Mira Thornwick's boot found the first iron rung in darkness, and she counted it aloud, because counting was better than thinking about the drop below.
"Fourteen," she said. "Fifteen."
The rungs were cold and slightly greasy, and the shaft that held them smelled of old oil and older stone. Somewhere far beneath her, water dripped in a rhythm that almost, but never quite, kept time. Mira had expected something foul. What rose to meet her was closer to metal, warm machine, and a faint sweetness she could not yet name.
"Sixteen," she said. "Seventeen."
A voice drifted up from below, bright and unafraid. "You should skip every third one. They wobble."
Mira's hand tightened on the rung above her head. She looked down. The shaft swallowed the light from the hatch above, and the light from whatever lay below had not yet climbed to meet her. She could see nothing. She could, however, hear Daphne Proudfoot breathing with the theatrical patience of a child who had been waiting far too long.
"How long have you been down there?" Mira asked.
"Since breakfast," Daphne said. "Mum thinks I'm in the yard. Don't tell her."
Mira closed her eyes for a moment that lasted exactly two heartbeats. She had promised Aldric Pfenning she would look. She had not promised she would look with Daphne Proudfoot, daughter of the innkeeper, age nine, who had a habit of appearing wherever Mira happened to be standing. Daphne's mother had, on three separate occasions, sent the girl to Mira's shop with an apology and a jar of preserves. On the fourth occasion, she had sent the preserves without the apology, which Mira took to mean the matter was settled.
She did not skip the eighteenth rung. It held her weight without complaint.
"Twenty," she said.
"Twenty-one's the one I was talking about," Daphne said.
The twenty-first rung made a sound like a knuckle popping. Mira descended. The shaft widened. The drip of water grew louder, and a new sound joined it: a low, steady pulse, somewhere between a heartbeat and a kettle on the boil. The walls around her changed texture. Stone gave way to brick, and brick gave way to riveted iron plates the color of a tarnished spoon. She passed a small brass plaque bolted to the wall, green with age, the letters worn to ghosts. She stopped, hung by one arm, and read it with her face nearly pressed to the metal.
UNDERCLOCK. NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT THE KEEPERS HAND.
Below the words, someone had scratched a smaller line with a nail.
THE KEEPER IS HAVING A NAP.
Mira resumed her descent. The shaft ended in a hatch of heavy oak banded with iron. She pushed it open with her shoulder, and the sound that came up through the gap was not one sound but a hundred sounds braided together: the tick of uncountable wheels, the sigh of pressurized air, the thin metallic singing of taut wires, the groan of something massive turning in the dark. She swung her legs over the edge and dropped the last few feet onto a floor of worn flagstone.
Daphne sat on a coil of discarded chain, swinging her legs. She had a stub of candle wedged into a link beside her, and its small flame made her shadow stretch and shrink as it pleased. She looked up at Mira with the expression of a girl who had been given a secret and could not understand why no one had told her sooner.
"There you are," Daphne said. "I knew you'd come down eventually. Mr. Pfenning said you wouldn't, but I said she would, because she always does, and he owes me a halfpenny now."
Mira set her lantern down on the flagstone and looked up.
The chamber rose above her like the inside of a cathedral built by someone who did not entirely trust gravity. Brass pipes the thickness of oak trunks climbed the far wall and curved overhead into arches that met and crossed and climbed again, vanishing into a darkness the lantern could not soften. The pipes were tarnished in patches and polished in others, as though someone had been tending them with a cloth for decades and then, suddenly, had not. Between the pipes, wheels turned: great iron gears the size of a miller's cart, their teeth interlocking in patterns Mira's eyes refused to follow, their hubs slick with oil that caught the candlelight and threw it back in slow, oily rainbows. The air was warm. Too warm for underground. It carried the sweetness she had scented on the rungs, and now she placed it: beeswax. Somewhere in this cathedral of metal, someone had been polishing.
And the levers.
