The Emperor of All Things (29 page)

‘Mr Quare?’

‘I cannot say it is pleasant,’ he answered through clenched teeth, ‘but there is no pain.’

The progress of the knife resumed, accompanied by an outbreak of cold sweat upon his forehead. His insides spasmed most unpleasantly, and he felt his gorge rise – less from the sensation of the intrusion than the unnaturalness of it. ‘Take it out,’ he said at last, when he could stand it no longer.

Longinus did so at once. ‘I apologize for any discomfort,’ he said.

Quare’s body was trembling beneath a sheen of sweat. Speech was beyond him. He held to the back of the chair to keep himself standing. Spots swam before his eyes.

‘You had better sit down,’ came Longinus’s voice; and then Quare felt the man guiding him into the chair. ‘Put your head between your knees.’

Again, Quare complied. It did seem to help.

‘Here.’

He raised his head to see Longinus offering him a tumbler filled with a dram of amber liquid.

‘Brandy,’ he said.

Quare took the glass and drained it at a swallow. The liquor flushed new vigour through his limbs. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘You’re most welcome. I think I could do with one myself. Can I get you another?’

Quare shook his head and stood. He lifted his shirt from the back of the chair and began to dress. ‘Well? What is your diagnosis?’

Longinus, who had crossed to the side table to pour himself a glass of brandy, tossed it back before answering. ‘Diagnosis?’ he echoed, setting down the empty glass. ‘Asclepius himself could not diagnose your condition. You are a walking dead man, sir. A living and breathing impossibility. That is my diagnosis.’

‘But …’

‘I do not doubt that your surmise is correct, and the hunter is holding your death at bay by some mechanism unknown to me. Whether permanently or temporarily, I cannot say. It would be interesting to learn if you are proof now against all mortal injury – in short, whether the watch has conferred a kind of immortality upon you. Unfortunately, I can think of no way to test this hypothesis without risking your life.’

‘Yes, most unfortunate, that,’ Quare said, shrugging into his coat.

‘You asked how the watch came into my possession,’ Longinus said. ‘Come, Mr Quare. A turn in the garden will do you good, I think. And I shall tell you as we walk.’

Longinus crossed the room and opened a glazed door leading out to a terrace. He gestured for Quare to precede him. The morning air was cool and refreshing, the sun bright, the garden green and flowering, woven through with meandering white gravel paths and sequestered behind high brick walls that screened off the neighbouring houses. The two men set off along a path, the crunching of their footsteps over the crushed stones and shells loud and vigorous in the hushed air. The bustle and clamour of London seemed miles away.

‘Are we safe in the open like this?’ Quare inquired. ‘Won’t the Old Wolf send his regulators against us?’

‘Not even Sir Thaddeus would dare to trespass here,’ Longinus replied with confidence. ‘My royal cousin, His Majesty, would look most unkindly upon any such intrusion, as the Old Wolf knows very well indeed. No, you may set your mind at ease on that score, Mr Quare. As long as we remain behind these walls, we are untouchable – at least, by Sir Thaddeus and his minions. Of course, we have other enemies to worry about. Nor can we remain behind these walls for ever. But I think we are safe enough for now. Besides, we are both armed, are we not? And though you cannot see them, rest assured that my own men are present, watching over us.’

Quare glanced about but, indeed, could not detect another soul. ‘They are very well hidden.’

Longinus inclined his head. ‘Now, as to the watch. I have been an avid collector of timepieces for many years, even before my partnership with Magnus. At first it was the exteriors that attracted me: I admired
the
richness and beauty of ornamentation lavished upon certain clocks and watches, caring nothing for the refinement of their inner works or even how accurately they kept the time. But gradually my interest shifted, and, as I began to pursue my researches into the nature of time, I sought out timepieces of advanced or eccentric design – it was this which brought me to the attention of Master Magnus. He viewed me as little more than a dilettante at first, a mere dabbler, but he did not scorn my wealth and influence, which he perceived, quite rightly, could benefit the Worshipful Company. In exchange for my patronage, I insisted that he take me on as an apprentice – and this he did. Our association was a secret one; not even the Old Wolf knew of it. But from that time, we proceeded in parallel, Magnus and I, our respective researches mutually reinforcing despite their obvious differences. In truth, we learned from each other. My experiments became more rigorously scientific, while he learned to be less scornful of the more esoteric branches of horological inquiry. When my apprenticeship was complete, I joined the ranks of the regulators, just as you did, though, again, the association remained secret, and I functioned more along the lines of a special agent, continuing to undertake my own investigations and acquisitions alongside the occasional mission that Magnus did not wish, for one reason or another, to entrust to the common run of regulator. And so it was, some twenty-odd years ago, that I first began to hear rumours of a timepiece like no other, a clock or watch – opinions varied on this point – that was to other timepieces as the philosopher’s stone is to these stones beneath our feet. Though “rumours” may be putting it too strongly – hints, rather, of something strange and anomalous, of a clockmaker who might as well have been a wizard out of some old fairy tale. When I mentioned them to Magnus, he dismissed them out of hand and advised me against chasing phantoms. Needless to add, I did not heed him. In those days, Mr Quare, I was young and fit – well, younger and fitter – and liked nothing better than a good adventure; my fortune allowed me the luxury of chasing whatever phantoms I pleased. I was absent from England for a number of years, and my quest took me throughout Europe, into Russia, and farther east, to Mongolia, China, and Japan, and thence to India, the Holy Land and Africa, and finally back to
Europe
again. Such marvels I encountered in my travels, horological and otherwise, that we might walk from here to Edinburgh before I had related even a tenth of them. Yet always the object of my search remained tantalizingly out of reach; the rumours, as it were, seemed to recede before me, drawing me ever onwards. And such, I concluded, was the case – I was being led a merry chase.’

