The shadow cast by the Citadel was so deep that they approached in near darkness. It rose against the blue sky in a dirty, alabaster rush. The street opened wide and the low buildings fell away like a funnel into the wide stairs that led to the doors. Dagger called a halt a dozen feet from the first step and gestured to Pitch.

"Pitch, dose us all. I want us clear, sharp and fast. The apothecary here yield anything that can make that happen?"

"They had a few interesting compounds," Pitch said as he drizzled powders from pouches into a thin glass vial. He corked it and shook it hard until the liquid glowed an irridescent, pale blue. He uncorked it and one by one held it beneath the nostrils of the rest of the Armory. Each of them took several strong, snorting inhales. The air brightened, and the sun lost its heavy glare. The shadow of the tower lightened. Dagger shivered appreciatively.

"Oh, yes," she said.

There were six flights of stairs, and six landings leading to the Citadel's massive iron doors. On each landing was a pair of guards. The closest were hulking figures draped in sheets of steel and leather. Each held a halbard taller than they were, the edges of the axe and spear blades glinted in the Armory's enhanced vision.

"The first two are mine," Dagger said.

"Aye, captain," Powder said, checking and re-checking the brace of loaded pistols strapped around her torso.

"Dagger, wait," Pitch said squinting past the first two guards, but Dagger ignored him. They had no choice but to form up behind her. As they neared the first landing, the tower swallowed the sky, becoming a frozen, stone wave poised to crash over them. Dagger stepped onto the landing and the two sentinels turned toward her with the creak and screech of leather and steel. Each was half again as tall as Dagger, and twice as broad.

She hefted her hammer and waited to see which of the two steel-clad hulks would swing first. In her leathers she'd be faster. She eyed their glinting shoulders. Well, she thought, she had told Saber to wait until they were sent to kill giants.

Something sailed over her head and shattered against the first of the two guards. The hulk's armor began to smoke as the acids mixed and hit air, eating through the metal and leather. If there was a living thing beneath the steel, it did not scream. It fell with a crash, thrashing as steel was planed away to whatever lay beneath. The other guardian watched, perhaps afraid of touching the corrosive chemicals, or perhaps with only detached curiosity. It turned to face Dagger and hefted its halbard to swing when a gunshot cracked and a hole punched through its chest plate. There was a moment of delay. The guardian lurched as if it had swallowed something the wrong way. Then it fell.

Dagger spun to face her crew, her expression livid.

"What did I say?" She grated.

"What's this single combat shit?" Pitch asked as he stepped diretly to her. "Since when do we solve problems like that?"

"I solve problems like that all the time," Saber said in a mild voice.

"Saber," Pitch said, "you fight idiots on fields and in alleys who assume you carry that many swords because you're overcompensating."

"Well, no. It's because variety is the spi..."

"I know, Saber," Pitch interrupted, "I wake up before you in every inn we stay in. I see them leave."

"Oh. Do they look satisfied?"

"Anyway," Pitch continued, "since when do we fight fair, boss?

"I lead, Pitch. Which means I take the first risk," Dagger said in a low, dangerous tone.

"Or maybe I just put too much fire crystal in the mix," Pitch shouted.

Dagger stopped. Her anger momentarily fading. "Did you?"

"I'm yelling at you aren't I?!"

Dagger clenched her teeth. "Goddammit, Pitch."

"What? I figured we'd need a little more aggression since we were going to face the tower of fucking doom, or whatever it is!"

"You going to stop yelling?"

"Maybe," Pitch said, mastering his tone with some effort. "Anyway, there's something odd here. Powder?"

Powder, who was reloading her rifle, handed her telescope to Dagger. Dagger put it to her eye and looked ahead to the new few landings. At the next were a pair of lithe swordsmen, the one after had a pair of thickset, shirtless fighters, their fists wrapped in chains. Beyond them were two men behind a barricade with a series of bottles and jars balanced across the top. And far beyond then, one either side of the door to the Citadel, were a pair sharpshooters on elevated perches in the stone. Dagger could see them training their rifles toward the Armory.