Mira counted them before she could stop herself. Seventy-three, ranged along a curved brass rail that followed the wall from floor to a height of seven feet. Each one was a finger of darkened steel, each one set in a housing of greenish bronze, each one unlabeled. No. She looked again. She had missed something. She stepped closer. There were scratches beside each lever, faint as spider tracks, but the scratches were not letters. They were numbers, and the numbers were not in order.
She reached for the nearest one.
"Don't," Daphne said, very quickly.
Mira's hand stopped an inch from the lever's tip. "Why not?"
"Because they move."
Mira looked at the lever. It sat where it sat. It had not moved. She was almost certain of it.
"They move when you're not looking," Daphne said. "I watched. I watched for an hour. Every time I turned my head, one of them had slipped. Not all of them. Just one. Just enough."
"Slipped which way?"
"Different ways," Daphne said. "I couldn't keep track. I wrote some of it down." She held up a scrap of paper covered in marks that might have been letters and might have been the efforts of a very tired nine-year-old. "Mr. Pfenning said it was the oil settling. But he said it quickly, the way he says things when he doesn't believe them himself."
Mira took the paper from her. She did not read it yet. She was watching the levers.
She watched them for a long moment, her eyes moving from one to the next in a slow sweep. Nothing stirred. The brass rail held its seventy-three fingers steady. She turned her head, deliberately, to look at the great gear above them, and then she looked back.
The forty-seventh lever, she was almost certain, had been further to the left.
"Daphne," Mira said. "Which one was it?"
"I don't know," Daphne said. "That's what I told you. I don't know which one, because every time I looked, it was a different one."
Mira set the scrap of paper on the flagstone and lifted her lantern. The light reached further than the candle had, and the chamber answered with new detail. A second rail of levers, higher up, partly hidden by a hanging chain of copper links. A row of pressure gauges behind glass, their needles trembling at different heights. A door of black iron set into the far wall, its handle missing, its surface crossed by a single line of rivets. On the floor near the door, a coil of rope, neatly tied, and beside the rope, a small wooden box with a hinged lid.
And on top of the box, sitting as though it had been placed there with care, a porcelain figure of a gnome, no taller than Mira's hand. The gnome's paint had chipped at the edges. Its left foot was damp.
Daphne saw Mira see it. Daphne's expression did not change, which Mira took to mean the girl had already seen it and had decided, for reasons of her own, not to mention it.
"Who put that there?" Mira asked.
"I didn't," Daphne said.
Mira crossed the flagstones, the lantern swinging at her knee. The chamber's pulse moved through the soles of her boots, up through her ankles, into the small bones of her wrists. She stopped in front of the wooden box and crouched. The gnome regarded her with the cheerful vacancy of its kind. She picked it up. It was heavier than porcelain had any right to be, and the damp on its foot was cold. She turned it over. On its base, in small neat script, a single word.
ODO.
She set the gnome down again, exactly where it had been.
"Daphne," she said, without turning around. "Has anyone been down here recently?"
"Just me," Daphne said. "And Mr. Pfenning, but he only came to the top of the ladder and shouted down that I wasn't to touch anything, and then he went away again. He has a lot to do with his hands. He folds them. When he's worried, he folds them."
Mira straightened. She looked at the seventy-three levers. She looked at the gear above her, turning with the patience of a thing that had been turning since before she was born. She looked at the door of black iron and the coil of rope beside it.
"Thistle," she said, very quietly.
She did not know why she said it. She had not seen Thistle since the morning, since the kitchen of her own shop, since a shadow at the edge of the doorway that might have been a child and might have been a one-eyed cat, depending on the light.
Nothing answered. The chamber's pulse went on. A drop of oil fell from a gear tooth and struck the flagstone at her feet with a sound like a small bell.
Then, from somewhere above them, in the dark of the shaft they had descended, came a sound that might have been a footstep, or might have been the wood of the hatch settling in the cold.
Mira did not turn around. She kept her eyes on the levers. Forty-seven. Forty-seven was the one she had marked, and it had been further to the left, and now she was not certain.
