The Emperor of All Things (32 page)

But the explosion, when it came, involved another organ. I felt the first shuddering spasm and looked down, only then realizing that my
member
was as hard as iron. I had never spent myself so violently, so prodigiously. I groaned as much in shame as in ecstasy, for the feelings kindled by the sight of my visitor had been pure, exalted, spiritual in the highest sense, and yet some faulty mechanism of my body had translated those feelings into the grossest sort of animal display. But I couldn’t cover the spreading stain, couldn’t move so much as a finger. And this was just from the mute aura of her presence. If she should speak or touch me, I felt that I would expire …

I raised my eyes to her face, expecting to see disgust and anger written there, afraid I had committed a sin for which the punishment would be swift and of utmost severity, though the gravest punishment I could think of was the loss of her. Instead, she was smiling, and her green eyes seemed kind, alive in a way they hadn’t been before, as if I’d made her a rich offering, a tribute that she accepted not just as her due, but with true gratitude: because it was needful somehow, precious to her despite its base origin … or, perhaps, because of it. I didn’t know. I only knew that I would do anything to please her, to keep her looking at me that way.

‘Please,’ I whispered. ‘Please …’

She seemed about to speak, but then she gave a start, as if at a noise only she could hear. Alarm and fear rose in her features. This shocked me, for how could such a perfect being be afraid … and of what? I realized at the same time that she was younger than I had thought: was, in fact, younger than I. Had she always been so? A rosy blush infused her skin; her lips glistened as if with the juice of blueberries; the green of her eyes was no longer that of cold stone but a shade at once more vibrant and more fragile: an audacious springtime green. She seemed to be in the throes of a transformation, as though something frozen in her had begun to melt; and even as I had this thought, tears welled up in her eyes, spilling down her cheeks.

‘What is it?’ I asked, pierced to the heart by this evidence of vulnerability and filled with a fierce desire to protect her; indeed, at that moment I would have laid down my life for her without question or hesitation. ‘What are you afraid of?’

She answered in a breathless voice that was nothing like I had imagined it might be – beautiful, yes, but humanly so … which made
it
seem even lovelier, and made her seem lovelier, too, nearer to me, not an angel but a woman. ‘He approaches.’

‘He?’

A booming shudder passed through the bed, the inn, the world. And then another. Like the rolling thunder of an avalanche. Or the footsteps of a giant.

‘My father,’ she said, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘If he should find me here … I must go!’

‘But who are you? I don’t even know your name—’

Another footstep, much closer, as if from just outside the window behind me. I turned, but could see nothing through the glass, which was thoroughly befogged. The whole room, in fact, was filling with fog, and when I turned back to the girl, I saw that the source of it was her gown. The air had grown warmer, and I heard the steady hissing of the stove again. Or not the stove, but the gown itself, the icy fabric melting, dissolving, turning translucent as it thinned, so that I could see the outline of the body within, willowy and white, the pink buds of breasts visible for an unforgettable instant before, raising one arm to cover herself, the girl turned with a cry and fled the room.

‘Wait,’ I called, but she was gone, vanished into the billowing mist. As I moved to follow, I felt the unmistakable sensation of being observed, and so powerful was this intrusive presence that I turned back to the window, afraid that I would see a gigantic eyeball pressed to the glass. But the swirling fog was too dense. Whatever was out there, watching me, I could not see it, though the force of its dreadful regard immobilized me, held me in its grasp so that I could not even breathe.

Then the pressure withdrew. I coughed, sucking air into my lungs as I heard and felt the ponderous footsteps drawing off. I was limp with relief, drenched in sweat. Yet I could not forget the girl was out there, pursued by a father (for so she had named him) that she feared. I was afraid as well, I won’t deny it, and a part of me wanted nothing more than to pull the sheets up over my head and, like a trembling boy, take refuge in a cosy darkness of my own making. But I would not be ruled by fear. I paused only to pick up my dirk before plunging into the already dissipating mists after my beautiful visitor. She would not face her father alone and unprotected.

