The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(72)

Though it did explain who’d run a gas line into her cottage.

“There’s an entire city down there. I would show you but the dwarfs are touchy about their secrets. They’re terribly polite, but they’d find some reason not to let you in.”

“How come they let you in?” Janet said.

“I’ve paid my dues. Plus I did them a few favors.”

“Like what?”

“Like saving Fillory.”

There was a funny kind of competitiveness in the room, a rivalry: the first generation of Fillorian royalty versus the second. Jane Chatwin didn’t seem especially fazed by Janet’s bluntness. On the evidence it was hard to imagine Jane Chatwin being fazed by anything.

“We saved Fillory,” Janet said.

“Twice,” Eliot said.

“But who’s counting.”

“It’s a start,” Jane said.

When they’d finished their tea she showed them into the next room, which had a pleasant smell of very pure mineral oil and raw-cut metal. The walls were studded with hooks, and on each hook hung a pocket watch. There were brass watches, steel watches, silver and gold and platinum watches. They had white faces with black numbers and black faces with white numbers and clear crystal faces that showed the movements behind them. Some just told the time, some were crowded with tiny subdials that displayed the temperature and the season and the positions of celestial bodies. Some of them were as fat as softballs; some of them were the size of cuff links.

“Did you really make all these?” Janet said. “They’re awesome.”

You could tell she really thought they were. Eliot also got the impression Janet wanted one but wasn’t quite up to asking.

“Most of them,” Jane Chatwin said. “It keeps me out of trouble.”

“Oh my God,” Janet said. “You’re trying to rebuild the watch, aren’t you? The time-travel one! Aren’t you? You’re going to reverse-engineer it or whatever!”

Jane shook her head solemnly.

“Oh. Well, I wish you would.”

“If they don’t control time, what do they do?” Eliot asked.

“They tell time,” Jane said. “That’s enough.”

When the tour was over they went back outside and admired the garden again. Behind it, rusted and half drowned in grass, were the broken remains of what Eliot took to be the Watcherwoman’s famous ormolu clock-carriage, run down at last. He wanted to ask about it, but he sensed that from Jane’s point of view the visit was coming to an end, and he wasn’t leaving without what they came for.

“What are the dwarfs doing all the way out here anyway?” Janet asked. “Why build a bunch of tunnels in the middle of nowhere? Or under the middle of nowhere?”

“I’ll show you.” Jane took a spade that was leaning against the house and stuck it into the ground with a coarse chuff. When she turned over the shovelful there were glints of something in it. “Didn’t you ever wonder why it was called the Clock Barrens?”

“I guess I did.”

Jane bent down with a groan and picked a couple of the shiny things out of the soil, three or four of them, and held them out. In the palm of her hand lay two tiny, perfect gears, a brass wheel as thin as paper, and a delicate coiled mainspring.

“Clockwork,” she said. “It’s naturally occurring here. You should see the big stuff they mine, deep down. You could make Big Ben out of it. I’m not entirely sure that they didn’t.”

She flung them away into the grass. Eliot had to suppress an urge to go after them. This kind of thing, totally inexplicable random strangeness like this, made him want to save Fillory more than ever.

“Plus they like the dwarfiness of the trees,” she added.

“Jane,” Eliot said, “we came here for a reason. Ember says that Fillory is dying. The end of the world is coming.”

She nodded but didn’t answer at first. The setting sun caught the bezel of a clock-tree and flashed off it, orange light on silver.

“I suspected something like that,” she said. “Did you notice the clocks? They don’t agree anymore. They used to keep perfect time, but now look at them. Their hands are going everywhere. It’s like they’re panicking. Little idiots.”

She frowned at the fairy ring of clock-trees like they were disobedient children. He supposed they were all the children she had, or would have.

“What do you think it means?”

“Hard to say.” Lost in thought, for a moment she looked young and beautiful and intensely curious, the way she must have looked to Quentin when she first recruited him back in Brooklyn, dressed as a paramedic, all those years ago. “You know, these were the last clock-trees I ever made. I always thought I’d think of a better name for them.

“Their roots go very deep into Fillory. Not all the way through to the Far Side, I don’t think they’ve made it that far, but more than halfway. They’re like a nervous system, very quick to register systemic change. They’re useful that way.

“But they shouldn’t be able to disagree with each other. It shouldn’t be possible. They’re all one big tree below the surface—they reach out for each other and grow together at the roots. The dwarfs hack through them sometimes, but they grow right back. Except that this time they haven’t. Deep underground, something must be tearing them apart. Tearing Fillory apart.”