The Emperor of all Things

by Paul Witcover

  Quare struggled to rise from the chair, but the grip of the guards was unbreakable. Now a third guard came over and forced his left hand open, until his fingers were splayed upon the table, his palm pressed down against the wood.

  ‘You call yourself a man of science?’ interjected Longinus from across the room. ‘You’re nothing but a butcher! Courage, Mr Quare. Tell him nothing. Remember what is at stake! Re—’ He broke off as one of the guards punched him in the face.

  ‘Yes, remember, Mr Quare,’ said the Old Wolf. ‘Remember that you are an Englishman, a journeyman of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers who has sworn a solemn oath to our Sovereign Lord the King’s Majesty. Why would any loyal Englishman, having the means to spare king and country the grievous losses of a war whose outcome is, to say the least, uncertain, withhold it? He would not. If you would show yourself loyal, speak now. Share your knowledge of this watch – or weapon, rather.’

  Quare could not concentrate for the roaring between his ears. His skull rang with it. How was it the others could not hear? He shook his head to clear it, but the noise intensified, bringing tears to his eyes.

  ‘What, do you weep already?’ demanded the Old Wolf in a scornful voice. ‘I will give you something to weep about!’ And without hesitation, as if this were not the first time he had performed such an action, he sliced through the little finger of Quare’s left hand.

  The blade passed cleanly through the middle joint of his finger. It happened so fast that he felt no pain at first, just the scalpel gliding through his skin and an unpleasant popping sensation as the ligaments holding the phalanges together were severed. Then the top of his finger lay upon the table like a white grub. Blood welled from the stump, shockingly red in the candlelight.

  ‘Ready to answer, Mr Quare?’ the Old Wolf inquired.

  Quare moaned as pain throbbed into his awareness, carried along on the beating of his heart. Feeling his gorge rise, he glanced away from the ruin of his hand. Pickens looked pale as a ghost, slumping in the grasp of his captors as if about to faint, while Longinus, a bruise already blooming below his right eye, was staring at the table with an expression of horror that seemed to transcend any physical cause. Horror … but also a hunger terrible to see.

  It was that which recalled Quare to his senses. That and the gasp of surprise from Grandmaster Wolfe. Looking down, he saw that the flow of blood from his hand was streaming to the hunter as if following a groove cut into the table. As he had witnessed before, the watch drank the liquid, absorbing it. It began to glow like a hot coal. At the same time, the works leapt into motion, gears whirring in a silent crimson blur.

  ‘What in God’s name …’ The scalpel dropped from the Old Wolf’s fingers to clatter upon the desktop, and he took a step back.

  At the same time, the three guards attending to Quare recoiled as one, releasing him in their instinctive retreat from the engorged timepiece.

  Quare’s maimed hand moved of its own accord to claim the watch. The instant he touched it, a powerful shock reverberated through his body and across his whole awareness. A black wave rolled in from one side and swept him along with it. It seemed to carry him not just out of the room but out of himself.

  All was darkness. He floated in it, suspended. The words of Genesis flashed into his mind: And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep …

  He felt that he had come to such a place. Nothing existed here: all was potential, emptiness fraught with what could be, lacking only the spark of creation to make the immanent real. Yet he also felt, with a certainty he did not question, that something needful was lacking for that spark to be struck. This was not the Otherwhere, of that he had no doubt. It was something else, something more primal still.

  He realized then that he was no longer hearing the song of the hunter. There was no sound at all. Or, rather, only a silence so deep it was itself a kind of sound – a sound that passed beyond the audible and into the realm of the tangible. He felt it all around him, this pregnant silence; it was the darkness in which he floated; it coursed about him like a playful ocean; its currents caressed him with velveteen softness, batting him about. It swarmed him.

  It purred .

  And suddenly Quare knew, again without question, what had happened to the cats in Master Magnus’s study. They were here. Just as the watch had absorbed his blood, so had it absorbed their furry essences, sucking the spirits from their bodies and leaving only empty husks behind. And that meant …

  I am inside the watch , he realized.

  He, too, had been absorbed. Was he dead then? His body lying slumped over the Old Wolf’s desk? Was he – his spirit, rather – trapped here now, a prisoner of the watch? Had the hunter captured its prey?