She had been wrong about the position. The chamber had shifted in her memory, the way familiar rooms did when one returned to them after years away, every angle subtly treasonable. She reached for the lever she believed was forty-seven, then stopped, her hand hovering over the brass.
From somewhere in the wall came a sound like a small, deliberate cough.
Then a voice, quiet and slightly damp, said: "Lighter."
Mira's hand dropped. Daphne made a small noise and swung her lantern toward the sound. The lantern threw a shaky ladder of gold up the western wall, where the steam-copper descended in a slow spiral toward the floor.
A pipe joint jutted from the stone at about the height of Mira's shoulder. From it, with the unhurried patience of something that had been waiting a long while and was in no particular rush about it, emerged a face.
Moss-coloured, with one ear chipped. A pointed cap, the same moss. One eye, the left one, slightly more awake than the right. A garden gnome, perhaps a foot high, hauling itself onto the lip of the pipe joint the way an old fisherman boards a boat, with a kind of slow ceremony that suggested it had been doing this for some time.
Daphne's lantern trembled in her grip. "Mira," she whispered. "Mira, it is the one with the writing. The one with the writing on the bottom."
"It is indeed," Mira said.
The gnome arranged itself on the pipe joint's lip. It was, Mira decided, a he. He had the look of a creature that had considered the matter of his own gender and arrived at a settled opinion. He tugged the pointed cap more firmly onto his head, adjusted a fold of his moss-coloured coat, and spoke.
"Civic ornament with opinions," he said, "at your service."
His voice was exactly the sort of voice that should not have been coming out of a garden gnome. It was hushed and breathy, with the faint rasping one associated with a throat that had not been used in some considerable time. It paused between phrases, as though making sure each word had been correctly invited.
Mira said, "You are Thistle."
"Well," the gnome said, "I am, and I am not. I am the part of Thistle that insisted on coming with you tonight. The rest is at home, sleeping in a patch of sun that I will not describe for you because you have not earned it." He tilted his head. The awake eye considered her. "What on earth have you done with your tie?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Your tie," the gnome said, with the patient enunciation of someone who had had to repeat himself to the same person many times. "You had a perfectly serviceable tie on this morning. Pale grey, I thought, with a faint stripe. Now look at you. Open collar. As though you had been handling fish."
Mira looked down at herself. She was indeed wearing an open collar. The tie was at home where she had left it the previous evening, knotted neatly over the back of a kitchen chair because she could never decide whether to throw it away.
"I do not wear it down here," she said. "It catches on things."
"And yet," the gnome said, "you have not once in eleven years thought to remove the second waistcoat button, which catches on the same things."
"I haven't the heart," Mira said, and was not entirely sure she was joking.
Daphne, who had been silent for a record-breaking twenty-three seconds, opened her mouth and let the silence pour out of it.
"Are you a real gnome? Are you really? I thought you were a fixture. I thought you were a thing someone had forgotten. We must tell my father. He will not believe me. He never believes me when things like this happen and then he has to admit he was wrong and he does this face, like this," and here she tried to demonstrate the face, with limited success, "this exact face."
"Your father," the gnome said, gravely, "has not yet learned that believing is less work than not believing. He will get there."
"What's your name?" Daphne said. "I am Daphne. I am nine. Well, I am nine and three quarters and I do not see why three quarters should not count just because they are not a whole."
"I have many names," the gnome said. "You may call me Thistle, if you promise to behave as though you have earned it."
"I will. I promise. I will be very good. I will be so good you will not believe I am the same girl."
"I already do not believe that," the gnome said. "Continue."
Mira made a small sound that, in another woman, might have been a laugh. She crouched, bringing her eyes level with the little green face on the pipe joint. From this close, she could see that the moss was not exactly moss. It was more the colour of moss, the shade such things take on when they have lived a long time in a damp place and have decided to commit to it. It smelled faintly of cellar air and wet stone and something older, something her mother would have called the smell of a house thinking.
She could feel the heat of the pipes through the wall. A thin line of condensation ran down beside the gnome's elbow and disappeared into the joint.
