"With animals, you mean?" said Fred, chagrined.

"No," Verne answered. "With intelligent animals."

"Mmm," Fred mused. "That's a little better, I guess."

"I thought we were cut off from the Archipelago," said Jack. "How are we to get to him?"

"He's not in the Archipelago," Verne said with a sly grin. "In fact, he's much closer than you realize."

Within a hour the tides were low enough that the companions were able to cross to the small island in the northeastern corner of the Nameless Isles, where Verne said the Watchmaker could most likely be found. "He's often here, working," the Frenchman explained as they waded through the shallow water. "He isn't confined, as Merlin was."

"Is he like the Cartographer, then?" John asked.

"In some ways yes, in others, no," Verne replied. "We don't know much about him, to be honest. We know he's old, very, very old, but doesn't look it. He's a friend of Samaranth but seldom speaks of him and how they met. And once, when I came to see him with no advance notice, I saw him-only it was not him. He appeared to be a twelve-foot-tall mantis. I blinked, and an instant later he was just a man again."

"Did you ask him about that?" asked Jack.

Verne laughed under his breath. "I did. He apologized for being dressed too formally and said he had not yet had time to change after another meeting."

"Intriguing," said John. "So he isn't human, then?"

"Oh, he's human," said Bert, "or at least, he started as one. Whatever else he became, who can say?"

The companions traversed the next hollow, where Verne signaled for them to stop. Up above them were three massive dogs standing guard at the crest of the hill.

One was the size of a normal, large dog. The next was the size of a small pony. And the third was the size of an ox. All three had massive round eyes the size of dinner plates-and those eyes were fixed intently on these possible trespassers.

"Ho, Fios," Verne said as he raised a hand in greeting.

"Well met, Master Verne," the smallest of the dogs replied. "Is your hunting good?"

"It is," Verne replied. "Ho, Luaths."

"Well met, Master Verne," the second dog said, sniffing. "One of your friends-he smells of cat."

John frowned. "Uh, sorry about that."

Verne looked slightly alarmed but continued to smile. "Ho, Tron," he said to the largest dog. "May we pass?"

"Well met, Master Verne," the dog replied, stepping aside to make an opening between himself and the other dogs. "You may pass."

The four companions walked between the huge animals and down the other side of the hill, where there was a small structure made of stone and marble. It resembled a crypt, or an elaborate barrow, and it had a broad door that opened onto steps that led to a shallow chamber.

"That was a bit chilling," Jack said as he and Bert removed four torches from a niche in the wall. "I suppose if you're being guarded by fellows like that you don't need fancy locks or a riddle in code."

"Exactly," Verne said as he lit the torches. "The dogs, whose names mean Knowledge, Swiftness, and Heaviness, incidentally, are good judges of character. They go by scent alone-anyone who doesn't pass is ripped to pieces."

"So the cat thing ...," John began.

"Oh, I'm sure it would have been nothing," said Verne as he stepped down into the darkness, "although for a moment there, I did think it was a shame we hadn't had Basil start a portrait for you yet."

Inside the chamber a great stone tablet was set into the earth and ringed about with smaller stones, all covered with runes.

Jack touched some of the stones, which were worn smooth with age. He looked questioningly at John, who shook his head. "They're beyond my skill," he said. "They may be some sort of proto-Aramaic, or Akkadian. The forms are vaguely familiar, but I can't suss out the structure."

"Not Akkadian," said Verne. "Think older."

"Cuneiform? Sanskrit?"

"Older," said Verne. "Poe thinks they may be prehuman."

"What can possibly be prehuman?" said Jack. "Except ..."

"Angelic," said Bert. "There's no way to know for sure, but that's our belief. We haven't dared ask the Watchmaker."

"For fear he won't tell you?" asked John.

"No," said Verne. "For fear he might."

Bert placed his watch into an indentation in one of the stones. Suddenly the great stone slab began to slide back into the hill, revealing a narrow set of steps that dropped away into the darkness.

Bert nodded in satisfaction as he pocketed the watch and lit up the torch he was carrying. "It's always a comfort to do that," he said, grinning. "It's like a ritual of acceptance, to ask for entry and be approved."

"I'm all for security," said Jack, "but really, after the dogs, this might be overkill."

"Oh, we only just put the dogs here seven years ago," said Bert as he stepped down onto the stone stairway. "Verne thought it was time to start considering some extra security, just in case."

