Thief of Time

LeJean and back. “I only take orderth from Marthter Jeremy, thank you,” he said.
    “The world will end if you start that clock!” said Lady LeJean.
    “What a foolish idea,” said Mr. White. “We laugh at it.”
    “Hahaha,” said the other Auditors obediently.
    “I don’t need medicine!” Jeremy shouted, pushing Dr. Hopkins out of the way. “And I don’t need people to tell me what to do. Shut up!”
    In the silence, thunder grumbled in the clouds.
    “Thank you,” said Jeremy more calmly. “Now, I hope I am a rational man, and I will approach this rationally. A clock is a measuring device. I have built the perfect clock, my lady. I mean ladies. And gentlemen. It will revolutionize timekeeping.”
    He reached up and moved the hands of the clock to almost one o’clock. Then he reached down, gripped the pendulum, and set it swinging.
    The world continued to exist.
    “You see? The universe doesn’t stop even for my clock,” Jeremy went on. He folded his hands, and sat down. “Watch,” he said calmly.
    The clock ticked gently. Then something rattled in the machinery around it, and the big green tubes of acid began to sizzle.
    “Well, nothing seems to have happened,” said Dr. Hopkins. “That’s a blessing.”
    Sparks crackled around the lightning rod positioned above the clock.
    “This is just making a path for the lightning,” said Jeremy happily. “We sent a little lightning up, and a lot more comes back—”
    Things were moving inside the clock. There was a sound best represented as fizzle, and greenish-blue light filled the case.
    “Ah, the cascade has initialized,” said Jeremy. “As a little exercise, the, ah, more traditional pendulum clock has been slaved to the Big Clock, you’ll see, so that every second it will be readjusted to the correct time.” He smiled, and one cheek twitched. “Some day all clocks will be like this,” he said, and added, “while I normally hate such an imprecise term as ‘any second now,’ nevertheless, I—”
    Tick
    There was a fight going on in the square. In the strange colors involved in the time-slicing state known as Zimmerman’s Valley, it was picked out in shades of light blue.
    By the look of it, a couple of watchmen were trying to take on a gang. One man was airborne, and hung there without support. Another had fired a crossbow directly at one of the watchmen; the arrow was nailed unmoving in the air.
    Lobsang examined it curiously.
    “You’re going to touch it, aren’t you,” said a voice behind Lobsang. “You’re just going to reach out and touch it, despite everything I’ve told you. Pay attention to the damn sky!”
    Lu-Tze was smoking nervously. When it got a few inches away from his body, the smoke went rigid in the air.
    “Are you sure you can’t feel where it is?” he snapped.
    “It’s all around us, Sweeper. We’re so close, it…it’s like trying to see the woods when you’re standing under the trees!”
    “Well, this is the Street of Cunning Artificers and that’s the Guild of Clockmakers over there,” said Lu-Tze. “I don’t dare go inside if it’s this close, not until we’re certain.”
    “Could it be the wizards at the University?”
    “Wizards aren’t mad enough to try it!”
    “You’re going to try and race the lightning?”
    “It’s doable, if we start from here in the valley. Lightning ain’t as quick as people think.”
    “Are we waiting to see a little pointy bit of lightning coming out of a cloud?”
    “Hah! Kids today, where do they get their education? The first stroke is from the ground to the air, lad. That makes a nice hole in the air for the main lightning to come down. Look for the glow. We’ve got to be giving the road plenty of sandal by the time it reaches the clouds. You holding up okay?”
    “I could go on like this all day,” said Lobsang.
    “Don’t try it.” Lu-Tze scanned the sky again. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it’s just a storm. Sooner or later you get—”
    He stopped. One look at Lobsang’s face was enough.
    “O-kay,” said the sweeper slowly. “Just give me a direction. Just point if you can’t speak.”
    Lobsang dropped to his knees, hands rising to his head.
    “I don’t know…don’t know…”
    Silvery light rose over the city, a few streets away. Lu-Tze grabbed the boy’s elbow.
    “Come on, lad. On your feet. Faster than lightning, eh? Okay?”
    “Yeah…yeah, okay…”
    “You can do it, right?”
    Lobsang blinked. He could see the