"You marked the lever," she said. "You marked forty-seven and told me not to touch it until the right hour."
"I did no such thing," the gnome said.
"You left ODO on my workbench. You scratched it into the base of the gnome at my shop."
"I have no idea what you mean," the gnome said. "I have been a fixture in this chamber for, oh, the better part of a century. Whatever you think you saw, you should not have seen. That is the kindest version of the advice I have."
"You were in the kitchen this morning. There was a shadow at the edge of the door."
"Mice," the gnome said, with finality. "The building is old. It has many mice."
Mira studied him. The little green face was unreadable in the manner of all small stone faces, but the one more-awake eye held a quality she could not quite place. It might have been amusement. It might have been the bland patience of a thing that had outlived several iterations of its own story and was not particularly interested in the current one.
"Why the tie?" she asked, after a pause. "Why does it bother you?"
The gnome considered this. Behind him, the pipes ticked as a fresh breath of steam passed through them.
The gnome's tie remained motionless. Somewhere in the pipe behind him, water burbled through a constriction and made a sound like clearing a throat.
Mira pressed her back against the cold stone of the chamber wall. She could feel every brick through her coat, the damp creeping past wool, past linen, into the small of her back. She counted her breaths. One. Two. Three. The gnome did not blink because he could not blink. This was a small mercy, perhaps, or simply a fact.
"You will not help me," she said.
"I cannot," the gnome said. "It is not my office. The tie is the office of one of my brothers, and he is indisposed."
"Indisposed how?"
"Painfully," the gnome said. "He fell into the boiler in 1903. He has been, as they say, tender about steam ever since."
Mira closed her eyes. When she opened them, the chamber was the same. The pamphlet was still folded inside her coat, the one with the 1847 ink and the water stains that had swollen its pages into small hills. Aldric's handwriting, cramped and certain, marched down the margin: OIL HERE. And HERE. And HERE.
She had read it through the night. She had tested every word she did not understand against three dictionaries and one retired engineer who owed her father a debt. She had memorized the order. She had laid out her tools on the kitchen table at dawn. She had come down.
"Aldric said if I oiled the main drive shaft before the seventh bell, the fog would lift," she said. "He said it had not lifted in three years because the oil had thickened. He said the fog was a kind of weather the town had agreed to."
"The town did not agree," the gnome said. "The town is merely where the fog happens to rest."
"Either way," Mira said, "I am going to do what he said."
"Mira Thornwick," the gnome said, and she did not like the way her full name sounded in his small mouth, "I cannot stop you. I lack the leverage."
Mira went.
The main drive shaft lay at the bottom of the eastern stair, behind a door she had never opened because the lock had been painted over and she had assumed, as one does, that painted-over things are best left alone. She had her pick set in her apron pocket. She had the pamphlet. She had the can of oil that smelled of old machine shops and the particular patience of her late father.
The lock resisted her for eleven minutes. She counted because counting was better than listening to the fog push against the upper windows of the mill, a sound like a hand testing a latch.
Inside, the shaft was enormous and black and wet. It ran the length of a long room, suspended from the ceiling on iron brackets, and it turned so slowly she had to watch the rust spots to see that it was turning at all. A thin skin of moisture coated it. The pamphlet said this was the thickened oil, three winters of it, slow as cold honey.
Mira set her lamp on a shelf. She uncapped the oil. The pamphlet said to begin at the coupling and work toward the flywheel, never the other way, never after the bell. She began.
The first stretch went well. She oiled in long careful strokes and the shaft, where her rag touched it, came up gleaming. The rust spots retreated. She could feel, through the rag, the metal remember that it was meant to move.
She was perhaps halfway along when the pamphlet told her to reach behind the third bracket and find the small auxiliary lever. She found it. It was a stub of brass with a notch in its head, the notch worn bright by other thumbs. The pamphlet said to pull it once, sharply, when the oil had reached the second set of bearings.
She pulled it.
The shaft stopped.
