The Watchtower

long story over dinner.”
    *   *   *
    Madame La Pieuvre took me to the top room of the château’s octagonal tower, which was lit by cleverly designed lanterns and fitted out with a telescope and a number of other astronomical devices I wouldn’t have thought had yet been invented.
    “I have some observations to make later,” she said, waving me toward a silk-upholstered chair. “I’ll ring for our supper to be brought here.”
    Supper was a delicious fish stew seasoned with Provençal herbs. “Bouillabaisse, my favorite!” I exclaimed.
    “ Bouillabaisse? What a lovely word for it. I’ll have to remember that.”
    When I’d slaked the worst of my hunger and drunk two glasses of a delicious sparkling white wine that she was amused to hear me call champagne, I told Madame La Pieuvre my story. I told her all of it, from my first glimpse of the silver box in New York City, about which she had heard rumors, to our trip to the Val sans Retour. I thought she’d stop me there, but she continued to listen with the same grave attention, her gray eyes as placid as a morning fog rolling over the sea, to my entire marvelous tale. The only sign she made that this part of the story had affected her was that she poured us each a glass of green liqueur, which she told me the local Carthusian monks had made. “They call it Chartreuse,” she told me. “I love it for its color.”
    I sipped the surprisingly potent liqueur and continued with my story. When I finished, she asked me one question.
    “May I see that timepiece you crafted?”
    I slipped its chain over my head and handed it to her, surprised that this was the detail that most interested her. She examined the front of the watch, opened it, watched its gears moving, then turned it over. Her eyes widened when she saw the design of the Watchtower on the back.
    “This wasn’t on the original watch you saw,” she said.
    “No, I added it.”
    “Do you know why?”
    I shook my head. “It just seemed to belong there.”
    She closed the watch and handed it back to me. “I imagine Cosimo Ruggieri strived for years to find the correct symbols to make his time machine work, but only a descendant of the Watchtower would know what symbol to add.” She rose to her feet and crossed to the north window, where her telescope was set up. Her arms, released from her train, plucked instruments from shelves as she went.
    “Cosimo has been endeavoring to trick time all his life,” she said, adjusting the telescope. “Here, come take a look.”
    I put my eye to the telescope. It was not trained on the heavens, but on the low skyline of Paris to the north. The view of dark, huddled buildings brought home to me the reality that I was not in my time. Paris had not yet become the City of Light. But by the glow of the nearly full moon I could make out the twin, square towers of Notre Dame, the three towers of Saint-Germain, the Tour Saint-Jacques, and the slim spire of Sainte-Chapelle. Brightest of all, though, northwest of Notre Dame, was a glowing orb. As I watched, a thread of lightning descended from the sky and struck the orb, illuminating a skeletal framework of interconnecting circles and ellipses. It looked like one of the astronomical contraptions I’d spied in the Musée des Arts et Métiers.
    “What is that?” I asked, my eye still glued to the telescope.
    “Cosimo Ruggieri’s tower,” Madame La Pieuvre replied. “It’s been drawing lightning for the last seven nights. I’ve been watching it, waiting for Ruggieri to return from his abbey in Brittany where my Bretagne friends have been keeping an eye on him, wondering what he was bringing with him that required so much power. Last night I received word that he and Dee had awoken la bête .”
    “You mean Marduk?” I asked, glancing away from the telescope. Madame La Pieuvre’s face, lit by flickering lantern light, was round and pale.
    “Yes, Marduk . The name is a perversion of the name he took many centuries ago. He called himself Duc du Mar—Duke of the Sea. I am ashamed to say that he was originally one of the fées de la mer. He arrived here in Paris on the boats that brought us after the fall of Ys. The aristocracy of Ys was a proud group. They enjoyed the way that humans worshipped them. Some genuinely fell in love with humans…” She looked away from me, her face wistful. I recalled that Monsieur Lutin had told me that more than any of the other fairies, the sea fairies had thrived off