The Emperor of all Things

by Paul Witcover

  She did not come down.

  Quare was in the grasp of claws larger than his body. They held him in a gentle but unbreakable grip, like the bars of an iron cage. On the other end of those claws was the dragon he had first seen in the vision he’d experienced at Lord Wichcote’s house. Tiamat, as she truly was: sleek, sinuous, serpentine, with scales as blue as the sky … so blue they seemed translucent. She was huge; he did not see how she could have squeezed herself into the body of the woman who had kissed him.

  As before, the effect of her presence was immediate and intense. He had no sense that resistance was possible; it was not a matter of will or even desire but instead the plain working of some natural – or supernatural – law to which he was subject by virtue of being human. It had been no different inside the egg; there, too, he had yielded up his seed in reflexive paroxysms that were anything but pleasant. For a time, he was lost in it, swallowed up.

  But at last there was nothing left. He was limp, wrung out, fever-stricken. Only then did Quare begin to take in his surroundings, though in a dreamy kind of way. Tiamat was flying with a peculiar wingless grace, seeming to swim through the air like a snake squirming through water; she did not glance down at him or seem to be aware of him at all other than by the fact that she did not drop him. There must have been a dozen or more crossbow bolts embedded in her body, but she seemed unaware of them as well. They were like thorns in the hide of an elephant.

  Quare knew at once that he was back in the Otherwhere. Not so much by anything he saw – the desert landscape of reddish sand and rolling dunes far beneath them, over which Tiamat’s stark shadow glided, clinging to every indentation and swell, might have been the sands of some African or Asian desert undulating below the baleful, white-hot sun – as by the overwhelming impression he had that everything could change in an instant, that the underlying reality of the scene was very different from what his senses were equipped to perceive. He had felt the same way when Longinus had first taken him into the Otherwhere, and it had been much the same within the egg.

  The egg that Aylesford was carrying to France.

  At that, recalled to the urgency of things, Quare called to Tiamat, but his voice was too weak, his words borne away by the blast of the wind that was the sole indication of the dragon’s prodigious speed. Where was she taking him? And what would become of him when they got there? Much has been asked of you , she had told him. Little has been offered in return. That is about to change . But Quare had had enough change to last a lifetime. He didn’t want any more.

  The desert stretched ahead without end. The sun might have been nailed to the sky.

  Tiamat flew on. She did not slow, did not seem to tire. She did not once address a word to him, or glance in his direction. He wondered if she had forgotten about him. Racked by fever, he shivered and baked by turns.

  It was in this state that he noticed a second shadow on the sand below. It was small, and at first he thought it was not a shadow at all but something physically present on the ground, a herd of horses, perhaps, or a caravan. But it grew, spreading like a black stain … or an angry cloud rising up to confront them. Or no, he realized dimly, with a certain distant interest, not rising but rather falling …

  Tiamat swerved as something big came roaring past. At once, all was confusion. Buffeted within the cage of the dragon’s claws, Quare saw flashes of ground and sky and what might have been a living shadow, night poured into flesh. The air rang with shrieks and bellows until he thought his eardrums must burst.

  Then Tiamat stopped dead in the air and hung there, her body eeling slowly, the movement somehow keeping her aloft. Streaks of a silvery liquid trickled down her blue scales. An angry hiss escaped her massive jaws.

  Hovering a hundred feet away or less was a black dragon even bigger than she was. It exuded age and power. Silver ichor dripped from its claws. Its head was like a sun-blasted mountainside scored with fissures and ravines. One eye was a pearlescent orb whose surface rippled like the placid mirror of a lake disturbed by the movement of some hidden swimmer. Where the pair of that eye should have been was a dark, gaping pit into which Quare thought he might fall for ever without touching bottom. To gaze into its abyssal depths was to already be falling into them, or so it seemed. He felt himself stiffening despite his terror; then he was coming again, burning with humiliation at his helplessness, hating his human frailty, this flesh that responded without his leave, slave to masters he did not know.

  Neither dragon paid him the slightest heed.

