The Emperor of all Things

by Paul Witcover

  ‘That was … most interesting,’ said Longinus, standing beside him in the same room from which they had departed. ‘Not since Corinna brought me out of Märchen have I felt so … superfluous on a journey through the Otherwhere.’ As he spoke, he methodically set into motion all the timepieces he had stopped in the room, beginning with the larger clocks and then moving on to the pile of watches on the table, each of which he returned to its place upon his person.

  ‘I saw the way,’ Quare said. ‘The path was plain – I merely followed it.’

  ‘And now?’ Longinus asked, turning to study him. ‘Can you still see the path? Could you follow it if you liked?’

  Quare shook his head. ‘The path is gone. Everything is as it was. Why do you ask?’

  ‘You brought us here so easily that I wondered if you might be able to travel through the Otherwhere entirely on your own – whether you needed me at all. Corinna required no talisman to enter that maze or navigate its twists and turns; it was her birthright.’

  ‘You think I am like her?’

  ‘I do not know what to think about you, Mr Quare. You are a mystery. A paradox. My time in Märchen changed me greatly from what I had been, but you have been changed more greatly still without ever setting foot there. Look at yourself, sir. You stand before me, a living and breathing man who yet bears a mortal wound. By all rights, you should be stretched out in a coffin. And that is not all. You have taken to the Otherwhere like a fish to water. I led you from this room, but it was you who brought me back. Do I think you are like Corinna, like Doppler and his kind?’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps you are something new. Human, yet also more than human. You warned me of the dangers in seeking to raise myself above my natural station. But haven’t you been raised in just that way?’

  Quare shook his head again, more vehemently now. ‘You would make me into something I am not – something I have no wish to be.’

  ‘It is not I who have done the making,’ Longinus answered.

  ‘I am as I always was,’ Quare insisted.

  ‘Are you indeed?’

  Quare found himself growing angry. ‘I do not wish to discuss this any further,’ he said. ‘And if you want my help, you will not press me.’

  Longinus sketched a bow. ‘I meant no offence. And I am gratified that you have decided to help – or so I judge by your words.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll help,’ Quare growled. ‘I do not think I have a choice. Not if I wish to learn what has happened to me. It is all bound up with that cursed watch. Perhaps, if I can examine it again, or even hold it in my hands, much will become clear.’

  ‘For your sake, I pray it is so,’ Longinus said. ‘Yet we must not count our chickens before they are hatched. A difficult and dangerous task lies before us, Mr Quare, with no guarantee of success. Indeed, I should judge the odds very much against us.’

  ‘You have a strange way of inspiring confidence,’ Quare observed.

  ‘It is to avoid overconfidence that I speak so plainly. But we shall have a few tricks up our sleeve, never fear. With a bit of luck, we will prevail.’

  ‘What, then, is your plan?’

  ‘There will be time enough for that later,’ Longinus said. ‘We must wait until the very witching hour of the night before we make our move. I suggest, until then, that you get some rest. That is certainly my intention. We must be at the top of our game tonight, Mr Quare. There will be no room for hesitation or error.’

  ‘I don’t believe I could sleep now even if I wanted to,’ Quare said.

  ‘Nevertheless, I advise you to try. Before my retirement, I went on many such missions as this, some on behalf of Master Magnus, others for reasons of my own, and I learned the value of this approach. Sleep if you can; and if you cannot, why, then do whatever it is that relaxes you. Have a hot bath—’

  ‘So that you can drug me again?’ Quare demanded.

  ‘I apologize for having done so last night. You need not fear a repetition. I am a great believer in the benefits of daily bathing; it is a habit I learned on my travels to the east. But if a bath will not relax you, try a book. Tinker with one of my timepieces if you like. I will send a man to wake you, or simply fetch you, as the case may be, shortly before midnight. Then we will fortify ourselves with a brief repast, and I will explain how we are going to gain entry to the guild hall, and how we shall proceed once we are there. In the meantime, should you require anything, the bell pull in your room will summon a servant. Oh, and one more thing, Mr Quare. Your pocket watch.’ Longinus passed it to him. ‘Wind it,’ he added after Quare had taken the watch and made to tuck it into his waistcoat pocket. ‘It may be that in moving through the Otherwhere, you have revealed yourself to Doppler or one of his minions. If so, they will be seeking you now. The defences of the house are likely sufficient to protect you, but it cannot hurt to get into the habit of shielding yourself as I do. In any case, I will be providing you with a number of watches to distribute about your person before we depart tonight.’

