Chapter 2 Baz
IT WAS IRONIC, BAZ THOUGHT, that time should lose all meaning here, in the very place where it was spun.
He was surrounded by more clocks than he’d ever seen in his life, time-measuring instruments of all sorts, shapes, and sizes, and yet it felt to Baz like time stood frozen.
Days and years might have passed without him knowing, were it not for the incessant ticking of clocks, a constant hum that followed him even in sleep.
But they indicated the passing of time out there—in the four realms of the living where time flowed differently for each according to careful sets of rules.
In here, though, time was an endless loop.
Here was the workshop of a god Baz had magically stumbled upon.
Maybe he should have been used to it by now, being dragged unsuspectedly through strange doorways.
He’d traveled back in time to an Aldryn College of the past, had spent a lifetime obsessing over a book about a scholar who went to other worlds through a portal on a page, and still it had come as a shock to fall into one such portal.
To find himself here, at the center of all worlds, in the presence of divinity.
Assisting the god of balance was meticulous work, tedious and time-consuming—or so Baz assumed; he knew time passed in here only by the hunger that seized him and the sleep he would fall prey to.
He woke, filled his belly with whatever the god conjured out of thin air for him—the endless supply of coffee and tea was nothing to complain about—then got to work.
Filled his belly again. Slept again. And again, the loop went on.
There was always something for him to do, whether it was dusting astrolabes or marking the pace of pendulums of different clocks for comparison.
Tasks that felt useless to Baz, though they seemed like the most crucial of things to the frazzled god of balance.
(If he had a name, he would not divulge it to Baz, who thought of him simply as the god and referred to him politely as sir, like he would any other professor.)
The real work revolved around the giant loom in the center of the god’s workshop, which spun threads not only of time, Baz learned, but of fate—working past, present, and future into a great big tapestry that was the universe itself.
“I’m here to ensure all things happen as they should,” the god had told Baz upon his arrival.
There’d been an air of self-importance to his demeanor, a note of gravity to his voice that Baz would come to be familiar with.
“Otherwise,” the god had continued in this dramatic way of his, “the tapestry of fate would be ripped to shreds, the worlds forever skewed off-balance. Thrown into chaos.”
Which was, understandably, the last thing a god who served balance wanted.
“But sir,” Baz had asked, running a nervous hand along the nape of his neck, “why am I here?”
He’d wondered if his tinkering with time—all the tiny little threads he’d pulled throughout his life, all the bigger ones he’d more recently dared to mess with, like mending the Hourglass when he ventured into the past—had done something to anger the god and landed him here to face the consequences.
“Why, you’re here to help me, of course,” the god had replied with a gruff chuckle and a clap on Baz’s back. “Time runs through your veins, and I’m here to show you how to use it to its full potential.”
So the god showed Baz how the loom worked.
He taught him how to use the warping board to measure and organize individual threads for weaving; how to work out small snags in the loom; how to properly gather the woven tapestry that piled onto the floor, shaking the fabric out flat as if he were making up his bed and watching it billow up and out into the stars beyond the workshop, where it disappeared into the dark.
“Where does it go?” Baz had asked, mesmerized.
“Into the universe,” the god had replied, “and back again.” At this, he’d pointed to the warping board where individual threads waited to be weaved. “Past, present, and future are always being woven and unwoven and on and on. Time is a never-ending thing, you see.”
Time hurt Baz’s brain and only added to the misery he felt over not knowing how those he loved were faring.
Images of that last moment with Kai haunted him often, how the Hourglass had barred Baz from following Kai through the door.
He needed to know what awaited Kai and Luce and Clover, if the vision Luce and Clover had both seen about the worlds being reduced to ash—by a Tidecaller they had believed was Emory but was in fact Clover himself—would prove true. If this horrid fate could be changed.
But no matter how much Baz begged for answers, the god of balance would not tell him their fates, always keeping his replies short and vague and infuriating. “Mortals are better off not knowing the ins and outs of fate’s design.”
