She’d learned that now and then, sometimes for years at a stretch, the Clock of the Time Dragon dropped out of sight. The acolytes of the Clock would shutter up the preposterous thing. They trusted in its own infernal charms to protect it. And maybe the boys were sensible enough to do so. Whenever the sergeant-at-hand called back the company-a few starry-eyed converts compensating for any no-shows-they apparently always found their treasure in working trim. Sometimes it would be overgrown with forest ivy or moss. Dead leaves, tendrils of cobweb. Perhaps a kind of natural camouflage the Clock called to itself. It didn’t matter. The handmade masterpiece snapped right back to business. The play of its gears remained deft, the tension in its belts and chains keen. Its mechanical advantage was said to have been augmented by a stubbornly adhesive magic.

The night watchwoman, a novice in service of the Clock, had asked the sergeant-at-hand their destination.

“We meander as whimsy dictates unless the Clock gives explicit advice,” he’d answered. “Whimsy is fate, too: just less knowable.”

“Did whimsy bring you to rescue me, Mr. Boss,” she asked, “or were you bound by advice?”

“That’s what they all want to know.” The sergeant-at-hand, a dwarf with regrettably sloppy habits of dental hygiene, leered his mustardy smile. “But it’s confidential, my darling, my dimple. Trade secrets indeedy.”

For five weeks the self-appointed acolytes had been pushing and dragging the towering Clock, which was mounted on a wheeled flatbed. They kept away from farmhouses, going overland through pastures and paddocks. If they had to pass through a small village, they waited till midnight.

The equipage rocked and lurched like a small ornate ship on stony seas. Above, the clockwork dragon supervised. How much of Oz those dull eyes had taken in. Oz rehearsing itself, rearranging itself decade after decade. Whimsy and fate, destiny and accident. The fall of the house of Ozma, the dirty years of the Wizard, the rise of impeccable Shell, holy Emperor of Oz. Fortunes, in any case: changeable fortunes converted into the changeless facts of biography by every passing tick of its mechanisms.

After the Clock had rescued her, its sergeant-at-hand had briefed the newest convert. “We pick our way with superior caution,” the dwarf told her. “Everything’s tinder-hot now and ready to conflagrate. We have our task. The Clock tells us so. Quietly, quickly, like mice stealing between the toes of battling manticores and basilisks, we inch forward as we’re told.”

“Imagine what it’s seen since we last brung it along to an audience,” one beardless boy said. “Imagine the stupefied Squirrel or idiot Monkey coming across this in the greenwood! Sitting all ‘lone and full of itself, like a pagan temple! Without us to service it, you think our smoky friend here would rouse itself and deliver a pronouncement?”

“For a chattering Monkey? Get real. That ever happen, I’d like to see so! Fun for the Monkey who goes shrieking mad and he drop right out of his tree!”