The Emperor of all Things

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.

The bone-white gears turned smoothly, soundlessly, meshing as if they were not pieces fitted together by hand but instead organic parts of a single whole; the chains slid past the narrow opening at varying rates of speed, here a silvery blur, there a measured inching. Behind them, deeper in the recesses of the prosthetic, Quare could make out other gears, other chains; the impression was of constant, complex motion. It dizzied him to look at it. Yet he could not tear his eyes away. Twined through the cluttered insides, as out of place as worms in a watch, were thin red threads that shone against their pale surroundings, seeming to pulse with vitality: veins, Quare registered with some distant part of his mind, or something analogous to them. Then a nearer, more visceral part of him rebelled against what he was seeing, against the wrongness of it, and he lurched to his feet and out of the belvedere, where he spewed the contents of his stomach upon the green lawn of Lord Wichcote’s garden.

By the time he returned to the belvedere, Longinus was once again wearing his hose and slipper. The tool kit was tucked away. He stood gazing at Quare with a look of concern. ‘Are you quite all right, Mr Quare?’

Quare managed a nod. ‘I-I’m sorry, my lord,’ he stammered.

‘Nonsense,’ his host replied, waving away both the apology and, it seemed, the offence that had prompted it. ‘You have seen something I have shown no one else, not even Magnus. Something that by all rights and reason should not exist. It would be a wonder if you did not have a violent reaction to it.’

‘But …’

Longinus raised a forestalling hand. ‘And none of this “my lord” business, if you please, sir. We have been over this already. You must get into the habit of calling me Longinus, for it is imperative that my true identity remain unknown to our enemies – whom we shall soon enough be facing.’

Everything was happening too quickly for Quare to process. ‘I…’

‘Come, Mr Quare,’ Longinus said, gesturing towards the house. ‘Let us go inside. I shall have this mess attended to. But there is more I must tell you. Much more.’

Quare allowed Longinus to shepherd him back into the house. They entered by the same door through which they had gone out some hours ago. The room where they had breakfasted was now arranged for dinner, but the sight and smells of the rich food that had been laid out upon a sideboard left Quare feeling as if he might become ill again.

Alert to his discomfort, Longinus led him through a side door and into a sitting room plainly used by Lord Wichcote and his male guests for card-playing, pipe-smoking and drinking. As with all the rooms in the house, and the belvedere as well, a variety of clocks were in evidence, none showing the same time, the soft, hollow clatter of their ticking like a gentle rain falling against the roof of an empty house.

Quare took the seat that Longinus indicated, watching as his host crossed the room and poured out a glass of brandy. This he brought back to Quare. ‘Drink it down, sir. You will feel better for it, I assure you.’

The warm burn of the brandy settled his stomach and rallied his reason. Longinus, meanwhile, went to the door, where a velvet bell pull hung; this he tugged, then opened the door to speak to someone Quare could not see: a servant, presumably. When he was done, he returned and seated himself in an adjoining chair. Quare observed closely as Longinus walked but could see no evidence that he favoured his false foot over the other; had he not witnessed it with his own eyes, he would never have guessed that the man was crippled in any way. It was extraordinary. He said as much to Longinus, who seemed to take his words as a compliment.

‘Whatever else, Wachter was a craftsman of the very first order. Not once in all the years I have worn this appendage has the mechanism failed or even faltered. In that time, it has caused me pain but twice. The first time was the same night I discovered it, when in my revulsion I thought to have the thing removed. Amputated. Repelled, I swore to myself that I would have it cut off as soon as I returned to London. I felt I should prefer a block of dead wood to such a monstrosity! But the mere idea of it so racked my body with agony that I never again considered it. And the same thing happened again some time later, back in London, when I made an attempt to probe the workings of the mechanism, to learn its secrets. In both cases, the prosthetic defended itself, you see. Just as the great clock in Märchen had done. Like that clock, Mr Quare, my appendage is not simply alive in some sense: it is aware .’

Quare could not suppress a shudder.

Longinus chuckled. ‘Oh, it does not speak to me, sir. I should be a fine figure of a man were I to engage in conversation with my foot. No, speaking with my footman is as far down that road as I care to go. And yet it does communicate after a fashion. It connects me to the realm Corinna spoke of: the Otherwhere. Some men sense changes in the weather by the ache in their bunions. I sense perturbations in that dreamlike dimension, which lies, I am convinced, just alongside our own, separated by a barrier thinner than the thinnest veil yet impossible for humans to cross unaided. That barrier, Mr Quare, is time.’

‘Time?’

Longinus gestured, indicating the gossipy assemblage of clocks. ‘What I have deduced over the years, through trial and error, and from my memories of Märchen, is that time is as much an artifice as the clocks that purport to measure it. It is not some intrinsic property of the universe, an extension of the mind of God or a manifestation of the natural order. It has been imposed upon the world – upon us. Indeed, we have been infected with it, like a plague. Or, rather, we are the plague, for we are not separate from time, Mr Quare. We are its very embodiment.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Quare confessed.

‘Time is foreign to Corinna and her kind. So she told me, and so I have come to believe. It is something strange and terrifying to them. Unnatural, as it were. Yet beautiful, too. It attracts them. Draws them like moths to a flame. And then burns them. Being immortal, they do not die of it. They do not age, as we do – for what else is aging but a slow burning, a fire that consumes itself in the end? Mortality is the fire in our veins. It feeds on us, swells and gutters over the course of our lives, leaving naught but ashes. But it spreads, too, does it not, that fire? Through procreation, we pass it on to our progeny, who do the same in turn, ad infinitum. Do you not see that we are mere vehicles for its expression? We are like lumps of coal endowed with mobility and reason, yet ignorant of our true nature. But not Corinna and her kind. They know what we are, what we carry. And do we not make tribute of it for their sake? Recall the effect that the townsfolk of Märchen had upon me. I was helpless to resist the demands of their desire, whether openly expressed or not. I spilled my seed at their whim. I employed the metaphor of fire, yet you might also think of us as bottles of wine, Mr Quare. We must age a bit to achieve our full potency. But then we must be drunk. And a true connoisseur of wine does not drain his bottles at a gulp. No, he sips them. Savours them. So it is with these connoisseurs of time. They sip at our mortality, at the wine of time that has matured within us. And they do not perish of it, as we do. No doubt that is why the taste of us is so sweet to them, Mr Quare – sweeter than we can imagine. That is why they are fascinated by us. Why they long for us … yet hate us, too. We are their laudanum. Their weakness. They are addicted to us. Addicted to time.’

Quare made an effort to marshal his thoughts. ‘You said imposed. Imposed by whom? And for what purpose?’

‘As to whom, why, Doppler, of course – that is, Corinna’s father, whatever his true name may be. It was plain to me, as I thought back over the circumstances of my escape from Märchen, that Herr Doppler, not Wachter, was the real power in that place. Corinna had told me, you will recall, that the Otherwhere was shaped by strength of will, and that her father’s will was the strongest of all. Wachter, or Immelman, rather, seemed a pathetic creature, frightened, his spirit broken. He claimed to be as human as I. No doubt he had been brought across the border much as I had. They had need of him, just as they had need of me. Indeed, Corinna said that I was meant to replace him. But for what purpose, to what end, I do not know. Only that it must have had something to do with time. With clocks and time, Mr Quare.’

‘What, then, of the watch that Corinna gave to you? What is its purpose?’

‘I cannot say for certain. But I have some ideas. It is plain that Doppler does not rule over his realm unopposed. Clearly, there are factions among his kind. Some, like Adolpheus, are loyal, while others are engaged in a rebellion of sorts. Corinna went in search of the rebels at the end, to join their fight. Why, if the hunter were some powerful talisman, would she entrust it to me, rather than take it with her? The answer must be that it is too dangerous for them to employ, or even to possess. Thus I deduce that it is a weapon of awesome destructive power. And what is it that these creatures seem most to fear … and most to desire? Why, time, of course. The watch, then, must be a kind of bomb, Mr Quare. A time bomb, if you will. Now, let us consider what the effects of such a bomb might be, were it ever to be triggered.’

‘But it has been triggered,’ Quare interjected. ‘In Master Magnus’s study, when it killed his cats in the blink of an eye. And again, when it took Magnus’s life, and somehow spared my own.’

Longinus nodded. ‘Unquestionably, the watch – how shall I put it? – intervened at those moments. I say intervened because it seems obvious to me that the hunter, like other, similar artefacts attributed to Wachter – and for all I know, they were in fact crafted by him, but, if so, at Doppler’s direction – at any rate, the hunter, too, is in some sense alive. Aware. It can choose how and when to act. Perhaps it can even decide the moment of its own detonation. But neither of the instances you have mentioned rises to that level. The proof of it is that the watch still exists … as do we, and everything around us. The world goes on, Mr Quare. Time passes as it always has. But in those effects, can we not see, in miniature, clues to the ultimate purpose and greater effect of the bomb? For what else could be the purpose of such an infernal device but the obliteration of every living thing in a sudden and catastrophic release of time? And yet that cannot be all, for it did, as you point out, spare your life. Therefore that, too, must be part of its design. The hunter is both a destroyer and a preserver of life. But which life will it destroy? And which preserve? I find it unlikely in the extreme that Doppler, whose will is supreme in a place where that is the measure of ultimate power, would create, or cause to be created, a device capable of causing his own death. No, it is far more likely, is it not, that he would instead create a weapon to cow his enemies – his allies, too, no doubt – and maintain his own pre-eminence. That, if my suppositions are correct, is the true purpose of the hunter. To destroy all life – not just mortal life, but immortal, too, for why else would Corinna and the others so fear it? – while preserving Doppler’s life. To return every living thing – save himself – to the primordial state from which it was born. Perhaps, after such an apocalypse, he might, as the sole survivor, begin again, crafting new worlds, new lives, out of the malleable stuff of the Otherwhere.’

‘You speak of him as if he were a god.’

‘What better word is there to describe him, or any of them? There was something that Corinna said to me as we were fleeing – a remark I little noted at the time but have had years to reflect upon. I confess it is behind all that I have told you.’

‘What remark?’

‘I referred to Corinna and her kind as fallen angels. She was quick to correct me, Mr Quare. “Not fallen,” she said. “Risen, rather.” She called it their crime, their original sin. Imagine, Mr Quare, that spontaneously, as it were, out of the primal stuff of the Otherwhere, creatures arose that possessed self-awareness, intelligence, and, most of all, will – that is, the ability to shape the Otherwhere to their own purposes. Now imagine that after untold eons of existence, in which each of these creatures was effectively equal to the rest, one of them, filled with ambition and desiring to rule over the others, to set himself above them and impose his will upon them, created something never before seen or even imagined: time. Thus, I believe, was our world brought into being, and every living thing in it, ourselves included. We exist to serve as receptacles for time.’

‘But what advantage would that give to Doppler?’

‘Why, the same advantage that accrues to any man in control of a substance prized or, indeed, required by others. Do you not see? I have told you that time is a drug, Mr Quare. I meant it as no mere metaphor! Doppler created time, and then addicted his fellow gods – to use your word, if I may – to that drug. No doubt it began with worship, with prayers and sacrifices. It must have seemed harmless enough! A new diversion amidst the stale pleasures of eternity. But now they are in thrall to it, to him. And, in a sense, to us as well, for we humans are, after all, the ultimate source of the drug. In us, it reaches its greatest potency, perhaps because we, of all mortal beings, possess self-awareness, the knowledge of our own inevitable death. Certainly that must confer an exquisite piquancy to the drug!’

‘But this is sheer speculation,’ Quare protested. ‘Pure fantasy … if not madness!’

‘If you can supply a more cogent explanation for the facts at hand, I should be glad to hear it,’ Longinus answered. ‘You have seen my prosthetic. You have seen the hunter – and experienced for yourself its uncanny power.’

‘I do not dispute any of that,’ Quare said. ‘But you go too far, surely, in your suppositions! What place is there for the Christian God in your system? Indeed, sir, you have turned Christianity upon its head, and made the Almighty into a very devil! I am no Bible-thumper, yet neither do I subscribe to rank atheism … or worse.’

‘Perhaps it is Christianity that has turned things topsy-turvy, not I. Yet some shred of the truth, however distorted, can be discerned in the gilded trappings of that religion, and of other faiths, or so it seems to me. But that is beside the point.’

‘And what is the point, if I may ask?’

Longinus shook his head, a superior smile upon his face. ‘You have a long way to go, Mr Quare. You cling to your illusions.’

‘To my sanity, rather.’

‘That is merely another illusion.’

‘For a man who claims to require my help, you have a strange way of going about it.’