  Such was the intensity of Longinus’s gaze that Quare felt obliged to follow his suggestion. Yet as he wound the watch, he couldn’t help feeling a deep-seated wrongness. It disturbed him to use the watch in a way that was contrary to its intended purpose: not to tell the correct time, but instead to employ a false time in order to confuse and misdirect … Of course, if what Longinus had told him was true, then everything he had ever known – or thought he had known – about time was wrong. But despite all he had heard and experienced, he was far from ready to accept his host’s assertions on that subject. He was far from even understanding them.

  Back in his room – to which he had been led by a servant – Quare divested himself of coat and sword. A hot bath had been drawn in his absence, and so tempting were the steaming waters that he decided to risk them. He thought it unlikely that Longinus would drug him again, not if he required Quare’s assistance in retrieving the hunter from the Old Wolf in a matter of hours.

  The water was hot enough to make him catch his breath, but he released it in a long, luxurious sigh as he settled down. The tub resembled a giant tin boot; there was ample room to stretch his legs out in front of him, while his back was firmly supported. The water smelled of fresh limes.

  He could feel tension seeping from his body, but his mind was not so readily soothed. The details of Longinus’s adventures in Märchen, added to his own experiences of the past few days, left him feeling as though he had stumbled into a fairy tale. A nightmare, rather. And at the centre of it all, the uncanny pocket watch that, so it seemed, had belonged to Herr Doppler, a creature of the Otherwhere so powerful he was indistinguishable from a god.

  Or, if Longinus were to be believed, not a watch at all, but a weapon, a time bomb whose purpose was to destroy everything that existed, to scour the universe free of life and order like some great cosmic Flood, returning things to a primal soup of limitless potential, so that a single survivor, Doppler, not a fallen but a risen angel, might begin again. Where, in this insane cosmology, was there room for the Christian God, the loving God who had created all things, visible and invisible, had wound them up like a watch and set them in motion, then stepped back into his heaven to watch the flawless operation of his benign universal machine? Quare had never considered himself to be religious; on the contrary, he had prided himself on his rational approach to the mysteries of life. Yet he had always, he realized now, kept a childish faith in the God of his boyhood tucked away in a corner of his heart, all but forgotten. Only now, that faith was being tested for the first time. More than tested: it was being overwhelmed. Routed. There was no room for such pretty delusions in the real world, the world in which a pocket watch might run on blood, a deadly stabbing have no more effect than a pinprick, a mechanical foot enable a leagues-spanning stride. A world of dragons, dwarfs and succubi, as if all the old myths and legends were true. A world that floated, like a bubble of time, on a vast sea of un-being: the Otherwhere. And in which time itself was … what? A disease? A drug? An imperfection
introduced into a perfect creation, a flaw in that glittering jewel, the original original sin? It seemed to be all of those things and more – for it also protected this place from Doppler, all the mismatched timepieces throwing up a snarl of thorny time, like the forest of briars surrounding the castle of Sleeping Beauty.

  And what of his role? Why had he of all people been chosen … for it seemed to Quare that he had been chosen, that there was more to his involvement than just bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, the conviction had been growing in him for some time, and by now it was so strong that he could not doubt it any longer: everything that had happened to him had happened for a reason, in response to a greater intention than his own, a sovereign will that could not be denied , that had pulled and pushed and prodded him towards the fulfilment of its ends just as he, however unknowingly, had forced Longinus from his chosen path in the Otherwhere.

  But what reason? And whose will?

