Ania
The clock’s ticks sounded strange to Ania. Weaker. Tick-tick, pause. Tick-tick, pause. The first tick slow and sibilant, as if the mechanisms were struggling. The second, fast and short. Then she heard the whisper. Si-ma. A cadence much like the ticking.
Sima. Sima Sima Sima. A rhythm, not a whisper.
She put her hands to her ears, but the sound continued. Jorit looked at her, worried. Tugged on her sleeve. “We have to go.”
Sima. Was it a word? She’d asked the clock a question back at the inn—was it answering? What did that word mean?
Ania blinked. She’d seen the word somewhere. In The Book of Gems, the catalog of names of all the jewels and their lapidaries?
As Jorit led her away from the market and the inn, and down a shadowed lane, Ania pulled the catalog from her satchel and looked. Yes, the youngest lapidary. The last one to have her name recorded by the Valley Jewels: Sima.
Ania couldn’t find any more information—other lapidaries were connected with a major gem, their skill with it documented. Ania paged through the book as she and Jorit walked toward the town walls. The whispers matched the crunch of their footfalls on the paving stones. Sima.
Ania replaced the book in her satchel and covered it again with the scarf. Jorit kept tugging her forward, the clock beneath her arm, fingers firmly wound around Ania’s dark sleeve.
As they sped away from the town, Ania thought about her heritage, about the stories of her grandmother: so many times the family had fled before the Pressmen and, before that, other armies. She’d witnessed the beginning of one such wave, with the Pressmen’s parade. And she couldn’t change the course of those marching feet. She could only try to run before them.
And Ania knew she was tired of running.
How her ancestors had been the last family to leave the Jeweled Valley. How they’d always been careful of who they’d taken into their confidences, preferring books to people. She’d once heard her grandmother whispering and listening to nothing and no one. How she’d hidden a handful of broken gems in her pocket and the family had locked her away in a spare room.
You have the look of a lapidary, the shopkeeper had said. She’d ignored him.
Now Ania stopped, pulling Jorit to a standstill. Was she a lapidary? Or what passed for one now that all the real gems were gone or broken? She could hear a voice. She’d talked to herself and ignored the answers that sometimes came since she’d begun working at the university library.
But now she knew. “This is one of the last gems,” she said to Jorit.
“It’s a strange one,” Jorit said. “A powerful mix of stones. Could you find it in the book?”
Ania shook her head. “But I can hear it whispering,” she finally admitted. “It has a name, and it can move across time. It could at least. Maybe never again.” Her head ached with ticking.
“Ania! Don’t slow down, not yet.” Jorit pulled her and the clock farther from the town. Ania’s braid fell around her shoulders. Their feet scuffed the rough pavers that were slowly transitioning into gravel and stone. Ania’s toes caught a gap in the road. She faltered.
She could go no farther.
A stand of trees huddled at a bend in the road just ahead. Ania leaned that way. “I need to sit.”
Jorit let her veer off the road, and soon Ania crouched in the shadows. She stared at the opal within the broken clock’s sides.
She looked at Jorit. “I think this gem is more than air moving through crystal structures. I think . . .” She was trying to recall the Jeweled Valley’s myths, among the books she’d memorized while trapped in the library. “I’m afraid.”
“It’s all right,” Jorit said. “I’ll keep you safe.”
Ania strained to remember, but couldn’t quite—something about the defeated kingdom, the sacrifice a lapidary had supposedly made for her Jewel.
Sima.
Jorit pulled the travel guide from Ania’s pack. “‘The Jewel and Her Lapidary’—I remember that formation from childhood,” she said. “There was a lapidary named Sima. She was the last of them.”
“Okay,” Ania said, sweeping her long braid back over her shoulder. She lifted the broken gears from the stone and looked over the places where the gem had been altered to smooth the mechanisms, the escarpment. Her fingertip brushed the divot where a small piece of the opal had been cut away. Then she examined the break from the drop in the marketplace. “You’ve been through so much.”
“What are you doing?” Jorit said, concerned. “Who are you talking to?”