"How long had he gone without the extra security?" John asked as he followed Bert.

Bert shrugged. "How old are the runes? Those were the first safeguards set up. I really can't tell you when."

John looked back at Jack, and they traded an expression of wonderment. The runes were deep, and carved in granite. To have been worn smooth by the wind and rain would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Their suspicion that the runes were Angelic in nature might not be so wild an idea after all.

Wordlessly they followed their mentor into the earth as the tablet slid closed above them.

The passageway was neither steep nor narrow, and the torches they carried provided more than enough light for the companions to clearly see the steps above and below. The descent to the Watchmaker's cavern did not take long-less than twenty minutes passed from the time they entered until they reached a place that was well-lit enough for them to extinguish their torches.

The enormous room looked to John as if someone had filtered a cave from one of Jacob Grimm's stories through a London clockmaker's shop, and then sprinkled in some Greek myths for good measure.

There were mirrors of all shapes and sizes spread throughout the space, mingled with crystal formations and stalagmites. Each one reflected not just the observers, but also some additional form-some were human; some, like the giant mantis Verne had mentioned, were not. They appeared as ghost images laid over the real reflection.

John found himself in front of a tall mirror that showed a rough-looking woman, dressed in skins and carrying a Bronze Age hammer. For a moment John thought she was real enough to touch, and he reached out with his hand.

"I wouldn't if I were you," Bert murmured, grabbing his hand, "unless you fancy living out your years in a form very different than you'd imagined."

Verne moved around the others and walked to the Watchmaker, who had been too absorbed in his work to notice he had company.

Predictably, he was sitting at a broad workbench amidst a scattering of tools, wires, cogs, and other sundry items that had no apparent purpose. Some of the objects were made of gleaming metal, while others were obviously stone. At the moment he seemed to be trying to coax a miniature sun into a porcelain clock.

The Watchmaker himself was shorter than the companions, but not noticeably older. He had a prominent nose that curved up and into his brow, and small, close-set eyes. His hair was black and slicked back over his head out of the way of his face, so as not to obscure his vision as he worked.

He was dressed simply in a tunic and breeches, and he wore a thick leather apron covered with pockets that were all laden with tools. On the companions' approach, he stood and greeted each of them, shaking their hands and repeating John's and Jack's names.

"I've met so many people over the centuries, you see," he said in explanation, "that I find repeating the names helps me to recall them. Of course, the fact that you are Caretakers who bear examples of my handiwork will help to narrow it down a bit," he added, winking conspiratorially.

On his prompting, both John and Jack pulled out their watches for him to examine. "Nice, very nice," the Watchmaker proclaimed on seeing Jack's, which was all silver, with a silver basrelief dragon on the cover. "Egyptian. Or maybe Chinese. I forget. I can never keep track of these young cultures and the things they do-but I know when they've done something worth incorporating into my own work."

He moved on to John's watch. "Ah, the classic," he murmured approvingly. "Silver case, silver chain, glazed ceramic disk with the Red Dragon on it." He turned the case over and noted the engraving: CAVEO PRINCIPIA.

The Watchmaker looked up at John appraisingly. "You're the Principal Caretaker, then?" He looked at Verne. "Well, Frenchman? Is he worthy?"

Verne nodded. "Eminently so."

"Good enough," said the Watchmaker as he handed the watch back to John. "Not that my opinion should matter, overmuch. You have a harder row to hoe than I."

"For a Watchmaker, you don't seem to have many actual, uh, watches hanging around," Jack said to their host. "No offense."

"Why would I want to surround myself with watches?" said the old man matter-of-factly. "I spend a great deal of time making them, but they aren't an all-encompassing obsession."

"How many have you made?" asked John.

"Several hundred for the Caretakers, of course," the Watchmaker replied, "and perhaps fewer for others."

"You make watches for people other than Caretakers?" John replied before Verne could caution him not to ask. "Isn't that dangerous?"

The Watchmaker fixed John with a gaze that was so intense it was almost a physical blow, and his smile belied the gravity of his words. "I am not the judge of all the Earth," he said, unblinking, "nor do I wish to be."

"These are very interesting mirrors," Jack said, trying to steer the conversation in a less tense direction. He was peering at an oblong one that reflected some sort of multi-tentacled creature. "They don't actually reflect very well."