  Panic and terror rose up in him, but he had no way to express them. He had no body here: no limbs to lash out with, no mouth with which to scream. He floated in the dark … yet was himself a thing of darkness. Would he, in time, flow into the surrounding dark, disperse into it, forget himself entirely? Even if he could have cried out, called on Tiamat, he did not think the dragon could hear him – or, if it did hear, breach the walls of this prison. The geis laid upon him had no power here. There would be no rescue. No escape.

  He found himself thinking of Master Magnus, who had set all this in motion by sending him to steal the timepiece from Lord Wichcote … and then given the watch a taste of his blood. Had he known somehow that this would be the result? Had he intended for it to happen?

  Quare understood with dawning dismay that his mission on that moonlit night had been very different from what he had been told. Why had he not seen it sooner? He had been too busy running for his life, from one dire mishap to another. But now that there was no place left to run, the logic of it unfolded to him. Lord Wichcote – that is to say, Longinus – must have been in on it as well. Perhaps part of whatever had really been going on had been, as Longinus claimed, a trap laid to catch the false Grimalkin, the young woman he had overpowered upon the rooftop. But there was more to it than that. There had to be. The trap, Quare felt, had been laid for him as well. But why? To what purpose?

  He had mourned Master Magnus’s death. Now he cursed his name. For lying to him. Using him. Leaving him with questions that had no answers, and an eternity in which to ask them. Why, this is hell , he thought with a flicker of hysteria like the first hint of a madness that would engulf him whether he resisted it or not. And why should he resist? Better to surrender. Perhaps that was the only escape possible.

  A ragged giggle issued from out of the dark. Or, no, it was the darkness itself that laughed. A terrible sound, like sanity ripping. Then it spoke, which was far, far worse.

  ‘ Well, well. Look what the cats dragged in .’

  The words came from everywhere at once – including, it seemed, from inside him … to the extent he still had an inside. Was this his own voice that addressed him, a voice spun out of the threads of his unravelled reason? Quare was losing his sense of separateness, of self.

  ‘ You wound me, Mr Quare. Do you not recognize my voice? ’

  And with that, he did. It was not precisely the voice he remembered but instead a close facsimile, as if whatever addressed him now lacked the equipment for human speech and had been forced to make do with materials unsuited to the task. Even so, there was no mistaking the voice of his late master, Theophilus Magnus.

  18

  What the Cats Dragged In

  THE VOICE OF Quare’s dead master giggled again. ‘ Behold .’

  Tendrils of darkness coalesced into the shape of a man, a living shadow cast by no light that Quare could see. Here he saw by some other means, as if with his mind’s eye. The figure thus revealed stood tall and unbowed, not the hunched, twisted shape of Master Theophilus Magnus but a paragon of male perfection, a David carved from ebony rather than marble, sleek-muscled as a god …yet sexless, its groin smooth. Around this statuesque figure, familiar details swam into focus: a desk, chairs, bookcases an
d stacks of books, even burning candles … all bereft of colour: only black and white and shades of grey. Yet it was unquestionably Master Magnus’s study – or, rather, a close facsimile of it … just as the voice was a close facsimile of the master’s. Quare perceived that he, too, now possessed a shape, a kind of inverse silhouette, a white space that felt less like the outline of his own body than what was left after the dark had drained away.

  ‘ You may speak ,’ said the shadow of the man.

  ‘ Is it really you, Master? ’ Quare asked, and the voice that issued from out of the white space that defined him was both familiar and strange, like his own voice echoing from a great distance.

  ‘ It is I ,’ came the reply. ‘ And yet not I. That is to say, the man I was is only part of what I am becoming .’

  ‘ And what is that? ’ Quare asked, not at all sure he wanted to know.

  The darkness opposite him unravelled, then re-formed. In an instant, the shadow of the man was gone, along with the furnishings on that side of the room and, indeed, the room itself: all blown away like so much smoke in a gust of wind. In their place hovered a wingless dragon so black it glowed. Quare’s first thought was that Tiamat had found him, that merely thinking of the dragon had been enough to summon it, though he had not called for it to come. But of course this was not Tiamat.

