The Watch That Stopped
The clock stopped at twenty-three minutes past three on the seventeenth day of the rain-month, and for almost half an hour Iren Vesh was the only person in Avenmoor who knew.
She had been bent over the back of an old longcase clock in her master's shop — a private piece, no Tower business, no urgency, only the wealthy widow on the cliff road who liked her father's clock to chime more reliably than her late father had — when she heard the silence.
It came in through the open shop door the way a smell does. The square outside, normally full of the polite mechanical chatter of a hundred small clocks in a hundred small windows, had stopped chattering. The silence was not absolute — a dog was barking, two streets over, and a horse complained somewhere on the wet cobbles — but the clocks had stopped, all of them, and without them the city sounded less like itself than Iren had ever heard it sound in her life.
She set down her file. She walked to the door. She looked up.
The Tower of Hours stood at the south end of the square as it had always stood, twelve stories of pale stone, its great copper hands black against the rain. The minute hand was at twenty-three past. The second hand was not moving.
She watched it for a long count of breaths. It did not move.
Around her, slowly, people began to come out of doorways. The greengrocer first — he kept his accounts by the Tower bell and was already counting on his fingers in confusion. Then the apothecary's boy. Then old Halver from the inn, who had not been outside in daylight in nearly a year and whose face, in the wet grey light, looked oddly young.
Nobody spoke. They were all looking at the Tower.
The seconds did not start moving again. The minute hand did not move. Above the square, the Tower stood silent, and the city — the entire careful and over-correct city of Avenmoor, every one of whose habits was timed to the great clock above its head — stood silent with it.
It was Halver who finally spoke. He said, very quietly, the way one speaks at a deathbed: "It hasn't done that since."
He did not finish the sentence.
Iren looked at him, then at the Tower, then back at Halver. Halver was eighty-two. Whatever he was about to compare it to had happened, at the latest, when he was a small boy.
She had been an apprentice clockmaker for nine years. She had inherited the shop from her master only six months ago. She had no business climbing the Tower. She had no key.
She stood in the doorway and watched the rain come down on the unmoving copper hands, and she understood, in the way a clockmaker understands these things, that something had gone wrong that her master had not lived long enough to teach her how to fix.