Here Longinus seemed to come to an abrupt conclusion. ‘You asked for proof, Mr Quare. Very well. You shall have it, or as much as lies within my power to give. I had not intended a demonstration. I had hoped to convince you with words, with reason. But now I see that I lack the eloquence to persuade, and you the broad-mindedness to be persuaded, by words alone. I must warn you, however. There is some risk involved.’ He gestured about the room. ‘All these clocks, ticking at their various rates, weave a tangle of time that shields this place and those within it from the attention of Doppler and his kind. That is why I carry so many misaligned watches upon my person – so that I may safely leave this sanctuary, enclosed in a cloud of conflicting time that deflects their scrutiny like the magic ring in Plato’s myth, which cloaked its wearer in invisibility. Make no mistake – Doppler has been searching for me tirelessly in the years since my escape. He has bent every particle of his iron will towards finding me … and taking back the watch that Corinna stole from him and placed into my safekeeping. Now, in order to afford you visible proof that what I say is true, in order, as it were, to speak with actions rather than words, I must weaken the barrier, unlock it, for, just as it keeps Doppler out, so, too, does it trap me within.’

‘I require no more proof,’ Quare protested. ‘I have had too much already.’

‘Proof of my madness, you mean.’ Longinus gave him a wolfish smile. And proceeded to divest himself of the watches he carried upon his person, stopping each one before placing it atop the table that held the decanter of brandy.

Soon quite a pile had accrued there; it would have been comical, thought Quare, were it not so bizarre. It almost seemed to him that he could feel a curious lightening of the room’s atmosphere as Longinus progressed. ‘Er, what did you say would happen if Doppler were to find us?’

‘I didn’t.’ Longinus moved about the room as he answered, stopping each of the clocks in turn. ‘No doubt it would be quite unpleasant. But if we are quick, and quiet, we should not draw his attention. Especially since the watch he seeks has been removed from my protection. The guild hall, with its cacophony of clocks, provides protection of a sort – I have made certain of that – but it is less complete, for I do not have total control over that establishment, as I do this one. You have been in the Old Wolf’s den. There the timepieces march in strict conformity to each other, like soldiers on parade. The temporal emanations arising thereby are not chaotic but regular. They do not result in an obscuring cloud, but instead an open window, a doorway – an opening through which Doppler can enter our world … or, rather, through which his influence may enter, for I have reason to believe that Doppler himself cannot cross whatever boundary divides the worlds, or at any rate chooses not to, perhaps to spare himself the addiction he inflicted upon his fellows. Or it may be that none of them has the power to visit our world in the flesh any more, as, to judge by myths and legends, they, or some of them, must once have done. Perhaps something prevents them, bars them from direct access to us. I have my theories about that, but I will leave them for another time. Whatever the truth, their agents are active here – men like Aylesford, corrupted to their influence, who may not even be aware of whom or rather what they truly serve. But no matter. I have strayed from my subject. My point is that the watch is no longer here, under my roof. The Old Wolf has it now, and thus it is no longer veiled from Doppler’s view. No doubt he has already located it. And all his attention is fixed upon it – upon retrieving it. He will not notice us.’

‘Why, if you know all this – or, I should say, are convinced of it, as it is plain to me that you are – would you give up the watch so easily to Grimalkin? And having done so, why would you not take it back from Master Magnus when it came into his possession?’

‘Good questions all.’ Longinus nodded approvingly. ‘I am glad to see you still have your wits about you, Mr Quare. You shall need them. As for Grimalkin, you were in no position to judge what took place in the attic that night, perched as you were upon the rooftop. The fact is, I did not give up the watch easily. The defence of it cost good men their lives. That I did not care to throw my own life away into the bargain cannot be counted against me. As it is, I am fortunate to have escaped alive; why, the brigand held a blade to my throat! You may see the scab, if it please you. As to your second question, the answer is simple. Once Master Magnus had his hands on a timepiece that interested him, there was no getting it away from him – I had ample experience of that, believe me. And so I could only watch helplessly as he turned his prodigious intellect upon the mystery of the hunter. Helplessly, yes … but also with hope, for surely if there were any mortal man equipped to solve its secrets, that man would be my old friend and master. Alas, it was not to be.’

‘So Grimalkin told me, when I took the watch from her.’

Longinus’s eyebrows shot up. ‘ Her? ’

‘Yes. Grimalkin is a woman.’

At this, Longinus burst into laughter.

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘Oh, I believe you, Mr Quare, as far as it goes. Which isn’t very far. That woman was not Grimalkin.’

‘Master Magnus was of the same opinion. He did not believe it possible that a mere woman could be such a dangerous and successful thief.’

‘A regrettable prejudice,’ Longinus said. ‘There is nothing a woman cannot do, as I know very well from personal experience.’

‘Then how can you be so certain that this woman was not Grimalkin?’

‘Why, because I am Grimalkin, of course.’

Once more, Quare found himself shocked into silence. Lord Wichcote, Longinus, Michael Gray, now Grimalkin – was there anyone in the world whom his host had not been at one time or another?

‘I had not intended to reveal myself just yet,’ Longinus continued blithely, ‘but as you have raised the issue …’

Quare shook his head. ‘No. This is entirely too much, sir.’

‘How better to pursue my researches into time than as a thief? How better to gain access to timepieces that would otherwise be beyond my grasp? After my return from Märchen, as I resumed my work with Magnus, I resumed as well my solitary search for other examples of Wachter’s work, creating the persona of Grimalkin to hide my efforts from Magnus. He never did learn or, as far as I know, suspect that Grimalkin was yet another of my aliases.’

‘I do not know what to think, what to believe,’ Quare said.

‘I dared not turn my attentions to the hunter Corinna had stolen from her father, for my speculations as to its nature and purpose had convinced me that it was best left alone, untouched, all but forgotten. Still less did I trust Magnus to respect its dangers. So I hid it away and looked elsewhere for enlightenment, using the skills of a regulator and, as Grimalkin, the abilities my new appendage had bestowed upon me. Abilities you are about to experience for yourself.’ He stepped towards Quare, extending his hand. ‘Your watch, Mr Quare, if you please.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You have seen me divest myself of my own personal timepieces. I must ask you to do the same. Even if it is only the one. It may still misdirect us. Unlikely, but under the circumstances, it is better not to take the chance.’

With misgivings, Quare handed over his watch. Longinus stopped it and placed it in the same pile with his own. Then he turned back to Quare and extended his hand once more. ‘Now, Mr Quare. Take my hand, sir. Come and walk with me.’

Quare rose from his seat. But he did not take the proffered hand. ‘Lead on,’ he said cautiously, ‘and I will follow.’

‘You cannot follow where I would lead,’ Longinus answered. ‘To go where I go, you must place your hand in mine. Then, in a manner of speaking, I will carry you along with me.’ And he stretched his hand nearer to Quare, as if in emphasis.

Quare felt giddy with confusion. Part of him wanted to leave the room, leave the house, deny all that he had heard and seen. But he knew too well what awaited him outside this sanctuary. Besides, for all his eccentricities, which verged on, if not crossed entirely over into, madness, Longinus – or whoever he truly was – had not harmed him, though it had lain within his power to do so at any time had he wished. It was this reflection, combined with a sense of rebelliousness that seemed to have no other outlet, that prompted him to grab hold of the older man’s hand.

‘Brave lad,’ said Longinus with a nod. He stared into Quare’s eyes. ‘Whatever you do, whatever you see, do not let go of my hand, or you shall be irretrievably lost. Say nothing, lest you alert Doppler or his allies. Save your questions until we are safe again. Do you understand?’

Quare nodded, his mouth dry.

‘Very well,’ said Longinus with a smile. ‘It has been years since I travelled thus. I find that I have missed it more than I realized. They say that the longest journey begins with a single step, Mr Quare. Let us begin our journey.’

15 Tiamat

BUT THOUGH QUARE stood ready to follow Longinus, the man did not move. Instead, regarding Quare with a sceptical expression, he asked hesitantly: ‘This woman calling herself Grimalkin … What did she look like?’

‘You think it might have been Corinna?’ Quare asked. ‘But surely she would be an old woman by now. The woman I encountered did not appear to be much older than myself.’

Longinus pulled his hand from Quare’s and made a dismissive gesture, as if to push him away. ‘They are immortal beings and do not age as we do. Besides, I have reason to believe they can alter their shape to appear however they desire. But you’re right – how could it have been her? Why would she not have revealed herself to me?’ He seemed to be addressing himself as much as Quare. ‘No – it is impossible. The woman could not have been Corinna.’

‘You do not seem entirely convinced of it.’

Longinus sighed. ‘I wanted it to be her. I have missed her so much, you see. But as I told you a moment ago, their kind cannot cross over to our world as easily as they once did. No, it was not Corinna.’ He spoke with confidence now. ‘Nor was this woman sent by Corinna, for then she would have said as much, and I would have given her the watch freely. There would have been no need for her to fight, to kill those men. She could only have been sent by Doppler. There is no other possibility.’

‘It seems your wards were not as impenetrable as you thought,’ Quare observed.

Longinus made the same dismissive gesture. ‘I had heard rumours that Grimalkin had come out of retirement, as it were. So I spread rumours of my own, to entice him – for the idea that the imposter might be a woman had not occurred to me, any more than the possibility he was working for Doppler – to my house, where I hoped to expose him and learn his history. Instead, I was the one surprised, both by his – or, rather, her – fighting skill … and her knowledge of the watch. Though I had hidden it away inside a clock that was altogether unremarkable, she nevertheless saw through the disguise and snatched it without hesitation. Then, before I could react, she smashed a glass vial upon the floor, just such a vial as I had once used in my thieving days, containing chemicals that give birth to a dense, obscuring cloud, and, behind that screen, she fled, taking the clock with her. A most formidable adversary! Tell me, Mr Quare, was there anything distinctive about her? Any peculiarities that impressed themselves upon you?’

Quare did not have to consider long. ‘I saw her in moonlight, and she seemed to me like some maiden descended from that orb, her hair spun of moonbeams and shadows, her skin pale and luminous, without blemish. Her features were exotic, as if she were a blend of races unknown to me. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. And, at the same time, the strangest.’

‘Why, I believe you fell a bit in love with her, Mr Quare!’

‘Love? I desired her, true enough. There was a kind of raw sensuality about her, and the effect she had on me was, I confess, not entirely unlike what you told me of your experiences in Märchen, though, as it were, in a minor key. But despite her allure, and the longing she inspired in me, I feared her, too. I had a sense that we were playing a kind of game … a deadly game in which only she knew the rules.’

‘A game?’

Quare nodded. ‘She told me that she would answer three questions truthfully – why, I felt as if I had stumbled into a fairy tale! But a dark one, for I believe she would have killed me in a second. Though I had the advantage of her, I suspect she could have done so with ease. I have never seen anyone move as swiftly as she did. But something prevented her . Bound her, as it were, against her will. She mentioned an ancient compact, but explained nothing more. It was most curious.’

‘And did you ask your three questions, Mr Quare?’

‘Two I asked, but not the third, for some intuition or instinct warned me that once she had answered, my life would be forfeit. It sounds ridiculous, I know. But at the time it was not ridiculous.’

‘And what did you ask her? Tell me everything.’

Quare blushed. ‘I’m afraid I wasted my first two questions. I didn’t understand the rules of our game and so did not take time to properly formulate my inquiries. Then, once I realized what was at stake, I took care to avoid anything that might be construed, however remotely, as a query.’

‘Most wise. So you left her there, did you, and returned to the guild hall with the watch, as you told Master Magnus?’

‘That is not quite true,’ Quare admitted. He decided that he would tell Longinus everything. There seemed no reason to keep his secrets any longer. This resolve brought a sense of relief that further encouraged him to honesty. ‘I had subdued her, more by luck than skill, yet though I had bound her hands securely behind her back, she freed herself – or, rather, was freed by an accomplice.’

‘An accomplice! You might have mentioned that detail sooner!’

‘Listen, and you will understand why I did not. The accomplice was a mouse, sir. No doubt you find that hard to credit. But so it was, as I saw to my astonishment. A trained mouse that nibbled through her bindings and then, quick as a wink, vanished into her clothing.’

Longinus gave a start. ‘A mouse, you say? Why, Corinna kept a mechanical mouse upon her person – I believe I mentioned it.’

‘Yes, but this was no machine, no automaton.’

‘You would have said the same had you seen the little dragon that lived in Frau Hubner’s cuckoo clock.’

‘So … you believe it was Corinna after all?’

Longinus considered, then shook his head. ‘No … for all the reasons I have said. But the mouse is meaningful. I am sure of it. It bespeaks some connection to her.’ He sighed again. ‘It is a riddle I cannot solve. Unless …’

Quare spoke into the hush. ‘Unless what?’