"What the fuck?" Dagger muttered, riding the waves of chemical rage in her chest.

"It seems we're expected," Pitch said.

"Any ideas?" Dagger asked.

"In a larger sense?" Pitch asked. "or just what to do about this?"

"What do you think?"

"I have an idea," Powder said, took aim and fired. One of the jars on the barricade shattered and burst into flames, taking the other bottles with them in a massive explosion that swallowed guards and barricade both.

"How's that?" Powder asked with a smirk.

"What about the gunners?"

"We're out of range."

"Of rifles?"

"Of their rifles."

As if to prove Powder's point, one of the gunners fired with a sharp pop. Something careened down the stairs past Dagger and whacked into Vice's shin.

He growled in annoyance and looked down at his greave. He bent and plucked a deformed lead ball from the hard leather. "Ow," he muttered.

"See? Out of range," Powder said. "And they don't know how to compensate for muzzle velocity."

"Seems we're expected," Dagger said, a fire still thundering in her blood. She controlled it with effort. "Let's go. Saber, Vice. Take the swordsmen."

"Be our pleasure," Saber said, "Oh, I'm sorry, Vice. You probably don't plan to enjoy it, do you?"

"My leg hurts," Vice growled.

"Well, you got shot. Kind of."

"Your mouth runs like a scared antellope, Saber," Vice said and rushed up the stairs with the Armory close behind as the swordsmen drew their blades to meet their assault. One of the swung at Vice, but the monk of the dead god caught the blade and struck it with his other fist, snapping it off near the hilt. He kicked one of the swordsman's legs out from under him and dragged the man to the ground where he stomped him into the stone floor. Saber parried a thrust meant for Vice's back and forced the second swordsman back. They danced with their blades for a step or two, the edges glinting, until Saber closed the distance and forced the grapple, their hilts tangling. The guard shoved Saber back, and he danced out of range, spinning around the confused guard and pointing his sword at the man's eyes in a stylized pose. Then there was a gunshot and the guard's head half-vanished in a puff of red.

"I had him!" Saber shouted Powder.

"What?" Powder said, reloading her pistol.

"How come you didn't shoot Vice's guy?"

"You were dancing," Powder said. "It was taking forever. If I wanted to watch you have fun, I'd peek through your keyhole at night."

"I hate you."

Powder blew him a kiss.

"Their guards do not appear to be very skilled," Vice said.

"No. They don't. Powder?"

"We still have the sharpshooters," Powder said and shouldered her rifle and fired. "Correction, sharpshooter."

Powder sighted again and swore.

"What?" Dagger asked.

"The other one's hiding behind cover. I can't get a clear shot," she said and fired again.

The sharpshooter popped up and fired back. It whined past them like a big mosquito. Powder returned a shot. "We get any closer he might get lucky."

"Fuck's sake," Dagger said and ducked slightly as another shot rang past them.

Powder fired again. There was a little puff of smoke from the stone above the sharpshooter's perch as the gunman hid behind a stone outcrop.

"This is idiotic. Fall back," Dagger ordered.

They walked back to the first landing.

"Sorry, captain," Powder said.

Dagger looked at the first, massively armored guard that Powder had shot. She cocked her head and knelt by the body, prodding among the armor plates with a short knife. She grunted and unbuckled a pair of straps and lifted off the guard's chest plate. She turned it and held it from the straps like a shield. It was nearly as big as she was if she moved in a crouch. Dagger began to walk back up the stairs.

"Behind me," she said.

They advanced behind Dagger and her breastplate barricade, keeping the curved sheet of metal between them and the last sharpshooter's guns. Bullets plinked off the metal's rounded edges and Dagger grunted and shifting with every impact. They advanced slowly, sweat pouring down Dagger's face. The sharpshooter fired again, and a stream of sunlight punched through the metal. Dagger dropped to one knee. The shield landed on one end tipped forward. Saber lunched for the straps. He grabbed one of them but it was too heavy. It fell and catapulted him swearing over the top and flinging him against the door with a bang.

