Read Thief of Time for Free Online

remember, as a small boy, being really annoyed at the depiction of Hickory Dickory Dock in a rag book of nursery rhymes because the clock in the drawing was completely wrong for the period.
    He tried to read Grim Fairy Tales . They had titles like “How the Wicked Queen Danced in Red-Hot Shoes!” and “The Old Lady in the Oven.” There was simply no mention of clocks of any sort in any of them. Their authors seemed to have a thing about not mentioning clocks.
    “The Glass Clock of Bad Schüschein,” on the other hand, did have a clock. Of a sort. And it was…odd. A wicked man—readers could see he was wicked because it said he was wicked, right there on the page—built a clock of glass in which he captured Time herself, but things went wrong because there was one part of the clock, a spring, that he couldn’t make out of glass, and it broke under the strain, and Time was set free, and the man aged ten thousand years in a second and crumbled to dust and—not surprisingly, in Jeremy’s opinion—was never seen again. The story ended with a moral: Large Enterprises Depend Upon Small Details. Jeremy couldn’t see why it couldn’t have just as well been: It’s Wrong To Trap Nonexistent Women in Clocks, or: It Would Have Worked With A Glass Spring.
    But even to Jeremy’s inexperienced eye, there was something wrong with the whole story. It read as though the writer was trying to make sense of something he’d seen, or been told, and had misunderstood things. And—hah!—although it was set hundreds of years ago when even in Uberwald there were only natural cuckoo clocks, the artist had drawn a long case clock of the sort that wasn’t around even fifteen years ago. The stupidity of some people! You’d laugh if it wasn’t so tragic!
    He put the book aside and spent the rest of the evening doing a little design work for the guild. They paid him handsomely for this, provided he promised never to turn up in person.
    Then he put the work on the bedside table by the clocks. He blew out the candle. He went to sleep. He dreamed.
    The glass clock ticked. It stood in the middle of the workshop’s wooden floor, giving off a silvery light. Jeremy walked around it, or perhaps it spun gently around him.
    It was taller than a man. Within the transparent case red and blue lights twinkled like stars. The air smelled of acid.
    Now his point of view dived into the thing, the crystalline thing, plunging down through the layers of glass and quartz. They rose past him, their smoothness becoming walls hundreds of miles high, and still he fell between slabs that were becoming rough, grainy …
    … full of holes. The blue and red lights were here too, pouring past him.
    And only now was there sound. It came from the darkness ahead, a slow beat that was ridiculously familiar, a heartbeat magnified a million times …
    …tchum…tchum…… each beat slower than mountains and bigger than worlds, dark and blood-red. He heard a few beats and then his fall slowed, stopped, and he began to soar back up through the sleeting light until a brightness ahead became a room.
    He had to remember all this! It was all so clear, once you saw it! So simple! So easy! He could see every part, how they interlocked, how they were made …
    And now it began to fade.
    Of course, it was only a dream. He told himself that and was comforted by it. But he had gone to some lengths with this one, he had to admit. For example, there was a mug of tea steaming on the nearby workbench, and the sound of voices on the other side of the door …
    There was a knocking at the door. Jeremy wondered if the dream would end when the door was opened, and then the door disappeared and the knocking went on. It was coming from downstairs.
    The time was 6:47. Jeremy glanced at the alarm clocks tomake sure they were right, then pulled his dressing gown around him and hurried downstairs. He opened the front door a crack. There was no one there.
    “Nah, dahn ’ere,