‘Nothing,’ Longinus said with a shrug. ‘An idle thought. Only, I regret not having had the opportunity to question this young woman.’

‘That would have been a most dangerous undertaking,’ Quare said. ‘I do not believe she would have spared you as she did me.’

‘Spared you? But she was at your mercy, was she not?’

‘I had my pistol pointed at her, but even so, I was not confident I could pull the trigger before she was upon me. She was that fast. But though free, she did not attack. The fight had gone out of her. Indeed, she seemed resigned to the loss of the watch. It was as if she’d had her chance and must abide by the result, however little she liked it. She was much struck by the fact that, in subduing her, I had spilled her blood – and she mine. That seemed, in her mind, to create a bond between us, to join us in some way I did not understand then and still do not, even now. Yet I cannot but recall the effect that my blood had upon the watch in Master Magnus’s study. I had thought that was the first time the watch had drunk my blood, but perhaps it had already tasted it, upon the rooftop. Perhaps, after all, it was not Magnus who awoke the watch with his probings, but I – or, rather, the girl and I. At any rate, she warned me of its dangers – called the watch a weapon – but made no attempt to take it back. Instead, she flung another of those glass vials to the rooftop and vanished into the cloud thus conjured. When the smoke lifted enough for me to see, she was gone. Nor did it seem that she had used the diversion to make her escape across the rooftops. There was not time enough for that. No, she disappeared, sir. Like a phantom, into thin air. And that is not the only time she did so.’

‘What? You have seen her again?’

‘Rather, it is she who has seen me. The other night, as I sat at the Pig and Rooster, she accosted me. Asked for my help in stealing back the watch, if you can believe it! But vanished as suddenly and completely as she had upon the rooftop, without shedding any more light on these mysteries. I confess, I have half expected to meet with her at any moment since. Indeed, there have been times I could have used her help! But I have had no further contact with her.’

‘Most intriguing,’ said Longinus. ‘You have given me much to consider, Mr Quare. But for now, I think it best that we resume our journey.’ He extended his hand again, and Quare clasped it. ‘Recall my warnings of a moment ago,’ he added. ‘Keep hold of my hand, no matter what, say nothing unless or until I indicate it is safe to do so, and shut your eyes until I give you leave to open them.’

‘Very well, but where—’

‘Humour me, Mr Quare. All will become clear.’

So saying, he took a step forward. Drawing a breath, and closing his eyes, Quare followed.

He had an impression of swift movement, almost as if he were falling, similar to but more pronounced than what he had experienced in the stair-master. Despite his intention to comply with Longinus’s instructions, he could not control an involuntary reaction – he opened his eyes. Madness confronted him. There was no fixed point of reference upon which to hang his understanding. Up, down, sideways: none of those terms described what he was seeing, or his position in it. The room in which he had been standing seemed to have stretched out to an infinite length, as though it had become a corridor leading to the very end of the universe. In the process its walls and floor and ceiling had faded to insubstantiality. Through them he could see other corridors, more than he could count, cutting through this one at every angle imaginable … and some he could not have imagined. Amidst this dizzying display he saw that Longinus was still taking the step which had begun the journey; his foot had not come down. Yet the sensation of movement grew more intense by the second, and the strange elongation of the room and everything in it – including Longinus and himself – accelerated. It was as if they were standing still, frozen in place, while around them the world was being pulled away in all directions at a speed greater than time could measure or human senses perceive, so that each object was, or seemed to be, in multiple locations at once. Longinus’s leg stretched farther and farther ahead, becoming increasingly attenuated. It no longer resembled a human limb but rather a black line … and the same was true of his own leg: two black lines extending in parallel into an immeasurable distance. But not straight. The lines, which were yet somehow themselves, traced a route that was full of sharp and sudden turns, abrupt cornerings that should have shattered bone but did not; instead, their legs bent as easily as copper wire being threaded through the labyrinth of a watch’s insides. Quare would have cried out, screamed in terror, but even that would have required more presence of mind than he possessed just then.

‘Close your eyes,’ hissed Longinus beside him.

But it was too late for that. Quare felt as if he had become a single all-seeing eye, open to everything, mute witness to a reality he could not comprehend. He clung to Longinus’s hand with every bit of strength and intention in him; how easy it would be to forget that he had a hand, that he was a body, that he had some stable, enduring centre which could not be dissipated in this place, swallowed up in its crazed immensity.

‘This may,’ gasped Longinus, ‘have been a mistake. Something is tugging at me, pulling me towards it, too strong to resist. I am sorry.’

And with that, the world returned to normal. Limbs and everything else shrank to their customary proportions. Quare stumbled, wrenching his hand from Longinus’s grasp. He looked around in wonder; they stood upon a London rooftop. He sank to his knees, dumbfounded.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Longinus. ‘That has never happened before. I had thought Doppler must have caught us and was reeling us in, like an angler his prey. But we are quite alone here – wherever we are.’

‘I know where we are,’ Quare managed to gasp out at last. He clutched his arms about his chest, shivering as if with cold.

‘Do you? Pray enlighten me, Mr Quare.’

Quare breathed deeply. He felt as if he might be sick again. But finally the nausea receded enough for him to go on. ‘This is where I caught up with Grimalkin. Why did you bring us here? And how?’

‘I did not bring us to this place,’ Longinus said. ‘My intended destination was quite other. I had thought to show you the peak of Mount Coglians. As to how …’ He shrugged. ‘I have the ability to walk between worlds, to cover vast distances in the blink of an eye.’ He spoke matter-of-factly. ‘I have no idea how it works, but it is as if I were wearing a pair of seven-league boots, like Jack in the fairy tale. Only in my case it is not magical footwear but instead the wondrous foot with which I was fitted in Märchen. With this appendage, there is no earthly room I cannot enter, no door that can lock me out, no distance I cannot travel. I need merely think of the place, take a step, and I am there. It is the secret of my success as a thief … or was, until, over time, I began to sense that I was not alone in my journeying, that others were present in that in-between realm of which you, too, have now caught a glimpse: vague shapes and shadows, or things even less substantial than that … yet which nevertheless filled me with unease, as though their insubstantiality did not make them harmless but, rather, more dangerous than I knew. Creatures of the Otherwhere, perhaps. Or agents dispatched by Doppler. Perhaps both. In any case, I became convinced that I was being hunted. I did not care to discover by whom … or what. Some years ago, after a particularly narrow escape, I stopped travelling in this way altogether. I had no wish to push my luck.’

‘But if you did not bring us here, who did?’

‘Why, I can only assume it was you, Mr Quare.’

‘I assure you I did no such thing.’

‘Not consciously, perhaps. Yet do you not find it telling that we were discussing this very place before we set out? In the past, the mechanism – or some lively spirit bound within it – fastened upon my intent and translated it into action. And indeed, it was that demonstration I hoped would convince you of the truth of my words. But this time I believe it was your intent that was translated, that overpowered my own. For some reason, Mr Quare, it is you who are the master of this magic – or, if you prefer, this science indistinguishable therefrom. Whatever it is, it answers to your whim above my will.’

‘B-but why?’ Quare stammered. ‘How?’

‘No doubt the answer lies in your connection to the hunter. Both artefacts had their origin in Märchen, after all, and both, or so it seems, were crafted by the same hand. Your blood brought the watch to life, whether here on this rooftop or later, in Magnus’s laboratory: provided it with a motive power it had lacked until that moment, and through that shedding of blood you gained a second life, for the watch stepped in when you were mortally wounded and miraculously preserved you. Perhaps even now, for all we know, it is the only thing keeping you alive.’

Quare shuddered, still on his knees. The afternoon was drawing on towards evening, the sun dipping low in a hazy, coal-smudged sky. His shadow, and that of Longinus, stretched across the dirty rooftop, a stark reminder of what he had seen as they travelled here. Longinus had called him the master of the magic, yet he did not feel himself to be the master of anything, least of all himself. He wanted to run … but run where? To lash out … but against whom? There was no place of refuge, no enemy to strike.

‘Come,’ said Longinus gently, as if pitying his distress, and once again extended a hand to him. ‘The hour grows late. We must ready ourselves for what lies ahead. Let us return to my house.’

Quare drew back. ‘Do you mean to take us back by the same route that brought us here?’

‘There is no other way,’ Longinus said. ‘For all its risks, it is safer than trying to navigate the streets of London, where we may be recognized and apprehended at any moment.’

‘And once we are safely returned, what then? Will we step from your house to the guild hall in the blink of an eye?’

‘Alas, that is beyond my power. The presence of so many ticking timepieces fences me out, even were I to try and step directly into the Old Wolf’s den. His clocks may keep a common time, yet though that regularity does not, as it were, throw up an impenetrable wall, like the one protecting my own house and its environs, it does engender obstacles, like the bars of a cell that are too narrow to squeeze through from either side. But never fear – I have another way to get us into the guild hall.’

‘You mean for us to return as we escaped – through the air? I tell you truly, sir, I am sick to death of such unorthodox means of transportation as you seem so readily to employ.’

Longinus smiled. ‘I assure you, Mr Quare, I have in mind a more mundane means of entry.’

Quare grunted. He took Longinus’s hand and allowed the other man to pull him to his feet. ‘Somehow, I do not find that comforting.’

‘But you believe me, don’t you?’ Longinus asked rather anxiously. ‘Surely, after all this, you must believe!’

‘I don’t know what I believe any more,’ Quare said. ‘I cannot explain how we came here; I cannot even explain what I saw along the way.’

‘What did you see?’ Longinus asked, peering at him with genuine curiosity. ‘All those years ago, when I escaped from Märchen, Corinna told me that the Otherwhere revealed itself differently to everyone who passed through it. That is why I warned you to close your eyes, as she had warned me, once upon a time. And to as little effect. To me, it has always seemed as it did then: a maze of corridors, with doorways leading to various destinations. Somehow – until this evening – I have always moved unerringly to the correct door; the rightness of it has always been apparent to me. But this time, I could sense immediately that the door was wrong – it was not the door that would lead to Mount Coglians. But I could not hold back from entering it.’

‘I did not see anything like that,’ Quare said. ‘I saw … But I do not have the words for it.’ A shiver ran through him. ‘Madness. That is what I saw. Madness.’

‘Yet even that may be proof of a kind,’ Longinus said.

Quare gave a sickly laugh. ‘Proof that the universe is mad?’

‘Or that we humans, for all our vaunted intellect and powers of reason, are helpless when confronted by the true mystery of existence.’

‘That is no comfort,’ Quare said.

‘Why, the truth seldom is,’ Longinus answered, raising his eyebrows. ‘At least, not at first. It is always painful to have one’s illusions dispelled. But salutary. Would you not rather know the truth than continue in ignorance?’

‘But what good is that knowledge if it merely reveals the extent of our helplessness, our ignorance?’

‘Every increase in knowledge is beneficial in and of itself,’ Longinus answered. ‘And perhaps we are not so helpless after all, Mr Quare. What seems like magic or miracle – or, indeed, madness – may be nothing more than a mechanism we do not yet understand. But that does not mean it lies forever beyond our understanding. Or our mastery.’

‘It sounds as though you would make yourself one of them,’ Quare said. ‘Raise yourself above the human and become a god.’

Longinus’s eyes flashed; suddenly Quare was reminded that the man, for all his eccentricity and fondness for disguise, was an aristocrat, a peer of the realm. ‘We are beings of reason and self-awareness. Our birthright is one of dignity and freedom. No one has a right to be our masters. If I would raise myself to their level, what of it? How better to pull them down?’

‘Why? To take their place? Exchange one pantheon for another, make yourself the Zeus to Doppler’s Cronos?’

‘I am an Englishman, sir,’ Longinus responded with heat. ‘I am no advocate of absolute monarchy, not in this world or any other. I have not forgotten Corinna’s words: that Doppler and the rest are not fallen but risen angels, and how their sin lay not in rebellion but rather in the act of setting themselves above others. And yet, is it right that we humans, through no fault of our own, find ourselves locked out of the Otherwhere and whatever lies beyond it?’

‘I do not know,’ Quare said. ‘I wish I had not learned of it, or seen it with my own eyes. I wish I could forget it now – all of it.’

‘Yes, but not even Doppler’s watch can turn back time and erase the past. What’s done is done and cannot be undone. I am afraid there is no forgetting, Mr Quare – for either of us. Fate, or some other power, has touched us, changed us. We are no longer what we were. For us, there can be no going back. Only forward.’

Quare nodded grimly. ‘Then let us go forward, by all means.’