  ‘ Is it not wonderful? ’ demanded the dragon in the voice of Master Magnus. ‘ Do you not see? The hunter is not a device for telling time. Nor is it a weapon, precisely. It is, rather, a chamber of sorts, an alembic in which the essences of various creatures may be combined to a new and higher purpose. In short, it is an egg. A dragon’s egg .’

  Quare was speechless. Longinus had told him that dragons had been born from the stuff of the Otherwhere, and Tiamat had indirectly confirmed that. Neither of them had said anything about an egg, however.

  In the next instant, the dragon was gone, its dark substance shredding then coalescing again into the shape of Master Magnus’s study. Of the master himself, there was no sign. Yet his voice continued to issue from all around. ‘ The egg draws sustenance from the outer world. It feeds upon our blood, our very lives. My blood and yours, Mr Quare. My life, and the lives of my cats. All mingled to quicken what lay quiescent until wakened by our presence .’

  ‘ So I am dead, then. The hunter has killed me .’ He felt numb.

  The disquieting giggle came again. ‘ Rather, it has saved your life .’

  ‘ I don’t understand … ’

  ‘ How could you? Even I succumbed to madness when I awakened here, a lone mind adrift in a sea of eternal night, with only the squalling spirits of my cats for company. Many years passed before I regained my reason, like a crippled man relearning the use of his limbs. Little wonder that you would be confused .’

  ‘ Master, you have only been dead a matter of days .’

  ‘ Time runs differently here, Mr Quare, as you shall learn. Perhaps it does not run at all. That is a question beyond the grasp of human intellect, I fear. But soon I shall leave all that behind and be born anew, with knowledge and power beyond anything you can imagine .’

  ‘ Born how? ’ Quare asked.

  ‘ Why, by hatching out of this egg, of course .’

  ‘ And then what? ’

  ‘ I shall spread my wings, sir ,’ Magnus answered as if this were a foregone conclusion and Quare a dunce for having failed to see it. ‘ I shall bring order and reason to the world. Superstition and ignorance will be eradicated. There will be no more war, no more religion, only the fearless pursuit of scientific inquiry, under my direction .’

  ‘ But Master … do you imagine a dragon will be welcomed with open arms – a creature of legend suddenly made real? You will be seen as a demon, a monster to be slain. Indeed, I can well imagine that your presence might end the war between England and her enemies – but only so that they may unite against you .’

  ‘ Let them try. They shall learn to fear – and to obey. But I will not be restricted to the body of a dragon, Mr Quare. Dragons are protean creatures, or so I now perceive. I will walk the Earth as a man – as the man I should have been, my outer form at last a match for my inner qualities. People will follow such a man willingly – perhaps not all of them, but enough .’ Again the darkness took the shape of a godlike man.

  Quare felt a shudder pass through him. ‘ Listen to yourself, Master – you are talking like a tyrant, not the man I knew … the man whose death I mourned .’

  ‘ In that, you were too hasty – though I appreciate the sentiment, of course. But as to the other: perhaps you did not know me as well as you thought. Perhaps I did not know myself. My perceptions were as stunted and twisted as the body that was my prison. But now I have escaped from both .’

  ‘ This is monstrous ,’ Quare said.

  ‘ Miraculous, rather. Yes, science has its miracles, too! For what else is this mechanism but a thing of science – an artificial egg, incubator of dragons, of gods? ’

  ‘ Of madness .’

  ‘ You disappoint me, Mr Quare, indeed you do. You, too, have known what it is to be mocked and scorned, to have the particulars of your birth held against you. Why would you not rejoice at the prospect of a world in which an orphan or a bastard could rise as far as his talents might take him? ’

  ‘ That world I would welcome. But you speak of fear and compelled obedience. I will not be part of such a world .’

  ‘ You are part of it already. When the hunter – the egg – drank our blood, it tasted us. It sifted our qualities and judged us. It chose how to use us in its great work of growing a dragon .’

  ‘ You speak as if it were intelligent .’

  ‘ Is a clock intelligent? A loom? This is a device, Mr Quare. A machine. It does what it was built to do – no more, no less .’

