Clockwork Guards

Overview

Clockwork Guards are automatons of the Gilded Cage, the Surplus Plane where order is absolute and freedom the only crime. They are among its Enforcers, the patrols that keep compliance, and they never tire and never question an order. The Gilded who live there tend themselves with oil and polish; the Guards need no tending of that kind, and no reason either.

Appearance

A Clockwork Guard stands taller than a tall man, an armoured figure of polished gold and chrome with slate-grey joints, its plates fitted so closely that no seam shows dirt, because there is no dirt in the Cage. Every Guard is identical to every other, down to the scratchless gloss of its shoulders, and a rank of them reflects the street and one another like a hall of mirrors. The face is a smooth oval with a single horizontal slit; nothing looks out of it. Each carries a baton, as the Enforcers do, that gives a pulse of order when it strikes.

Guards walk in step at a measured pace along the straight grid of the streets and turn corners at exact right angles. They tick as they go, a dry, regular sound that joins the plane's hum of clocks and marching feet. Their only smell is the plane's: ozone, metal, and something like cleaning oil.

Habitat and Range

They are found only in the Gilded Cage, on patrol through its cities of identical stacked blocks and manicured squares, and standing post at doors, crossings, and the public squares where the Rule-Breakers stand as warnings. Their routes are fixed and their hours set by the plane's clocks.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Guard carries out its orders and nothing else. It is neither cruel nor kind; it does not threaten, bargain, or listen. It cannot be talked out of a duty, because it does not weigh one: an order it has been given is the whole of what it knows about the matter. It treats a frightened visitor exactly as it treats a defiant one.

Like the other Enforcers it does not kill. A violator is reset, set right again, and what that leaves of the person depends on how far from the plane's order they had strayed.

Abilities

Clockwork Guards do not tire, sleep, or slow. They do not err in a task they were set, and they do not forget a face they were ordered to watch for. The baton's pulse of order stills a struck body and steadies a racing mind into the plane's linear calm, which is how a reset begins. In the Cage itself no chaos is possible, and that is the Guards' greatest strength: a visitor cannot surprise them with anything the plane allows.

Uses and Dangers

The Guards give visitors nothing but safety on the plane's terms, and the price is compliance. To an outsider the rules are unknown and endless, and Guards enforce them all; most of what a traveller does without thinking, a joke, a hurried step, a change of route, is a rule broken somewhere. Those who come back say the way through is to learn the rules before moving at all, and that the Guards are easier to bear than the Gilded, who at least know they are watching.

Lore and Belief

On the Material Plane the Guards are a traveller's tale and a proverb. Rulers' critics speak of a well-ordered hall as "a street of clockwork guards", and some city watches have been praised, or mocked, with the same words. Many believe the Guards were once Gilded who obeyed so perfectly that they stopped needing to feel, and that the Rule-Breakers in the squares are their opposite. Others say they were made by the plane's order itself. Accounts agree only that they never question an order; who gives those orders, nobody knows (see Knowledge of the Cosmos).

Where It Appears

• The Gilded Cage