Jerahmiance the Mad Tinkerer clattered to the ground before Haetleccan, my steaming axe. Cool droplets of water plipped off the blade and smeared the blood that drenched his sagging cheeks. Copper balls and brass pyramids rolled out of his sleeves and down the dias steps, their journey towards the carpet echoing in the hall of pendulums. Some he’d used to try and stop me, but those automata lay in pieces and piles around the room.
He dropped the rest of the trinkets in his hands down the steps, looking like a man who’d thrown snake eyes in the devil’s hall. There was resentment and resign in his eyes, a look I’ve seen on many men before. “Who sent you?” he whispered.
“The Priests of High Seven disagreed with your edicts of minutes. The others, the butchery.”
“I only wanted,” he wheezed, “to synchronize the clocks of man… with the timepiece of eternity. I know what time was meant to be.”
“Then why the blood? Appeasing the reaper’s hourglass?”
“In a way…” his body shook, and he spat blood, but it fizzled into a red mist as the gob splashed against my axe. “The second hand of fate is blood. This pitiful world counts in seconds and hours, but the greater world, too great for us mortals to comprehend, counts by passing souls. I know this, and had no choice. Would you be so greedy as to halt the passage of a force beyond time?”
“Enough.”
In his last moments, he smiled. “Even this…”
I wiped my blade on the carpet and left. I had no time to waste.