Quare looked on with a sense of mounting dismay as the Old Wolf manipulated the hands of the watch just as he himself had done in Master Magnus’s study … and with the same result. The fact that those hands were carved in the semblance of a wingless dragon had taken on a new and decidedly sinister significance, reminding him – were any reminder necessary – of Tiamat.
Another nod from the grandmaster, and each of the two guards flanking him grabbed one of Quare’s arms, lifted it over the top of the desk and slammed it down, then held it there in a grip of iron. The Old Wolf set the opened watch face-down on the table before him, between his arms. ‘Let us begin with the workings. Of what are they made, sir? Wood? Bone? Some new substance heretofore unknown to science? I confess I cannot say.’
‘No more can I,’ Quare answered, shuddering at the sight of the gears, wheels and pinions packed so elegantly into the tight interior of the hunter, all of a silver so pale as to be almost translucent. He recalled
all
too well how his blood had made the inert workings bloom with fiery incandescence and take on for a brief moment a sickening semblance of life. Yet at the same time, he felt the sovereign pull of the timepiece, and he knew that if his hands had not been immobilized, he would have snatched it up. The roaring in his head grew louder.
‘Thus far I have come, but no further,’ the Old Wolf said. ‘I have searched Master Magnus’s notes in vain for the means of powering the watch. Yet I know – we both know, Mr Quare, do we not? – that such a means exists. What is it? Tell me.’
‘No.’
Grandmaster Wolfe nodded, as if he had expected no other reply. He leaned forward and calmly opened the tool kit he had placed upon the table. Within were not implements of the horologist’s art, as Quare had expected, but the shining, sharp-edged tools of a surgeon. Quare’s eyes widened; he felt his heart quail.
‘I am going to ask you again, Mr Quare,’ the Old Wolf said as he removed a scalpel from the kit. ‘Each time you refuse to answer, or respond with a lie, I will remove one of your fingers.’
Quare struggled to rise from the chair, but the grip of the guards was unbreakable. Now a third guard came over and forced his left hand open, until his fingers were splayed upon the table, his palm pressed down against the wood.
‘You call yourself a man of science?’ interjected Longinus from across the room. ‘You’re nothing but a butcher! Courage, Mr Quare. Tell him nothing. Remember what is at stake! Re—’ He broke off as one of the guards punched him in the face.
‘Yes, remember, Mr Quare,’ said the Old Wolf. ‘Remember that you are an Englishman, a journeyman of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers who has sworn a solemn oath to our Sovereign Lord the King’s Majesty. Why would any loyal Englishman, having the means to spare king and country the grievous losses of a war whose outcome is, to say the least, uncertain, withhold it? He would not. If you would show yourself loyal, speak now. Share your knowledge of this watch – or weapon, rather.’
Quare could not concentrate for the roaring between his ears. His skull rang with it. How was it the others could not hear? He shook his
head
to clear it, but the noise intensified, bringing tears to his eyes.
‘What, do you weep already?’ demanded the Old Wolf in a scornful voice. ‘I will give you something to weep about!’ And without hesitation, as if this were not the first time he had performed such an action, he sliced through the little finger of Quare’s left hand.
The blade passed cleanly through the middle joint of his finger. It happened so fast that he felt no pain at first, just the scalpel gliding through his skin and an unpleasant popping sensation as the ligaments holding the phalanges together were severed. Then the top of his finger lay upon the table like a white grub. Blood welled from the stump, shockingly red in the candlelight.
‘Ready to answer, Mr Quare?’ the Old Wolf inquired.
Quare moaned as pain throbbed into his awareness, carried along on the beating of his heart. Feeling his gorge rise, he glanced away from the ruin of his hand. Pickens looked pale as a ghost, slumping in the grasp of his captors as if about to faint, while Longinus, a bruise already blooming below his right eye, was staring at the table with an expression of horror that seemed to transcend any physical cause. Horror … but also a hunger terrible to see.
