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– This was the world of the Watchmakers, Christopher.

One of the first Great Races. Things of extraordinary power.

Perhaps more power than they ever realized. See?

Chris concentrated on her smile, and focused on the Watchmakers in their cities; grim-faced men in robes of grey, their hands busy at machines, turning handles and pressing switches. They looked ordinary. They looked drab.

– The Watchmakers. Logical, masculine creatures. They rejected the possibility, and denied the world of wonders.

Perhaps it scared them. They wanted existence to be precise, to be mechanical, so that they could live their lives to a solemn timetable. They wanted to understand the universe in the same way you might understand a piece of clockwork. As a cold machine. No room for cities of brass or dragonfly-gods. They invented rules, and tied creation down to those rules.

‘Rational,’ Chris heard himself say.

– Yes. They were beings of Reason. They proved that horses couldn’t fly, so horses didn’t fly. They proved that cities couldn’t dream, so cities didn’t dream. The shadeling gods, the children of the Pythia... one by one, they all died, pushed out of a cosmos that was too rational to let them live.

The Watchmakers took away the glamours and the mysteries, then built machines in their places. They became kings of Reason. Masters of space, lords of time

And there they all were, in the folds of her face. The monsters and angels and impossible things, retreating into the darkness as Chris watched, vanishing into the whirlpools of her eyes. Everything strange and magical dropped out of the universe. The Watchmakers held creation in a hard grey fist and squeezed it dry.

The Watchmakers. Something clicked in Chris’ head.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘What did you call the Watchmakers? Masters of space and lords of -’

But then the Carnival Queen changed her expression, and Chris was looking into a vast hall, a throne-room painted in the dull grey of eternity. There was a man seated in the hall, a large, powerful man, his face wreathed by a great white beard and moustache, his head topped by a conical crown. His throne was made out of the crushed bones of things that looked suspiciously like gigantic bats.

Two other men sat at his side. One carried the tools of an engineer; the other’s position was less obvious.

‘I dreamed about this place,’ breathed Chris. ‘I was looking for Roz, and... I mean, how? How could you know about this?’

– Been there, done that.

‘Now, See What We Have Created,’ the bearded man said, and his voice was living thunder. ‘We Have Built A World Of Reason Triumphant. And It Is Good.’

– The greatest of all the Watchmakers, said the Carnival Queen. The first King of the Majestic Clockwork. Watch.

So Chris watched. Watched as the man lifted an arm, placed a hand against his chest. Watched as he sank his hand deep into his own body, and pulled something out from his torso. Chris thought it might be his heart, but then he saw the thing, wriggling in the man’s hand; it was shadow-coloured, slippery, its shape changing from second to second.

The other two men in the hall reached into themselves as well, and pulled out similar objects. Chris took a step back.

Across the planet of the Watchmakers, grey people in grey robes were reaching into their bodies and pulling out their...

... their what?

– Nobody is entirely rational, Christopher. Not even the Watchmakers. They wanted a universe of Reason, but to get it, they had to give something up. Those little irrational parts of themselves. Those small corners of their souls that believed in the superstitions, that wanted the world of wonders back. The mutable parts. The changeable parts.

Across the Watchmaker world, the people were grasping their irrational shadows and hurling them away. The shadows shrieked into the sky, screaming, crying. Forsaken. They congregated in the upper atmosphere, becoming one great cloud of unreason.

‘Go,’ said the King.

And the cloud went. It shrieked across the skies, exiled from its