Twelve-year-old Carmen has a secret: she can talk to her cat Grim. But the powerful Brotherhood has banned pets, and the penalty is death.
Ward is the most wanted boy in the world. The only thing standing between him and the hangman's noose is maste...
Now Carmen had to fight her impatience, because once the chair got going it was difficult to stop – there were some steep hills, and it took all their strength to keep the chair from hurtling out of control down them. Her body ached. Her muscles burned. How long since they had passed Parliament? Ten minutes? Fifteen? There was no way of knowing.
They passed the market and Flag Wood, and reached Ironfield, where they turned left for the long descent to the riverside. Sam Sung's came into sight, dirty and white like a long-buried bone. Black ship masts stood like skellingtons, interspersed with the monolithic shapes of funnels belching smoke that hung in a pall over the docks. The air was stifling. The clouds were low and dark and there was no wind. Thunder boomed away over the Northern wilds.
Carmen remembered fishing with her pere down at the Yar on a day like this, coming home soaked to the skin and laughing, with two fish in a bucket, her pere looking like a naughty boy as her mere scolded him; then her mere drying her hair with a fluffy towel and giving her a bowl of hot chicken soup, and the three of them talking by the fire as the night came on and the wind howled outside and the rain drummed on the roof. She wanted them back. Everything that had happened since they had been taken away yesterday seemed unreal, like a dream she might wake from at any moment.
At the sound of thunder Grandmere Anna had quieted.
"Grandmere?" Carmen said, but the thunder boomed again, drowning out her voice. The wind rose suddenly, roiling up from the river, thick with charged particles. There was a sound carried on the wind, up from the riverside, a distant piping torn into fragments on the whirling breeze.
Suddenly Grandmere looked up at Carmen. The old woman's eyes were clear. She looked about herself as if getting her bearings.
Slops turned to her with bright eyes. "Carmen! I can hear..."
As if called, Leif poked his head out of Slops's breast pocket and looked around, his eyes bright and his whiskers twitching. Carmen had forgotten all about the gillywig. Grim had stopped on the street and was staring down the road, his tail curling sinously. A flock of birds wheeled about in a mass over Sam Sung's and coasted down towards the river.
Carmen didn't ask Slops what he had heard. She had a crazy notion that if by voicing it she might break the spell. Instead, she pushed harder at the chair.
They had picked up pace. The descent here was steady, the incline steep enough to keep the chair rolling, but not so steep that it accelerated out of control. We're going to make it, she thought.
As if hearing her thought, Grandmere Anna looked up at her again. "Carmen?"
Then Carmen saw something that made her heart lurch in her chest.
For as long as anyone could remember the fish market had stood at the corner of Flynn and Spanner streets. Nobody knew what it had been before, and many had wondered at the tower attached to it. Market Tower it was called, time out of mind, and the tempus set in the tower was renowned. It was considered the master timepiece for the city; all others were calibrated against it. You're to be home at five by the Tower, meres would warn their children, and when officials forgot to wind their pocket watches they were known to take a chaise across the city from Parliament just to reset them to the great tempus.
What had stopped Carmen's heart was the time on the Tower.
It showed two minutes past three.
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Looks like Carmen's parents are done for then.
Oh well, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
