The Emperor of All Things (46 page)

‘Risen, rather,’ she said. ‘That is our crime – our original sin, if you will. I repent of it most heartily now, perhaps too late. But I have made my choice at last. I spurn my father and all his works. I will fight him. And you will help me.’

She was right – I understood nothing of what she was telling me. I asked only, ‘What is to become of me?’

‘Why, I am sending you back across the border,’ she said. ‘I am sending you home. No more questions now,’ she added, for we had come to an exit that I recognized – beyond it lay the town square, and the clock tower. ‘Whatever happens, stay close to me, meet no one’s eye, say nothing, and follow my every command.’

‘It sounds as though you are expecting a fight.’

‘A fight?’ she echoed, and laughed grimly. ‘Michael, I am expecting a war.’

She got one. Or the makings of one, anyway, for when she opened the door and stepped through, taking me by the hand and drawing me along beside her – and a good thing, for I could not have taken a step under my own power – I saw a great armoured host filling the square. The clash of sunlight off their armour and the weapons they held was blinding. But then I realized the light was radiating from the host itself, like Corinna’s light only a thousand times brighter because it came from a thousand separate sources. And hotter, too, for the snow was melting all around us with a loud hissing, and steam rose into the air.

Even Corinna seemed taken aback by the sheer numbers confronting us, a bristling silver wall of swords and pikes, shields and helms. Upon
those
shields, and on banners that fluttered from standards scattered throughout the throng, I saw the same figure of a gearlike sun, or sun-like gear, that I had seen on the cover of Herr Doppler’s book. Like that cogwheel sun, these, too, were turning.

Corinna paused as if gathering her resolve, then strode forward, pulling me along with her. No one in that glittering array spoke as we advanced towards them hand in hand. It was only then, in the crashing silence, that I realized the bells had stopped tolling. The ground was still. Whatever had been approaching seemed to have arrived. Yet I saw no giant; perhaps, I thought, it had been the heavy, measured tread of the army arrayed before us, marching into position, that had so shaken the earth. The square as I remembered it could not have contained such a vast throng, yet it did not otherwise appear any different; the buildings looked the same as they always had, as did the hulking shapes of the mountains beyond, their tops lost in a blanket of grey cloud heavy with snow. Of the sun there was not even the palest hint in that gloomy, threatening sky. The resplendent soldiers facing us were the sole source of light. We might almost have been underground.

‘Fear not, Michael,’ Corinna whispered to me. ‘Take courage. They dare not stand against us.’

But she squeezed my hand as she spoke, and I felt she was exhorting herself to courage as much as me. I returned the pressure in the same spirit.

As we drew near, a figure detached itself from the rest and advanced to meet us. Though armoured and wearing a full helm, like some knight of old, its diminutive stature put me in mind of Adolpheus, and my supposition was proved correct when, at a distance of a dozen feet or so, he stopped and lifted his visor. The face thus revealed was both the face I knew and one I did not recognize, as if the Adolpheus I had seen and spoken with had been only a rough sketch for this one, as crude a likeness in its way as the automaton I had seen atop the clock tower. Like Corinna, he had somehow diminished himself in my presence, made himself less than he truly was. But now I was seeing him unveiled, in all his glory, shining like a little sun, his size no indication of his power but rather a necessary component of it, as if he were a god of small things. I felt a familiar stirring in my loins, a lustful
quickening
. This was no man, I told myself. This was something else, something that only wore the shape of a man, that tugged at me as a lodestone tugs at an iron filing. And then, as fast as that, the pull was gone. I glanced at Corinna and saw that she had resumed her former splendour; she stood once more like a queen of ice and moonlight, and though her cold blue radiance did not outshine his light, it did blunt it, shielding me from his glare.

‘Do not do this, Corinna,’ he said. ‘We do not wish to fight you. Return to the Hearth and Home and all will be forgiven. It is not too late.’

‘I have made my choice, Adolpheus,’ she replied. ‘Join me or stand aside.’

‘I will do neither,’ he said. ‘Your father has given me the power to stop you. I will use it if I must.’

‘You are welcome to try. But first there is something you should see.’

‘And what is that?’ he asked.