Together, side by side, they returned to the Otherwhere. And this time, Quare did not flinch or close his eyes, but faced as squarely as he could the madness that he saw there. He did not try to make sense of it, to squeeze its disparate dimensions into the Procrustean bed of his reason; instead, he let it wash over and through him. And to his surprise, he did not go mad. He did not become so attenuated, so stretched out, that nothing remained of him, as he had feared might happen. He was not swallowed up. He felt it now: this place, for all its terrible strangeness, was not foreign to him … at least, not any longer. Longinus was right. He had been changed. He was no intruder here, no trespasser. He belonged. It was as if something that had been within him all his life, but so deeply asleep he had not known of its existence, or even suspected it, had awakened at last, and was now sitting up in bed and rubbing the last grains of sleep from its eyes, looking out with wonder and eager anticipation upon the home it had been dreaming of. That part of himself did not see madness here. Instead, it grasped the order within the chaos. How could he have failed to see it before? Why, the path back to Wichcote House was so clear a child could not miss it! Laughing now, he brought his foot down and finished the step he had begun on a rooftop miles away.

‘That was … most interesting,’ said Longinus, standing beside him in the same room from which they had departed. ‘Not since Corinna brought me out of Märchen have I felt so … superfluous on a journey through the Otherwhere.’ As he spoke, he methodically set into motion all the timepieces he had stopped in the room, beginning with the larger clocks and then moving on to the pile of watches on the table, each of which he returned to its place upon his person.

‘I saw the way,’ Quare said. ‘The path was plain – I merely followed it.’

‘And now?’ Longinus asked, turning to study him. ‘Can you still see the path? Could you follow it if you liked?’

Quare shook his head. ‘The path is gone. Everything is as it was. Why do you ask?’

‘You brought us here so easily that I wondered if you might be able to travel through the Otherwhere entirely on your own – whether you needed me at all. Corinna required no talisman to enter that maze or navigate its twists and turns; it was her birthright.’

‘You think I am like her?’

‘I do not know what to think about you, Mr Quare. You are a mystery. A paradox. My time in Märchen changed me greatly from what I had been, but you have been changed more greatly still without ever setting foot there. Look at yourself, sir. You stand before me, a living and breathing man who yet bears a mortal wound. By all rights, you should be stretched out in a coffin. And that is not all. You have taken to the Otherwhere like a fish to water. I led you from this room, but it was you who brought me back. Do I think you are like Corinna, like Doppler and his kind?’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps you are something new. Human, yet also more than human. You warned me of the dangers in seeking to raise myself above my natural station. But haven’t you been raised in just that way?’

Quare shook his head again, more vehemently now. ‘You would make me into something I am not – something I have no wish to be.’

‘It is not I who have done the making,’ Longinus answered.

‘I am as I always was,’ Quare insisted.

‘Are you indeed?’

Quare found himself growing angry. ‘I do not wish to discuss this any further,’ he said. ‘And if you want my help, you will not press me.’

Longinus sketched a bow. ‘I meant no offence. And I am gratified that you have decided to help – or so I judge by your words.’

‘Yes, I’ll help,’ Quare growled. ‘I do not think I have a choice. Not if I wish to learn what has happened to me. It is all bound up with that cursed watch. Perhaps, if I can examine it again, or even hold it in my hands, much will become clear.’

‘For your sake, I pray it is so,’ Longinus said. ‘Yet we must not count our chickens before they are hatched. A difficult and dangerous task lies before us, Mr Quare, with no guarantee of success. Indeed, I should judge the odds very much against us.’

‘You have a strange way of inspiring confidence,’ Quare observed.

‘It is to avoid overconfidence that I speak so plainly. But we shall have a few tricks up our sleeve, never fear. With a bit of luck, we will prevail.’

‘What, then, is your plan?’

‘There will be time enough for that later,’ Longinus said. ‘We must wait until the very witching hour of the night before we make our move. I suggest, until then, that you get some rest. That is certainly my intention. We must be at the top of our game tonight, Mr Quare. There will be no room for hesitation or error.’

‘I don’t believe I could sleep now even if I wanted to,’ Quare said.

‘Nevertheless, I advise you to try. Before my retirement, I went on many such missions as this, some on behalf of Master Magnus, others for reasons of my own, and I learned the value of this approach. Sleep if you can; and if you cannot, why, then do whatever it is that relaxes you. Have a hot bath—’

‘So that you can drug me again?’ Quare demanded.

‘I apologize for having done so last night. You need not fear a repetition. I am a great believer in the benefits of daily bathing; it is a habit I learned on my travels to the east. But if a bath will not relax you, try a book. Tinker with one of my timepieces if you like. I will send a man to wake you, or simply fetch you, as the case may be, shortly before midnight. Then we will fortify ourselves with a brief repast, and I will explain how we are going to gain entry to the guild hall, and how we shall proceed once we are there. In the meantime, should you require anything, the bell pull in your room will summon a servant. Oh, and one more thing, Mr Quare. Your pocket watch.’ Longinus passed it to him. ‘Wind it,’ he added after Quare had taken the watch and made to tuck it into his waistcoat pocket. ‘It may be that in moving through the Otherwhere, you have revealed yourself to Doppler or one of his minions. If so, they will be seeking you now. The defences of the house are likely sufficient to protect you, but it cannot hurt to get into the habit of shielding yourself as I do. In any case, I will be providing you with a number of watches to distribute about your person before we depart tonight.’

Such was the intensity of Longinus’s gaze that Quare felt obliged to follow his suggestion. Yet as he wound the watch, he couldn’t help feeling a deep-seated wrongness. It disturbed him to use the watch in a way that was contrary to its intended purpose: not to tell the correct time, but instead to employ a false time in order to confuse and misdirect … Of course, if what Longinus had told him was true, then everything he had ever known – or thought he had known – about time was wrong. But despite all he had heard and experienced, he was far from ready to accept his host’s assertions on that subject. He was far from even understanding them.

Back in his room – to which he had been led by a servant – Quare divested himself of coat and sword. A hot bath had been drawn in his absence, and so tempting were the steaming waters that he decided to risk them. He thought it unlikely that Longinus would drug him again, not if he required Quare’s assistance in retrieving the hunter from the Old Wolf in a matter of hours.

The water was hot enough to make him catch his breath, but he released it in a long, luxurious sigh as he settled down. The tub resembled a giant tin boot; there was ample room to stretch his legs out in front of him, while his back was firmly supported. The water smelled of fresh limes.

He could feel tension seeping from his body, but his mind was not so readily soothed. The details of Longinus’s adventures in Märchen, added to his own experiences of the past few days, left him feeling as though he had stumbled into a fairy tale. A nightmare, rather. And at the centre of it all, the uncanny pocket watch that, so it seemed, had belonged to Herr Doppler, a creature of the Otherwhere so powerful he was indistinguishable from a god.

Or, if Longinus were to be believed, not a watch at all, but a weapon, a time bomb whose purpose was to destroy everything that existed, to scour the universe free of life and order like some great cosmic Flood, returning things to a primal soup of limitless potential, so that a single survivor, Doppler, not a fallen but a risen angel, might begin again. Where, in this insane cosmology, was there room for the Christian God, the loving God who had created all things, visible and invisible, had wound them up like a watch and set them in motion, then stepped back into his heaven to watch the flawless operation of his benign universal machine? Quare had never considered himself to be religious; on the contrary, he had prided himself on his rational approach to the mysteries of life. Yet he had always, he realized now, kept a childish faith in the God of his boyhood tucked away in a corner of his heart, all but forgotten. Only now, that faith was being tested for the first time. More than tested: it was being overwhelmed. Routed. There was no room for such pretty delusions in the real world, the world in which a pocket watch might run on blood, a deadly stabbing have no more effect than a pinprick, a mechanical foot enable a leagues-spanning stride. A world of dragons, dwarfs and succubi, as if all the old myths and legends were true. A world that floated, like a bubble of time, on a vast sea of un-being: the Otherwhere. And in which time itself was … what? A disease? A drug? An imperfection introduced into a perfect creation, a flaw in that glittering jewel, the original original sin? It seemed to be all of those things and more – for it also protected this place from Doppler, all the mismatched timepieces throwing up a snarl of thorny time, like the forest of briars surrounding the castle of Sleeping Beauty.

And what of his role? Why had he of all people been chosen … for it seemed to Quare that he had been chosen, that there was more to his involvement than just bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, the conviction had been growing in him for some time, and by now it was so strong that he could not doubt it any longer: everything that had happened to him had happened for a reason, in response to a greater intention than his own, a sovereign will that could not be denied , that had pulled and pushed and prodded him towards the fulfilment of its ends just as he, however unknowingly, had forced Longinus from his chosen path in the Otherwhere.

But what reason? And whose will?

He didn’t want any of it. Didn’t want to play whatever part had been prepared for him. There were wars within wars, it seemed. A war in heaven, so to speak, between Doppler and his followers and those, like Corinna, who opposed him. A war that centred upon the hunter, which Grimalkin had been sent to acquire on behalf of one side or the other – he wasn’t sure where her allegiance lay. And, mirroring it, a war on earth, between England and her enemies, chief among them France: a war that could very well determine not just the fate of his country but that of the hard-won liberties which were the birthright of all Englishmen. And that war, too, centred upon the watch, for Aylesford had been sent in quest of it, and the Old Wolf, who now possessed it, yearned to unlock its deadly secrets and use them in defence of king and country. But in doing so, Quare now understood, he would only be serving the interests of Doppler. And the same would be true if it were Aylesford who possessed the watch and brought it to his French masters to further the cause of Scottish liberty.

He saw now that the watch could not safely be used by any human being. Whoever did so risked acting on Doppler’s behalf. Yet neither could it be hidden away. Recent events had proved that. Doppler and his fellow creatures were immortal, after all. A human lifetime was nothing to them. They could be patient in their pursuit of the hunter. Sooner or later, it must come to light.

No, he realized, the watch had to be destroyed. That was the only way. But was it even possible? And if it was, could the hunter be destroyed without unleashing whatever terrible forces it contained? If the watch were destroyed, would it take the world with it? He remembered what it had felt like in the aftermath of the watch’s brief awakening, when the world had seemed to blink in and out of existence, and Master Magnus’s beloved cats had died: all of them, in an instant. He remembered the sight of their limp corpses lying like so many scattered leaves strewn by a whirlwind. Then he imagined London filled with such corpses: human corpses: the bodies of men, women and children felled as they went about their daily business, like victims of a plague far swifter and less merciful than the Black Death. Some, at least, had survived that calamity. But he did not think there would be even a single survivor of this one. Apart from Doppler, anyway.

Despite the warmth of the bathwater, a shiver rippled through him. He felt more alone than he could remember ever having felt since his orphan days in the workhouse. In that moment, the image of Grimalkin came to him, the memory of her moonlit face on the rooftop, and, later, that same face smeared with paint yet still lovely, exotic in its beauty. Who was she? Where had she gone? He could not help but feel that she knew the answers to his questions, if she would but speak plainly. He recalled how she had vanished from the rooftop, and disappeared in the blink of an eye from the Pig and Rooster, and he wondered if she, like Longinus, had access to the Otherwhere. Was she a traveller in that strange country … or a denizen of it? And what of the connection she claimed, the bonds of blood that linked them? Those bonds, if they existed, had not pulled her to him, or he to her, for that matter, when he navigated the Otherwhere or at any other time.

Quare’s ruminative gaze settled upon the Chinese screen that stood at the foot of the bath. The scene depicted there, of a peaceful, mist-wreathed mountain landscape, seemed to call to him as it had before. What would it be like to step from this world into that one? Longinus had asked if he could still see the path he had followed back from the rooftop, wondering if Quare possessed the same ability he did to traverse the Otherwhere, but whatever ability or instinct had guided Quare on the return journey seemed to have deserted him now. He saw no path, no doorway … unless the screen were itself a door. Yet he did not see a means of passing through it and into the remote but restful scene beyond, which, as he studied it with weary, unfocused longing, seemed to grow more real, though without becoming more immediate, as if he were gazing through a window that could neither be opened nor broken.

And then, as though it had been there all along, just waiting for the opportunity to show itself, a wingless dragon drifted into view, its long body eeling through the air, seeming to swim there: blue-scaled, wide -eyed, open jaws revealing teeth that looked sharp enough to shear through iron as easily as they might rend flesh and bone.

It hovered before him, within or behind the screen, the undulations of its body, like the gentle flexions of a water snake, holding it fixed in mid-air … and holding Quare’s attention, too, the movements deeply entrancing, as was the thing’s gaze, its eyes as big as plates yet placid as the eyes of a hare, sky-blue irises with centres of inky night.