She proved easy to follow: her melting dress had left a wet trail across the floor that glowed with a silvery-blue phosphorescence. I lost my footing once and almost fell as I hurried down the stairs and into the common room … which was empty save for the hound, Hesta, asleep before the glowing coals of the fire, her fat old body twitching in the throes of some doggy dream. Curtains of fog made slow undulations in the air. I wondered how late it was, how long I had slept, but I couldn’t make out the face of the cuckoo clock. Nor did I linger for a closer look or check my pocket watch. Instead, I hurried out of the inn.

The snowstorm had grown worse. I did not think even Inge would have balked at the word
blizzard
now. Driven by the wind, icy flakes smacked into my face from all sides, like an insect swarm. I sheathed my dirk and pressed forward, my hands raised in a useless attempt to ward off the snow. I managed a few stumbling steps before halting, overwhelmed, in a snowdrift that reached to mid-thigh, so disoriented I wasn’t sure I could find my way back to the inn. The sweat had frozen upon my body, so that I felt rimed in ice, and the seed I had spilled was so cold against my skin that it almost seemed to burn. Perhaps I should have given up then, or at least returned to the Hearth and Home for my cloak, but then a fresh blast of wind tore the white swarm asunder long enough for me to pick out the trail again: a shimmering path that twined across the mounds and swells of snow like the track of a sledge. All at once, at the end of that trail, I saw the girl rise into view as if emerging from out of a hole in the ground; she was far away, a small glowing figure that skimmed over the snow like a skier. I cried out, but the wind tore my words away, and then she swerved around the corner of a building and was gone.

I pushed after her. The trail I had seen was a narrow path of ice whose thin crust stretched unbroken by so much as a footprint over the new-fallen snow. It did not bear my weight as it had hers, and I felt rough as an ox as I lumbered in her wake through drifts that reached to my hips, fighting the wind every step of the way, pulling myself forward with my arms as if wading through a river.

After a time impossible to measure, I saw what I took to be crows or ravens flapping frantically inside glass cages, and I stopped, aghast at the strangeness and cruelty of the sight, wondering at its purpose. But then
I
realized that I was looking at the street lamps Adolpheus had lit earlier, their flames so black it was as if darkness itself had caught fire. This seemed even stranger than my first, mistaken impression, and I felt my courage quail. But though I no longer heard or felt the earthquake footsteps of the girl’s father, I believed she was still in danger, still in need of my help.

Redoubling my efforts, at last I turned the corner where I’d lost sight of her. The clock tower loomed ahead.
Wachter’s Folly
, Inge had called it. Like everything else except the flames of the street lamps, it glowed a spectral blue … only the light appeared more intense than elsewhere, as if I had found its source. I hadn’t thought the night could get any colder, but now, as I approached the tower, the temperature dropped further, and the air actually seemed to grow denser, as if in transition from gas to solid. The wind, too, opposed me, pushing back until I was no longer advancing but struggling just to hold my ground.

The girl’s trail led straight to the base of the tower, a good ten yards away … and vanished. Had she entered the structure somehow? Or climbed its intricately adorned surface, seeking shelter from the blizzard and her father in the recess of the upper platform or among the bells of the campanile? I glanced up, shielding my eyes, and saw that the hands of the clock were spinning wildly, out of all proper relationship to each other, as if following different measures of time. The hour hand flew by the minute hand, which was itself turning at an abnormally fast speed.

This was no malfunction. I had seen enough examples of the wizard’s work to know that the clock was operating as it had been designed to do. I was convinced that I had found what I had been searching for – if not the wizard himself, then a timepiece built by his hand, or to his specifications. I needed to get closer, to get inside the tower, where I could examine the machinery. I would need no lamp or candle in the otherworldly blue light, which did not fall from without but instead seemed to have its mysterious origin deep within each object, a radiance arising from the heart of all matter. Then it struck me. And shook me to my soul. For what else could be the source of this eldritch light but time?

