Page 1 of 18
A clockwright of Lowmarket mends a shard of darkness and unwittingly awakens Harrowlight's hunger. To protect her city she bargains with a lantern's appetite, faces a man who would privatize memory, and learns that saving a town demands the precise toll of what one is willing to lose.
Iris Valen's hands smelled of oil and salt before dawn. She worked bent over brass and bone at a bench by the window of a low shop on Lowmarket, where the sea wind shoved its cold fingers between the shutters and the gulls stole the smell of sugar from the bakery down the lane. Her workshop was a cramped half-room stacked with coils of wire, lockplates the size of a palm, and the carved heads of clockwork birds whose eyes had long since gone cloudy. A single window looked out to the channel and, beyond the black teeth of the quay, the lighthouse they called Harrowlight. From here it was a suggestion of light and iron: a bone-white column, its lantern haloed by gulls and the salt spray.
She had learned the language of gears young—how a pin slipped, how a spring talked when it was tired. The market gave her what it could: broken watches with names scratched into their backs, the occasional brass cruciform with a faint scent of perfume, and people with small, urgent things that would not wait for a richer workshop in the higher wards. Her hands remembered what her memory sometimes failed. Tonight she was mending a child's tin soldier whose hinge had split. The soldier's paint had been stamped smooth by a thumb, and inside his chest someone had placed a hair the color of river silt. Iris used two needles and a sliver of mother-iron to hold the hinge.
Coal—the cat chosen by the shop because charity would not take him—slept in the case of loose screws. He dreamed with one paw twitching and a low sound like a pocket-clock winding rose from his throat. Outside, the market was waking. A bell bounded through the fog; it was not the church bell but the little warning bell the fishwives hung to call bargains. The sound was metallic and precise, and it set a dozen brass teeth in the shop to chime, chiming against one another like tiny knives.
When she finished, Iris ran a rag over the soldier and caught her reflection in the glass as if the world had been fitted into a lens. Her face was smudged with the blue of old paint and a thin scar that began near her jaw and vanished beneath her collar. She tasted salt and felt the ache of stitches in muscles that turned over years of small work. For a moment she let the quiet be a place to breathe: the hum of gears, Coal's soft breath, the distant bell. Then the door's knocker sounded twice, a hard, flat sound, and a child burst into the shop holding a music box that clicked with broken teeth and would not open.