Those eyes regarded him with shrewd intelligence … if intelligence was even the right word for what he saw there, and the longer he looked in mute fascination, the more certain Quare was that it was not, at least not by any human standard … though he had no better word, either. He felt a breeze caress his skin, and the tangy smell of limes grew stronger, more concentrated, seeming to emanate from the dragon itself. The scent had a stimulating aphrodisiacal effect; he felt himself grow hard, his erection pointing towards the dragon like the needle of a compass fixed at true north. He felt no shame – nor even excitement; the effect seemed to be independent of his will or desire, a reflex over which he had no control, exactly like what Longinus had reported of his erotic encounters in Märchen.

‘You may call me Tiamat,’ the dragon said without preface, and he felt neither surprise nor fear at hearing it speak. ‘But do not imagine that is my real name and think to use it against me. Three questions will I answer freely. Think well before you ask.’

Quare felt as if he had entered into a dream. ‘Three nights ago, I had a thief at my mercy. Grimalkin was her name. She, too, invited me to ask three questions, as in a fairy tale of old. She spoke of an ancient compact …’

‘The Law of Threes,’ the dragon said, its jaws spreading wide as if in silent laughter. Its teeth were the size and shape of scimitars. From its throat came a rumble of thunder. Then: ‘Do you think I am at your mercy?’

‘No,’ he said. And the knowledge was upon him from he knew not where: ‘Neither am I at yours.’

The dragon lashed its tail. ‘Not here,’ it admitted. ‘Not now. But know that things will go differently between us if we meet outside this screen and you do not please me.’

By screen , Quare understood the dragon – Tiamat, it had named itself – to mean not just the ornamental partition with its delicate Chinese brushwork but the barrier of time erected by so many clocks and watches ticking away in riotous disharmony. A distant part of him was amazed at his calmness, his ability to face the dragon without fear, naked and erect as he was, all but imprisoned within the narrow confines of the bath. Was he dreaming? Had he been drugged again? Or was the dragon casting some kind of spell over him? He did not know, and, strangely, it did not seem important. What did seem important was what questions he should put to the beast. He had wasted the three questions Grimalkin had offered him; he would not make that mistake again. ‘Two nights ago,’ he said at last, choosing his words with care, ‘I received a wound that should have killed me. Yet I did not die. How is that possible?’

‘All men die,’ Tiamat answered. ‘That is their nature, and the nature of all time-bound things.’

This was not illuminating. The dragon seemed to be suggesting that he had died after all. For the first time, Quare felt a frisson of real fear. It warned him to pursue the matter no further, lest he learn things he could not unlearn, truths that would destroy him.

‘Tell me about the watch,’ he said instead. ‘The hunter. What is its secret?’

Tiamat grinned, baring its formidable teeth again. ‘It is just what you have called it: a hunter. It hunts. That is its secret, or one of them. It has drunk your blood and left its mark upon you. That is how I sensed you. It will answer to you now, protect you … but do not imagine yourself its master. It is a weapon, a very great weapon – too great to be left in the hands of men.’

Too great to be left in anyone’s hands , Quare thought to himself. ‘If you’ve come to get it back, you’re out of luck,’ he said. ‘I don’t have it any more.’

‘But you know where to find it,’ the dragon said. ‘You will bring it to me.’

‘Why should I – so that you can give it to Doppler?’

‘No … but what do you know of Doppler?’ the creature asked in turn.

‘Longinus has told me of his experiences in Märchen and the Otherwhere. He met a dragon there – Hesta was her name. Her master was a man called Doppler. Or, rather, a thing that wore the shape of a man.’

‘Longinus understands less than he imagines. But you are right that Doppler only wore the shape of a man. Just as I wear the shape of a dragon. Why? Because it is fitting – that is to say, it suits me. We are born of what you called the Otherwhere, and our true forms are beyond physical representation. To take on any form diminishes us – but some forms diminish us more than others, as they are in some sense further from our origins and what we truly are. But to answer your question – I do not serve Doppler. He is as much my enemy as he is yours. You must give me the hunter because I am the only one who can keep it from him. There is war among the immortals, a war in which the fate of all that lives hangs in the balance. Whoever holds the hunter holds the key to victory. If Doppler should win, he will use it.’

‘And you won’t?’

‘That is your fourth question. I could answer and put you in my debt. But to show my good faith, I will answer freely one last time. I have no intention of using the hunter. On the contrary, I mean to destroy it.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Quare said.

‘It is too dangerous to use. To dangerous to keep. It was a mistake to make it. It must be unmade. That is why I have come to you, Daniel Quare.’

‘Why me? Why not Longinus?’

‘Because you understand that it must be destroyed, while he does not. And that answer I do not give freely. You have incurred a debt.’

‘No,’ Quare said. Truly, he had not meant to ask another question. It had just slipped out. Unless the dragon had coerced him somehow …

‘You should have kept better count,’ Tiamat said, and its grin grew wider still, as though to devour him. ‘By ancient compact, I have the right to lay a geis – a fateful compulsion – upon you. And this right I do hereby invoke. Seek out the hunter. It has tasted your blood and will tug at you no matter where it may be. Once you have it, call to me and I will come.’

‘I won’t.’

‘You will,’ the dragon said. ‘Whether you fight it or not, whether you believe it or not, you answer to me now.’

Before Quare could reply, the dragon flexed its muscular coils, and there was something irresistible in the movement, a sovereign directive that sank deeper than reason, right into the animal heart of him. Suddenly he was ejaculating with a force that nearly bent him over in the bath, wringing him like a sponge. There was nothing remotely sensual about it; it seemed more like an act of rape.

The next instant, Quare jerked upright, shivering in water that had grown ice cold. The Chinese screen stood where it had always stood; of Tiamat, there was no sign. Someone was knocking at the door to his room.

16 A Whole Different Order of Drowning

QUARE LOST NO time in rising from the bath. He wrapped himself in a towel and called to whoever was knocking at the door. A liveried servant entered the room.

‘His lordship requests that you join him downstairs,’ the man said.

‘I’ll not be long,’ Quare said.

‘If I may assist,’ the man began.

But Quare interrupted. ‘I’m capable of dressing myself. If you wait in the hall, I’ll be out directly.’

‘Very good, sir,’ said the man, and left a bow.

Quare rubbed himself dry, his thoughts racing. If anyone had told him that he would one day converse with a dragon, he would have called that person a lunatic, yet he did not for a second doubt what had just occurred. The experience had left him drained in every way. His hands trembled, and his legs felt boneless as he stumbled to a nearby chair and collapsed into it. The only illumination in the room was from burning candles; the windows had gone dark behind their curtains; it appeared that he had been in the bath for some hours, though it had not seemed longer than a few minutes.

The dragon – Tiamat – had said that the hunter had marked him. There was a small cut on his finger, where Master Magnus had jabbed him, spilling his blood, but he did not think that was the mark Tiamat had been referring to. No, the dragon had been speaking of a deeper marking , a connection binding him to the watch, and the watch to him.

It has tasted your blood and will tug at you no matter where it may be , the dragon had said. It will answer to you now, protect you … but do not imagine yourself its master .

He closed his eyes and tried to feel that connection. But, as with the link that Grimalkin had mentioned, he detected no tug, no hint of a presence pulling at him the way a lodestone might pull at a nail, or as the house had pulled at him when he’d stepped from the rooftop back into the Otherwhere. No, what he felt was weak. Empty. And afraid.

Whether you fight it or not, whether you believe it or not, you answer to me now .

And as if to prove that claim, Tiamat had demonstrated just how little Quare controlled his own body. What if, when the moment came – if it came – and he held the hunter in his hand, a similarly irresistible compulsion took hold of him, and, despite his intent, he called out to Tiamat, summoned the dragon to him and gave up the watch? He did not believe that the dragon intended to destroy so powerful a weapon. Nor was he at all convinced that the creature was not one of Doppler’s minions.

He was in over his head. That much was plain. Had been for some time now. But this was a whole different order of drowning. He was used to the idea that he could not trust anyone else. But now it seemed he could no longer trust himself. He had to tell Longinus. Explain that he could not accompany him back to the guild hall. It was too dangerous. Too risky. They could recover the watch only to lose it again, and everything with it.

He dressed and belted on his sword. The servant led him down to the same room in which he and Longinus had breakfasted that morning. As before, enough food for a feast had been laid out. There, too, his host was waiting.

‘Ah, Mr Quare,’ Longinus said as he was ushered into the room, which was ablaze with light from a chandelier that bristled with creamy white candles. ‘I trust you had a good rest?’

It certainly appeared that Longinus had. The man – who had been sitting at the table, a plate of roasted chicken and a glass of red wine before him – rose to greet Quare energetically. He was wearing a bright green robe de chambre with a red cap that stood up like the crest of a bird, and beneath the gown a ruffled white shirt, forest green breeches, and white stockings. The beauty mark that had been on his left cheek earlier in the day had migrated to the other side of his face.

‘Actually,’ Quare began … but got no further.

‘Capital,’ Longinus said. ‘Capital.’ He dismissed the servant with a gesture as he advanced to take Quare by the arm and guide him to a sideboard loaded with dishes of food: there were meats and pies, cheeses, soups, and pastries. ‘Refresh yourself, sir.’

‘I-I’m not hungry,’ Quare said.

‘Nevertheless, eat,’ Longinus directed. ‘You will be glad of it later, I assure you. We shall need all our strength.’ As he spoke, he prepared a plate of roast chicken for Quare.

Quare had no appetite; indeed, the sight of so much food, along with its attendant odours, was making him queasy. Yet even more unsettling was the fact that he had not succeeded in broaching the subject of the dragon. And not for lack of trying. From the point Longinus had dismissed the servant, leaving the two of them alone in the room, Quare had been attempting to tell his host about his monstrous visitor and what had passed between them. At first it had seemed that what prevented him was the difficulty of framing the event intelligibly, of finding the right words. But it soon became obvious that he could not speak of it at all. His will was not his own.

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!’

Longinus did not appear to share Quare’s amusement. ‘A coincidence, no more. Or less even than that, for two generals, after all, may employ the same means to achieve an objective; it is the circumstances that dictate a particular tactical approach. Magnus may have been wrong in his hypothesis – though strictly speaking he was not, for there were two Grimalkins in the attic that night: myself and the imposter! – but the logic behind his reasoning was sound. Grimalkin has a fearsome reputation, as you know. He is rumoured to be a ghost, a devil. No walls can keep him out; no weapons, it is said, can harm him. That reputation will aid us, giving us an advantage over our adversaries, even if it is only a matter of seconds. In such situations as we are about to enter, Mr Quare, life or death, success or failure, hinges upon seconds. The one who best exploits them will almost invariably win.’

‘You speak as if it were a game.’

‘Why, and so it is – like a game of chess, which can be won in an instant, through checkmate, or the sudden capture of a queen, or more slowly, by the accumulation of lesser pieces, even lowly pawns. Gain enough pawns, or seconds, as the case may be, and victory becomes that much more likely.’

‘A game of time,’ Quare said; then added bitterly: ‘Only, we are not the players. We are the pawns.’

‘That is so,’ Longinus agreed. ‘But do not forget that pawns may be promoted.’

‘To other pieces,’ said Quare. ‘They cannot become players themselves.’

‘In chess. But this is not chess, Mr Quare. In this game, as you have seen, we can rise up from the board and move into the world beyond it, the world of the true players: the Otherwhere. Once there, why should we not become players? It is our right, as thinking beings and as Englishmen, to determine our own destiny, or at least to have a say in it, just as our representatives in Parliament act as a check on the powers of the king. Tonight we take the first, indispensable step towards that goal.’

Quare was unimpressed. ‘You think that gaining possession of the hunter will make us the equal of Doppler and the others?’

‘Obviously not,’ Longinus granted. ‘But it will, at the very least, improve our position.’

‘Or simply make us more of a target than we are already.’

‘Faint heart never won fair lady, Mr Quare! To do much, one must dare much. When Corinna held the hunter in her hand, neither Adolpheus nor the dragon Hesta dared to strike us down: the one with an army at his back, the other mightier still. There is power in that watch, a power feared even by those we must regard as nearer to gods than to men. Should we, for that reason, bow our heads meekly and offer up our surrender? No, sir. That I will never do! Not while I have the strength and wit to seek a better outcome.’

Quare felt ashamed. ‘I am merely trying to be realistic.’

‘It is our plain duty to deny this infernal device to anyone who might trigger it, whether purposely or by accident. Doppler seeks it still. The Old Wolf possesses it – who can say what mischief he is up to even now? Nor is it likely that the French have given up their pursuit; the villain who stabbed you and murdered eight people in cold blood is still at large. Doppler I fear because of his knowledge; the others because of their ignorance. No, Mr Quare. I mean to have that watch – with your help, if you will give it, but alone if I must.’

