The Emperor of all Things

by Paul Witcover

  ‘There are larger caverns by far to be met with below the ground. Indeed, I have often thought that another city exists here, a kind of anti-London … or, since these spaces long pre-date the first rude building raised above them, it is London that is the obverse reflection of this place.’

  ‘A city below a city … Do people live here, then?’

  ‘Some,’ said Longinus. ‘It was through one of the branching tunnels of this London underground, if I may term it such, that Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators gained access to the cellars of Parliament. Others have found their way here for more benign purposes, compelled by curiosity or misfortune. I learned of the tunnels from my father, and he from his, and part of my inheritance was a collection of maps, to which I have added substantially over the years, for, as you can imagine, a working knowledge of this maze might well benefit anyone desirous of moving about the city in secrecy. Yet I do not believe I have discovered more than a fraction of what exists. There are routes I have not explored, passages too dangerous to traverse unaided, if at all. Many who come here, for whatever reason, do not find their way out again – I have come upon their bodies, or what is left of them, often enough in my explorations. Others do not wish to leave, and dwell here like the kobolds of legend, furtive and sly, inured to the dark and suspicious of surface dwellers; I have done much over the years to gain their trust, for they do not take kindly to intruders. But tonight we shall not stray from the familiar paths – familiar to me, at least. They will take us back to the guild hall, with no one the wiser.’

  ‘How can you be certain the Old Wolf doesn’t know of these paths? Perhaps there will be guards waiting to take us as we emerge.’

  ‘There is always a risk,’ Longinus said with a shrug. ‘But I think it unlikely. I have shared my knowledge of the underground with no one – not even Master Magnus himself. Do not forget that I have spent many hours in the guild hall, disguised as a servant. If the Old Wolf or anyone else there knew of these spaces, I would have discovered it before now. No, their knowledge of the underground extends no further than the dungeon in which you were imprisoned. They have no notion of what lies below those cells. No doubt they did once, long ago, for some of the old entrances have been bricked up … though even those barriers are crumbling now, and useless.’

  ‘And when we gain entrance to the guild hall – what then?’

  ‘That will depend on what we find there. Planning can only take one so far, Mr Quare; we regulators live or die by improvisation. But let us “suit the action to the word, the word to the action”, as the Bard has it. Come.’ He advanced into the cavern, leaving Quare to follow.

  This he did, albeit slowly, gazing about with a mix of trepidation and wonder. The ceiling was so high overhead that he could not see it, only long fingers of rock that depended out of the dark like icicles … melting icicles, for they dripped with water whose mineral content – the rich tang of iron and limestone freighted the cold air – had accreted into slick stone fingers on the cavern floor that reached up to clasp what had given them birth, a many-handed infant grasping for its many-handed mother, as if this were the pits of Tartarus into which Zeus had cast the Titans. Or as if these two sundered halves strove to pull themselves back together, repairing the ancient breach that had separated them. Despite the spaciousness of the cavern, Quare was very aware of the weight pressing down, all the streets and buildings of the London he knew resting on the shoulders of this secret sister city, which seemed at once as solid as a fortress and as fragile as a bubble.

  ‘No dawdling, Mr Quare,’ came Longinus’s impatient voice.

  Quare hurried to catch up.

  His guide stood waiting at the far side of the cavern, beside a fissure angling sharply into the rock – one of many such passages converging here, Quare thought, like streets and alleys leading to a central square in the world above.

  ‘It is impressive, I know,’ Longinus said. ‘Like something out of Dante. Later, when we are not so pressed for time, I will take you on a tour. But for now you must not let yourself be distracted. Follow as closely as you can, as lightly as you can, and speak only as necessary, for sound travels in peculiar ways in these convoluted spaces.’

  Quare nodded. His mouth was dry, his skin covered in clammy sweat beneath the loose grey costume of Grimalkin. Once again, he tried to discern some connection to the hunter, straining not just with his ears but with every fibre of his being to hear the timepiece calling to him as Tiamat had said it would. To feel its tug. But all he felt was a diffuse tingling, as if his garments were imbued with a faint electrostatic charge.

