The Emperor of All Things (53 page)

You answer to
me
now
…

He clenched his fists at his sides, struggling to break free of the dragon’s influence, the geis laid upon him.

‘Are you well, Mr Quare?’ his host inquired with curiosity and concern.

I have just been visited by a dragon called Tiamat
, he said … but only in his mind.

I am ill; I fear I cannot accompany you tonight
, he tried to say … but again, the words remained unspoken.

‘I … did not get much rest,’ he forced out at last.

Longinus nodded and steered him back towards the table. ‘I was the same when I first began my career as a regulator. Too anxious to eat or sleep before a mission. But I learned better, and so will you.’ He set the
plate
upon the table and guided Quare to a seat, then returned to his own place, where he tucked into his meal with relish.

Quare watched glumly.

‘Wine?’ Longinus inquired, his mouth full.

Quare shook his head. If he could not speak openly about the dragon, or refuse the mission outright, perhaps he could accomplish both aims in a more oblique fashion. ‘Ever since I spoke with Grimalkin,’ he said, trying to hurry the words past whatever internal censor the dragon had set up in his mind; and, indeed, the strategy seemed to work, for nothing impeded him now, ‘or, rather, the woman who went by that name, I have wondered about the business of three questions. Is that something you encountered in Märchen?’

‘I had remarked on that aspect of your tale as well,’ Longinus said and took a thoughtful sip of wine. ‘I confess I did not experience any such thing in my time there. It is most curious. She mentioned an ancient compact, did she not?’

‘Yes,’ Quare affirmed. And attempted again to evade the censor – again with success. ‘The Law of Threes.’

‘I have heard of no such law,’ Longinus said. He paused, then continued: ‘Yet it strikes me that the number three is ubiquitous in the world. In religion, we have the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; and this threefold divinity is repeated in pagan systems as well: the three Fates, for instance. In natural science, Newton’s three laws of motion are paramount, and there are as well the three states of matter: gas, liquid, and solid. In alchemy, the
Emerald Tablets of Toth
at once elucidate and obfuscate the esoteric mysteries of that number. And in fairy tales there are three wishes – indeed, there is something very like a fairy tale about your encounter with this imposter. It may be that such old tales, passed on by word of mouth, preserve an ancient wisdom civilized man has long forgotten. They are ripe, I have often thought, for systematic scientific study, as opposed to the purely literary approach of Monsieur Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, and their imitators. Much might thereby be revealed. But as to the compact of which the imposter spoke, I must confess ignorance. Only, I do wonder at one thing.’

‘What is that?’

‘With whom was this compact entered into?’

‘Why, surely with us – that is, with human beings.’

‘Perhaps. Yet why should creatures of the Otherwhere deign to bargain with us? What could compel them to lower themselves so? Surely nothing in
our
power. Is it not more likely that the compact, though it may include us in its terms, is not really about us at all – that we are, as it were, incidental to it?’

‘But if not us, who is the other party?’

‘You have put your finger on it, Mr Quare. Until now, I have conceived of the struggle in binary terms, with Doppler and his risen angels on one side and the rebels whom Corinna sought to join on the other. But what if there is a third party in this war? Indeed, the Law of Threes, whatever it may be, would at least seem to imply the involvement of another power. And is that not the case in our earthly war, which, as we have both been told, mirrors the war in heaven? England and her allies fight against France and her proxies, but on the outside, waiting its opportunity, sits Russia.’

‘But who, then, would this third power be?’

‘That I do not know. But if my experiences in Märchen are any indication, Doppler, if he was ever a party to this compact, feels no need to comply with it now. That the false Grimalkin behaved otherwise with you suggests that the unknown third power remains a factor – that she, or, rather, whoever it is she represents, either the rebels or this third party itself, still consider themselves bound by the compact. More than that, I do not think we can infer. And even this much, frankly, seems speculative. Yet it would explain much.’