‘And once you have it – what then? Anything we attempt with the hunter is as likely to have a catastrophic as a beneficial result. We do not know how to use it safely, or, indeed, how to use it at all, beyond the fact that it has a taste for human blood. I, for one, do not care to give it any more of mine than it has drunk already.’

‘We do not need to do anything with it,’ Longinus persisted. ‘Possession alone will give us a seat at the game … and guarantee our safety as well.’

‘How so?’

‘We know that there are at least three factions vying for the hunter: Doppler and his risen angels; another group of angels – let us call them rebels – who oppose him; and a third party, whose identity and interests we do not precisely know but whose existence we have inferred from certain hints dropped by the false Grimalkin, who may or may not have been sent by them. If we possess the hunter, and any one of those parties should seek to move against us, the self-interest of the others must compel them to intercede on our behalf, so as to maintain the status quo. The logic is impeccable, Mr Quare.’

‘Is it? Men are not logical creatures, Longinus. We do not act according to the cold dictates of reason, nor out of enlightened self-interest – not in the small events of our everyday lives, and still less in the pursuit of such power as this. It has always been thus. And, from what you have told me, and my own small experience, I judge that things are no different among the angels, risen or rebel.’

‘I would be a fool to deny it,’ Longinus said. ‘Still, I will go regardless. Are you with me, Mr Quare? You have misgivings, it is plain. That is understandable. But if you mean to withdraw, do it now. If that is your decision, I will respect it – though I confess I would think less of you.’

‘I will go,’ he answered, feeling again the iron compulsion laid upon him by Tiamat. ‘I have no choice.’

‘Good man.’ Longinus grinned. ‘Master Magnus would be proud.’

Quare knew better, but could say nothing.

After they had dressed – Longinus transferring from his old clothes to his new ones the array of timepieces he always carried, and supplying Quare with ten watches he had brought for that specific purpose; shirt, breeches and boots all had pockets sewn to hold them – the two men regarded themselves in a full-length mirror.

‘Why, we are as alike as two peas in a pod,’ Longinus exclaimed, delighted.

Indeed, with hoods raised and masking kerchiefs in place, the two Grimalkins reflected in the glass were indistinguishable. In height, there was not an inch of difference between them; in build, both were slender as whippets; the eyes that peered out beneath the hoods were the same ghostly greyish blue. Longinus had divested himself of his powder and beauty mark, so even the exposed skin of their faces was the same pale hue.

Faced with this resemblance, Quare experienced a sudden and shocking surmise. ‘Longinus,’ he said, then paused and removed his mask. He took a breath and began again. ‘Lord Wichcote … forgive me, but there is no discreet way to ask, and I must know. Are you my father?’

At this, Longinus removed his own mask. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You said yourself we are alike as two peas in a pod,’ Quare said.

‘But why should that make you think I might be your father?’ Longinus seemed baffled. ‘Many men resemble each other without there being a drop of blood between them.’

Quare could not keep a tremor of emotion from his voice. ‘Surely you must know that I am a bastard – it is no secret. All the guild knows. But Master Magnus once told me that my father was still alive. Indeed, he promised to help me find him if I agreed to become a regulator. Now I cannot help but wonder if that is why he sent me here, to you, for my first assignment. Why, before his death, he had planned to bring us together – you told me so yourself!’

‘That is true. But I am sorry, Mr Quare … Daniel. I would be proud to have such a son as you. And if somehow you were my son, and I had been in ignorance of your existence, I would make up for it by acknowledging you before the world, gladly and without hesitation. Yet the fact remains that I am not.’

‘How can you be certain?’

‘Do you recall what Corinna told me as we were making our escape from Märchen? She warned me to be careful of what I said, because words spoken in the Otherwhere had a way of coming true. And so it has proved. I swore to her that I would desire no other woman, and that is exactly what has come to pass. I am not your father, sir. I am no one’s father and shall never be. I am impotent, you see – and have been ever since my return from Märchen.’

Quare studied the man’s face, but there was no hint of anything there but sincerity. He swallowed his disappointment. ‘I am sorry, sir.’

‘I am sorry as well,’ Longinus said, still holding his gaze. He laid a gentle hand on Quare’s shoulder. ‘I meant what I said about being proud to have you as a son. Any man would be.’

‘Save for my father, apparently.’

‘In fairness, he may not know. I have no doubt that Magnus would have uncovered the truth, had he lived. But I am not without resources of my own. I will look into the matter, sir. I give you my word.’

Quare, unable to speak, nodded.

Longinus returned an encouraging smile and clapped him upon the shoulder. ‘Now, sir, let us arm ourselves.’

Longinus took a sword, a dagger and a crossbow, strapping the latter, with a brace of bolts, across his back. He took a handful of the silver stars, which he explained were for throwing, and the flute-like instrument with its collection of small, feathered darts; this, he said, was a blowpipe, a weapon he had come across in his travels. The darts were tipped with a poison that would swiftly paralyse their target. The throwing stars, blowpipe and darts he tucked into the underside of his cloak. Finally he took down a pair of pistols and slid them into holsters strapped to his thighs. These trim guns were unlike any Quare had seen before.

‘Another of Magnus’s inventions,’ Longinus said. ‘They require no priming and are always ready to fire, even in the most inclement weather.’

‘No primer? How, then, does the pistol discharge?’

‘The primer is already added, part of the projectile itself. What’s more, each pistol can fire four shots without reloading.’

‘Why aren’t His Majesty’s troops equipped with these weapons?’ Quare wondered. ‘They could turn the tide in the war.’

‘As to that, you must ask Mr Pitt. But I can hazard a guess. The problem with such innovations as this is that they represent a kind of Pandora’s box. If we were to make thousands of these guns, and equip our soldiers with them, it would not be long – perhaps even before the first shot was fired on a battlefield, for England is riddled with spies – before the enemy had learned of it, analysed the mechanism, and introduced an equivalent or even superior weapon. I believe, then – though I have no first-hand knowledge of it – that we are holding this and other, similar inventions in reserve, in case the French cross the Channel in force. I certainly hope that is the case. For if that should ever come to pass, we would be in desperate straits indeed.’

Turning to the table, Longinus filled a number of glass or clay containers with an assortment of powders and liquids, which he then slipped into small grey pouches and attached to his belt; here were smokescreens, bomblets, gases to burn the eyes and the lungs.

‘You seem prepared for any eventuality,’ Quare said, impressed.

‘One endeavours to anticipate,’ Longinus said. ‘But one invariably encounters the unexpected. No doubt that will be as true tonight as any other night, if not more so. I dare not supply you with any of my potions or powders, Mr Quare; you would be as likely to use them accidentally against us as against any enemy we may encounter. The same goes for my more exotic weapons. When we have sufficient time, I will train you in their use. But for tonight, you will carry only your sword, a dagger and a crossbow. And, if you like, one of Magnus’s pistols.’

‘I should like that very much. Only, I hope I shall have no cause to fire it.’

‘As do I. But if the need arises, do not hesitate. You will find the recoil somewhat more than you are used to, but the accuracy substantially improved.’

Once Quare was fitted out – this included pouches attached to his belt, each filled with another pocket watch, so that his appearance matched that of Longinus in every outward detail, at least upon casual examination – Longinus drew a close-fitting pair of grey silk gloves onto his hands, completing his transformation into Grimalkin, then presented another pair of gloves to Quare, who found them a tight squeeze but no impediment to his manual dexterity.

‘Now let us pay the Old Wolf a visit,’ Longinus said with a grin.

Quare nodded, his mouth dry.

Longinus returned to the full-length mirror, as if to inspect himself once more. He touched a corner of the frame, and the mirror swung open, revealing the small candlelit chamber of another stair-master.

‘Why, is there a room in your house that does not contain one of these devices?’ asked Quare.

Longinus said nothing. He gestured Quare into the chamber, then followed him inside. He closed the door, tugged the pull, and the stair-master began to descend.

Quare counted the seconds to himself. When he reached twenty-two, the stair-master slowed; at twenty-eight it stopped. The door slid open, revealing what appeared to be, at least as far as Quare could judge in the weak light, a fissure carved out of solid rock, scarce wide enough for two men to stand side by side. He could not see very far before a curtain of darkness descended, but he felt a whisper of cold, damp air that suggested the fissure extended a good distance ahead.

‘What is this place?’ he whispered, as if standing on the hushed threshold of a cathedral.

‘You shall see,’ Longinus answered in a whisper of his own. He gestured for Quare to step out and then followed him out of the chamber, lifting two candles from their sconces. One of these he passed to Quare.

As the door closed behind them, Longinus led Quare into the depths of the fissure, which narrowed as they advanced, until they were walking single file. The path zigged and zagged, following a gentle but steady decline. The chill in the air grew more pronounced, and Quare smelled a damp mineral tang. The words walls , floor and ceiling were too suggestive of civilization to describe what surrounded him; this passage, he realized, had not been carved or even extended by the hand of man but instead had been cut into the bedrock of the earth by Nature herself in some ancient paroxysm of violence that had sundered stone from stone. The rock was slick with moisture, and there was a sound of dripping, eerily magnified, that wove in and out of the sounds of their own footsteps and breathing: a sound very much like the ticking of the clocks in the rooms above, as if Longinus’s temporal shield extended even below the surface.

‘How deep are we?’ he asked, still whispering.

‘A quarter of a mile,’ said Longinus.

‘Does this passage lead to the guild hall?’

‘Not this passage, no,’ Longinus said. ‘We must go deeper for that.’

‘Deeper? How far does this fissure descend?’

‘Why, we have barely scratched the surface,’ Longinus said, sounding amused. ‘Did you not know that the netherworld of London is honeycombed with such spaces as this? Here one might see Nature’s rough draft of Magnus’s internet.’

As he spoke, the fissure widened. Longinus used his candle to light a torch that lay, along with a supply of others, against the rock face to their right. The flame sprang up, and the darkness fell back, revealing a vast chamber whose full extent was impossible to judge. Quare lit a torch of his own and raised it, gazing about in awe. ‘Incredible – we might almost be standing beneath the dome of St Paul’s!’

‘There are larger caverns by far to be met with below the ground. Indeed, I have often thought that another city exists here, a kind of anti-London … or, since these spaces long pre-date the first rude building raised above them, it is London that is the obverse reflection of this place.’

‘A city below a city … Do people live here, then?’

‘Some,’ said Longinus. ‘It was through one of the branching tunnels of this London underground, if I may term it such, that Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators gained access to the cellars of Parliament. Others have found their way here for more benign purposes, compelled by curiosity or misfortune. I learned of the tunnels from my father, and he from his, and part of my inheritance was a collection of maps, to which I have added substantially over the years, for, as you can imagine, a working knowledge of this maze might well benefit anyone desirous of moving about the city in secrecy. Yet I do not believe I have discovered more than a fraction of what exists. There are routes I have not explored, passages too dangerous to traverse unaided, if at all. Many who come here, for whatever reason, do not find their way out again – I have come upon their bodies, or what is left of them, often enough in my explorations. Others do not wish to leave, and dwell here like the kobolds of legend, furtive and sly, inured to the dark and suspicious of surface dwellers; I have done much over the years to gain their trust, for they do not take kindly to intruders. But tonight we shall not stray from the familiar paths – familiar to me, at least. They will take us back to the guild hall, with no one the wiser.’

‘How can you be certain the Old Wolf doesn’t know of these paths? Perhaps there will be guards waiting to take us as we emerge.’

‘There is always a risk,’ Longinus said with a shrug. ‘But I think it unlikely. I have shared my knowledge of the underground with no one – not even Master Magnus himself. Do not forget that I have spent many hours in the guild hall, disguised as a servant. If the Old Wolf or anyone else there knew of these spaces, I would have discovered it before now. No, their knowledge of the underground extends no further than the dungeon in which you were imprisoned. They have no notion of what lies below those cells. No doubt they did once, long ago, for some of the old entrances have been bricked up … though even those barriers are crumbling now, and useless.’

‘And when we gain entrance to the guild hall – what then?’

‘That will depend on what we find there. Planning can only take one so far, Mr Quare; we regulators live or die by improvisation. But let us “suit the action to the word, the word to the action”, as the Bard has it. Come.’ He advanced into the cavern, leaving Quare to follow.