Powder stepped out, firing both pistols at the sharpshooter's position, forcing them behind cover.

"Dagger," Pitch said rushing to her side as Vice stood his body in front of hers. He and Pitch dragged her by the leather up the last of the stairs to the door and the stone overhang above it.

"Saber, get up," Vice muttered.

"Dagger?" Saber asked.

"I'm fine," Dagger grated. "Just pissed off. The steel slowed the bullet. It didn't get through," she picked the flattened metal slug from her armor and dropped it disdainfully on the stairs. As Pitch prodded at her ribs, the sniper continued to fire down, bullets cracking ineffectually against the stone a few feet away. "Pitch, I'm fine."

"You would say that if you were crawling up here on stumps."

"What do you want to do about him," Saber asked Powder as she reloaded her pistols.

"Maybe Dagger can set up the shield again to toss you up there," she grinned.

"Very funny."

"Fuck the shooter," Dagger said. "We're at the door. Let them waste the bullets."

The door towered over them, set into the citadel's stone on steel hinges bigger than Dagger. She set her hands against one of the doors, took a deep breath and shoved.

It swung open as if it weighed nothing at all.

The Armory slunk into a vast central hall with a vaulted stone ceiling. At the center was a stone monument on a dais. It was covered in dozens of candles. Curling along the wall to their left was a gradual set of stairs that circled the room again and again. It rose beyond the reach of the monument's light.

They climbed, slowly circling the room. Their eyes were drawn again and again to the single point of light at the center, and the dark reaches of the room revolved and shrank to that single point of focus. The floor slowly fell away below them filled with shadows like water in a well. The light seemed to grow brighter, and Pitch, who had studied the changing patterns of the stars, muttered under his breath that the light looked like the sun in a starless sky. Was ceiling lowering to meet them? Or were they really climbing higher to meet it? The Armory climbed the final steps and reached a darkened doorway in the stone. There was a peculiar wrenching feeling like a carriage brought to a stop too fast. They lurched with the tilting world and clutched at the stone wall for balance.

"What the fuck was that?" Dagger asked.

Vice muttered a prayer under his breath. Powder and Saber looked around them without trust. Pitch tapped Powder on the shoulder.

"Hand me your glass, please."

Wordlessly Powder handed over the device, and Pitch trained it on the monument below, but the glare of the light was terribly bright in all that darkness.

"I think there's runework on the monument. I can't quite read them, but there's no mistaking the patterns."

"What's that mean for us?" Dagger asked.

"It's too soon to tell. We could climb back down and check?"

"Vice, go with him," Dagger said. "Powder, Saber, we'll hold the doorway."

As Pitch and Vice turned to go back down the stairs, the steps rose to meet them, rolling over and over each other in a wave of stasis that carried them nowhere. They looked like trick dancers pretending to walk in place.

"Fuck," Pitch said. "Fuck, fuck fuck."

"What the hell is happening?" Dagger asked.

"I should have known, but I've never seen it except in books. Fuck," Pitch said.

"What? Pitch, you keeping us in suspense?"

"It's Temker's Clock. I've only ever seen drawings. It's never been done before. Not successfully."

"What's Timmy's Crock?" Saber asked.

"Tempker's. Clock," Pitch said, saying it slowly as if to a child. "It's an alchemical concept. From when the craft was more closely allied with magic, before the schism away from faith toward science. Temker was a fallen priest from a religion that used labyrinths as a form of meditation. He blended his faith with alchemical concepts. He posited that light, and timed revolutions used in the right repeating patterns, could break a walker free from time's grip."

"Free from time?" Dagger asked.