On this point, Quare could not agree. Rather than simplifying matters, it seemed to complicate them. Who – or what – was this mysterious third power? Had Tiamat been its representative? Grimalkin? Even more disturbing was the idea that now came to him: namely, that he had not, after all, managed to sneak his question past Tiamat’s internal guard or geis but, rather, had been compelled, not so much against his will as beneath his very notice, to ask it. If that were true, then Tiamat had encouraged these speculations – if speculations they were. For what if Longinus, whether he knew it or not, was also subject to a geis and was acting as Tiamat’s agent – or even Doppler’s? Perhaps in grafting the unnatural foot upon him, Immelman – Wachter,
rather
– had also grafted something less visible, a mechanism purely interior, which Longinus remained unaware of … even as he conformed in word and action, in thought itself, to whatever strictures that interior grafting imposed. Indeed, for all he knew, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Longinus could be as artificial in his whole person as he was in the matter of his foot. Yet if that were the case, and the man sitting opposite him at the table, eating with every appearance of an appetite, and seeming to savour every sip of wine, was not a being of flesh and blood but rather some kind of automaton – which seemed ridiculous, but not quite as ridiculous as he would have thought a few days or even hours ago – then how could he be sure of anyone else? The servants, for instance. Or Master Magnus, whose dead body he had never seen.

Or, for that matter, himself. For was he not still alive – at any rate, continuing to function – despite a wound that would have proved fatal to any living person? And now Quare recalled something else the dragon had told him. When he had asked how he could have survived such a mortal injury, Tiamat had replied,
All men die. That is their nature, and the nature of all time-bound things
.

He had interpreted this as a confirmation of his death – an indication that, as Longinus had suggested, it was only the mysterious blood-engendered power of the hunter that was keeping him alive. Yet now Quare realized that there was another interpretation.
All men die
– did that not imply, since he had
not
died, that he was not a man? That he was not, in the dragon’s suggestive phrase, ‘a time-bound thing’?

The notion shook Quare to his very core. A ball rolling down a slope was subject to absolute laws whose operation continued in effect regardless of whether or not the ball had a destination in mind, knew that it was rolling, or even conceived of itself as a ball: Newton’s law of threes! Wasn’t he, too, in motion, subject to the same or similar laws? He could no more halt his descent than could the ball, of its own accord, decide to stop rolling downhill or reverse its course and roll back up the slope.

This was a disheartening realization, to be sure, as if he were a pendulum in a clock. Yet it was also liberating. Quare felt a kind of peace settle over him, a despairing yet nonetheless welcome numbness
as
soothing to his distressed mind as it was to his weary body and anguished heart. He need not fight, need not worry, need do nothing at all. Far from shameful, this surrender seemed like the beginning of a hard-earned wisdom. It was, he realized, an embrace of a sort of faith … though one that rejected reason as much as it did religion. This was a new faith, a faith without hope of redemption or resurrection, yet without fear of damnation, too. It was a clockwork kind of faith.

Longinus, meanwhile, glanced at one of his assortment of pocket watches and declared that it was time to get started.

‘So, at least one of your timepieces keeps the correct hour,’ Quare observed.

‘Only one,’ Longinus answered with the ghost of a smile as he pushed his chair back from the table and stood. ‘And of course no hour can be in and of itself correct, but merely in greater or lesser accord with a measurement arbitrarily fixed and agreed to by others. As the Bard wrote, “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come – the readiness is all.”’

Longinus did not lead him out of the room but instead to a wall where, with a touch to the moulding, he caused a hidden door to spring open, revealing a small candlelit chamber that Quare recognized at once as a stair-master.

He entered at Longinus’s invitation. ‘Will this take us back to the guild hall?’

Longinus stepped in behind him, closed the door, and tugged at the bell pull. The chamber gave a shudder and began to glide sideways. ‘The mechanism does not extend so far as that,’ Longinus said. ‘Though Magnus spoke of one day establishing a network of stair-masters linking disparate parts of the city. Imagine the ease and comfort of travelling from one end of London to the other without ever setting foot upon a crowded, filthy street!’

‘But where would this network run?’

