The Emperor of All Things (47 page)

‘But how is it that we see different things?’

‘This is an in-between place. In your language, I suppose you might call it the Otherwhere. It has not had the stamp of reality placed upon it. It can be anything, or many things. Whoever enters gives it shape, whether unconsciously or by an act of will.’

‘You mean that I can change what I am seeing?’

At this, she laughed. ‘Only our kind has the strength of mind for that. We are creatures of the Otherwhere, you see. It is our home.’

‘I thought Märchen was your home.’

‘That is a home we have made. This is the home that made us.’

‘Made you? You talk as if it were alive.’

She laughed again. ‘Everything is alive, Michael. Alive and always. Only, some things have forgotten it and need to be reminded – woken up.’

‘What things?’

‘All the productions of time. There – I have told you the great secret.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘That is why I have told you.’ She stopped, and I bumped against her. We stood before a door; she turned to me and fixed me with a gaze at once imperious and tender. I felt she loved me then, but it was a love that reached down to me, as it were, from an immense distance, one I could not cross; it was, in short, a love that could not be truly reciprocated, for it was not equal. It could only be accepted and endured. The knowledge of this, too, was in her eyes, and it seemed to sadden her.

‘Corinna,’ I began, wanting to declare my feelings for her once more, as I had in simpler, happier times, to tell her that I loved her and to place myself at her service in whatever manner she might require. But she interrupted me.

‘Here we must part,’ she said. ‘I deeper into the Otherwhere – you back to your world. Listen, now, Michael. My father will soon awaken and discover what I have stolen from him.’

‘Has he not already awakened? Those footsteps …’

‘The tread of Adolpheus’s army. My father, great as he is, sleeps deeply and is slow to wake. But if he should find us here, there can be no escaping, for his will is the strongest of all and can impose itself on everything, including me.’

‘Take me with you,’ I said. ‘I would help, if I can.’

‘Then take this,’ she said, and thrust what she held into my hand. It was, of course, Herr Doppler’s pocket watch. It felt cold as ice, or colder, burning against my palm. Yet I clenched my fingers around it, ignoring the pain – no, revelling in it, for her sake. ‘Let no one know of it,’ she went on, her gaze holding mine, ‘not even your closest friend. Not even your wife.’

‘You are my wife,’ I told her. ‘I shall have no other.’

‘Beware of what you say here,’ she admonished. ‘Words can become reality.’

‘If saying you are my wife will make it so, why would I be silent? You are the only woman I desire or ever will desire.’

At that, she smiled but did not otherwise respond to my declaration. Instead, she returned to the subject of the watch. ‘Do not attempt to open it; do not seek to learn its secrets.’

‘But what is it?’

‘Infinity bounded in a nutshell. My father will seek it ceaselessly, but as long as it sleeps, locked in matter, he cannot find it. Without it, he cannot win his war. Keep it secret, Michael. One day I – or, it may be, another – will come to claim it. But be on your guard, for my father has agents mortal and otherwise, and they will fool you if they can, or take it by force if they must.’

‘But if it isn’t you who comes to claim it, how will I know it is not some emissary of your father’s?’

Before she could reply, there came a roar of anger such as I had never heard, like an earthquake wrapped in a tornado and fired from a cannon as big as a ship-of-the-line. At this, Corinna wasted no time, but flung open the door and shoved me through before I could protest or even gather my wits. There was a blinding flash, then the sensation of falling; I screamed, my vision aflame with all the colours of the rainbow, a shimmering display behind whose rippling folds I saw, or seemed to see, geometric shapes floating and tumbling as though suspended in an ocean of light. I could not grasp the size of them – at one instant they seemed huge as mountains; the next, no bigger than motes of dust drifting through a sunbeam. What they were, I knew not – but that they were aware of me, I did not doubt; I felt their attention, their interest. They turned towards me with purpose, coming together like the pieces of a puzzle, or the parts of a machine. Yet their movements were slow and ponderous; or perhaps it was that I was moving so fast, blazing like a comet across their sky. Remembering how Hesta in her dragon aspect had flinched away from the pocket watch, I raised my fist, brandishing the timepiece like a shield or rather a weapon … one I had no idea how to use. In Corinna’s hand, the watch had shone like a star; in mine it was dead as a stone. But even so, those living geometries drew away and let me pass through their midst, just as Adolpheus and his army had done.

