City of Time

City Of Time

Eoin Mcnamee

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For Arabella, Niamh, Odhrán, and Danny

Chapter 1

Owen walked down the riverbank, straddled the log that acted as a bridge over the water, and shinned quickly across. It was a fine sunny day with a brisk cold wind blowing up from the sea. The wind stirred the branches of the trees over his head, where the first colors of autumn were just creeping onto the edges of the leaves.

He stopped at the end of the log as he always did and looked up at the dark bulk of the ruined Workhouse towering above him. It was hard to believe that it had been only a year since he had stumbled across a secret organization called the Resisters who were hidden inside, asleep until the world needed them.

He shivered at the memory of the deadly Harsh, the enemies of mankind and of life itself, who had sought to

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turn back time, spreading cold and darkness throughout the whole world. They had constructed a device called the Puissance, which was like a huge whirlwind, sucking in time. But the Resisters had emerged and Owen had joined with them to defeat the Harsh, imprisoning the Puissance in the mysterious old chest in his bedroom.

When the battle was over, the Resisters went back to sleep in the chamber known as the Starry, hidden under the Workhouse. They waited there until they were called again. It was his friend Cati's job to watch for danger and to wake them when it came. She was invisible to the ordinary eye, hidden, as she said, in the shadows of time.

"Hello, Watcher!" Owen shouted as he always did, knowing she could see him even though he couldn't see her. He paused and scanned the shadows under the trees, wondering if she was safe and if he would ever see her again. Time, he had learned, was a dangerous place.

He strode briskly along the path toward his Den. Owen had made the Den in a hollow formed by ancient walls and roofed it over with a sheet of perspex he had found. The entrance was cleverly disguised with branches, so it was almost impossible to find unless you knew where it was. He moved quickly. He was late for school, but he had an errand.

He uncovered the entrance and ducked into the Den. Everything was as it had been the evening before. The old sofa, the pile of comics, the battered old kettle

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and gas stove, the truck mirror on the wall. The only thing that had changed in a year was the empty space on the wall where the Mortmain had hung, the object that he had thought was an old boat propeller, the object that turned out to be the key to defeating the Harsh. It was a magical thing, whose properties he didn't really understand. It resembled a battered piece of brass a little larger than a man's hand, with three leaves coming out from the center. When activated, it transformed into an object of wonderful intricacy and power. The Mortmain was now in his bedroom as well, acting as a lock to keep the Puissance in the chest.

Owen looked at himself in the mirror. His face had filled out and the thin, worried boy of last year had gone. His brown eyes were still wary, but that wasn't surprising, given the danger he'd gone through.

Quickly he opened the small box he had left on the old wooden table. He reached into his pocket and took out what looked like a jagged stone, one that glowed bright blue. It was the piece of magno that Cati had left as a keepsake, the stone filled with a power that the Resisters harnessed like electricity. He had taken it home with him the evening before, but he wasn't comfortable leaving it in his bedroom. It belonged in the Den, close to the Workhouse. He shut the magno in the box, took a last glance round, then left.

Once outside, he climbed up the side of the bridge onto the road. His mother had forgotten to give him

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lunch again, so he ran toward Mary White's shop. He had to stoop down to get into the tiny dark shop with the whitewashed front. As always, Mary was standing in the gloom behind the counter wearing an apron and pinafore, her hair in a bun.

"Have you been down at the Workhouse recently?" Mary asked. Owen remembered that the Resisters had spoken of her and seemed to have a great deal of respect for her. How much did she know about them and their battles with the Harsh?

"Be careful down there," she said. "Be very careful." For a moment the shop seemed to grow even darker and Mary's face looked stern and ancient. Then she smiled and things went back to normal.

Owen bought a roll and some ham. He put the money on the counter and Mary looked at his hands, which were unusually long and slender for a boy.
Just like his father's
, Mary thought.
Hands that were made for something special
.

Things had been easier at school since Owen had fought alongside the Resisters. No one knew about his adventures with the Resisters, or that if they hadn't defeated the Harsh, everyone would have vanished from the face of the earth, but he had grown up a lot during that time and his classmates sensed it. He was still a loner, but he was respected. It also had something to do with the fact that his mother was not as depressed and

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forgetful as she had been, so no longer sent him out in clothes he had outgrown or cut his hair with the kitchen scissors. Now he had the quiet air of a boy who could solve problems, and the younger children in particular often came to him for help.

At lunch he sat in the shelter outside. He had forgotten to buy a drink, so when Freya Revell sat down beside him and offered him a sip of her smoothie, he gratefully accepted.

"Look at the moon," she said. "It's so clear today."

"So it is," Owen said.

"You can see the man in the moon," she said.

Owen looked up and saw she was right. Then he turned back to Freya and felt his blood run cold. Instead of Freya's pleasant features, he saw the face of an old woman, more than old, ancient beyond counting. He felt himself recoil.

"What is it?" she said. "Is there something wrong?"

Owen rubbed his eyes. When he opened them again, Freya's face was back to normal. "I just... I just felt a bit dizzy," he said, knowing that didn't sound very convincing. "I have to go now."

He backed away, feeling Freya's eyes following him, her expression puzzled and a little hurt. He looked up again and for a moment the man in the moon did not seem like the kindly face from the nursery rhyme, but instead looked hard and cold.

After school, Owen walked slowly home, trying to

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rid himself of the image of Freya's face, how it had changed. Was there something wrong with him, or had it been a kind of waking dream?

