“We should assume there is. Otherwise it’s...still not safe, but easily repeatable and with a built-in bribe, and that’d be too easy.”

He shrugs. "No rule against that. And it's meant to be super rare and hard to find? Malcolm—that's Laird's grandfather—said he'd had an argument with some people once who were hunting cryptids and he thought they weren't real."

“It’s not impossible. But as far as going in with a plan...

Negotiating with animal Others is always hard. Food, changes in conditions, others of its kind...this one doesn’t sound domesticated enough for attention to be a good lever. Maybe these cryptid hunters would know what it eats or wants.”

"It seems to eat living things and send them to the past, at least—maybe it eats their time? Or something." Pause. "Maybe it eats time."

“Hmm. You don’t seem to have lost sixty years off your life span or anything. And judging by how far back it usually sends its meals, it could take a lot to bribe.

Actually, I could try and find out how the Jacob’s Bell people are feeding it, if they are. Laird might just tell me.”

"I... would prefer you didn't mention me asking you about it, if possible."

“That’d be easy to guess, especially if he comes here for the Lordship fight and notices we’re on the same side. I could just stick with speculating, if you’d rather risk it being wrong.”

"You can say you heard me mention I went to the past, during the Conquest debacle, and you asked me how I did it so I told you about the Charybdis, and now you're wondering how they're dealing with it."

“Sure, I can try that. He’d still guess, but maybe not too strongly. And I am also just plain curious.

We’ve been in contact a lot because of the Conquest thing, so it won’t be too unnatural.”

"Thank you. That'd help me a lot."

“I’ll call him, ask about using it for the Lordship contest, get told it’s too dangerous, and accept that. And let you know what he says about its eating habits.”

"Okay. Thank you very much."

“Good luck with whatever parts of your plan need luck.”

"There are probably some," he agrees.

He... doesn't have much to do while he waits for Duncan to contact Laird, so he'll go visit some sentimentally important places and pace around. He still has an apartment here, it's only been a day, but he's not super keen on returning to it quite yet.

It’s not very long before Duncan calls back. Laird took his interest for the other thing it was—a hope that they could use the Charybdis as a generator or a means of preparing retroactively—and shot him down as expected. But as for what it “eats,” Laird has been theorizing.

From its point of view, time is a directional force. When the Charybdis swallows something, that thing moves through time by the monster’s rules instead of the rest of the universe’s. Then it expels it, and derives its energy from its meal (or more likely its meal’s corpse or fossil) being pushed back by normal time passage. It’s much the same concept as someone who finds himself immune to gravity creating free energy by bouncing up and down a ladder and releasing heavy objects to become normal at the top.

Laird is like 80% sure this is what’s going on. Duncan notes that if true it does mean the Charybdis gets some small benefit from giving Sadde a short-term ride to the past, but has no idea whether it’d see that as enough of a bribe to be worth doing.

But what is it that it eats, then? Is it the time itself? Time "potential"?

Whatever is most like mass in this analogy. Someone carrying one of those beads of distilled time would probably generate more than someone without, yes. But there’s likely something to do with individual identity as well, unless it’s only eating people and animals instead of metamorphic rocks because it evolved from a carnivore. Not that it’s digesting anything in any normal sense. 

But sure, saying it eats time is far from wrong.

Could they try to bribe it with some more time? How does one even store time, anyway?

With chronomancy! It’s not a complicated project; Duncan set something up on his own. But then you’ve got to fill it with something, and there are only so many hours in a day. (You only get out a fraction of what you sacrifice, he doesn’t say. He doesn’t know Johannes told Sadde that long ago.) The Lord of Montreal can convert money to chronomancy as easily as any other form, though.

Yes. Yes he can.

But Sadde has another way of getting time. A way he figures Duncan would... not approve of. So he doesn't mention it to the Behaim. He will instead thank the Behaim for all his help and... probably take a bus back to Jacob's Bell.

If he spends much time on transit he’ll miss the meeting where they officially declare Toronto up for grabs. Oh well, there’s time travel on the agenda anyway. No hurry at all.

And his other self is probably on it already. He doesn't need to be as much of a nonentity as possible, since his future self is in fact the one who knows where this Sadde is gonna be and who can avoid being obviously in two places at once, but he'll still try to lay low.

...but he thinks he should go find Padraic, first.

It’s a small town. People are not hard to find.

“Welcome back!” Padraic says when he recognizes him. He’s still glamoured to look like Sadde, for a total of three Saddes in Jacob’s Bell. “Time to tip the dominoes?”

"The... what dominoes?"

“The figurative ones. It’s amazing how much of what’s so solid is so precarious, all it needs is a...

But first, I’ve made you a friend. Let me introduce you.”