mercury vat surged upward, defied gravity, and turned into jagged needles of solidified, motionless glass. "Get down!" Levon barked, but he didn't pull back. He reached for her shoulder. The metal armature exploded outward. Rings weighing three hundred pounds apiece tore free of their gimbals, whistling through the air. Trailing behind them came an arc of calcified slivers—sheared fragments of the hall's past that reduced whatever they grazed to dust. Anahid stumbled, her skirts tangling around her ankles. Her lethargy betrayed her; her limbs felt packed with wet sand. A crescent-shaped sliver of cobalt frost sliced directly toward her throat, cutting the air with a shrill hiss that rattled her teeth. A violent force struck her ribs. Levon threw his entire body across hers. The impact knocked the breath from her ribs as they struck the flags behind an iron lectern. He shielded her skull with his broad palm, his heavy frame blanketing hers entirely. A sickening sizzle hissed in the air above them, followed by the smell of scorched leather and burning hair. Levon grunted, a short, strangled sound torn from deep in his throat. His weight slumped heavier against her chest for a single second before he pushed himself up onto one knee, his sword clearing its scabbard with a feral shriek. "Lord Makarian!" The heavy oak doors burst inward. Half a dozen archive guards flooded the hall, halberds lowered, crossbows leveled, boots clattering frantically against the stones. Two of them rushed directly toward Anahid, iron irons drawn to pin her down. "Stand back!" Levon’s voice ripped through the vaulted hall, an absolute roar of animal fury that froze the guards in their tracks. "Do not touch her! Get back, you fools, before you drive another shard into the air!" The soldiers shrank away, terrified by the sheer ferocity of his snarl. Levon stood panting, his broad chest heaving, standing protectively astride Anahid as if she were a treasure he had not finished cataloging rather than the woman he blamed for his father's death. Slowly, the madness in his glare shifted down to his own right arm. The sleeve of his uniform was sheared away. Along his forearm ran a hideous, chalk-white furrow. It wasn't bleeding red. The skin along the gouge had withered into paper-thin parchment, mottled with deep liver spots and dried scales—decades of youth stolen in a heartbeat by the chronal shard. His hand trembled, fighting the phantom ache of sudden decrepitude. Anahid pushed up onto her elbows, stone biting through her skirts. She stared at the withered furrow across his arm, then looked past him to the shattered sphere, where the black arsenic-glass lay in powdery grains. He had taken the blow meant for her neck. And the woman who set that trap wasn't trying to make Anahid suffer. Siran was trying to kill them both.

The Sundered Clock