In the fading light of a snowy winter's evening, with church bells and timepieces sounding the hour, a story has been set in motion by turns magical, terrifying, and urgent as a ticking clock.

The characters are Karl, an apprentice clockmaster who has missed a deadline that may well be his last; Fritz, the writer, who has begun a story he can't control; and Gretl, the innkeeper's daughter, whose courage will soon need to match her kindness.

There's also Prince Florian, whose mechanical heart will wind down if help isn't found; sir Ironsoul, the clockwork knight with murderous tendencies; and finally, the nefarious Kr. Kalmenius, who some say is the Devil himself.

Like the gears of a strange and wonderful clock, the characters and tales fit together piece by piece to form a masterwork of chilling suspense. From one of the world's greatest storytellers, a timeless tale all wound up and ready to spring.

Excerpt

"I wonder if any of you remember the extraordinary business at the palace a few years ago? They tried to hush it up, but some details came out, and a bizarre mystery it was, too. It seems that Prince Otto had taken his young son Florian hunting, together with an old friend of the royal family, Baron Stelgratz. It was the dead of winter-just like now. They'd set off in a sledge for the hunting lodge up in the mountains, well wrapped up against the cold, and they weren't expected back for a week or so.

"Well, what should happen but that only two nights later, the sentry on duty at the palace gate saw a commotion down the road, and heard the whinnying of horses-whinnying in panic-making a terrible racket; and it looked, though he couldn't be sure, as if a sledge was being driven toward the palace by a madman.

"The sentry raised the alarm and called for lights, and when the sledge got close enough, they could see that it was the royal sledge, the very one the Prince had set off in only three nights before. It was hurtling up the road behind those terrified horses, and it wasn't going to stop; and the sergeant of the guard gave orders to drag the palace gates open quickly before it crashed.

"They got them open just in time. The sledge rushed through, and then drove round and round the courtyard, for the horses were mad with fear and couldn't stop. The poor beasts were covered with foam and their eyes were rolling, and the sledge would be going round that courtyard still if one of the runners hadn't caught on a mounting block and turned the whole thing over. "Out fell the driver, and out fell a bundle in the back of the sledge. A servant hastened to pick it up, and found little Prince Florian wrapped in a fur rug, safe and warm and half-asleep.

"But as for the driver . . .

"Well, as soon as the sentries came close, they saw who it was. It was none other than Prince Otto himself, stark dead, as cold as ice, with his eyes wide and staring ahead of him, his left hand gripping the reins so tight they had to be cut loose, and (this was the strangest part) his right hand still moving, lashing the whip up and down, up and down, up and down.

"They covered him up so the Princess, his wife, wouldn't see him, and took little Prince Florian to her to prove he was alive and well; because he was their only child.

"But what was to be done with Prince Otto? They took his body into the palace and sent for the Royal Physician, a worthy old man who'd studied in Heidelberg and Paris and Bologna, and published a treatise on the location of the soul; he'd studied geology, hydrology, and physiology, but he'd never seen anything like this before. A dead body that wouldn't keep still! Imagine that! Stretched out icy cold on a marble slab, with its right arm lashing and lashing and lashing with no sign that it was ever going to stop.

"The Physician locked the door to keep the servants out, brought the lamp closer, and bent low to look, whereupon his eye was caught by something in the clumsy arrangement of the clothes. So, avoiding that lashing right arm, he carefully unfastened the cloak and the fur coat and the underjacket and the shirt, and laid the Prince's chest bare.

"And there it was: a gash across his breast just over the heart, crudely sewn up with a dozen stitches. The Physician got his scissors and snipped them away, and then he nearly fainted with surprise, because when he opened the wound, there was no heart there. Instead there was a little piece of clockwork: just a few cogs and springs and a balance wheel, attached in subtle ways to the Prince's veins and tick-tick-ticking away merrily, in perfect time with the lashing of his arm.

"Well, you can imagine how the Physician crossed himself and took a sip of brandy to calm his nerves. Who wouldn't? Then he carefully cut the attachments and lifted out the clockwork, and as he did, the arm fell still, just like that."

As he got to that point in his story, Fritz paused for a sip of beer, and to see how his audience was taking it. The silence in the tavern was profound. Every single customer was sitting so still they might have been dead themselves, except for their wide eyes and expressions of tense excitement. He had never had such a success!