No. It had happened, and there was no one he could tell.

If only Cati were here
.

When he got back home, his mother was in the kitchen. She looked careworn, but she smiled to herself from time to time as though she remembered something funny. It was an improvement on the way she had been, he thought. She had put out tea for him. Well, he thought, she had tried. There was a rubbery fried egg, which looked as if his fork would bounce off it, a bowl of porridge that had set like cement, and tea that came out as hot water because she had forgotten the tea bag.

Owen didn't mind, though. After his father was lost when his car crashed into the sea, his mother had sunk into a terrible depression, barely recognizing even Owen. But when he had broken the hold that the Harsh had on time, his mother had recovered a little, although Owen didn't understand how. She was vague and sometimes hardly seemed to be there, but she was happier.

He put the egg between two slices of toast and gulped it down, then grabbed his schoolbag from the corner, kissed his mother gently on the cheek, and went upstairs.

Owen spread his homework out on the bed, but he

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couldn't concentrate. When it got dark he climbed up onto the chest underneath his window and stared out at black trees whipped by the wind. Then he got down and examined the chest, as he did almost every night. It was a plain black chest with brass corners and what looked like an ordinary brass lock and yet he dared not open it. The terrifying whirlwind that had turned time backward and threatened to destroy the world was trapped in it. The tarnished brass lock, the Mortmain, could look dull and uninteresting, as it did now, but Owen knew it was ornate and complicated.
Not made just to be a lock on a chest
, he thought.
No matter how important the chest is
.

He pulled off his trainers and lay on the bed. He shut his eyes, but Freya's old-woman face was the first image that came into his head. Then he saw the moon, with Freya's wizened face on it. He drifted into a troubled sleep in which images of the chest and the Mortmain flowed and merged into each other.

Owen wasn't the only one thinking about the chest. At the far side of the garden there was an ash tree, and in its branches a heavy figure was perched holding a brass telescope in one hand. The man had a broad red face, large sideburns, and a sly look. His name was Johnston and he was a sworn enemy of the Resisters. He was a scrap dealer, but the previous year he had stood shoulder to shoulder with the Harsh, the cold enemy who had tried to crush Owen and his friends.

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He peered through the telescope into Owen's room. Reflected in the dressing-table mirror he could see the chest and the dull gleam of the Mortmain. It had taken Johnston all year to work out that the chest contained the Puissance. The Harsh were eager to get it back. He lowered the telescope. This time Owen would not stand in his way.

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Chapter 2

Cati also lay awake. For a long year she had been the Watcher. There was always a Watcher--one member of the Resisters who stayed awake while the others slept.

She lived in the Workhouse on the river below Owen's house, taking food from the cavernous storerooms and cooking it in the vast empty kitchens. Every day she walked the crumbling battlements of the Workhouse, the Resister headquarters, which just looked like an old ruin to human eyes. She could see traffic moving up and down the road, but the drivers could not see her. She wondered what they would think if they knew that there was an army sleeping in the old building.

Watching other people going up and down the road was lonely enough, but worst of all was seeing Owen

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going to and from school or walking to his Den, his brown hair blowing in the wind from the harbor. She loved it when he waved and said hello even though he couldn't see her. She longed to call to him and walk along the river, to laugh and talk the way they had before.

Cati sighed. Her father had been the Watcher before her, but he hadn't said much about what it was like to be awake when everyone else slept. He had never mentioned the loneliness. He'd merely told her that it was a bit like being a night watchman. She sat up in bed. She knew that she wouldn't sleep that night, so, pulling on her clothes and boots, she made her way toward the stone staircase that led to the top of the Workhouse.
If I'm the Watcher
, she thought,
then I might as well go and watch
.

It was a crisp clear night, with a full moon that seemed to fill the sky over the harbor. Cati shivered and pulled her collar tight around her neck. She listened to the gentle murmur of the river far below. Then she heard the sound of wings. A vast skein of wild geese were flying low and hard toward the harbor. They were flying in a V formation from north to south and Cati could hear them honking. She watched them cross the face of the moon until they were framed in its circle.
They are free and I am not
, she thought sadly.

Then she froze to the spot. A second before, there had been birds on the wing. Now they turned to skeletons, the flesh and feathers gone! For a moment they

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hung in the sky, a great silent flock of the dead, their bone wings fixed in flight, their beaks agape but noiseless. Then they turned to dust, which fell earthward in a great plume until it was swallowed by the darkness below.

Cati felt as if her heart had stopped. For a long moment she stood staring at the moon, wondering if she had hallucinated the whole thing. But the geese had been real; nothing could have been more real than their wild honking high in the sky. She forced herself to think. No weapon could have reduced the geese to dust. No storm or wind or lightning strike. Only one thing could have happened. Somehow, time had changed them and they had aged many years in a single second.

Her job was to watch for a threat to the fabric of time and to wake the other Resisters if they were needed to defend. Was this one of those times? Her heart told her that it was. She turned and plunged down the stairs.

In two minutes she stood at the doors that led to the Starry, the great chamber where the Resisters slept. As she fumbled at the lock, doubt began to creep into her mind. What if she was wrong? She thought about Samual, one of the Resister leaders. The warrior was a brave fighter, but his tongue was acid and he had not approved of Cati's friendship with Owen. She could almost hear his sarcastic words.
Geese turning to dust? You woke us because you had a silly dream?