  This sensation he associated, after a moment’s reflection, not with the hunter but with the various timepieces secreted about his person, whose ticking constituted a steady background noise that merged into the echoes of dripping water until – as he had often felt in the guild hall – it was easy to fancy himself within the workings of a gigantic clock. Only this was a clock far older and greater than any built by human hands.

  He had a sudden glimpse then, in his mind’s eye, of a clock greater still: the moon and the planets, the sun itself and all the far-flung stars, pieces of a vast and intricate orrery marking the minutes and hours until time and the universe ran down. And then? Would it be the Last Judgement, life or torment everlasting meted out by the stern justice of the Almighty, as he had been taught from childhood and, with a child’s credulity, had always believed? Or, on the contrary, was oblivion the common fate of men and the universe?

  Or was there yet another alternative – again, the Law of Threes! – bound up with the watch and the Otherwhere, an alternative that lay coiled in the secret heart of the hunter like a charge of gunpowder awaiting a spark?

  At that moment, as if in answer, and without a glimmer of warning, what might have been a ghostly hand reached inside his chest. It slid past whatever shield the timepieces had knit around him, wrapped icy fingers about his heart, and yanked, as though to pull it out of his body. He gasped, more from shock than pain. Every inch of his skin erupted in a fierce buzzing. Then, in the blink of an eye, the hand was gone – whether of its own volition or banished by the effect of the watches, he did not know.

  Stumbling forward with a groan, Quare put out a hand to steady himself against the cavern’s rocky side. Dark spots flashed before his eyes; a mass of bees seemed to have chosen his head for a hive. He gulped air, afraid he would be sick. At some point, he had dropped his torch; it lay guttering on the ground.

  Longinus’s voice reached him through the buzzing. ‘What is it, Mr Quare? Are you all right?’

  He nodded, speech beyond him. Nor, he found a moment later, when the buzzing had receded and he could speak again, was he able to relate what had happened. The dragon’s geis prevented him … another ghostly hand, or rather claw, this one squeezing his throat. But he did not doubt that the hunter had made its presence felt at last. One more power seeking to pull his strings.

  ‘I have seen this before,’ Longinus said meanwhile. ‘There are those who cannot bear to abide beneath the ground for any length of time. It is not a question of cowardice; here, the stoutest heart may quail without shame. If you cannot go on—’

  ‘I can,’ Quare interrupted, his voice echoing hollowly. He stooped to retrieve the torch, which blazed up again once clear of the ground. His arm, his whole body trembled, though the buzzing had subsided, dwindling to a kind of background hum. His heart felt bruised. Helpless he might be, but that did not make him any less angry; on the contrary. He was seething with rage. He lacked only the means to express it, and a target on which to focus it. Both, he felt sure, lay ahead. ‘By all means, let us continue.’

  Longinus held his gaze with his own, then nodded and slid into the passage.

  Thus began a journey that Quare would always remember as a kind of dream. With his vision curtailed by the narrow fissures they squeezed through and the caverns into which those fissures opened, only to contract again, it was easy to imagine that they were n
ot moving at all, but instead walking in place while the subterranean world moved around them, changing its shape and even its substance from moment to moment under a torch-spun magician’s cloak of shadow and darkness, as if Longinus had brought him back into the Otherwhere. And it occurred to Quare that perhaps this was as close to the Otherwhere as could exist in what he had always thought of as reality but which now seemed to him merely, as it were, a special (and necessarily lesser) case of a realer real , like Plato’s shadows cast upon the cave wall. Here was the primordial stuff of the planet, out of which the world above and its myriad wonders, living and unliving, had arisen … and into which they would all return, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, just as this reality itself would one day be enfolded back into the Otherwhere if Doppler – or, he suspected, Tiamat – gained possession of the hunter.

  Yet how could he deny Tiamat the hunter, assuming they were able to retrieve it from the Old Wolf? He had seen how fruitless it was to fight the geis Tiamat had laid upon him. Every detail of their encounter was engraved upon his memory, so much so that he felt the creature’s reptilian presence still, as if it were lurking somewhere near by, for if there was ever a place that a dragon might find hospitable, this was surely it. He half expected, each time they entered a cavern, to see a pile of bones and treasure with a scaly form coiled on top of it like a sovereign seated on a throne.

