Time's Mistress Read Online Free PDF

reborn. He wept to see her familiar features laid flat across the glass-topped work surface, and then rejoiced to see it shaped around the glass cranium of the machine. He held her hands as they were crafted, remembering each and every blemish and beauty mark and insisting they were rendered precisely, such were the perfection of the Art.
    At nights, Josiah sat with Balthazar learning the secret of the metal disks and how to create commands that would complete the illusion of Annabel Leigh’s return to him.
    He was hungry to learn, his mind healed for the first time in forever, focussed, driven. He slaved away, wracking his brain to remember each and every movement and gesture she possessed in life, so that he could give them to her in death. The tilt of her head, the curl of her lip, the impish delight in her eyes, he tortured himself with all of it, needing to believe that the machine could be more than that; needing to believe that the machine could be his Annabel Leigh.
    And alone, as he always had to be when the day disappeared, he began to remember so many other things he thought lost forever. He curled up on the cold mattress, pulling the blanket up to his chin, aware that soon the emptiness that marked the other side of the bed would be gone. It was every bit as chilling as it was thrilling.
    O O O
    And then they brought her back to him, in a wooden box just as those others had taken her away from him. It was part of the ritual he had insisted upon. The return. It had to be the same as the departure. Instead of mourners he had the men of the Mechanicum walk at her side, celebrants bringing her back to him.
    They carried the casket into the front room and laid it respectfully on the table, handing him the crowbar to break open the seals. He slipped it into the crack between lid and frame, and worked it open.
    Looking down on her his heart broke.
    She was perfect in every way.
    But she appeared so utterly cold and dead in the casket, just lying there. They had placed a white rose on her chest. They had stuffed her coffin full of the most fragrant flowers when they buried her, to mask the corruption of the disease. This single flower on her return was meant to be a token of rebirth, the delicate white petals life, the denuded thorns their mastery over the bite of death.
    The experience so horribly mirrored the last time he had gazed down upon her lifeless face. “Help me get her out of there,” Josiah begged, reaching in to cradle the clockwork woman in his arms. She was heavy, far heavier than she had been in life. They lifted Annabel Leigh out of the casket and stood her in the centre of the room, encouraging Josiah to inspect their craft, to be sure he was happy. “We can make adjustments,” they assured him, like Savile Row tailors.
    He couldn’t bear to look at her.
    “We have fashioned a number of disks according to your instructions, all you need to do is wind the mechanism for the first time and insert the option of your choice.”
    “I just want the company,” he said, standing beside the window out into the world. His fingernails dug into the wainscoting of the sill. “You can leave us now, please. How much do I owe you?”
    “This is our gift to you,” Balthazar assured him. “There should be no money between friends. If we can bring you happiness that is reward enough.”
    “Thank you,” Josiah said, though what they called a gift already felt like a curse. Still he could not bear to look at her in the middle of the room. It was a blessing that she was mute. To hear her would have been too much. It was enough to feel her behind him, that almost but not quite familiar presence.
    The Magisters left him alone with his new Annabel Leigh. “The mechanism will last for twelve hours,” Balthazar explained, “before it will need to be wound again.”
    She had a life of only twelve hours.
    When the front door closed behind them Josiah Bloome finally turned away from the window.
    He looked at her,