"The stairs, how slow they moved up. Their angle. All of it was part of Temker's Clock. Every step we took, we were winding it."

"And you didn't mention that?"

"I didn't see it! It's not supposed to be real. It's a fucking cautionary tale not to allow one's preconceptions to pervert the way of truth."

"What does it mean for us?" Powder asked.

"It means there's only forward," Vice said. "There is always and ever forward. No other directions exist."

"Vice is mostly right," Pitch said, "if Temker's Clock was successful here, which it looks like it was, it means the entire Citadel could exist outside time. Or we exist outside time within it. If it's the only entrance, it means whatever enters the Citadel is broken free from time. Every living thing in these walls too. Permanently."

"What does that mean?" Saber asked.

"While we are in the clock's grip, time will not pass for us."

"So?" Saber said. "That's good, right?"

"No, Saber. It's not good. We've been in here for half an hour. Maybe. By our perceptions. Outside could have marched along by years already. Decades. And if the Citadel itself isn't affected..."

"It still doesn't sound that bad," Saber said, "we'll wrap up this job quickly and get out of here."

"Saber, everything you do is governed by your perception of time. Everything. Every heartbeat. Every blink. Every memory. Worse, if the Citadel itself is not outside time, but we are, then it could crumble to dust over decades and to us it would seem like five minutes. The floor you're standing on could vanish before you take your next step."

"Feels pretty solid to me," Saber said.

"Let's move," Dagger said. "We can worry about next when next happens."

They stepped through the doorway and into a hall lit with a torchglow that had been invisible to them from the other side. They blinked as their eyes adjusted. Behind them the dark doorway vanished, the blackness replaced by stairs leading up. When they turned again, the hall had become a corridor filled with doors on either side and guttering torches lining the walls. Broken, shattered doors with barred windows littered the stone floor. The stone that once held the hinges had crumbled to dust, the metal still clinging to the stone was rusty to the point of rot. Pitch reached out a hand and snapped free a piece of steel, the bolts nearly dissolving in his hands.

"This is what I meant," he showed the others, "this place is not all affected by the clock. This is the work of eons."

"Is this a dungeon?" Powder asked.

"Pretty well lit for a dungeon," Saber answered.

Dagger walked into the cell. Against the far wall was a bucket and a low table. Mounted to the wall was a snarl of rusty chained restraints, decorated with manacles at intervals among the links. The chains were woven through with wires that led to a leaking voltaic pile with a hand-crank.

"Something was imprisoned here," Dagger said. She lifted up one of the manacle-studded chains. Rust gave way and a manacle fell to the ground and shattered. "Something with a lot of arms and legs."

"Something they had to shock keep under control," Powder noted.

"Or to study it," Pitch suggested.

"Or torture it," Saber said. "Either way, it escaped" Saber gestured to the shattered door.

"Time set it free," Pitch said. "All it had to do was wait."

"So where's the jailer?" Dagger mused. "Who was maintaining this place?"

"Nobody, looks like," Pitch said. "Or they're dead somehow."

They left the cell and continued down the corridor. They passed door after door. Not all were shattered open. Some were empty, but a few still had their occupants. In one was a glass case filled with some viscous liquid instead of air. In others, humans and other creatures they did not recognize met their curious with hopeless, dead eyes as if even if they had swung wide every door, the guests of the Citadel of Stairs would not have moved. At the end of the hall was a double, metal door streaked with rust and buckling bands of steel. The lock had been burned out by something, and the rest torn free by tool or claw. It opened on screeching hinges onto a hall the same size as the one through which they'd entered.

And it held the sound of fighting and machinery.

"Oh good," Saber said, "some shit that isn't dead."

"And that's far enough away for me to shoot it," Powder grinned.

"Hold on, you two," Dagger muttered.

