God of Clocks

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In the dark heart of Cospinol's great wooden skyship they boiled a demigod. Her wings and legs had been broken with hammers to fit them inside the iron cooker-a witchsphere now strengthened to resist steam at high pressure. It was clamped in a mighty vise set upon a brazier. A lead pipe fed carbolic water in through a nozzle in its paneled shell. Another pipe channeled the demigod's spirit to a glass condenser, for collection.

For fifty days the slaves had pumped water and stoked the brazier while red shadow-figures loomed over them like some infernal puppet show. Steam issued from valves and moiled the tarry bulkheads, but the workers neither perspired nor complained. They moved with the mute efficacy of men long used to a task. All around them the Rotsward shuddered and pitched, her joints sorely tested by her captain's desperate flight westwards.

The slaves observed as sparkling liquid gathered in the condenser flask like a colloid of starlight, then crept up the glass and cascaded back down in furious scintillations. It seemed to whisper to itself in voices edged with madness. They paused to study the vise clamps each time the cooking sphere rattled or boomed. Yesterday they'd brought their hammers and laid them out on the floor where they could be reached in a hurry, poor weapons as they were. And then they added more coke and curried the furnace with blasts of air from bellows. The booming sounds intensified as Carnival continued to kick within her pressurized prison.

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