The Orrery of Wett

While the going train is wound — ten minutes' work with the key, once in seven days — the orrery keeps the day, the month, the moon and the tides of the place where it stands, exactly, and cannot be made to read false by any means. Set upon a table for 1 hour, it tells you the true date and hour even if you have been asleep, held, enchanted, or carried elsewhere without your knowledge, and it tells you to the minute how long that lasted.

Once in a year, and never twice in a year, you can set the mourning hand. Name aloud a person you have seen with your own eyes, or whose name stands written in a document you hold, and release the click behind the calendar ring (an action). The movement runs for 1 hour and cannot be stopped, hurried, muffled, or covered. At the end of the hour the mourning hand comes to rest upon a day of the ring, and that day is the true day of that person's death, past or to come. It is never wrong. It gives a day and a month and never a year.

When the hand rests, the movement stops. It cannot be wound again by any hand until the turn of the year. While it is at rest it keeps no time and does nothing, and is a case of brass and glass worth what the brass weighs.

The setting is written down elsewhere. Within the hour, the name of the person who released the click is found written, in that person's own hand, upon some paper, plate, wall, or skin that person did not write upon. The writing is small, it is not always found, and it is not always found by the one who made it.

While you are attuned and the mourning hand stands at rest, you know without counting how many days lie between this day and the day upon the ring. You wake knowing the number. No magic can make you mistake it or forget it while you remain attuned. Ending your attunement takes the number away and leaves the day where you set it.

A day shown once is shown for good. The orrery will not answer a second time for a person it has answered for, and the hand will not be moved off a day by force: the arbor breaks first, and the second train is beyond the trade to mend.