Ania ignored her. She put her hand on the fire opal, whispering, “Sima. Is that your name?” Instead of the gem calling her, Ania called the gem. She held it in her mind and for a moment felt the pull through the needle’s eye, but then she became the needle and the thread. She felt the gem encompass her mind, and she bound it, tightening the space between the crack, sealing it. “Sima.”
When Ania opened her eyes, Jorit gasped. “Your eyes. They were brown, I’m sure. Now they’re the color of opals. All colors.”
For a moment, Ania saw her fellow traveler’s face in facets, as a child and a young woman, as an old woman too. Jorit was beautiful.
Ania reeled. The trees spun around her dizzyingly, as saplings, as a bare meadow, as an ancient grove. “What is happening?”
A heartbeat later, she answered herself. “Time. I can see it.”
A moment after that, she shuddered. “The gem can see it. Not me. I can see through the gem. And it’s more than a gem. She—had a name—Sima.” She paused, hoping Jorit would understand. “I was right. She was once a lapidary too—partly. The opal is a compendium.” She caught her breath for a moment. “It’s alive.”
She looked at the books they’d carried from the library, The Book of Gems, the travel guide. The books shifted beneath the opal’s lens: they were so many things at once, a tree, a river, the blood of a child, the pages blank then inscribed with words, the gems inside all coming down to a secret Ania could not see, but the pages, the pages blurred and aged. . . .
She shook her head to clear it. Felt Jorit’s arms around her shoulders, supporting her. The once thief, now friend, future—
Ania caught her breath.
Her friend now. Keeping her from toppling over in the dirt.
“What is it?” Jorit asked.
“I can see what the gem sees. I can understand, and it’s difficult.” Ania clutched her head as it began to ache. “But I understand better what happened to some of the books. They’re being erased, the ink pulled right from them. I saw it at the university, but didn’t understand. The Pressmen are using their gem to feed off the ink, the knowledge inside. The gem was trying to show us how the Pressmen are doing what they’re doing, but it couldn’t control when it was going any more than we could.”
She clung to Jorit and saw what Sima saw. All the places the fire opal had been. All the moments in times past and future. For a moment, she was both Ania and Sima. She knew, in that moment, that they’d seen Sima’s friend the Jewel Lin running from the palace. She knew all that had happened.
“It will be all right,” Sima whispered, from Ania’s lips.
“No! We must go back!” Ania countered, her eyes shut tight. The vein at her temple throbbed as she fought for the fire opal’s attention. “To rescue Lin, to rescue Sonoria. To save the Pressmen.”
“You cannot fight time,” Sima said.
“We must go forward.” Jorit tried to speak to the fire opal, to beg for help. But Ania needed to realize it too. “We cannot change the past. You saw what happened to the old Master. Do you want to be trapped in time like that?”
Ania’s eyes opened, blazing. “That’s my friend,” she said. “I cannot leave her to die then.”
“Sonoria? You can’t remove her from then, not now,” Jorit said. “She’s trapped there, the clock—Sima—can’t change that. Especially not after what happened. Sima fought back with everything she had. If you stay, you’ll be trapped too, and the books, and possibly many other things, will disappear forever.” Jorit waited. Then, when Ania didn’t respond: “We have to go. Forward.”
Ania’s eyes filled with tears, but she nodded. “I know.”
She and Jorit both grasped the broken clockwork. Ania heard the fire opal’s wild, half-constrained whispers; they both felt its heart beating against their hands. Slowly an image formed in Ania’s mind, of a far-flung future, with machines and masked guards. Of the library under siege, falling into its own basement.
“No,” she whispered. “Sima, that’s too far!”
It was too late. The clock ticks slowed and lengthened and, maddeningly, they echoed twice in Ania’s ears, once for the opal, once for her. She shook, and Jorit’s hand covered hers, steadying her. Then her free arm reached for Jorit’s shoulder, and Jorit’s free arm held her friend and the fire opal tight.
Pale clouds swirled around them, holes tearing in the mist. The broken clock and the opal within it returned them to the library’s quiet.