‘By whom?’ asked Quare.

‘Why, the wizard himself – or so I convinced myself. It seemed that wherever I set foot, he had preceded me and left behind traces of his presence designed less to throw me off the track than to entice me farther along it. There was something flattering about it. I felt as if I were being tested like some knight of old, that I must prove myself worthy before I should be permitted to find the grail which I sought.’

‘That being the watch, I assume.’

‘I did not know it at the time. But patience, Mr Quare – you shall hear all. Indeed, you shall be the first to hear it. Not even Magnus knew the whole story. He would not have believed it. I did not fully believe it myself for many years, although it happened to me. I thought much of it a dream. And perhaps it was. But dreams, too, can be real. Never doubt it, sir.’

PART TWO

8

Wachter’s Folly

I REACHED MÄRCHEN
with the last echoes of the hour still haunting the air. Snow was falling, as it had done on and off during my ascent of Mount Coglians. I was exhausted, hungry, chilled to the bone. My rucksack seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. Even my hat was heavy. Yet I was in high spirits. I had been back in Europe for some months, having sailed from Africa to Italy, then made my way up the peninsula and across the Italian Alps into Austria. Winter was drawing nigh, and I was glad to be away from the oppressive heat of the climes in which I had spent much of the last year. I was travelling incognito, in the guise of a journeyman, following the clues – or riddles, rather – left by that nameless horologist whose footsteps I had dogged halfway round the world. Wherever I went, I found evidence that he had preceded me. Among the timepieces brought to me for examination and repair in each new town or city, I would find one or two that bore the unmistakable signs of his touch – strange, capricious-seeming alterations whose only purpose, as far as I could tell, was the introduction of random inaccuracies.

By random I mean simply that they were not regular, as, for example, the loss of a certain number of minutes in a day, but rather unpredictable from day to day and even moment to moment. A clock might run fast and then slow, then speed up again, for instance, all within the space of an hour. Needless to say, the mechanisms responsible for such variation were impressive, and quite often beyond
my
understanding – I sent drawings back to Magnus, and he incorporated many of them into subsequent inventions of his own. Always there would be a clue concealed somewhere in the timepiece itself, or in its altered functioning, that, once divined, led me to my next destination. And this was true, by the way, regardless of the type of timepiece. Not just mechanical clocks driven by springs or weights but clepsydrae and other water clocks, hemicycles, hourglasses, even gnomons. Nothing, it seemed, was beneath the interest, or beyond the expertise, of my quarry.

I did not expect to end my quest in Märchen. Indeed, I was not even aware of the town’s existence until, travelling on foot across the lower slopes of Mount Coglians, I happened to hear, from out of the cloud-steeped heights above me, the tolling of bells that struck an hour at odds with what my pocket watch assured me was the correct time. I paused to examine my map but could find no trace of a town anywhere near by, save for the place I had spent the previous night. Of course, I could have been hearing the echo of a clock from elsewhere: the peaks and valleys of the mountains had a way of playing tricks with sound. Still, I decided to investigate. Over the next five hours, as I picked my way up the side of the mountain, following trails that seemed better suited to sheep than men, the clock struck thrice only. And not once did the tolling of the bells – one tone overlying the next, echo building upon echo to extend across the frozen surface of the air, then dispersing by an equivalent subtraction until no trace remained – coincide with the true hour.

Märchen turned out to be a small village; it almost had to be, perched so high, in the shadow of an immense glacier. All the way up the mountain, amidst snow flurries, I had watched the sun progress towards that distant upthrust dagger of ice until, at last, it seemed to impale itself there. Now, in the waning light, skirls of snow and ice crystals unfurled from the glacier’s jagged edge like blood from a wound in the sky. I topped a ridge, and as quickly as that, with a suddenness that took my breath away, I found myself on the outskirts of the village. Even at the time, it seemed strange to me that there had been no warning, no sign that I was drawing near to a place of habitation. No rubbish such as one might expect to find at the edge of a settlement, no pastured
animals
, no stray dogs, not even wagon tracks. I looked back the way I had come, but all was lost in mist and snow; I might have been in a different world altogether from that in which I had started.

The few people I saw on the streets were bundled against the weather and hurrying to be out of it; they did not stop to talk, shooting me curious but not unfriendly glances. I nodded as I passed by, taking note of their simple but well-made clothing. The houses and other buildings of the town shared these qualities. There was nothing ostentatious about them; everything I saw bespoke the quiet confidence of long-standing prosperity, as if the bloody tides of war that had surged back and forth across the lands below had never risen high enough to splash Märchen’s well-kept streets.

Street lamps glittered through the snow, which had increased, whipped by a biting wind that made me clutch my cloak to my throat. Upon reaching what I took to be the central square, I saw a lone, dark-cloaked figure kindling the lamps around its periphery from a sputtering flambeau. The man was scarcely more than four feet tall and required a stepladder to perform his task; he carried this implement with him, slung over one shoulder, which gave him a hunchbacked appearance as he trudged from post to post with an uneven gait, the flickering torch held before him, his dark cloak flapping behind. For an instant, I thought I was seeing Magnus, and that, by some incomprehensible circumstance, my friend and former master had preceded me here.

At the centre of the square stood the clock tower, a square, monolithic structure about fifteen feet to a side that rose to a height of perhaps thirty feet. Such monumental clocks are usually part of a town hall or prominent church, but this one stood alone in the middle of the square – where I would have expected to find a statue or fountain – as though proclaiming its independence from all secular and religious authority. The façades of the surrounding buildings, as far as I could make out, were clockless.