Len reached into the small, heavy watch-pocket sewn into the waistband of his courier breeches. He pulled out his clockwork pocket watch by its braided horsehair fob.
It was an ordinary northern turnip watch. Four ounces of nickel-plated brass, with a thick beveled crystal and a heavy winding crown that needed three half-turns every morning before the mail cart left the station. The dial was white fine china, fired thirty years ago in the kiln works of Highwater Wash. It was marked with clean black Roman numerals and a small, sunken seconds sub-dial at the six.
He clicked the spring-catch open with his right thumb.
The gold-plated balance wheel inside beat back and forth with a rapid, steady, cheerful rhythm: five ticks every second, eighteen thousand ticks every hour.
Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.
It was the only sound in the cellar that didn’t belong to Chancellor Morn, didn’t belong to the twelve-year sky shield, and didn’t depend on the sixty-cycle hum of the Salt Ward generators. It was a purely clockwork heartbeat, forged in the daylight of another country, counting the true sky-high rotation of the earth without regard for country emergency decrees.
The hands stood at twenty-four hundred hours and fifteen minutes.