Rather than answering him, she whispered to me, though she did not take her eyes from Adolpheus. ‘Look away, Michael. Fix your eyes upon the ground, and keep them there on your life. Watch my feet, and when you see me walk, walk with me.’

I dropped my gaze. Thus I cannot tell with certainty what it was that she showed to Adolpheus, though I can guess readily enough. I heard Adolpheus gasp in something like horror, and heard that sound echoed from what seemed ten thousand throats. Meanwhile, shadows stretched and writhed across the ground as if struggling to pull free of what had cast them.

‘O, infamous daughter!’ cried Adolpheus. ‘Traitor and thief!’

The very air seemed to groan.

Corinna began to walk forward. I followed. It was difficult to keep my balance amidst the shifting patterns of shadow and light that danced over the ground. A kind of battle, it seemed to me, was being fought there. A silent and insubstantial battle that was nevertheless as much in earnest as any bloody clash of arms. The sight of it filled me with dread, yet, mindful of Corinna’s warning, I forced myself not to look away, though my every instinct screamed to do so. I do not know why I trusted her, but I did; she had said that she was sending me home, and
I
clung desperately, fervently, to that hope, as a madman clings to a single idea though everything in the world should testify against it.

‘Stand aside, Uncle,’ Corinna commanded. This time there was no defiance from Adolpheus. Instead, I heard the clanking of armour as he complied. At that, the army behind him followed suit, splitting into two wings that, as they retreated step by noisy step, pivoted towards us with the precision of well-drilled troops on parade, fashioning a narrow corridor that led to the clock tower.

Corinna did not hesitate. Neither did she hurry. With every appearance of calm, as if reviewing troops assembled to do her honour, she walked with regal assurance through the mass of fighters who could have killed us in an instant. They did not strike at us, however, not even with a word, and so motionless were they on either side – though my gaze was lowered, I could see their silver-plated legs, numerous as the trees of a petrified forest – that I could not help but wonder if they were machines, an army of automatons.

Their shadows, meanwhile, stretched and twisted out of all semblance, continued to make war with each other, or, perhaps, with something else I could not see, and finally, to preserve the crumbling bastions of my sanity – for I could no longer tell my own shadow from the others, and it had begun to seem to me that I was being drawn into their war, or was already a part of it – I shut my eyes and, like a blind man lost in a foreign land, let Corinna lead me where she would.

She stopped walking, and I bumped against her, reflexively opening my eyes. We had passed the army and now stood before the tower clock. Once, in what I had taken for a dream, I had watched a great dragon uncoil itself from the tower. Now that dragon faced us. Its long, scaled body, brown as burnished walnut, and haloed in a soft yellow glow, was looped around the edifice in an intricate knot my eyes could not unravel.

The beast would have towered over us, but it had lowered its flat head to our level to regard us serpentwise, and indeed it seemed more snake than dragon, wingless as it was. One of its eyes was gone, a pitted scar testifying to some ancient injury; the other was a glittering orb bigger than my hand, darker than dark. The warring shadows through which we had walked were gone now, yet I felt as if they had
not
vanished but only withdrawn into the inky depths of that solitary eye, for the longer I looked, the more I seemed to see movement there, smoky and serpentine. It called to me, that alluring movement, tugged at me with a strength I couldn’t resist, and I took a step forward, and then another before Corinna hauled me back.

‘I told you not to look,’ she hissed, passing her hand before my eyes; it was as if a razor had cut whatever bound me to the dragon’s greedy gaze. I gasped and looked away, yet I did not close my eyes as I had before. Instead, I let them roam over the dragon’s body, trying to trace the sinuous, scaled, knotted immensity of it, as if it were a riddle I might solve. It was in constant motion, rippling like the surface of a river, which moves and yet stays still. Locked within its looping coils I saw the shadowy figures of men and women writhing as though in torment. The air shimmered with heat; I felt I stood on the very border of hell.

Meanwhile, Corinna addressed the monster. ‘I would not fight you, faithful Hesta,’ she said, and I started at that, not just because she had called the dragon by the name of the dog but because, when she did so, I perceived that they were one and the same, or, rather, aspects of each other, like two shadows cast by a single object; I could see the shadows, but the object itself remained hidden to me. But that was not the whole of the riddle.