It was that which recalled Quare to his senses. That and the gasp of surprise from Grandmaster Wolfe. Looking down, he saw that the flow of blood from his hand was streaming to the hunter as if following a groove cut into the table. As he had witnessed before, the watch drank the liquid, absorbing it. It began to glow like a hot coal. At the same time, the works leapt into motion, gears whirring in a silent crimson blur.
‘What in God’s name …’ The scalpel dropped from the Old Wolf’s fingers to clatter upon the desktop, and he took a step back.
At the same time, the three guards attending to Quare recoiled as one, releasing him in their instinctive retreat from the engorged timepiece.
Quare’s maimed hand moved of its own accord to claim the watch. The instant he touched it, a powerful shock reverberated through his body and across his whole awareness. A black wave rolled in from one side and swept him along with it. It seemed to carry him not just out of the room but out of himself.
All was darkness. He floated in it, suspended. The words of Genesis flashed into his mind:
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep …
He felt that he had come to such a place. Nothing existed here: all was potential, emptiness fraught with what could be, lacking only the spark of creation to make the immanent real. Yet he also felt, with a certainty he did not question, that something needful was lacking for that spark to be struck. This was not the Otherwhere, of that he had no doubt. It was something else, something more primal still.
He realized then that he was no longer hearing the song of the hunter. There was no sound at all. Or, rather, only a silence so deep it was itself a kind of sound – a sound that passed beyond the audible and into the realm of the tangible. He felt it all around him, this pregnant silence; it was the darkness in which he floated; it coursed about him like a playful ocean; its currents caressed him with velveteen softness, batting him about. It swarmed him.
It
purred
.
And suddenly Quare knew, again without question, what had happened to the cats in Master Magnus’s study. They were here. Just as the watch had absorbed his blood, so had it absorbed their furry essences, sucking the spirits from their bodies and leaving only empty husks behind. And that meant …
I am inside the watch
, he realized.
He, too, had been absorbed. Was he dead then? His body lying slumped over the Old Wolf’s desk? Was he – his spirit, rather – trapped here now, a prisoner of the watch? Had the hunter captured its prey?
Panic and terror rose up in him, but he had no way to express them. He had no body here: no limbs to lash out with, no mouth with which to scream. He floated in the dark … yet was himself a thing of darkness. Would he, in time, flow into the surrounding dark, disperse into it, forget himself entirely? Even if he could have cried out, called on Tiamat, he did not think the dragon could hear him – or, if it did hear, breach the walls of this prison. The geis laid upon him had no power here. There would be no rescue. No escape.
He found himself thinking of Master Magnus, who had set all this in
motion
by sending him to steal the timepiece from Lord Wichcote … and then given the watch a taste of his blood. Had he known somehow that this would be the result? Had he intended for it to happen?
Quare understood with dawning dismay that his mission on that moonlit night had been very different from what he had been told. Why had he not seen it sooner? He had been too busy running for his life, from one dire mishap to another. But now that there was no place left to run, the logic of it unfolded to him. Lord Wichcote – that is to say, Longinus – must have been in on it as well. Perhaps part of whatever had really been going on had been, as Longinus claimed, a trap laid to catch the false Grimalkin, the young woman he had overpowered upon the rooftop. But there was more to it than that. There had to be. The trap, Quare felt, had been laid for him as well. But why? To what purpose?
He had mourned Master Magnus’s death. Now he cursed his name. For lying to him. Using him. Leaving him with questions that had no answers, and an eternity in which to ask them.
Why, this is hell
, he thought with a flicker of hysteria like the first hint of a madness that would engulf him whether he resisted it or not. And why should he resist? Better to surrender. Perhaps that was the only escape possible.
A ragged giggle issued from out of the dark. Or, no, it was the darkness itself that laughed. A terrible sound, like sanity ripping. Then it spoke, which was far, far worse.
‘
Well, well. Look what the cats dragged in
.’
The words came from everywhere at once – including, it seemed, from inside him … to the extent he still had an inside. Was this his own voice that addressed him, a voice spun out of the threads of his unravelled reason? Quare was losing his sense of separateness, of self.
‘
You wound me, Mr Quare. Do you not recognize my voice?