  He didn’t want any of it. Didn’t want to play whatever part had been prepared for him. There were wars within wars, it seemed. A war in heaven, so to speak, between Doppler and his followers and those, like Corinna, who opposed him. A war that centred upon the hunter, which Grimalkin had been sent to acquire on behalf of one side or the other – he wasn’t sure where her allegiance lay. And, mirroring it, a war on earth, between England and her enemies, chief among them France: a war that could very well determine not just the fate of his country but that of the hard-won liberties which were the birthright of all Englishmen. And that war, too, centred upon the watch, for Aylesford had been sent in quest of it, and the Old Wolf, who now possessed it, yearned to unlock its deadly secrets and use them in defence of king and country. But in doing so, Quare now understood, he would only be serving the interests of Doppler. And the same would be true if it were Aylesford who possessed the watch and brought it to his French masters to further the cause of Scottish liberty.

  He saw now that the watch could not safely be used by any human being. Whoever did so risked acting on Doppler’s behalf. Yet neither could it be hidden away. Recent events had proved that. Doppler and his fellow creatures were immortal, after all. A human lifetime was nothing to them. They could be patient in their pursuit of the hunter. Sooner or later, it must come to light.

  No, he realized, the watch had to be destroyed. That was the only way. But was it even possible? And if it was, could the hunter be destroyed without unleashing whatever terrible forces it contained? If the watch were destroyed, would it take the world with it? He remembered what it had felt like in the aftermath of the watch’s brief awakening, when the world had seemed to blink in and out of existence, and Master Magnus’s beloved cats had died: all of them, in an instant. He remembered the sight of their limp corpses lying like so many scattered leaves strewn by a whirlwind. Then he imagined London filled with such corpses: human corpses: the bodies of men, women and children felled as they went about their daily business, like victims of a plague far swifter and less merciful than the Black Death. Some, at least, had survived that calamity. But he did not think there would be even a single survivor of this one. Apart from Doppler, anyway.

  Despite the warmth of the bathwater, a shiver rippled through him. He felt more alone than he could remember ever having felt since his orphan days in the workhouse. In that moment, the image of Grimalkin came to him, the memory of her moonlit face on the rooftop, and, later, that same face smeared with paint yet still lovely, exotic in its beauty. Who was she? Where had she gone? He could not help but feel that she knew the answers to his questions, if she would but speak plainly. He recalled how she had vanished from the rooftop, and disappeared in the blink of an eye from the Pig and Rooster, and he wondered if she, like Longinus, had access to the Otherwhere. Was she a traveller in that strange country … or a denizen of it? And what of the connection she claimed, the bonds of blood that linked them? Those bonds, if they existed, had not pulled her to him, or he to her, for that matter, when he navigated the Otherwhere or at any other time.

  Quare’s ruminative gaze settled upon the Chinese screen that stood at the foot of the bath. The scene depicted there, of a peaceful, mist-wreathed mountain landscape, seemed to call to him as it had before. What would it be like to step from this world into that one? Longinus had asked if he could still see the path he had followed back from the rooftop, wondering if Quare possessed the same ability he did to traverse the Otherwhere, but whatever ability or instinct had guided Quare on the return journey seemed to have deserted him now. He saw no path, no doorway … unless the screen were itself a door. Yet he did not see a means of passing through it and into the remote but restful scene beyond, which, as he studied it with weary, unfocused longing, seemed to grow more real, though without becoming more immediate, as if he were gazing through a window that could neither be opened nor broken.

  And then, as though it had been there all along, just waiting for the opportunity to show itself, a wingless dragon drifted into view, its long body eeling through the air, seeming to swim there: blue-scaled, wide -eyed, open jaws revealing teeth that looked sharp enough to shear through iron as easily as they might rend flesh and bone.

  It hovered before him, within or behind the screen, the undulations of its body, like the gentle flexions of a water snake, holding it fixed in mid-air … and holding Quare’s attention, too, the movements deeply entrancing, as was the thing’s gaze, its eyes as big as plates yet placid as the eyes of a hare, sky-blue irises with centres of inky night.