  Longinus set a fast pace, and Quare had to hurry to keep up. There was no time to study his surroundings or even to mark the path. If he were separated from Longinus, or if the other man were captured or killed at the guild hall, he would not be able to find his way back through this underground maze. He thought to mention this to Longinus but then decided to hold his tongue, afraid that anything he said, however softly, would find its way to their enemies, mortal or otherwise. In any case, he felt that as long as Tiamat had need of him, it would not abandon him here; if he called to it, it would come: it had promised – or threatened – as much. And however little he liked it, he knew that he would call upon the dragon if it were a question of dying down here, alone in the cold dark.

  Longinus had spoken of men and women driven to seek shelter underground, and as they progressed farther into the journey, their course continuing ever downward, Quare began to see occasional evidence of it: rubbish left behind, scraps of old clothing and rags, the bones of small animals, the remains of fires. Markings on the walls made with charcoal or simply scratched into the stone: crude drawings of human and animal figures, simple declarations, names, initials, dates … and symbols he did not recognize, like letters in an unknown language. But he did not see a living soul.

  After some time – how long, Quare could not have guessed – Longinus drew to a halt at the entrance to yet another cavern. Looking back at Quare, he raised a finger to his lips for silence, then motioned for him to approach.

  ‘We are not alone,’ he whispered as Quare came up.

  Quare glanced behind him, but saw only the shadows thrown by their torches.

  ‘You must let me do the talking,’ Longinus continued. ‘Say nothing unless you are spoken to, and then be brief and respectful in your replies. Comply at once with whatever is asked of you. Under no circumstances draw your sword or any other weapon, unless I draw first. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes. But should we not don our masks?’

  ‘No. My face is known here, though not my true identity.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Shh,’ he hissed. ‘This is not the time for questions or arguments. I have broken no laws in bringing you here, but I have stretched certain … understandings. I had hoped to avoid discovery, but like so many hopes, it appears to have been futile. So be it. In a way, Mr Quare, you are fortunate indeed. First, to see what few surface-dwellers have ever seen. And second, to do so in my presence, for otherwise you would almost certainly be dead.’

  ‘If this is fortune,’ Quare replied, ‘I could do with less of it.’

  ‘’At could be arranged,’ came a voice from out of the darkness ahead, speaking in the thickest Cockney that Quare had ever heard, so that it seemed almost a foreign language even to his London-trained ear.

  Quare put a hand to his sword, but Longinus grasped his wrist, preventing him from drawing. ‘Be still, sir!’

  Now a second voice spoke, this one from behind. ‘’At’s right. Ain’t no cause ter be all berligerent like. We don’t mean no ’arm to them what means us no ’arm. We Morecockneyans is a peaceful folk.’

  ‘More … what?’ Quare asked, pulling free of Longinus’s grasp.

  ‘Cockneyans,’ came the first voice. ‘Morecockneyans, on account of ’ow we’re more cockney than the blasted Cockney.’

  The second voice laughed. ‘We’re the original article, yer might say – been down ’ere since before the Great Fire, we ’ave. This is our kingdom, your lordships, and you may pass ’ere by our leave or not at all. Now, put out them torches and let’s ’ave a look at yer.’

  ‘Put out—’

  ‘Do as he says,’ Longinus interrupted. ‘They have become so habituated to dark that even the poor light of these torches blinds them.’ So saying, he let his torch fall to the ground and stamped it out. ‘Go on, Mr Quare. We’re perfectly safe, I assure you, as long as we behave in a manner befitting guests.’

  ‘If you think I’m going to— ow!’ Quare dropped his torch as what felt like a hornet’s sting pierced the back of his hand. In the seconds before Longinus stamped out the torch, he saw an angry red welt rising there. Then a darkness fell that was beyond any darkness he had ever experienced; it seemed to require another word entirely. He fumbled for his weapons, then froze as the tip of a blade pricked his throat.

  ‘Quare, is it?’ queried the voice that had laughed. It was not laughing now. ‘You’d best listen to your mate, Mr Quare.’

  ‘Gorblimey, if it ain’t the Grey Ghost, old Grimalkin ’isself!’ exclaimed the first voice meanwhile. ‘It’s been an age. I ’eard tell you’d retired.’