The hall held pockets of glowing light with no visible source, but in a patchwork fashion, as if there had been others and they'd gone out. The floor that stretched away before them was crumbling, and gave way to large pits where it had fallen. Below the floor were whirling gears, their teeth gritting together and and stuttering as they turned. They whined as they stuck for a moment on some debris, and then cracked free of it and spun back up. Several spiral staircases stood at the far end of the hall, and they were moving, spinning up into the ceiling perpeturally like drills.

At the center of the room four beleaguered human warriors fought back ten figures. They were not human. They were carved from some rough-hewn wood, like the citadel's firewood pile had come awake with a grievance about the forest they'd been stolen from.

"Go," growled Dagger. "Go."

The Armor rushed out onto the floor, taking care to avoid the holes. The floor cracked and gave way under Pitch, who would have fallen if Vice hadn't grabbed him by the collar and dragged him clear. Once upright, Pitch hurled a clay sphere at the nearest wooden soldier and the ceramic shattered. The human warrior it had been fighting shied away as the wooden man caught fire, blazing and spinning. He bumped into his fellows sending two of them tumbling to the ground. Dagger swung her hammer overhand and into one of the fallen wood golem's chests, cracking it in half. Vice ducked one of their swings, stuck out his foot and spun with the golem's momentum and pulling hard on its arm. It was too heavy and clumsy to stop itself, and it stumbled past him. Its feet clunked on the stone and it fell without a sound into one of the holes where it met the gears under the floor with a grinding noise. One of the spiral staircases stuttered, stopped for a moment and then began to revolve again as the golem below was ground to sawdust. The human warriors rallied at the Armory's aid and leapt back into the fight, tackling a golem, bearing it to the ground and severing its arms and legs from its body, using their swords and axes like prybars. Saber chopped and danced, but his slender blade did little more than chip and glance off their bodies. With an angry swear he lodged the edge in a wooden man's shoulder, drew his cleavers and hacked its legs away. It fell and crawled toward him. He jumped on its back and chopped away its head and arms. Powder fired from a distance, staggering the wooden men as Dagger, Vice and the other warriors they'd found ganged up on the rest, tossing their pieces into the holes in the floor. More gears stopped and choked, jammed with wooden men and two more of the staircases ceased to spin.

Saber swore as he pried loose his sword from a golem's torso. "These things aren't made to chop wood."

"Next time we'll let you cower in the background," Powder said.

"Isn't that usually your job?"

"Shut up."

The wounded warriors stood together panting. They eyed the Armory, and five faced four with nothing but questions for expressions.

"Who are you?" Dagger asked.

"That double dealing bitch," the lead warrior said, still trying to catch his breath. "She told us we had the contract."

"That's the way with rulers. Don't take it personally."

"Don't get in our way."

"Or save your asses?" Dagger said.

One of the other warriors whispered in their leader's ear.

"He wants to know what that is," the man said, pointing at Powder.

"That's a woman," Saber said, "though I can see the confusion."

Powder whipped the deformed bullet she'd just dug out of a wooden man. It hit Saber in the side of the head with a solid sound. "Ow! Don't waste those! We might be in here a while."

"Worth it!"

"No," the warrior said, "her weapon. The one that shoots fire like a crossbow."

Dagger turned to look at Powder who shrugged and said. "It's a gun."

The warriors looked at each other. "Where do such strange weapons come from?"

Dagger looked puzzled. "Everywhere. What kind of question is that?"

"Tell me," Pitch asked, "what year is it?"

"1194. Though it is always summer in these lands, it is the Season of Frost in the Kingdom of Karlwhyte."

"I see," Pitch said. "Thank you."

"We do thank you, but we'll go our separate ways. If we meet again... Well. The contract is ours to complete," the warrior said and led his band away. They exited the room through a side doorway.

"Pitch what was that about?" Dagger asked. "You know what the year is."

"Yes. The answer doesn't matter much anyway. The Karlwhyte empire had an idiot for a ruler who forced his people to use a calender that began with the day of his coronation."

"Had?"

"Karlwhyte fell two hundred years ago," Pitch said.