In the empty clockroom’s shadows, the sharp ticking of the big clock’s sweep hand echoed like a knife hitting a glass. The small clock’s broken, irreverent ticking bounced off the rhythm, and the close space filled with discordance.
Ania whispered, “The clock still works.”
The fire opal had taken them to a different time than it had meant to. Earlier—before the Pressmen came into the university. The timepiece’s repaired mechanisms weren’t perfect yet.
Ania collapsed in her friend’s arms, and Jorit wrapped her shawl around her until she stopped shivering. Finally, Ania opened her eyes.
“Brown again,” Jorit whispered. She tucked strands of Ania’s hair back into her braid.
The library’s halls and stacks were dark except for the clock face’s glow.
Ania looked at the glass. Unbroken. Numbers still there. The Master Archivist’s name—and her grandmother’s—clearly lettered on the clock face. Ania Dem.
The breath Ania drew shuddered so loudly that Jorit turned, worried.
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
“You’re lying,” Jorit answered, almost tenderly. “We have no time for lies. Not anymore.”
Ania met Jorit’s eyes. “We’ll find the truth together.” She calmed, and they moved toward the clock’s mechanism.
The room was not yet filled with books. The Pressmen’s demands had not yet begun. Ania’s cot was there, but empty. She’d moved it that day, she remembered. The day the Master Archivist disappeared. Her name had been—
“Ania,” Jorit whispered. “Focus.”
They were still in the past, but not far in the past. Long enough back to travel to where the press was, and to arrive . . . in the present? The thought was confusing. Perhaps it would work.
“We have to get to Quadril. Fast. To stop the other gem,” she said with more conviction than she felt.
Jorit nodded again, but this time with grave concern. “How?”
“I don’t know. We don’t have money for boat passage.” Prices had been sky-high for a boat from the Far Reaches long before the danger was readily apparent. And there was no way to walk to Quadril from here.
Jorit frowned. Pulled out a handful of ancient coins. Her eyebrows shot up, and she looked at Ania. “I’ve given up thieving.”
“Don’t worry.” Ania clasped her hand reassuringly. “Those were fairly gotten. We’ll need money to repair the timepiece too.”
“If we dare try to travel that way again.” Jorit’s eyes closed again. This time from exhaustion. She lay down on the cot beside Ania before she fell down.
As her eyes closed, the timepiece ticked faster.
“No,” Ania whispered. She felt the pull of time, the thread drawing out. She fought it, but she was tired. Very tired.
“Wait—” Jorit cried out, reaching for the clock too, but late. And so slow.
The fire opal, the clock, and Ania all disappeared, leaving the cot with a dent and a slowly collapsing blanket.
* * *
When Ania woke, she was still in the library, but there were few books, and the clock . . . was a series of cogs laid out on the floor.
Ania gasped and hid in the stacks as Sonoria Vos strode past, dragging her young assistant with her.
The younger librarian’s braid swung half loose, hairpins scattered behind her.
“Do you hear something?” the librarian asked.
“It’s a library,” the Master Archivist answered. “There are always whispers.”
Ania knew she must not be seen. Too risky. She might accidentally change something big and be trapped forever, like her predecessor. And with the timepiece too.
She looked again at the floor. The small clock and its case sat there, new and shiny.
But she couldn’t steal the parts without breaking the other clock.
She could copy them, though. Copies overcame time.
But only with books. And with clocks. Not people.
That she could travel back in time, but only to learn how to change the present, was a sharp, cold fact.
That night, Ania began to fix the broken clock, using scraps of metal, pieces of wood from elsewhere in the library. Her previous work among books about clockworks, many days spent traveling with a thief, and learning to live on her wits guided her and served her well.
During the day, she slept in the stacks, her robes turned out, like a student. Sometimes, she copied from memory one of the books she’d read while trapped in the future library. She hid these in the stacks. Sent some to other universities.
And when she was ready, she whispered to the gem, “Sima, wake up. Take us back to Jorit.” She closed her eyes and thought of her friend alone in that library closer to the future than she was.