How long I fell, I cannot say. Time had no meaning in that place, that Otherwhere. My vision never cleared; the colours never faded. It came to me after a while that I was the source of them: like a meteor flaring with a fiery peacock’s tail, I was shedding colour as some otherwise ineffable part of me was burned away, ablated. This only increased my terror, for it seemed to me that I must be consumed entirely, in hideous ruin and combustion, as the poet says. Yet I never felt so much as a twinge of heat or pain as I fell, faster and faster it seemed.

Then came another flash, as blinding as the first. Only, if that flash had signalled my entrance into a kind of dream, suffused as it was with menace and wonder, this one signalled my emergence from it. What blinded me now was the simple, pure light of the late morning sun peeking over the tops of mountains I had despaired of ever seeing again. Thus did I awaken and find myself stretched on a cold hillside at the foot of Mount Coglians in the Carnic Alps. I was home. Corinna had kept her promise.

I had arrived at Märchen at the turning of the season, autumn giving way to winter, but the chill in the air now was of a different quality, and the frost-rimed grasses and wildflowers that blanketed the hillside in soft splashes of colour, the lowing of distant cattle and the hollow clanking of cowbells that echoed from the heights – all testified to the burgeoning of spring. I thought of the old tales of Fairyland and how time flowed so capriciously there. Perhaps I had been gone for years, decades, entire lifetimes.

Yet I was not thinking so much of what awaited me in the world to which I had been returned. No, all my thoughts were bent towards the world I had left behind – and Corinna.

I got to my feet – I felt as hale as I ever had in my life – and retraced my steps up the mountain, determined to enter Märchen again despite all that Corinna had told me. I was not thinking clearly. I was not thinking at all. It was the yearning of a broken heart, bereft and disconsolate, that drove me. But when I reached the spot where I had first set eyes on Märchen, there was nothing. I knew I was in the right place, for I could see the icy dagger of the glacier upthrust and glittering in the sun. But of the town not a trace remained, as if it had never been there at all.

PART THREE

14

The Otherwhere

QUARE HAD LONG
since put up his pipe, listening to Longinus’s story like a child entranced by a fairy tale. And indeed, as his host sat back and gazed at him, seeming to invite comment by his silence, it struck him that he had been hearing just that. But now, in the comfort of the garden belvedere, with late summer clinging to the afternoon air, the spell of Longinus’s words melted away like some fantastic ice sculpture. While it was true that Quare himself had experienced any number of inexplicable occurrences of late, not the least of which being the wound that by rights should have killed him, he found that something in him remained sceptical in the face of what Longinus had related. For what, really, had he been told? He knew no more about the nature of the pocket watch than he ever had; the timepiece remained as mysterious as ever, both in its workings and its purpose. And as to the town of Märchen and its fabulous inhabitants, angels or fairies or whatever it was they were supposed to be, he had no proof that they were more than figments of an eccentric, if not deranged, imagination. The watch, however uncanny its behaviour, was something he had held in his hands. He had seen it, felt it, witnessed it drinking his blood to provide its motive power. It was unquestionably real. Though he did not understand how it worked, how it achieved the effects he had witnessed, Quare still believed that there must be a scientific explanation for it all. He was not ready to abandon his faith in science for a superstitious credulity in magic. He did not wish to insult the man who, at
great
personal risk, had rescued him from the dungeons of the guild hall, yet he was not prepared to take Longinus at his word, much less to follow him back into danger.

