Chapter One – The Silent Clock
Prague never really sleeps. It just holds its breath between the chiming of hours. Some nights the city feels alive — like the Vltava itself runs through its veins, carrying laughter, arguments, and the heavy perfume of cheap cigarettes and spilled beer. Other nights, like this one, it feels like the whole city is waiting for something to break.
I was nursing a coffee in the station when the call came in. Not the good kind of coffee, either — the bitter sludge that eats through your stomach lining and reminds you you're still alive. Dispatch said the Astronomical Clock had stopped. A mechanical failure, probably. Not exactly homicide territory. But then the dispatcher's voice dipped, like she was trying not to choke on her words.
"There's… a body, Detective Novák. Inside the tower."
That got my attention.
The Astronomical Clock isn't just some tourist toy. It's a six-hundred-year-old piece of pride and stubbornness, a miracle of gears, saints, and superstition that never missed a beat — until tonight. If it stopped and there was a corpse in the mix, then Prague was about to wake up to one hell of a morning.
By the time I got to Old Town Square, the place was already crawling with uniforms trying to hold back the curious. Midnight, yet half the square was awake, tourists clutching their scarves, whispering about omens and curses. The tower loomed over them, its black spire cutting into the sky like a knife.
Hana Veselá, my partner, met me at the cordon. She was younger, sharper, still had hope in her eyes. I hated her for it sometimes.
"Victim's male, forties," she said briskly, handing me gloves. "ID says Karel Růžička. City council. Found by a maintenance worker when the gears jammed."
"A politician in the clock." I muttered, tugging the gloves on. "Guess even time doesn't want them."
Hana didn't laugh. She never did at my jokes.
Inside the tower, the air was colder, thicker, like dust and centuries of breath had soaked into the walls. The staircase spiraled upward, stone worn down by six hundred years of footsteps. At the top, near the mechanism, a single halogen lamp lit the chamber in stark yellow. The gears of the clock stood frozen, teeth locked mid-bite. And beneath them, on the wooden platform, lay the body.
Karel Růžička. Mid-level bureaucrat. A man whose face I'd seen shaking hands at ribbon-cuttings, forgotten a minute later. Now his face was pale as parchment, lips slightly parted as though he'd been about to speak. His arms were spread wide, like a saint on a cheap cathedral painting. And his eyes — glassy, staring straight at the Madonna statue built into the mechanism above.
Someone had posed him. Carefully.
The maintenance worker was sitting in the corner, chain-smoking like his life depended on it. His eyes darted to the corpse, then away. He muttered something about gears grinding to a stop, about hearing a thud. His hands shook too hard to light the next cigarette.
I crouched near the body. There were no obvious wounds. No blood. But his suit jacket was unbuttoned, and I could see faint marks on his throat. Strangulation, maybe. On the wooden beam beneath him, scratches caught the light — deliberate cuts, almost symbols, half-carved into the grain.
"What do you make of that?" Hana asked quietly behind me.
I traced one of the scratches with a gloved finger. It wasn't letters. Not in any language I knew. Circles, intersecting lines, a shape that made the back of my neck prickle.
"I make it someone wanted us to think," I said, standing. "Or to keep us guessing."
She glanced at her notepad. "The widow's been notified. Lucie Růžičková. Captain Dvořák wants us at her apartment first thing in the morning."
"Of course he does." I muttered. The captain hated cases like this — cases that stirred up journalists, the kind where the city's dirt floated to the surface. He'd want it cleaned, tied up neat, and shoved in a drawer before daylight.
But this wasn't neat. It never is.
I looked back at Růžička's body, arms outstretched beneath the frozen gears, the silent saints staring down from their niches. A politician dead in the city's most famous clock. A symbol carved in wood like some madman's signature.
The Astronomical Clock had stopped for the first time in centuries. And I had the sick feeling it wouldn't be the only thing in Prague grinding to a halt.
"Bag him," I told the techs, my voice rougher than I meant. "And be careful. Whoever did this… they wanted to be remembered."
Hana gave me a sidelong look as we left the chamber. "You think it's political?"
"Everything in this city is political," I said, pulling out a cigarette. "But politics don't carve symbols into wood."
We stepped back out onto Old Town Square. The tourists were still there, buzzing like flies, their camera flashes dying against the darkness. Somewhere a drunk sang a folk song out of tune. Snow had started to fall, quiet flakes settling on cobblestones.
I lit my cigarette and watched the smoke curl upward into the night. In six hours, the newspapers would scream about omens and curses, about history catching up to the present. But right now, it was just me, the silence of the stopped clock, and a dead man who had no business being inside it.
And I knew one thing: Prague had just started whispering a story. My job was to listen.
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