"They reflect well enough for me," said the Watchmaker, "as they should, since they are my mirrors. What good would my mirrors do to me if they reflected someone else better than I?"

"I guess you have a point," Jack admitted. "Is that a winged centaur?" He pointed to a large rectangular mirror above a worktable.

"It is," replied the Watchmaker, "when that's what I want to be."

John threw a surreptitious glance at Jack, who widened his eyes in response. Whatever this Watchmaker was, he was not a kind of creature they had met before. It was no wonder he was friends with Samaranth-they were similar in both mystery and temperament.

"You all have watches," said the Watchmaker, "so I expect you have come for some other reason."

"We've come," Verne began, "because they don't seem to be working properly. In fact, one of the Messengers has died because he could not return to us in, ah, time."

"Not working?" the Watchmaker exclaimed. "Improbable. Let me take a look."

Verne handed over his watch, and the Maker looked at it for barely a moment before he handed it back. "The watch is fine," he proclaimed. "Something else must be broken."

"History," said Bert. "History has come undone."

"History?" the Watchmaker repeated. "History is a self-defining term. By necessity, it is an accounting of the past-and that past is not real, not solid. At least, not as much as we'd like to believe.

"The present is real. The future is malleable. And the past is both, because although all stories are true, some of them never happened.

"Events and accountings may become undisputed components of history not merely because of the truth they hold, but because of their perpetuity: The stories we believe are the stories we know."

"He talks just like Merlin used to," Jack said to John. "I never thought I'd miss it so."

"Merlin?" the Watchmaker asked. "I know that name, don't I?"

"The Cartographer of Lost Places," said Verne.

"Oh, yes," said the Watchmaker. "I remember him now. The young stallion with fire in his belly."

"Young?" Jack exclaimed. "Merlin is one of the oldest people I ever met."

"Youth is a relative term," the Watchmaker replied. "I prefer to think of it as a state of mind."

"I know a lot of youthful students who might argue that point," said Jack.

"I've no doubt you do," the Watchmaker replied. "That's what gives my point of view credibility. Everyone argues against it at first, but eventually they all come around. So," he said to Verne, "how is young Merlin?"

"Gone," Verne said simply. "Freed from Solitude, just before the Keep of Time fell."

"Ah," the Watchmaker said, leaning back in his chair. "I suspected that might be why you've come. Sit, and tell me what's been occurring."

As quickly as they were able, the four Caretakers related all the events that had happened, including the mystery of the discontinuity.

"It's not a mystery," the Watchmaker said when they had finished. "Without the Keep of Time, there is nothing to connect Chronos and Kairos, and Kairos itself is loosed.

"Chronos time is merely a record of the passage of objects through physical space," he explained, "but Kairos time is what gives those events meaning. This is why your watches cannot find any zero points. The meaning has been lost. The connection is gone."

"Is that why there were doors in the keep?" asked Jack. "To connect to zero points in time?"

"The doors merely acted as focal points for the energies within the keep," the Watchmaker said. "Once attuned to a specific time, they would continue to work, as you noted with the false tower the Barbarian-Burton-built for the Shadow King."

"And the door that Hugo Dyson stepped through in Oxford," added John. "That makes sense to me."

The Watchmaker nodded approvingly. "The Barbarian's design was faulty to begin with-the doors opened to the same energies, and had you not dispatched it, it would have no doubt eventually fallen on its own accord. But it was in his original premise that he made his most grievous error. The doors were not the aspect of the keep that made it function-that was something integral to the keep itself. Something about the construction design, and the stones used, and perhaps even the runes carved into the stones. The doors focused the energies to allow passage, but the Keep of Time served a larger function: It anchored Chronos and Kairos. And now that the anchor has been lost, time is flowing freely in the Archipelago, and there is no way to harness it again."

"How can we repair it?" John asked. "We've gone back in time before and managed to not do so badly. We believe we can do so again-we just don't know where to start, or how to get there without the watches."

"So, you need the watches to fix time, but you cannot use the watches until you already have."

"A paradox?" asked Jack.

"A pickle," said the Watchmaker.

"I wish we were able to consult Samaranth on this," John said miserably. "I think he'd have an idea or three as to what to do."

"I spoke with him before the fall of the keep," the Watchmaker said. "He anticipated that this might happen-but he is also reluctant to participate in the matter."