  Those eyes regarded him with shrewd intelligence … if intelligence was even the right word for what he saw there, and the longer he looked in mute fascination, the more certain Quare was that it was not, at least not by any human standard … though he had no better word, either. He felt a breeze caress his skin, and the tangy smell of limes grew stronger, more concentrated, seeming to emanate from the dragon itself. The scent had a stimulating aphrodisiacal effect; he felt himself grow hard, his erection pointing towards the dragon like the needle of a compass fixed at true north. He felt no shame – nor even excitement; the effect seemed to be independent of his will or desire, a reflex over which he had no control, exactly like what Longinus had reported of his erotic encounters in Märchen.

  ‘You may call me Tiamat,’ the dragon said without preface, and he felt neither surprise nor fear at hearing it speak. ‘But do not imagine that is my real name and think to use it against me. Three questions will I answer freely. Think well before you ask.’

  Quare felt as if he had entered into a dream. ‘Three nights ago, I had a thief at my mercy. Grimalkin was her name. She, too, invited me to ask three questions, as in a fairy tale of old. She spoke of an ancient compact …’

  ‘The Law of Threes,’ the dragon said, its jaws spreading wide as if in silent laughter. Its teeth were the size and shape of scimitars. From its throat came a rumble of thunder. Then: ‘Do you think I am at your mercy?’

  ‘No,’ he said. And the knowledge was upon him from he knew not where: ‘Neither am I at yours.’

  The dragon lashed its tail. ‘Not here,’ it admitted. ‘Not now. But know that things will go differently between us if we meet outside this screen and you do not please me.’

  By screen , Quare understood the dragon – Tiamat, it had named itself – to mean not just the ornamental partition with its delicate Chinese brushwork but the barrier of time erected by so many clocks and watches ticking away in riotous disharmony. A distant part of him was amazed at his calmness, his ability to face the dragon without fear, naked and erect as he was, all but imprisoned within the narrow confines of the bath. Was he dreaming? Had he been drugged again? Or was the dragon casting some kind of spell over him? He did not know, and, strangely, it did not seem important. What did seem important was what questions he should put to the beast. He had wasted the three questions Grimalkin had offered him; he would not make that mistake again. ‘Two nights ago,’ he said at last, choosing his words with care, ‘I received a wound that sh
ould have killed me. Yet I did not die. How is that possible?’

  ‘All men die,’ Tiamat answered. ‘That is their nature, and the nature of all time-bound things.’

  This was not illuminating. The dragon seemed to be suggesting that he had died after all. For the first time, Quare felt a frisson of real fear. It warned him to pursue the matter no further, lest he learn things he could not unlearn, truths that would destroy him.

  ‘Tell me about the watch,’ he said instead. ‘The hunter. What is its secret?’

  Tiamat grinned, baring its formidable teeth again. ‘It is just what you have called it: a hunter. It hunts. That is its secret, or one of them. It has drunk your blood and left its mark upon you. That is how I sensed you. It will answer to you now, protect you … but do not imagine yourself its master. It is a weapon, a very great weapon – too great to be left in the hands of men.’

  Too great to be left in anyone’s hands , Quare thought to himself. ‘If you’ve come to get it back, you’re out of luck,’ he said. ‘I don’t have it any more.’

  ‘But you know where to find it,’ the dragon said. ‘You will bring it to me.’

  ‘Why should I – so that you can give it to Doppler?’

  ‘No … but what do you know of Doppler?’ the creature asked in turn.

  ‘Longinus has told me of his experiences in Märchen and the Otherwhere. He met a dragon there – Hesta was her name. Her master was a man called Doppler. Or, rather, a thing that wore the shape of a man.’

  ‘Longinus understands less than he imagines. But you are right that Doppler only wore the shape of a man. Just as I wear the shape of a dragon. Why? Because it is fitting – that is to say, it suits me. We are born of what you called the Otherwhere, and our true forms are beyond physical representation. To take on any form diminishes us – but some forms diminish us more than others, as they are in some sense further from our origins and what we truly are. But to answer your question – I do not serve Doppler. He is as much my enemy as he is yours. You must give me the hunter because I am the only one who can keep it from him. There is war among the immortals, a war in which the fate of all that lives hangs in the balance. Whoever holds the hunter holds the key to victory. If Doppler should win, he will use it.’