’
And with that, he did. It was not precisely the voice he remembered but instead a close facsimile, as if whatever addressed him now lacked the equipment for human speech and had been forced to make do with materials unsuited to the task. Even so, there was no mistaking the voice of his late master, Theophilus Magnus.
18
What the Cats Dragged In
THE VOICE OF
Quare’s dead master giggled again. ‘
Behold
.’
Tendrils of darkness coalesced into the shape of a man, a living shadow cast by no light that Quare could see. Here he saw by some other means, as if with his mind’s eye. The figure thus revealed stood tall and unbowed, not the hunched, twisted shape of Master Theophilus Magnus but a paragon of male perfection, a David carved from ebony rather than marble, sleek-muscled as a god …yet sexless, its groin smooth. Around this statuesque figure, familiar details swam into focus: a desk, chairs, bookcases and stacks of books, even burning candles … all bereft of colour: only black and white and shades of grey. Yet it was unquestionably Master Magnus’s study – or, rather, a close facsimile of it … just as the voice was a close facsimile of the master’s. Quare perceived that he, too, now possessed a shape, a kind of inverse silhouette, a white space that felt less like the outline of his own body than what was left after the dark had drained away.
‘
You may speak
,’ said the shadow of the man.
‘
Is it really you, Master?
’ Quare asked, and the voice that issued from out of the white space that defined him was both familiar and strange, like his own voice echoing from a great distance.
‘
It is I
,’ came the reply. ‘
And yet not I. That is to say, the man I was is only part of what I am becoming
.’
‘
And what is that?
’ Quare asked, not at all sure he wanted to know.
The darkness opposite him unravelled, then re-formed. In an instant,
the
shadow of the man was gone, along with the furnishings on that side of the room and, indeed, the room itself: all blown away like so much smoke in a gust of wind. In their place hovered a wingless dragon so black it glowed. Quare’s first thought was that Tiamat had found him, that merely thinking of the dragon had been enough to summon it, though he had not called for it to come. But of course this was not Tiamat.
‘
Is it not wonderful?
’ demanded the dragon in the voice of Master Magnus. ‘
Do you not see? The hunter is not a device for telling time. Nor is it a weapon, precisely. It is, rather, a chamber of sorts, an alembic in which the essences of various creatures may be combined to a new and higher purpose. In short, it is an egg. A dragon’s egg
.’
Quare was speechless. Longinus had told him that dragons had been born from the stuff of the Otherwhere, and Tiamat had indirectly confirmed that. Neither of them had said anything about an egg, however.
In the next instant, the dragon was gone, its dark substance shredding then coalescing again into the shape of Master Magnus’s study. Of the master himself, there was no sign. Yet his voice continued to issue from all around. ‘
The egg draws sustenance from the outer world. It feeds upon our blood, our very lives. My blood and yours, Mr Quare. My life, and the lives of my cats. All mingled to quicken what lay quiescent until wakened by our presence
.’
‘
So I am dead, then. The hunter has killed me
.’ He felt numb.
The disquieting giggle came again. ‘
Rather, it has saved your life
.’
‘
I don’t understand …
’
‘
How could you? Even I succumbed to madness when I awakened here, a lone mind adrift in a sea of eternal night, with only the squalling spirits of my cats for company. Many years passed before I regained my reason, like a crippled man relearning the use of his limbs. Little wonder that you would be confused
.’
‘
Master, you have only been dead a matter of days
.’
‘
Time runs differently here, Mr Quare, as you shall learn. Perhaps it does not run at all. That is a question beyond the grasp of human intellect, I fear. But soon I shall leave all that behind and be born anew, with knowledge and power beyond anything you can imagine
.’
‘
Born how?
’ Quare asked.
‘
Why, by hatching out of this egg, of course
.’
‘
And then what?
’
‘
I shall spread my wings, sir
,’ Magnus answered as if this were a foregone conclusion and Quare a dunce for having failed to see it. ‘
I shall bring order and reason to the world. Superstition and ignorance will be eradicated. There will be no more war, no more religion, only the fearless pursuit of scientific inquiry, under my direction
.’