  ‘ Built by whom? ’

  ‘ That I do not know … yet .’

  ‘ But you knew the hunter was no ordinary timepiece. You’ve known that for years. You and Longinus – Lord Wichcote, that is – worked together once to discover its secrets. He has confessed as much to me. Surely he must have told you of his experiences in Märchen. Of the Otherwhere. Of Wachter, Doppler, and the rest .’

  ‘ Of course he did – though now I perceive, for everything you know is known to me in this place, that his lordship omitted some choice information. That extraordinary foot of his, for instance. And to think that Grimalkin was under my nose all that time! ’ His laughter rumbled. ‘ But Lord Wichcote is a man who likes his secrets. No matter. For many years, we did work together, as you say. If one of us had spilled even a drop of blood during those investigations, things might have gone very differently! But we had no inkling that blood was the key. No clue whatsoever. And finally, out of frustration, or greed, or an excess of caution, perhaps, fearful of drawing the attention of Doppler or some greater power, Lord Wichcote stopped cooperating. He refused to grant me access to the hunter, or even to tell me where he had hidden it. We continued to work together on other matters – he remained a key asset of the Most Secret and Exalted Order. But a certain mutual trust was spoiled .’

  ‘ Is that why you sent me to his house that night? To steal the hunter, so you could resume your investigations? ’

  ‘ I had no delusions on that score. Even at his age, Lord Wichcote is a deadly swordsman, a consummate fighter. I doubt there is a regulator alive who could best him. Certainly not you. No, you could never have stolen the hunter from him .’

  ‘ What then? Did you expect him to simply give it to me? ’

  ‘ In point of fact, yes, I did .’

  ‘ And why should he have done that? ’

  ‘ Have you not marked the resemblance between you? Lord Wichcote is your father, Mr Quare .’

  Quare had not thought he could be any more discomposed than he was already. But in that, he had been wrong. ‘ Lord Wichcote … Longinus … my father?’

  ‘ You are his bastard by-blow. I tracked you down, brought you to London, trained you in t
he skills of a journeyman and regulator – all so that I might have a trump card with his lordship. It is always wise, I have found, when dealing with the gentry, to do so from a position of strength. They do not generally feel themselves bound by honour or any other constraint when dealing with those they perceive to be their inferiors .’

  ‘ But you are wrong. I asked Lord Wichcote himself if he were not my father. I put the question to him directly, face to face. He denied it .’

  ‘ Of course he did. Such is the way of the world. But make no mistake: you are his son, his bastard, and he knows it well .’

  ‘ Has he always known? ’

  ‘ No. He had not known of your existence until the very day I dispatched you to him. That same afternoon, I sent a confidential note to his lordship detailing the particulars of your parentage and informing him that you would be paying him a visit later that same night. Knowing that there are men in this world who do not welcome their by-blows with open arms, I warned him in no uncertain terms that if any harm befell you, I would release all the details to His Majesty … and to the vultures of Fleet Street. If he wished to avoid disgrace or worse, he need only hand over the hunter to you. I did not like to resort to blackmail, but there was no choice. Time was running out, you see. Others were on the trail of the hunter, among them, or so I thought, the notorious Grimalkin. I did not have faith in my old friend’s ability to keep the hunter safe from this paragon of thievery. And was I not right to be concerned? So it was that I decided the time had come to play my trump card. And I feel certain that his lordship would have given you the hunter, Mr Quare … if Grimalkin – a false Grimalkin, as it appears, and a woman no less! – had not got there first .’

  ‘ Why didn’t you tell me any of this before? ’ Quare demanded. ‘ I trusted you … looked upon you as I might have a father .’

  ‘ Yes, that made it all very easy, I must say. You would do well in the future, Mr Quare, to be a good deal less trusting. At least you need not search for a substitute father any longer. And after all, haven’t things turned out for the best? You retrieved the watch from the female masquerading as Grimalkin and returned it to me. I pricked my finger in examining it, and discovered the secret key I had looked for in vain all those years. Thanks to you, I have shed my ruined body and will soon enjoy a better one, along with the power to reshape the world. I owe you much – and never let it be said that I do not repay my debts .’