Surely, I thought, this was how God and His angels apprehended the
world
! Within this clock tower, preserved like a corpse within a glacier, lay the secret for which I had been searching, the grail I had followed halfway round the world: a mechanism by which time itself could be mastered, transcended. I was sure of it. And the same intuition that told me the end of my quest was waiting within the tower assured me the girl was a part of it all … and, what’s more, always had been: that without ever suspecting it, I had been searching for her as well as the wizard. I did not know who – or even what – she was: whether woman or angel. I only knew she was essential to me, that I would never possess the secret of this clock until I possessed her. She
was
the secret, I sensed, or a facet of it, a part inseparable from the whole. To gain one was to gain the other.

By now the spinning hands had lost their individuality, melting into a silver-blue blur that seemed distinct from the clock itself, detached from it, a cloudy, pearlescent sphere hovering in the air before me like a cyclopean eye. I shuddered, feeling that I had come once again under the scrutiny of whatever had observed me earlier, in my room at the inn. The girl’s father, whose footsteps had shaken the ground like an avalanche and sent her fleeing in terror. But where was he?
What
was he? I could not tear my eyes away from the floating orb, could not move so much as a finger.

And then, with mounting horror, I perceived that the orb was not merely
like
an eye but was in fact that very thing, and the tower likewise was no tower but a serpentine body coiled tightly upon itself. The campanile was the crest of a huge head, and what I’d taken to be a recessed platform, a stage across which automatons would parade in stiff, mechanical pantomime, was a cavernous mouth that could swallow me at a gulp. As I could see only a single eye, I assumed at first that the beast was peering at me sideways, its vision monocular, like a snake’s. But then the great head stirred, rose, and came gliding towards me without haste, inescapable as fate, and I realized that the dragon was staring at me full-on and that there was just the one eye, the other socket empty, as if the eye once housed there had been put out long ago by the lance of a questing knight. Its breath washed over me, redolent of hot metal and oil, and for a second, deep in the monstrous gullet, I saw a silvery glimmer, like a chain of stars. Then what might have been
a
cloud of bats came winging towards me from out of that long tunnel, hundreds, thousands of flickering shadows. I quailed, remembering the black flames trapped in their glass cages. But there would be no caging these flames, no escaping them. Paralysed with terror, I awaited incineration.

It did not come. No fire shot from between the gaping jaws. Instead, a pleasant warbling filled the air, as if, despite its size and appearance, what faced me was nearer to bird than dragon. Sweet music tumbled over me, an avalanche of pure, ringing tones …

It had been, of course, a dream, as I realized the instant I came awake, bolting upright to a cascade of carolling bells. My heart thumped, and sweat clung to my skin in the overheated room. Outside, Wachter’s Folly was tolling some no doubt outlandish hour. In the strong and shifting winds, laden with their cargo of snow, the sounds seemed near one second and far off the next, as if the tower were being blown about like a kite on a string. But those winds couldn’t touch me here, claw as they might at the windows, rattling the panes. The lamp on the table across the floor glowed a warm, welcome yellow, and its steady light illuminated the furnishings and other objects it fell upon, just as proper light should do. The stove sighed contentedly in its corner.

I rubbed my eyes, wondering how long I’d slept. According to my pocket watch, it was well past midnight. Dream images fluttered through my mind. I recalled the head of the dragon drawing near, the baleful effulgence of its solitary eye. And the girl … How beautiful she had been! Majestic, like a queen of ice and darkness … yet vulnerable, and all the more desirable for it.

Desirable indeed, for as I rose from the bed, a certain intimate dampness testified to one way, at least, in which the dream had not been entirely a thing of fancy. Succubus-like, the girl had ravished my body even as she seduced my mind.

I made my way to the table, where I laved water from the basin over my face; though lukewarm now, it brought me fully awake. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten all day. I turned to leave the room, intending to go in search of food, perhaps some of that stew Inge had mentioned … and froze, hackles rising.

Water was puddled on the floorboards at the foot of the bed. A trail of smaller puddles led to the door.

Someone had entered my room, tracking in snow from outside, and stood at the foot of the bed, watching as I slept. I assured myself that my purse had not been cut, thinking with a shiver that it was fortunate I was such a deep sleeper; had I woken, it could very well have been my throat that was cut. But some intimation of the intruder’s presence had reached me nonetheless, insinuating itself into my dream. The girl, the menacing sense of being observed, even the tread of footsteps …