The god’s responses only made Baz more desperate for the truth. And if the god would not share with him Kai’s fate, then Baz would find out on his own.
So he set about studying, eager to excel at every lesson and task the god threw his way.
Baz learned how to use his magic to manipulate the threads of time in ways he never had before, like unspooling them forward so that he might view an object’s future.
The principle was the same as pulling them back, but it was harder to do in practice.
“The past is easier to make sense of,” the god explained, “because it has already happened and cannot be changed.” When Baz argued that he and Kai had ended up in the past, and surely that meant they had changed it, the god shook his head.
“You were always meant to travel to the past; and so the past always involved you. There has never been a version in which you did not find yourself there by some means. Fate’s design can never be broken. ”
“So then isn’t the future also set in stone, if fate is already written?” Baz asked.
“Well, yes,” the god faltered, fiddling with the buttons of his waistcoat—a very loud floral print that he’d paired with a plaid jacket and brown tweed pants, a mismatched ensemble that should have been an eyesore but somehow worked for him.
“But there can be variables in the road leading up to that fate,” he continued, “which is why the threads multiply and unravel in ways your mortal mind could not keep up with. You would have to follow each thread separately to see the several different ways in which a thing might happen, but it will always lead to the same outcome.”
Baz slumped in defeat. “Then what am I doing here? If nothing at all can be changed, what’s the point of doing any of this?”
“The point,” the god said, “is for you to learn. You have yet a part to play in your world. What knowledge you acquire here will serve you when you go back.”
Baz asked the more pertinent question: “Back when?”
He had come here from the past—Aldryn College as it was in its two hundredth year of existence.
But there was nothing left for him there.
After being separated from Kai and the others who had gone through the door, Baz had intended to find a time rift that might bring him back to present-day Aldryn.
Instead he had inadvertently found himself here, at the center of the universe, in the presence of a god who would not give him a straight answer.
“Back to your own time, of course,” the god said as if it were obvious.
He looked at the silver pocket watch he carried—one of four pocket watches attached to his vest, each one representing one of the four worlds, though if they told time or something else, Baz did not know.
“Things there are getting worse,” the god continued conversationally, as if he were discussing something as trivial as the weather. “Your arrival will be due soon.”
“And what exactly am I meant to do there?”
“It would not be wise of me to say. Your part will play out the way it is meant to. You’ll know what it is when it comes to you.”
Frustration sang through Baz’s veins. It wasn’t that he did not want to return to present-day Aldryn and help however he could—especially if things were getting worse.
But he couldn’t help this sinking feeling in his gut, this unshakeable idea that, if he left this place and went back to the present, he would lose Kai for good.
Kai, whom he had last seen in the past. Kai, whose fate remained unknown.
It was clear to him that what Clover had set out to do—wake the Tides and the Shadow, save their worlds from being plunged into darkness—had not happened.
Would not happen. Clover would bring them to ruin as his vision foretold.
Baz himself had seen this in Thames’s memory, a nightmare of Clover’s where he and Emory faced off against each other, two Tidecallers at the end of the world, one wretchedly evil, the other a source of light.
But if Clover was still alive in the present—having found a way to make himself immortal, perhaps—what would become of Kai and Luce? Surely they would not exist in Baz’s time given that they’d left with Clover two hundred years ago.
If Baz left the past behind, he would never see Kai again.
It was not unusual for the god of balance to step away from the loom and become so engrossed with the workings of one instrument or another that he seemed to forget about Baz entirely.
Today what held his attention was a large piece of canvas he was hunched over, sketching like a man possessed.
There were sketches scattered everywhere in the god’s workshop, plans and designs for fancy clocks and whimsical gadgets and instruments of all kinds.
Baz had never seen him quite so invested as he was now.
With his thick black hair disheveled, his peculiar goggles covering his eyes, he looked like a mad scientist.