“Am I interrupting anything interesting?” the professor asked.
Cade staggered to his feet and swayed. Karigan leaped up to steady him, a small cry of pain escaping her lips before she could prevent it. The professor looked from one to the other.
“I’d rather the two of you be circumspect in the injuring of one another,” he said at last. “Makes it hard to explain away such things.” Giving Karigan a long, appraising look, he added, “You look stunning in black, my dear, and you have some very good moves.”
How long had he been watching? Karigan wondered. And he was referring to her sword work, right?
He strode off toward the library, and Cade and Karigan nearly tripped over themselves in their haste to follow.
“Don’t stop doing whatever it was you were doing on my account,” the professor said.
“Miss Goodgrave—I hurt her ribs,” Cade said.
“Cade banged his head,” Karigan said.
The professor turned on his heel to face them once more. “Are these life-threatening injuries?”
“Miss Goodgrave won’t allow me to see her ribs.”
The professor crooked a bushy eyebrow.
Cade blushed and started to stammer.
“I’m fine,” Karigan interrupted. “We both are. Really. I think . . .”
“Hmm.” With that, the professor continued on his way to the library.
Cade glanced at her, but Karigan could not meet his gaze.
AT TWO HOUR
Karigan and Cade hovered just a little too anxiously over the professor’s desk as he searched through various drawers. He paused to give them an all-too-knowing look before reaching into a drawer with an, “Ah ha!” He withdrew a gold sphere with a delicate chain dangling from it. It was etched with decorative whorls and ornate script. Initials, perhaps? It fit neatly into the palm of his hand.
“What is that?” Karigan asked.
“This, my dear, is a very rare item. A chronosphere.”
“A what?”
“A timepiece,” Cade supplied. “Shows time down to the minute. The finest can show time to the second with great accuracy.”
“To the second?” she asked “In that little thing?” She thought of her world’s few huge water clocks, used to synchronize the bells in the chapels of the moon. There were other modes of time telling, of course: candles, sundials, hour glasses, and on the coast, posts that marked time with the rise and fall of the tides. But the general population listened for the bells if they needed to know the hour, just as they did here.
The professor thumbed open a clasp and the sphere sprang open on hinges, revealing two halves. Karigan peered closely. In the center of one half, a tiny mechanical figure of a man with a tall hat and cane straightened up from a bowed position. He was deftly detailed and colored with enamel paint, his elbow chipped. He pivoted on a rotating disk and extended his cane to the other half of the sphere, which contained two rings of numerical glyphs carved in yellowed ivory. The numbers of the outer ring were larger, and the mechanical man bowed so that the tip of his cane clicked on the glyph for the number one. Then he straightened and pivoted again with a distinct whirring noise and tapped on a glyph of the inner ring.
“It is ten till two hour in the morning,” the professor announced. When the mechanical man returned to his starting position, the professor snapped the chronosphere shut.
To Karigan, the device was almost as impressive as the plumbing, and the gods had permitted her to see it, which meant she probably couldn’t hope to understand how it worked. When the professor placed it back in his drawer, she asked, “Why do you leave it in your desk? If I had something like that to tell me the time, I’d carry it everywhere.”
“I’d like to do so,” he replied, “but only the emperor’s elite, his most favored, are allowed to have one. It’s one more thing that elevates them over everyone else. Having such immediate access to the time is a form of power. And of course, it is they who control when the bells ring.”
Karigan saw the advantage immediately. If someone wanted the mills to be more productive, they could stretch the hours by changing the time the bells rang. Ordinary people might feel something was off, but they’d have no other way of verifying it, and must rely on the bells—controlled by the empire’s leadership—for the time, correct or not.
“Fortunately the empire rarely manipulates the bells,” the professor said, “though it has happened. Another reason I don’t use the chronosphere regularly is that winding the mechanisms is not enough to make it function forever. They rely on etherea, and I fear this one is running very low, so I must be conservative in its use.”
“If only the most favored receive these timepieces,” Karigan said, “how did you get this one? Did you acquire it like you did the Cobalt gun?”
The professor chuckled. “No, my dear. This was different. It was my grandfather’s.”
“You inherited it.”
“No, they can’t be inherited as other goods can be. It’s not allowed. It was supposed to be buried with my grandfather when he passed. I’d been so fascinated by it, and he’d often show it to me to amuse me.”
“So you acquired it before he was buried.”
The professor paused. Then said, “After.”
“You . . . ?”
“You could call it my first archeological excavation.”
Karigan exchanged glances with Cade. She could not tell how he felt about that particular detail. Undoubtedly he’d known.