For a moment she thought she had broken something. Then she thought she had not. The shaft was not stopped. It had reversed. She could see it now, the rust spots moving the wrong way, the whole vast cylinder beginning to creep backward with the slow determination of a thing that had been told to go and was reconsidering.
"Aldric," she said, to no one. "Aldric, you did not tell me this would reverse."
But Aldric had not told her many things. Aldric had told her what she needed to hear and trusted her to survive the rest, and she was, at thirty-one, tired of surviving in particular ways.
Above her, in the town she could not see, the fog began to move.
She did not know this yet. She was watching the shaft, willing it forward, but it would not. It backed up. She tried the auxiliary lever again and again. Nothing. The pamphlet in her coat pocket began, she was sure, to develop a new water stain of its own, right over the word OIL.
Then the sound came down through the pipes.
A long exhalation. The town breathing out.
Mira climbed the stairs.
The mill door was open when she reached it. She had closed it. She had closed every door. The fog was at her ankles, then her knees, then her waist, then her shoulders. She pushed out into it. The fog poured past her, out of the square, down the cobbled streets, away from Millhaven in a slow gray tide that took the loose papers from the inn steps and the yarn from a child's abandoned ball and the patience of a town that had been sitting inside its own weather for three years.
She ran.
"Stop," she said, to the fog, to the shaft, to Aldric, to herself. "Stop. Stop."
The fog did not stop. The fog was already at the edge of town. She could see it, a slow gray shoulder, tipping over the ridge toward Wellow, toward Upper Wellow, toward Lower Wellow, which were three different villages and which would each receive, she realized with the cold clarity of a woman who had just made a very large mistake, a portion of the fog that had been Millhaven's alone.
"No," she said.
In the square, a shape sat on the edge of the fountain. Small. Damp. Smiling in a way that was either very old or very new. Mira knew the shape. Everyone in Millhaven knew the shape
The shape on the fountain had one eye. The other, where an eye should have been, was a neat round scar, slightly pinker than the rest of its face, which was the color of a fog-dampened apple. It sat with its feet dangling, its small boots leaving dark prints on the stone lip, and it regarded Mira with the patient attention of something that had been waiting for her to notice it for quite some time.
"You are the gnome," Mira said.
"I might be," said the gnome.
Its voice was a whisper wrapped in a breath, a sound like wind through tall grass, like the inside of a seashell held to an ear that had forgotten what the sea sounded like. It spoke the way fog moves, in long slow drifts with pauses in between that felt deliberate and important.
"Thistle," Mira said. "Your name is Thistle."
"Names are tricky things," Thistle said. "Especially the ones that belong to other people."
The fog was still moving. Mira could feel it at her back, that slow gray tide pouring out of the square, out of the town, away down the three roads that branched toward Wellow and the villages beyond. She wanted to turn and chase it. She wanted to grab it by its trailing edges and shove it back down the shaft where it belonged. Instead she stood in front of a small damp creature who sat on the fountain and smiled at her with the serenity of someone who had arranged all of this and was now admiring the arrangement.
"Did you do this?" she asked.
"Do what?"
"The fog. The shaft. The, "
"The seventy-three levers," Thistle supplied. "Yes."
Mira stared.
Thistle lifted one small hand and began counting on its fingers, lips moving soundlessly. When it reached ten it paused, switched hands, continued. At twenty it paused again. At thirty it closed both hands into fists and rocked back on the fountain's edge with the expression of someone who had arrived at a satisfactory conclusion.
"Sixty," it said. "No. Seventy-two. The third from the bottom does not count because it has been broken since before you were born. Or after. Time is slippery in the shaft. Seventy-three was the pamphlet's number, and the pamphlet was wrong, but the pamphlet was also, in its own way, quite right."
"I do not understand," Mira said.
"You do not need to," Thistle said. "Understanding is a luxury. You need to listen."
"Listen to what?"
But Mira heard it then. Under the quiet of the square, under the soft hiss of the fog moving past her ankles, under the small wet sounds of Thistle's boots shifting on the fountain stone, there was another sound. A voice. Faint and far away, or perhaps faint and very close, the way a memory can be both. It was coming from the shaft.
