Tiny stood on the tavern roof, one platform boot braced against the giant wooden hammer nailed there, and held his newest gear up to the sky. Through his brass goggles the gear looked the size of a coin. Without them, it was the size of his head. Tiny was a gremlin. Tiny was three feet tall in the boots. And Tiny was going to build a clockwork tower so high that every person in Ice&Glitter would have to tip their chin to find him. The gear came down black. He wiped it on his wide-cuffed jeans and the grease smeared like tar. Upwind, past the market square, a squat factory pumped a brown column into the morning. Ash drifted down over the rooftops like dirty snow. Tiny had spent six days building the tower's first tier on the tavern roof. Every exposed spring had already gummed shut. When he wound the escapement, it grated, coughed, and stopped. He climbed down. His platforms clacked on the cobblestones of the square. Stalls were opening. A vendor arranged painted toys under a striped awning, flicking soot off a tin drummer with his sleeve. Tiny marched past him to the shop with the boot bell over the door. "I need oilcloth," Tiny said. "Enough to wrap a tower." The shopkeeper looked down at him over round spectacles, then further down, adjusting for the boots. Aldric Pennworth had sold Tiny every screw and spring for the tower so far and had never once laughed. Tiny liked him for that. "Wrapping won't help," Aldric said. "The grease eats the cloth. You need the factory shut for a morning. Long enough to seal the mechanism." "Shut how?" Aldric tipped his beard toward the square's center. "Complaint. Officially filed. He reads them at dawn." On the soapbox stood the town crier, coat buttoned tight, mustache twitching, a scroll gripped in each fist. Cornelius Bellweather had guarded that box for eleven years. Tiny had seen him shove a fishmonger off it once for standing too close. Tiny walked over. He did not step on the box. He stopped one boot-length away. "I have a grievance," he said. "Fresh one. The factory smoke is ruining precision work in this town." Cornelius squinted down. "Precision work." "Clockwork. Mine." Cornelius uncapped a small inkpot from his belt. He wrote without looking at the paper. "Been waiting years for someone to complain about that chimney. Consider it read tomorrow." He rolled the scroll shut. "Off my square, small sir." By the next dawn, Cornelius bellowed the grievance across the stalls, and by noon two officials in stiff collars were nailing a closure notice to the factory gate. The brown column thinned. The sky over the tavern went pale again. Tiny climbed back to his tower with a fresh gear. It wound smooth. It ticked. He grinned with all his gold teeth. Then, over the quiet rooftops, he heard the first shout — someone in the square, pointing up at him, asking who had given the gremlin permission to build on a roof at all.