Free Chaos Clock by Gill Arbuthnott Page A

again.”
    Mist obscured their surroundings once more and they were back on the loch edge, watching the children hurl the pieces of the broken sword into the water. This time though, they saw what happened next: two young men wrestled a great tree stump into the loch.
    Abruptly they were back in the study.
    “The monkey was carved from the oak stump on which those weapons were forged. Some of their power flowed into it. The anvil should also have stayed hidden from the world, but it was dredged up with theweapons and shaped into the monkey. She is the spirit of the clock, and the power that was in the weapons has shaped itself into consciousness in her. Now she calls their power to herself and her strength grows. She is close to escaping the clock altogether, and if she does so, all the pent-up power in the museum will tip into Chaos. Already she moves away from it sometimes in the night, creeping through the museum. Soon she will grow bolder.
    “We must bind her to the clock for good, while we have the chance.”
    “How do we do that?” asked Kate.
    “You already have the means, although you do not know it. Kate, you have a necklace of your grandmother’s , do you not?”
    “Yes,” she said, her brow creasing. “How did you know?”
    He smiled, the first time he had really looked untroubled all that day.
    “I know, because I had it made and gave it to her, and asked her to leave it to her first granddaughter. It was made fifty-four years ago for this moment, to bind the monkey to her place in the clock for all time.”
    “But the clock wasn’t made until 1999.”
    “But I knew it would be.”
    Kate shook her head, completely baffled. “So all I have to do is put the necklace on the monkey and that’s it, everything’s fixed?”
    He gave a short laugh. “I wish it was so simple. It must be done in the right way at the right moment by both of you working together. Only together will you bestrong enough.”
    “Wouldn’t it be better to get some of the other Guardians to come to help instead of us? Then you’d be sure of winning, wouldn’t you?”
    “If Edinburgh were the only battleground that might work, but each one of us faces a part of this struggle wherever we are. The truth of it is that there is no one who can leave their own fight to lend us help here. The four of us must accomplish this alone.”
    “Three of us, you mean.”
    “Four. Only three as yet, but we need a fourth. We must find someone inside the museum who will work with us and help us steal the Duddingston Hoard so we can return it to the loch.
    If we can do both these things, the past should sink to its rightful level again and this particular threat will be over.”
    “So now you have to try and persuade someone at the museum about all this?” said David. “How are you going to do that? It was hard enough convincing
us
.”
    “It may not be as difficult as you think. Already there are rumours about a small animal which leaves its traces in the museum but is never clearly seen, and a feeling of disquiet is growing among those who are sensitive to what is happening.
    “I’ve been a regular visitor for a long time. The staff are used to talking to me.”
    Mr Flowerdew looked at the children’s bleak faces and said gently, “We have some time before we will be forced to act.”
    “Oh good,” said Kate weakly. “Enough time for us togrow up?”
    “A few weeks.”
    “Oh. Right.”
    They sat in silence round the big wooden table until David said, “We should be going.”
    “Of course.”
    Numbly, they gathered their belongings.
    “I’ll be in touch soon, but if you want to talk to me before that, just telephone.”
    He opened the front door.
    “And by the way, I think you know me well enough to call me John, don’t you?”
    “John?”
    “Even a Guardian of Time needs a first name. You don’t imagine everyone calls me Mr Flowerdew all the time?”
    “John.”

LATIN
    Princes Street Gardens hadn’t played any nasty