‘Well, Mr Quare?’ asked Longinus at last. ‘What do you make of my tale?’

‘In truth, I hardly know what to think,’ he answered. ‘The nature of the watch is as clouded to me as ever, and I confess I am utterly at a loss how to account for Corinna and the other townsfolk.’

‘I felt the same as I stood upon that empty hillside all those years ago. Yet I knew that something miraculous had happened to me, something that would change the course of my life, even if I did not understand everything about it. After all, I had the watch in my hands. And the memory of all I had witnessed.’

‘But I have neither of those things.’

‘So, you require more proof, do you?’

‘More? Why, sir, you have offered none at all! Only a tale whose airy wonders I might find appealing enough were I still a child, but which, I regret to say, lacks the substance required by an adult apprehension.’

‘Then perhaps
this
will be sufficiently substantial.’ Without further ado, Longinus bent over his right foot. Quare watched in bafflement as the older man removed his slipper and then pulled off the white hose that covered his leg from ankle to knee. Beneath it, he was wearing a second slipper, white as bone, that came to just above his ankle.

Quare was about to remark on this curious affectation when he realized that the slipper was not a slipper at all. It was, instead, a foot. Or, rather, a prosthetic that resembled, in all but colour, the appendage it had replaced. Carved, no doubt, out of whalebone, and with an exquisite attention to detail that would not have been out of place on a statue by Michelangelo.

Longinus, meanwhile, gazed at him with an expression of amusement. ‘Is this proof enough for you, Mr Quare?’

‘What … I mean, how …’

The toes of the prosthetic wiggled.

Quare shot to his feet with a cry.

At which Longinus laughed heartily. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, his eyes
flashing
with mirth. ‘But you cannot imagine how often I have wished to do that.’

Quare could make no rational reply.

‘Extraordinary, isn’t it? However, I confess that my first reaction upon encountering this object at the end of my leg was not one of fascination but horror. It was that same night, after I had hiked back down the mountainside and retraced my steps to the town I had last visited, what appeared to have been many months ago. There I obtained a room, and a hot bath … and it was then, when I stripped away the bandages that still swathed my foot, that I made the awful discovery. After I had calmed somewhat, and regained a modicum of reason, and pacified the alarmed proprietors who, summoned by my screams, had first threatened to break down my door, and then to evict me from the premises, what must have happened became clear to me. As I had lain unconscious in the Hearth and Home, Dr Immelman – or, as I now had reason to believe him to be, Herr Wachter himself – had amputated my mangled foot and replaced it with a prosthetic … a prosthetic that in all respects functioned as well as – and in some respects, as I was to discover, a good deal better than – the flesh-and-blood original.’

Quare had by now taken his seat once more. Not because he had regained possession of himself, but because he did not trust his legs to support him.

Longinus crossed his ankle over the opposing knee, bringing the prosthetic near enough to Quare that he could perceive where the white bone – if it were bone – met pale flesh. There was no scar, only a seamless joining. As he marvelled at this, senses reeling, Longinus removed a small tool kit from his coat pocket, calmly opened it, and, holding it in one hand, selected an instrument from within – a slender pick-like tool useful for prising open watches and probing their insides. Quare carried just such a tool in his own kit. But the sight of this familiar object did not soothe him. On the contrary, it underscored the perceptual clash he was experiencing, of two things fundamentally antithetical to each other brought into an impossible proximity.

Setting the open tool kit upon his thigh, Longinus tapped the probe against the side of the prosthetic. It made a sharp clicking sound, as if it had struck marble. Then, though to Quare’s discerning eye the
appendage
appeared smooth as an eggshell, he somehow found an opening, and with a flick of the wrist caused a narrow panel in the side of the foot to swing open. Beneath, exposed to Quare’s all but stupefied gaze, was a system of gears and fine chains that resembled nothing so much as the insides of a clock – or, rather, a watch. And not just any watch, but one in particular: the hunter he had examined in the work room of Master Magnus.