This he did, albeit slowly, gazing about with a mix of trepidation and wonder. The ceiling was so high overhead that he could not see it, only long fingers of rock that depended out of the dark like icicles … melting icicles, for they dripped with water whose mineral content – the rich tang of iron and limestone freighted the cold air – had accreted into slick stone fingers on the cavern floor that reached up to clasp what had given them birth, a many-handed infant grasping for its many-handed mother, as if this were the pits of Tartarus into which Zeus had cast the Titans. Or as if these two sundered halves strove to pull themselves back together, repairing the ancient breach that had separated them. Despite the spaciousness of the cavern, Quare was very aware of the weight pressing down, all the streets and buildings of the London he knew resting on the shoulders of this secret sister city, which seemed at once as solid as a fortress and as fragile as a bubble.

‘No dawdling, Mr Quare,’ came Longinus’s impatient voice.

Quare hurried to catch up.

His guide stood waiting at the far side of the cavern, beside a fissure angling sharply into the rock – one of many such passages converging here, Quare thought, like streets and alleys leading to a central square in the world above.

‘It is impressive, I know,’ Longinus said. ‘Like something out of Dante. Later, when we are not so pressed for time, I will take you on a tour. But for now you must not let yourself be distracted. Follow as closely as you can, as lightly as you can, and speak only as necessary, for sound travels in peculiar ways in these convoluted spaces.’

Quare nodded. His mouth was dry, his skin covered in clammy sweat beneath the loose grey costume of Grimalkin. Once again, he tried to discern some connection to the hunter, straining not just with his ears but with every fibre of his being to hear the timepiece calling to him as Tiamat had said it would. To feel its tug. But all he felt was a diffuse tingling, as if his garments were imbued with a faint electrostatic charge.

This sensation he associated, after a moment’s reflection, not with the hunter but with the various timepieces secreted about his person, whose ticking constituted a steady background noise that merged into the echoes of dripping water until – as he had often felt in the guild hall – it was easy to fancy himself within the workings of a gigantic clock. Only this was a clock far older and greater than any built by human hands.

He had a sudden glimpse then, in his mind’s eye, of a clock greater still: the moon and the planets, the sun itself and all the far-flung stars, pieces of a vast and intricate orrery marking the minutes and hours until time and the universe ran down. And then? Would it be the Last Judgement, life or torment everlasting meted out by the stern justice of the Almighty, as he had been taught from childhood and, with a child’s credulity, had always believed? Or, on the contrary, was oblivion the common fate of men and the universe?

Or was there yet another alternative – again, the Law of Threes! – bound up with the watch and the Otherwhere, an alternative that lay coiled in the secret heart of the hunter like a charge of gunpowder awaiting a spark?

At that moment, as if in answer, and without a glimmer of warning, what might have been a ghostly hand reached inside his chest. It slid past whatever shield the timepieces had knit around him, wrapped icy fingers about his heart, and yanked, as though to pull it out of his body. He gasped, more from shock than pain. Every inch of his skin erupted in a fierce buzzing. Then, in the blink of an eye, the hand was gone – whether of its own volition or banished by the effect of the watches, he did not know.

Stumbling forward with a groan, Quare put out a hand to steady himself against the cavern’s rocky side. Dark spots flashed before his eyes; a mass of bees seemed to have chosen his head for a hive. He gulped air, afraid he would be sick. At some point, he had dropped his torch; it lay guttering on the ground.

Longinus’s voice reached him through the buzzing. ‘What is it, Mr Quare? Are you all right?’

He nodded, speech beyond him. Nor, he found a moment later, when the buzzing had receded and he could speak again, was he able to relate what had happened. The dragon’s geis prevented him … another ghostly hand, or rather claw, this one squeezing his throat. But he did not doubt that the hunter had made its presence felt at last. One more power seeking to pull his strings.

‘I have seen this before,’ Longinus said meanwhile. ‘There are those who cannot bear to abide beneath the ground for any length of time. It is not a question of cowardice; here, the stoutest heart may quail without shame. If you cannot go on—’

‘I can,’ Quare interrupted, his voice echoing hollowly. He stooped to retrieve the torch, which blazed up again once clear of the ground. His arm, his whole body trembled, though the buzzing had subsided, dwindling to a kind of background hum. His heart felt bruised. Helpless he might be, but that did not make him any less angry; on the contrary. He was seething with rage. He lacked only the means to express it, and a target on which to focus it. Both, he felt sure, lay ahead. ‘By all means, let us continue.’

Longinus held his gaze with his own, then nodded and slid into the passage.

Thus began a journey that Quare would always remember as a kind of dream. With his vision curtailed by the narrow fissures they squeezed through and the caverns into which those fissures opened, only to contract again, it was easy to imagine that they were not moving at all, but instead walking in place while the subterranean world moved around them, changing its shape and even its substance from moment to moment under a torch-spun magician’s cloak of shadow and darkness, as if Longinus had brought him back into the Otherwhere. And it occurred to Quare that perhaps this was as close to the Otherwhere as could exist in what he had always thought of as reality but which now seemed to him merely, as it were, a special (and necessarily lesser) case of a realer real , like Plato’s shadows cast upon the cave wall. Here was the primordial stuff of the planet, out of which the world above and its myriad wonders, living and unliving, had arisen … and into which they would all return, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, just as this reality itself would one day be enfolded back into the Otherwhere if Doppler – or, he suspected, Tiamat – gained possession of the hunter.

Yet how could he deny Tiamat the hunter, assuming they were able to retrieve it from the Old Wolf? He had seen how fruitless it was to fight the geis Tiamat had laid upon him. Every detail of their encounter was engraved upon his memory, so much so that he felt the creature’s reptilian presence still, as if it were lurking somewhere near by, for if there was ever a place that a dragon might find hospitable, this was surely it. He half expected, each time they entered a cavern, to see a pile of bones and treasure with a scaly form coiled on top of it like a sovereign seated on a throne.

Longinus set a fast pace, and Quare had to hurry to keep up. There was no time to study his surroundings or even to mark the path. If he were separated from Longinus, or if the other man were captured or killed at the guild hall, he would not be able to find his way back through this underground maze. He thought to mention this to Longinus but then decided to hold his tongue, afraid that anything he said, however softly, would find its way to their enemies, mortal or otherwise. In any case, he felt that as long as Tiamat had need of him, it would not abandon him here; if he called to it, it would come: it had promised – or threatened – as much. And however little he liked it, he knew that he would call upon the dragon if it were a question of dying down here, alone in the cold dark.

Longinus had spoken of men and women driven to seek shelter underground, and as they progressed farther into the journey, their course continuing ever downward, Quare began to see occasional evidence of it: rubbish left behind, scraps of old clothing and rags, the bones of small animals, the remains of fires. Markings on the walls made with charcoal or simply scratched into the stone: crude drawings of human and animal figures, simple declarations, names, initials, dates … and symbols he did not recognize, like letters in an unknown language. But he did not see a living soul.

After some time – how long, Quare could not have guessed – Longinus drew to a halt at the entrance to yet another cavern. Looking back at Quare, he raised a finger to his lips for silence, then motioned for him to approach.

‘We are not alone,’ he whispered as Quare came up.

Quare glanced behind him, but saw only the shadows thrown by their torches.

‘You must let me do the talking,’ Longinus continued. ‘Say nothing unless you are spoken to, and then be brief and respectful in your replies. Comply at once with whatever is asked of you. Under no circumstances draw your sword or any other weapon, unless I draw first. Is that clear?’

‘Yes. But should we not don our masks?’

‘No. My face is known here, though not my true identity.’

‘But—’

‘Shh,’ he hissed. ‘This is not the time for questions or arguments. I have broken no laws in bringing you here, but I have stretched certain … understandings. I had hoped to avoid discovery, but like so many hopes, it appears to have been futile. So be it. In a way, Mr Quare, you are fortunate indeed. First, to see what few surface-dwellers have ever seen. And second, to do so in my presence, for otherwise you would almost certainly be dead.’

‘If this is fortune,’ Quare replied, ‘I could do with less of it.’

‘’At could be arranged,’ came a voice from out of the darkness ahead, speaking in the thickest Cockney that Quare had ever heard, so that it seemed almost a foreign language even to his London-trained ear.

Quare put a hand to his sword, but Longinus grasped his wrist, preventing him from drawing. ‘Be still, sir!’

Now a second voice spoke, this one from behind. ‘’At’s right. Ain’t no cause ter be all berligerent like. We don’t mean no ’arm to them what means us no ’arm. We Morecockneyans is a peaceful folk.’

‘More … what?’ Quare asked, pulling free of Longinus’s grasp.

‘Cockneyans,’ came the first voice. ‘Morecockneyans, on account of ’ow we’re more cockney than the blasted Cockney.’

The second voice laughed. ‘We’re the original article, yer might say – been down ’ere since before the Great Fire, we ’ave. This is our kingdom, your lordships, and you may pass ’ere by our leave or not at all. Now, put out them torches and let’s ’ave a look at yer.’

‘Put out—’

‘Do as he says,’ Longinus interrupted. ‘They have become so habituated to dark that even the poor light of these torches blinds them.’ So saying, he let his torch fall to the ground and stamped it out. ‘Go on, Mr Quare. We’re perfectly safe, I assure you, as long as we behave in a manner befitting guests.’

‘If you think I’m going to— ow!’ Quare dropped his torch as what felt like a hornet’s sting pierced the back of his hand. In the seconds before Longinus stamped out the torch, he saw an angry red welt rising there. Then a darkness fell that was beyond any darkness he had ever experienced; it seemed to require another word entirely. He fumbled for his weapons, then froze as the tip of a blade pricked his throat.

‘Quare, is it?’ queried the voice that had laughed. It was not laughing now. ‘You’d best listen to your mate, Mr Quare.’

‘Gorblimey, if it ain’t the Grey Ghost, old Grimalkin ’isself!’ exclaimed the first voice meanwhile. ‘It’s been an age. I ’eard tell you’d retired.’

‘I had.’

‘A bit old ter be gallervantin’ about down ’ere, ain’t yer?’

‘No older than you, Cornelius.’

The voice chuckled. ‘Sharp ears for an old man.’

‘My blade’s grown no duller, either. Hello, Starkey.’

Quare felt the blade at his throat withdraw.

‘Grimalkin,’ came the reply. ‘Up ter yer old tricks again, are yer?’

‘You could say that,’ he answered. ‘Mr Quare and I are in pursuit of a certain timepiece.’

‘And who is Mr Quare at ’ome, eh?’ asked the voice of Cornelius. ‘Took on a ’prentice, ’ave yer? Never thought I’d see the day. You was always solitary as a cat.’

‘Mr Quare is a journeyman of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers,’ Longinus said.

‘Oho,’ said Starkey with a laugh. ‘A regulator, you mean. One of the Old Wolf’s whelps, is ’e? Or does ’e answer to Master Mephistopheles?’

‘Master Magnus is dead,’ Longinus said.

Silence greeted this news. Quare, meanwhile, had begun to notice that all was not as dark as it had first appeared. A diffuse, pale glow, fainter than the first pale smudge of dawn, hung like a sourceless fog in the air, and though it did not exactly illuminate anything, it did place objects into a kind of relief, so that he was able to discern, though none too clearly, the silhouettes of the two Morecockneyans. Cornelius, it appeared, was a large, stout man, nearly as big as the Old Wolf himself, while Starkey was thin as a greyhound.

‘Dead ’ow?’ asked Cornelius at last. ‘Was it murder?’

‘Did the Old Wolf do ’im?’ Starkey chimed in eagerly.

‘I cannot say,’ Longinus replied.

‘Cannot … or will not?’ Cornelius demanded.

‘In truth, I do not know for certain how he died. I cannot explain it. All I know is that it involves the timepiece I spoke of.’

‘Worf a lot, is it?’

‘It does not even tell the time,’ Longinus demurred.

‘Then why are you and Mr Quare ’ere so innerested in it?’ asked Starkey in a sceptical tone.

‘For two reasons. First, it belonged to me once, and was stolen by—’

At this, Starkey guffawed. ‘What, the great Grimalkin robbed? There’s a larf!’

Longinus continued testily. ‘You can see why I wish it back. No self-respecting thief enjoys having the tables turned. And to add insult to injury, the churl who stole it did so in the guise of none other than’ – and here he sketched a self-mocking bow – ‘the great Grimalkin.’

‘The cheek of it!’ Starkey sounded delighted. ‘The rogue!’

‘Second,’ Longinus resumed, ‘the timepiece is of considerable scientific interest.’

‘Pull the other one,’ Cornelius objected. ‘You said it don’t tell the time.’

‘Neither does a cannon or a musket.’

‘What, is it some kind of weapon, then?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ Longinus said. ‘Its mechanism is unique, to put it mildly. It is no exaggeration to say that whoever can uncover its secrets will gain considerable power thereby – perhaps even enough to decide the outcome of the war.’

‘What war?’

