The Remembered Man

Jasper went up into Ashenhold in the last hour of the night, carrying the echo of the warden's voice in his steel chest like a coal, and knocked on doors. The town was awake. All of it. The whole town stood in the first light of its first real morning in two centuries, holding its returned years the way people hold bundles after a fire — checking them, weeping over some, laughing over others, gathering in the square where the clocks had all begun to tick forward at once, the sound of it like rain after drought. And into that noise came the half-boy, half-clockwork figure, and asked his question, door to door, over and over, and heard the answer no, and no, and no — — because memory does not work the way movies of memory work. The harvest had taken the hours; the founder's engine had taken the *records*; two hundred and forty years of Ashenhold's town-meetings and ledgers had simply never written down a boy who was never supposed to have existed. The oldest archive in the town had been in the vaults under the great clock, and the great clock's keeper was Veyne, and Veyne had kept his secrets. Jasper stood in the square at dawn, hoarse, hollow, holding the echo, and looked across the remembering town at the one thing that had been remembered by no one — and it was the eldest woman of the town, out on her porch because at ninety-six she had wanted to relive one last hour of her returned marriage in the morning air, who stopped him as he turned back for the stairs. "Say the question again, tin lad." "Does anyone remember the apprentice?" Jasper said. "The founder's apprentice. The one who kept the wound." She sat very still. And Ashenhold, which had spent the whole night remembering everything, watched its oldest citizen remember the one thing the town had truly lost — not an hour, not a harvest, but a *name*, kept alive by accident in the only vault Veyne had never thought to raid: a ninety-six-year-old woman's memory of her own grandmother's bedtime story. "He came before the founding," she said slowly. "My grandmother's grandmother told it. There was a clever boy, clever with his hands, too clever to be let alone, and he was kind, and he hummed, and the founder was jealous of him because the fracture sang when the boy was near it. And when the founder built the clock, the boy went in. The story said *in*, mind — we children thought it meant he worked there. The clockmaker's apprentice, keeping the town's time." Her eyes, filmy with ninety-six years, found the tower. "It never once meant *worked.*" "Do you know his name?" Jasper asked, barely a whisper in the works. "Tobias," said the oldest woman in Ashenhold. "The boy in the story was called Tobias, and he could fix anything, and he never came home, and my grandmother's grandmother said —" and here her voice did what voices do when they carry two hundred and forty years — "she said *the town will owe him till the last clock stops.*" Jasper ran. Down through the tower stairs, through the emptied mechanism, to the cavern under the wound, with the name in his steel heart where the humming had always lived — and Emilia took it from his hands and set it into the gap like the last gear of the machine. "Tobias," she said, to the thing in the clock, out loud, in the hearing of the wound and the gears and the boy. "Clever with his hands. Kind. He hummed. He was never asked, and he stayed anyway, for two hundred and forty years, because the town would tear without him. His name is Tobias. It was always Tobias. And the town remembers him." The warden went still. And the fracture — the wound in the world where past and future touched, held for two centuries by an unasked boy — pulsed once, like a heart hearing its own name. "Now," said Tobias, in a voice worn thin as a wafer and light as a boy's, "now I can let go. Someone has to hold the gap from the other side while I come out. Clockmaker. Ask me." Emilia asked. She asked the way the founder never had, with the town's whole returned history at her back and the key in her blistered hand and Jasper humming the river-song that had lived in his heart all along: "Tobias, apprentice, keeper, warden of Ashenhold. Will you come out of the clock?" And the gears, all of them, every one, in every tower and every parlor and every pocket of that remembering town, struck the hour at once — not midnight, not any hour, but *his* hour, the one that had been taken first — and the wound in the world began, after two hundred and forty years, to close.