‘Why, below the streets, of course, in rooms much larger than this one – big enough to accommodate dozens or even hundreds of people. Magnus even had a name for this interior network of his: the internet.’ As Longinus spoke, the stair-master shifted course from the horizontal
to
the vertical, dropping smoothly but with a speed that left Quare’s stomach aflutter. ‘Alas,’ his host continued without missing a beat, ‘I doubt we shall see the internet implemented now – not without the force of Magnus’s genius and personality behind it. Such a project could only be brought to fruition by the government – no private fortune, even one so large as mine, could accomplish it. I covered the costs of installing the system in the guild hall, and here, in my own home, but nowhere else. Perhaps some day Magnus’s dream will be realized, but I dare say not for many years yet, until another such outsized intellect emerges.’

Quare’s grieving was twofold. First, for the death of the man who had been friend and mentor, albeit distant and stern, and second for loss of a mind whose quicksilver workings he had observed with awe and envy. Though he had, on occasion, mocked to himself the impracticality or sheer eccentricity of Magnus’s ideas, he had far more often found himself inspired by their example to greater efforts of his own. It was Magnus who had first recognized his potential and encouraged it, Magnus who had pulled him from obscurity and brought him to London, providing him with the opportunity to better himself and advance his position in the guild and the wider world. Yet it was also Magnus who had set him in pursuit of the hunter, who had pricked his finger and used his blood to bring the watch to life, or a semblance of life, who had, in short, embarked him down the perilous road whose twists and turns had brought him to this place, this moment. Could he not thereby infer that Magnus, too, had been either an active agent of some greater power or, like himself, its helpless tool? He shrugged the question aside. What did it matter now?

The stair-master came to a halt. The door slid open, revealing a corridor lit by candles burning in bronze sconces upon the wall. Longinus gestured for Quare to step out. He did so, and his host came out behind him.

‘Follow me, Mr Quare,’ he said. ‘I am about to show you something no one else has ever seen.’ The corridor was lined with doors on both sides; a hodge-podge of timepieces cluttered the walls, gleaming in the candlelight. The corridor ended in another door, which Longinus opened with a key produced from a pocket in his robe. Quare, looking
over
Longinus’s shoulder, saw the vague outlines of a room but could make out nothing of its dimensions or contents in the wavering light from behind. Then, plucking a candle from one of the sconces, Longinus entered the room, where he lit other candles, revealing all.

‘Behold Grimalkin’s lair,’ he said with a theatrical flourish.

The room was smaller than his room at Mrs Puddinge’s establishment but far more luxurious in its appointments. Yet it was not the furnishings that left him most amazed. A veritable armoury covered one wall: swords and daggers, crossbows, pistols, and other, less ordinary weapons: a pair of sticks joined by a chain; a sharply hooked, flat but wide wooden blade something like the hands of a clock frozen at the hour of three; a flute-like instrument with tiny feathered darts alongside; small, thin silver discs like gears with teeth as cruel as a shark’s. Everything was immaculate: the metal shone, the wood gleamed. On the adjoining wall, to Quare’s right, hung items of clothing – breeches, shirts, boots, cloaks, hoods, kerchiefs … all in the same shade of ash grey. A long table of dark wood against the wall to his left displayed as many glass vials and clay pots as an apothecary’s shop or an alchemist’s laboratory. Interspersed with everything on the walls were still more clocks, all of them ticking busily, none of them showing the same time.

‘Come, sir,’ said Longinus. ‘Let us dress and arm ourselves. Then we shall be off!’

Quare stepped into the room. ‘So it’s true,’ he said. ‘You really are Grimalkin.’ He had not entirely believed it until now.

‘Was,’ Longinus corrected. ‘And will be again, for tonight, at least. As will you; we shall both be garbed as Grimalkin, the better to— Why, what is so amusing?’

For Quare had begun to chuckle. ‘How strange!’ he said. ‘When I told Master Magnus of my rooftop encounter, and revealed that the great Grimalkin, as I thought then, was a woman, he advanced a hypothesis I considered most unlikely – so unlikely that I argued against it … with as little success as, knowing him, you may imagine.’

‘What was this hypothesis?’ inquired Longinus with an expression of interest.

‘Magnus believed you had been confronted by not one but two
Grimalkins
. The real one and a disguised confederate, the object being to sow confusion and apprehension in their target – that is, in you. And now here we are, adopting the very strategy ourselves!’