The inside of the clock tower was a heavy-duty cathedral of pure clockwork torque.
As they climbed past the two-hundred-foot platform, the gear-trains grew titanic in scale. Bronze gear catch wheels twelve feet in width revolved with slow, hypnotic care, their polished teeth meshing with dull, rhythmic clangs that shook the iron stairs. Massive lead balance weights, each weighing six thousand pounds, hung suspended on braided steel cables that plunged into the gloom below.
Ren Prime paused on a narrow high walkway to adjust the brass clamp on his breathing collar. Through the floor gratings, he could see the entire town gearwork. The escapements, the differential gears that timed together the solar timepieces of the southern wards with the clockwork clock-dials of the northern railway yards.
“Master Bell-Founder Garrow was a genius of sound metalworking balance,” Artificer Ren explained, his brittle, crystal-clear fingers tracing the casing of a backup bronze swinging weight. “He alloyed the bell-metal with three percent silver flux and a trace of native antimony from the western geode veins. He wasn’t just building a public timepiece. He was constructing a town resonator designed to ground sound shocks from seasonal thunder-gales. The bell is already tuned to the ringing hum of the river valley. We only need to provide the excitation hum.”