  ‘Where is it?’ the black thundered. ‘What have you done with my eye?’

  Or was it ‘egg’? Quare, half deafened, was not sure what he had heard.

  ‘I do not have it,’ Tiamat replied. ‘Sister, move aside.’

  ‘You lie,’ the black raged. ‘You reek of time and generation! Give back what is mine – or I will take it!’

  Before Tiamat could answer, the black struck. The two dragons twined together in a murderous flux, slashing, biting. They rose entangled, knotting and unknotting. The noise of their roaring was a physical thing.

  The claws caging Quare came open; he fell.

  He watched the dragons, still locked together, dwindle above him to a single speck. Then he began to tumble. The air swaddled him in a rough silence all its own. A flash of blue sky and sun gave way to the tawny pelt of a brown landscape leaping to meet him. Then he saw blue sky again, only a different sky, in which two suns blazed; but in the blink of an eye, this impossible vision was replaced by a slate-grey ocean stretching endlessly, wave upon wave. Another blink, and he was gazing at a night sky spangled with strange stars. Blink: a city greater than London lay buried beneath a blanket of unspoiled snow. Blink: a fleet of great ships depending from greater balloons, like Magnus’s Personal Flotation Device on an immense scale, glided through the air.

  With each revolution of Quare’s tumbling body, the scene changed, as if he were flipping between worlds. But then it came to him that he wasn’t falling at all, that he was hovering in place as the dragons had done, and the sights he was seeing were glimpses of what lay beyond the spinning windows of the standing stones between which Tiamat had carried him. For all the time he had been here, for all the distance Tiamat had carried him, still he was somehow at the very centre of those stones. And if that were so, why couldn’t he just, as he had done the last time he’d been in the Otherwhere, choose a path out of it? The windows … or doors, rather, were here before him, offering themselves in swift succession. Were their shapes in some way symbolic of what they led to, like the alchemical symbols of planets and stars? If so, it was a code he could not decipher. He would have to trust to luck.

  Now, without understanding what he was doing or how, as if in the grip of an instinct he hadn’t known he possessed until the moment came for its exercise, Quare groped towards a doorway, not caring where it might lead. He only knew, with a blind, animal certainty he did not question, that he could not remain here. He must escape or die. He reached out with his mind, or some aspect of his mind, like a drunken man fumbling to fit a key into a door. He thrust, thrust again. Felt himself slip in. He turned, or the world did.

  All was darkness. And cold. And then it was as if he had been falling the whole time, after all. For he struck ground, or something as solid as ground, with a force that snuffed the candle of his consciousness.

  Epilogue

  WAR HAD COME to the village, stayed a while, and then moved on. What structures remained were little more than skeletons, blackened shards of timber and stone standing desolate beneath a grey sky from which flakes of snow drifted down like ash to settle upon wreckage half locked in ice, as though these ruins were of no recent vintage but had passed long centuries at the heart of a glacier only now, begrudgingly, yielding them back to the world. Nothing stirred in the frozen, stark tableau. Not the faintest whisper of wind could be heard. If whatever battle had been fought here had left survivors, it seemed they had long since fled, taking the bodies of their d
ead with them. Even the birds had departed.

  Into the silence came a keening, a rising wail that split the air like the cry of an angel cast out of heaven. A shining arc traced a steep descent, ending in an explosion of snow and ice and billowing clouds of steam.

  The ground shuddered.

  A bell began to toll.

  The steam thinned, returning to the ground as a new and whiter dusting of snow that clung to a grey-garbed man sprawled on his back in a soup of half-melted ice and snow at the base of a clock tower that hadn’t been there before, as if it had crashed to earth along with the splayed and unmoving figure beside it.