At the sound of its name, the dragon growled low in its throat, and a smell of hot metal and oil gusted over me. It was an automaton. Another of Wachter’s incredible, impossible machines, or so I surmised. It opened its jaws, and I cringed, fearing its breath, for I could see a fiery glow deep in its gullet. But instead the creature spoke in a voice as sinuous as its body, as mesmerizing as its eyes. The voice of a woman, I would have said, an empress … had I not seen the source of it.

‘Go, faithless daughter,’ the dragon said. ‘I cannot harm you, nor will I impede you. But know this. Leave now and the way back will be for ever barred to you. You will never look upon Märchen again.’

‘There are other gates,’ Corinna replied. ‘I will be back. And I will not be alone.’

‘Others have said as much. Where are they now?’

‘I shall find them,’ Corinna said.

‘Then you will die with them,’ the dragon said, and there was sadness in its voice, but also resolution. ‘And what of you, human?’ it asked then, addressing me. ‘Will you share this rebel’s fate? You may stay with us if you wish. There is a place for you here. She cannot compel you to go, whatever she may have told you.’

‘Do not answer,’ Corinna warned.

Too late. ‘I did not ask to be brought here,’ I said, careful to avoid the dragon’s eye. ‘I merely wish to go home.’

At which the creature laughed, a low, thunderous rumble. ‘You sought us out. You found us. You may leave, but you will never go home again.’

‘She lies,’ Corinna told me. ‘Do not listen to her, Michael. I will bring you home, I swear it.’

‘You will be hunted,’ the dragon promised. ‘Both of you.’

Corinna raised her hand again, displaying what she held clenched in her fist; thin beams of blue-white light streamed between her fingers, and the dragon hissed and shied away as if from a weapon it feared to so much as gaze upon. ‘I will be waiting, Hesta,’ Corinna said, a promise of her own. Then she took hold of my hand again and stepped forward, advancing towards the dragon. The creature drew back with each step, flattening itself against the façade of the tower. By the time we reached the base, there was only the elaborate wooden carving that had always been there, of a dragon whose coils seemed to encompass hell itself.

Corinna placed her hand against the carving, and a door appeared, summoned by her touch. ‘Open it,’ she told me. I heard a strain in her voice I hadn’t heard before; glancing at her, I saw that she appeared once more as a young woman, her face pale and drawn, as if she were nearing the end of her strength. She had never looked so beautiful to me, and I felt my heart go out to her, wanting to protect her, to sustain her with my own strength, paltry as it might be. I wondered why Hesta, seeing her weakness, did not strike now, or Adolpheus, who stood at our backs with his army. And where, I asked myself, was Herr Doppler? Why wasn’t he trying to stop us?

‘Hurry,’ Corinna hissed.

A wooden hand extended from amidst the dragon’s coils like that of
a
drowning man grasping for salvation; as there seemed to be no other knob or handle, I took hold of it and pulled. The door swung open; beyond was darkness, and a noise like the pumping of a great bellows … or a mighty heart. Though my greatest desire since I had arrived in Märchen had been to plumb the insides of the tower, I paused now on the threshold of attaining it. The blackness was absolute, dimensionless, all-engulfing. I feared that it would swallow me up, snuff me out.

Corinna, however, hastened through, pulling me along willy-nilly. The door shut behind us of its own accord. We were in a corridor, a wooden passageway like the ones in town, right down to the oil lamps set at regular intervals along the walls. I hadn’t known what to expect upon entering the tower, but it had not been this. I looked around in confusion; really, to all appearances we might have stepped out of the Hearth and Home. The only heartbeat I could hear now was my own.

‘What do you see?’ Corinna asked.

I told her.

‘Good. If you saw it as I do, you would undoubtedly go mad. Come now.’ And she set off down the corridor at a hurried pace, pulling me along beside her.

‘What do
you
see, then?’ I inquired as we went. We passed doors and sidepassages, each identical to the others, but Corinna ignored them all. I wondered where they led. Into other worlds? Other times?

‘Nothing that would make sense to you,’ she answered. ‘Your language lacks the words to describe it, just as your senses lack the capacity to perceive it.’