  ‘I had.’

  ‘A bit old ter be gallervantin’ about down ’ere, ain’t yer?’

  ‘No older than you, Cornelius.’

  The voice chuckled. ‘Sharp ears for an old man.’

  ‘My blade’s grown no duller, either. Hello, Starkey.’

  Quare felt the blade at his throat withdraw.

  ‘Grimalkin,’ came the reply. ‘Up ter yer old tricks again, are yer?’

  ‘You could say that,’ he answered. ‘Mr Quare and I are in pursuit of a certain timepiece.’

  ‘And who is Mr Quare at ’ome, eh?’ asked the voice of Cornelius. ‘Took on a ’prentice, ’ave yer? Never thought I’d see the day. You was always solitary as a cat.’

  ‘Mr Quare is a journeyman of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers,’ Longinus said.

  ‘Oho,’ said Starkey with a laugh. ‘A regulator, you mean. One of the Old Wolf’s whelps, is ’e? Or does ’e answer to Master Mephistopheles?’

  ‘Master Magnus is dead,’ Longinus said.

  Silence greeted this news. Quare, meanwhile, had begun to notice that all was not as dark as it had first appeared. A diffuse, pale glow, fainter than the first pale smudge of dawn, hung like a sourceless fog in the air, and though it did not exactly illuminate anything, it did place objects into a kind of relief, so that he was able to discern, though none too clearly, the silhouettes of the two Morecockneyans. Cornelius, it appeared, was a large, stout man, nearly as big as the Old Wolf himself, while Starkey was thin as a greyhound.

  ‘Dead ’ow?’ asked Cornelius at last. ‘Was it murder?’

  ‘Did the Old Wolf do ’im?’ Starkey chimed in eagerly.

  ‘I cannot say,’ Longinus replied.

  ‘Cannot … or will not?’ Cornelius demanded.

  ‘In truth, I do not know for certain how he died. I cannot explain it. All I know is that it involves the timepiece I spoke of.’

  ‘Worf a lot, is it?’

  ‘It does not even tell the time,’ Longin
us demurred.

  ‘Then why are you and Mr Quare ’ere so innerested in it?’ asked Starkey in a sceptical tone.

  ‘For two reasons. First, it belonged to me once, and was stolen by—’

  At this, Starkey guffawed. ‘What, the great Grimalkin robbed? There’s a larf!’

  Longinus continued testily. ‘You can see why I wish it back. No self-respecting thief enjoys having the tables turned. And to add insult to injury, the churl who stole it did so in the guise of none other than’ – and here he sketched a self-mocking bow – ‘the great Grimalkin.’

  ‘The cheek of it!’ Starkey sounded delighted. ‘The rogue!’

  ‘Second,’ Longinus resumed, ‘the timepiece is of considerable scientific interest.’

  ‘Pull the other one,’ Cornelius objected. ‘You said it don’t tell the time.’

  ‘Neither does a cannon or a musket.’

  ‘What, is it some kind of weapon, then?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ Longinus said. ‘Its mechanism is unique, to put it mildly. It is no exaggeration to say that whoever can uncover its secrets will gain considerable power thereby – perhaps even enough to decide the outcome of the war.’

  ‘What war?’

  ‘Come now, sir,’ said Longinus. ‘You cannot expect me to believe that you are ignorant of the fact that our country is fighting for its very life against the French and their allies!’

  ‘You surface dwellers are always fightin’ over somefin’ or other. It don’t make us no nevermind down ’ere,’ said Starkey with a shrug of his narrow shoulders.

  Quare’s vision had continued to improve, and he saw now that the faint glow he had discerned earlier had its source in Starkey and Cornelius; or, rather, in a kind of pale powder that covered their faces and clothes. It radiated a sickly greenish light, giving them the aspect of mouldering ghosts. Cornelius had a nose like a warty potato above a beard like a tangle of moss, while Starkey’s face was gaunt, his nose sharp as a knife’s edge, his eyes sunk so deep in their sockets that their existence could only be inferred. And though Cornelius was fully as large as the Old Wolf, his bulk, unlike that of the corpulent clockman, was made up of muscle.