  The tower, like the surrounding buildings, was heavily damaged. Gaping holes punctured its sides where cannonballs had bitten deep, leaving splintered fragments of carved figures whose postures and expressions seemed to reflect the horror of the instant in which their artistry had been obliterated, while the proscenium, where once automatons would have paraded, was a jumble of stone and exposed machinery in which could be glimpsed portions of those same automatons, an arm here, a leg there, heads and torsos mixed willy-nilly, like a graveyard after an earthquake. The clock itself, which had been set above the proscenium, had also been struck. Its face was as pocked and cratered as the moon. Most of its numbers were missing, and its metal hands were bent and twisted, pointing outwards, away from what was left of the clock, as though registering a time that could not be represented there. Yet despite the carnage, the campanile was intact, and it was from there that the single bell rang out its insistent summons, as if to wake the man lying at the foot of the tower, half sunk in a bloody slush already re-hardening to ice around him.

  But the man did not wake. Instead, a door opened at the base of the tower, and from its interior emerged an elderly man in a powdered wig and gold-framed spectacles, dressed all in black. He hurried to the prone figure as if he’d been expecting just such a visitation. He was so thin, his movements so jerky, that he might almost have been an automaton. All the while, the bell in the campanile kept up its ringing.

  This man was more supple than his angular appearance or evident age indicated; stronger, too, for he stooped and lifted the fallen man with ease. Cradling his burden, he retraced his steps to the tower and slipped back inside, turning as he entered to ensure that no portion of the limp and lanky body in his arms would brush against the doorway.

  The door closed behind him.

  The echoes of the bell faded. The devastated village stood silent and still under a feathering of falling snow.

  Meanwhile, in a moonlit attic filled with a variety of clocks, no two of which told a common time, so that the air was thronged with a quarrelsome murmur of ticking and tocking, a peal of bells began to ring. Every clock able to announce the hour in some fashion or other did so now, as if, despite the discordant times displayed upon their faces, they had come to an inner agreement … or were reacting to a common stimulus , like a London crowd that in one instant fuses its separate members into a single organism able to cry out with one voice at the passage of a king or the hanging of a highwayman.

  As abruptly as they had rung out, the clocks quieted. Silence reigned in the attic. Even the sounds of ticking had ceased. The hands on every dial had stopped dead, pointing straight up at XII.

  A whisper of air, like a sigh, as the casing of a tall clock swung open.

  A groan, as a grey-clad figure slumped from within to the sawdust-covered attic floor. And began to crawl, ever so slowly, across it.

  Leaving a bloody trail.

  A second whisper, exactly like the first, as another casing opened in a clock that stood alongside the other.

  A second grey-clad figure slumped groaning to the floor and began to crawl after the first.

  ‘Lord Wichcote,’ called this second figure. ‘Wait.’

  At which the first figure halted and, with visible effort, using a nearby table for leverage, pulled itself erect and turned to face the other, a dagger in hand.

  Which, too, had pulled itself erect by similar means. And held a rapier en garde.

  The two stood in mutual trembling regard in a dim fall of moonlight that concealed more than it illuminated. Each might have been the reflection of the other. At their feet inky shadows spread.

  ‘What do you here?’ asked Lord Wichcote. ‘Have you not stolen enough from me already?’

  ‘We need not be enemies, you and I,’ the other said, and just then the room brightened, as if a mask of cloud had been pulled away from the face of the moon, revealing a young blonde-haired woman with skin like porcelain, her expression one of suffering stoically endured. Upon her shoulder, tucked against her neck, sat a mouse.

  Lord Wichcote staggered back against the table. ‘Corinna?’

  ‘Her daughter,’ answered a dwindling voice, ‘and yours.’ The woman dwindled along with it, falling in a slow faint. The mouse had already vanished into the shadows by the time the rapier clattered to the floor. It rolled a half turn on the wheel of its guard, then lay as still as its owner.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born in Zurich, Paul Witcover is a writer and critic. He is the author of the novels Waking Beauty , Tumbling After and Dracula: Asylum and with Elizabeth Hand, he created the cult comic book series, Anima . His short fiction has been collected in Everland and Other Stories . His work has been a finalist for the Nebula, World Fantasy, James Triptree, Jr. and Shirley Jackson awards. Paul lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is currently working on the sequel to The Emperor of All Things .

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