"Odo," Mira said. "That is Odo Vane's voice."
"Odo Vane is dead," Thistle said agreeably.
"Then why, "
"Why does the dead speak? Why does the fog move? Why does a clockmaker's apprentice have seventy-three levers to manage when most clockmakers manage seven?" Thistle tilted its head. One eye regarded her. "You have been in that shaft for three years, Mira Thornwick. You have been the lungs of this town. And you have done it alone, because Aldric Pfenning could not be found, and because the town did not think to look for him, and because looking for him would have required admitting that they had let him go."
"Aldric," Mira said.
The name felt strange in her mouth. She had not spoken it aloud in a long time. She had not allowed herself to think it in a longer time.
"He is here," Thistle said. "He has been here. He has been in the shaft with you, on the other side of the wall, working the same levers you worked, breathing the same fog you breathed. He came back, Mira. He came back before the fog did, and he has been working to undo what was done, and he is tired, and he is frightened, and he would very much like someone to find him."
Mira turned toward the mill.
The fog was still pouring out. She could not see the mill door from here. She could see only the gray, the slow gray, the patient gray.
"Aldric," she called.
Her voice went out into the fog and did not come back.
"Aldric Pfenning."
And from somewhere inside the mill, somewhere down in the dark where the seventy-three levers waited and the shaft breathed its slow breath, a voice answered. Thin. Hoarse. The voice of a man who had been alone for a long time and had nearly forgotten what it felt like to use his throat for anything other than counting.
"Mira," said the voice. "Is that you."
"I am here," she said. "I am here. Come out."
A pause. The sound of metal on stone. The sound of a man who had been sitting in the dark, gathering himself, preparing to stand.
"I cannot find the door," Aldric said. "I have been trying for three days. The fog took it."
Thistle hopped down from the fountain. Its small boots made no sound on the cobbles. It walked past Mira, into the fog, toward the mill, and after a moment Mira followed.
The fog closed behind them. It was not cold. It was not warm. It was the temperature of held breath, of paused time, of a town that had been waiting for someone to say the right thing in the right order to the right small creature at the right moment on the right fountain.
Thistle stopped at the mill door.
The door was open.
Inside, the shaft breathed. The levers gleamed, all seventy-three of them, though Mira could have sworn the third from the bottom had been broken, and yet here it was, whole, and polished, and waiting.
And at the base of the shaft, sitting on the stone floor with his back against the wall and his hands in his lap, was Aldric Pfenning.
He looked up. He looked older than he had any right to look. His hair was longer. His coat was the same coat he had been wearing when he left, though it had been mended in three places with thread that was not the original color. His eyes, in the dim light of the shaft, were the color of wet stone.
"Mira," he said again.
"Aldric," she said.
Thistle looked between them. It smiled its old-new smile. It lifted one small hand and, very gently, pushed the third lever from the bottom.
The fog stopped.
The pause lasted exactly as long as a heartbeat, and then the fog began, very slowly, to come back. It came in through the mill door. It came down the cobbled streets. It pooled in the square and curled around the fountain and settled, at last, into its old shape, the shape it had held for three years, the shape of a town that breathed its own weather and kept its own counsel and waited, with the patience of fog, for someone to notice it was there.
Mira sat down on the shaft floor beside Aldric Pfenning.
Neither of them spoke for a long time. The shaft breathed around them. The levers ticked in their places, one after another, the sound like a pulse like a clock like the town itself, finally, beginning again.
When at last she did speak, her voice was small, and wondering, and not at all the voice of a woman who had been the lungs of a town for three years.
"Is it really you," she asked.
"It is really me," he said.
"And you have been here. All this time."
"All this time," he said. "I came back. I tried to tell you. The fog took my words before I could say them."
Thistle, at the top of the shaft stairs, laughed its small breathy laugh, and the sound went down into the shaft and came back up again, and somewhere in the mill a clock that had been stopped for three years began, very softly, to tick.