‘Come now, sir,’ said Longinus. ‘You cannot expect me to believe that you are ignorant of the fact that our country is fighting for its very life against the French and their allies!’

‘You surface dwellers are always fightin’ over somefin’ or other. It don’t make us no nevermind down ’ere,’ said Starkey with a shrug of his narrow shoulders.

Quare’s vision had continued to improve, and he saw now that the faint glow he had discerned earlier had its source in Starkey and Cornelius; or, rather, in a kind of pale powder that covered their faces and clothes. It radiated a sickly greenish light, giving them the aspect of mouldering ghosts. Cornelius had a nose like a warty potato above a beard like a tangle of moss, while Starkey’s face was gaunt, his nose sharp as a knife’s edge, his eyes sunk so deep in their sockets that their existence could only be inferred. And though Cornelius was fully as large as the Old Wolf, his bulk, unlike that of the corpulent clockman, was made up of muscle.

‘Whether you live above the ground or beneath it, you’re still Englishmen,’ Longinus said meanwhile.

‘We’re Morecockneyans first,’ Cornelius replied matter-of-factly. ‘We ’ave our own king, our own country.’

‘Maybe we orter ’ave a look at this timepiece, Corny,’ put in Starkey. ‘Might be we should take it to ’is Majesty.’

‘A capital idea, Starks.’

‘Gentlemen, the timepiece has already been stolen from me once,’ Longinus interjected. ‘I do not mean to put myself to the trouble and risk of retrieving it only to have it stolen again. Nor is it to be idly handled – poked and prodded like some common chronometer. That is what killed Master Magnus, or so I do believe. And if he could not handle the timepiece safely – he, the foremost horologist of the age – I do not think you, or any Morecockneyan, would be advised to try.’

‘What about you, then, eh? You fink you’re better than Magnus?’

‘On the contrary, I know my limits.’

‘Then ’ow—’ began Starkey, but Cornelius interrupted:

‘Mr Quare.’

Quare started; he had begun to think himself forgotten. ‘Yes?’

‘That’s why you brung ’im along,’ Cornelius continued, ignoring Quare completely. ‘You fink ’e can do what Magnus couldn’t and what you dare not even try. That’s right, ain’t it?’

‘Hardly. There may be one other in all of England who can discern the secrets of this timepiece, but that person is not Mr Quare. However, it’s true enough that my young friend has a certain … affinity with it,’ Longinus said. ‘I do not think it will kill him.’

‘’Ear that, Mr Quare?’ asked Starkey, more amused than ever. ‘’E don’t fink it’ll kill yer. ’Ow’s that for a vote o’ confidence?’

‘It’s not the watch I’m worried about,’ Quare answered.

‘So it’s a watch, is it?’ Starkey rejoined.

‘Of course it’s a watch,’ Longinus replied before Quare could add anything. ‘Did I not say so already?’

‘No, you did not,’ said Cornelius, measuring out his words. ‘What else ’ave you omitted to mention, I wonder? I thought we ’ad an understandin’, Grimalkin. An agreement. We give you the right o’ passage through our dark domain, and you give us bits o’ information and a cut o’ the swag from up top. Ain’t that always been the way of it?’

‘Might be it’s time to renegotiate our agreement, Corny,’ put in Starkey.

‘I was thinkin’ the very same, Starks.’

‘We don’t have time for this,’ Longinus said, exasperated. ‘Gentlemen, I assure you, our need is urgent. More urgent than you can imagine. As for the agreement to which you refer, neither you, Mr Cornelius, nor you, Mr Starkey, has the right to renegotiate so much as a syllable. Do not forget that I saved your king’s life once. I dare say he has not forgotten.’

‘There you would be wrong,’ Starkey said. ‘King Jeremiah ’as grown rather forgetful of late, I regret ter say.’

Cornelius added, in a voice edged with mockery, ‘Come now, sir. You cannot expect me to believe that you are ignorant o’ the fact that King Jeremiah is no longer among the livin’.’

Longinus drew in a sharp breath. ‘Jerry dead? When? How?’

‘That don’t concern you,’ said Cornelius. ‘But there’s a new king on the mushroom throne. And ’e might not feel ’isself bound by any agreements entered into by ’is predecessor – kings is peculiar that way, I find.’

‘You know what I fink, Corny?’ piped up Starkey.

‘What’s that, Starks?’

‘I fink we should bring our guests to meet ’is Majesty.’

By now the conversation had undergone so many twists and turns that Quare was positively dizzy. Whether the ‘Morecockneyans’ were friends or enemies or something in between, he didn’t know, but he did know that he had no desire whatsoever to meet their so-called king. And the same, it was apparent, was true of Longinus.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said as if speaking to guests in his own drawing room, ‘you know me. You know what I can do. That I have not thus far drawn my sword is a measure of my friendship with your late king, and my belief that the agreement between us was still in effect even after so many years. If that is not the case, I shall feel justified in defending myself.’ And here he did in fact make to draw his sword; seeing which, however indistinctly, Quare did likewise.

The effect was electric. ‘No need ter be so ’asty,’ said Starkey, backing off a step.

‘Indeed not,’ Cornelius said. ‘We was only tryin’ ter be ’ospitable like. But I can see yer in a ’urry. Yer can always meet ’is Majesty some uvver time.’

‘Then our agreement is still in effect?’

‘’Course it is,’ said Cornelius. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ll just—’

‘Very well,’ Longinus interrupted with a satisfied nod. ‘Then by the terms of that agreement, I require your assistance, gentlemen.’

‘But—’ began Starkey.

Faster than Quare could follow, Longinus’s sword was out of its scabbard. ‘You will accompany us to the guild hall of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers,’ he said. ‘That way we can travel without the need for torches. Your vision, after all, is considerably better than our own down here. Though never fear: I can see well enough to employ this’ – he flourished the blade – ‘if we should run into any trouble along the way.’

‘That’s … comfortin’ ter know,’ Cornelius said after a glance at Starkey.

‘Mr Starkey, you will oblige me by joining Mr Cornelius at the head of our little group. Sword sheathed, if you don’t mind.’

‘Wiv pleasure,’ he grumbled, sliding his sword back into its scabbard as he pushed past Quare, who only now drew his own blade, feeling slow and clumsy.

‘Now,’ Longinus said, ‘let us resume our journey in silence, for we would not wish to alert our enemies above – or, for that matter, our friends here below, who might misconstrue the situation. I trust we would all prefer to avoid such misunderstandings, eh, gentlemen?’

‘Assuredly,’ said Cornelius.

‘By all means,’ Starkey agreed.

‘You would do well to remember that I know the route as well as you, if not better. So you will oblige me by avoiding any short cuts or other unpleasant surprises along the way.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ Starkey said.

‘Do you really mean to proceed without torches?’ Quare asked, not quite believing what he had heard.

‘The Morecockneyans, as you have surely noticed, employ a fine powder made of the crushed spores of phosphorescent fungi specially grown for the purpose,’ Longinus said. ‘You’ll find the light sufficient to travel by … or fight by, if it should come to that.’

‘It won’t,’ Cornelius said with assurance. ‘No surface dweller can move as quiet as a Morecockneyan, or ’ear us if we don’t wish to be ’eard. Present company excepted. Everyone knows the Grey Ghost ain’t no ordinary surface dweller.’

‘Ain’t no ordinary ’uman bein’, yer ask me,’ Starkey opined.

‘Nobody did ask, so shut yer ’ole,’ Cornelius responded with a snarl. ‘What I mean to say, Grimalkin, is that we’ll get the two of yer safely up to the guild ’all, never fear. But that’s as far as me and Starks is prepared ter go, agreement or no.’

‘I had not thought to presume upon you one step farther,’ Longinus said. ‘Now, pray, lead on. And remember: not a word, not a sound.’

The two Morecockneyans set off, followed by Longinus and Quare. At first their pace was brisk, but Longinus soon called them to heel. The light emanating from the Morecockneyans, while sufficient to illuminate the way, if only just, gave the already dreamlike surroundings an even stranger aspect, so that Quare felt more than ever that he had slipped back into the Otherwhere. Everything seemed created out of nothing an instant before they came to it, and then, as soon as they were past, to dissolve again into the primordial soup that had spawned it. Quare, after some moments, had sheathed his sword, concentrating on avoiding the obstacles that emerged as if out of thin air; at the same time, he was intent upon any hint, however faint, of the hunter’s ethereal touch. His heart pulsed; his skin tingled; his every nerve was pulled taut, vibrating like a violin string. The discordant ticking of the timepieces he carried in his clothing, a constant soft patter of sound, set him further on edge.

But as Cornelius had promised, they encountered no one, and soon enough they stood at the entrance to a passage that, according to Longinus, led into the lowest levels of the guild hall. Quare had no idea how much time had passed since he and his mentor had begun their subterranean journey, but it seemed impossible that it should still be night. Nevertheless, Longinus appeared unconcerned.

‘Gentlemen, thank you for the guidance,’ he said. ‘We are in your debt.’

‘Quite all right,’ whispered Cornelius. ‘I reckon you can find yer own way from ’ere.’

‘I should hope so,’ he said.

‘I guess we’ll be ’eadin’ ’ome, then,’ Starkey said. ‘Best o’ luck to yer both.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t allow that,’ Longinus said, already moving as he spoke, a shadowy blur.

Quare heard two surprised exhalations, so close in time as to be almost a single sigh. Cornelius and Starkey sank to the ground. He gaped like a schoolboy.

‘Don’t just stand there,’ Longinus hissed. ‘Help me move them.’

‘Are they … dead?’

‘Do you take me for a cold-blooded murderer?’

‘No – a regulator.’

This drew an appreciative chuckle. ‘Touché, Mr Quare. But they are not dead, merely rendered insensible by a salve on my dagger point. They will regain consciousness in a few hours, none the worse for wear. By which time we shall either be long gone … or it will no longer matter.’

‘But why …?’

‘Surely you could see that they were not to be trusted. Things are different down here. I have been absent too long. Jerry – that is, King Jeremiah – is dead. I confess, I hadn’t expected that. From the sound of it, I do not think my old friend died peaceably in his sleep. He had no heir, only a gaggle of bastards – no offence, Mr Quare. But it seems plain that Cornelius and Starkey serve whoever it is that now sits upon the mushroom throne. Had I allowed them to depart, they would have reported back to him and then returned here with others to wait for our exit. They would have set upon us, stolen the timepiece, and left us for dead. There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind.’

‘Well, you have made an enemy of them now … and of their new king, whoever he may be.’

‘Regrettable but necessary. With luck, I shall have time to make amends, if warranted, though in truth I have shown our friends here more mercy than they would have given us, had they not been too intimidated by the reputation of the Grey Ghost.’

‘Another of your aliases?’

‘A nickname bestowed by King Jeremiah. I am most sorry to learn of his death. He was a giant in stature and in heart – every inch a king. When we have finished here, I shall look into the manner of his death. If it be murder, I will see that justice is done, one way or another. I swear it. But that is for later. The hunter awaits us, and time is short. Come, sir – let us be about our business.’

With that, he laid hold of Cornelius’s bulky form and, again evidencing his surprising strength, dragged the man into the passage; Quare did likewise with Starkey, who was as light as a bird. Beyond the narrow opening, the passage widened considerably, and they were able to deposit the bodies off to one side, leaning the two men against the rock wall, their legs stretched out before them, heads lolling, so that they resembled two sentries napping on the job.

‘Should we not bind them?’ Quare asked.

‘No need,’ Longinus assured him. ‘One way or another, this will be over by the time they regain their senses.’

‘Still, I should rather be safe than sorry.’ Quare cut strips of cloth from the Morecockneyans’ clothing and secured their hands behind their backs. ‘That will slow them down at least, if they awaken sooner than you expect. I would not like to find them waiting for us when we return. Perhaps we should take their weapons as well …’

‘And dispose of them where, precisely? Caution is commendable, but what is required now, Mr Quare, is speed and stealth. From this point on, not a word unless absolutely necessary. We shall endeavour to escape detection and to avoid violence for as long as possible; with luck, we shall be in and out without any bloodshed. But if we are not so lucky, do not hesitate – strike to kill. Do you understand?’

Quare, however, did not reply.

‘Mr Quare, do you understand? What has come over you, sir?’

And indeed, Quare had not heard a word Longinus had spoken. Instead, he was listening to another voice: faint but insistent. It called to him like a siren’s song. Not at all the brutal invasion he had experienced earlier, as of invisible talons clawing at his heart. This was a gentle suasion, an invitation, a seduction. If this was the hunter, then what had assailed him before?

‘Mr Quare!’

He blinked, recalled to himself. ‘The hunter is here,’ he said. ‘It calls to me.’

‘I hear nothing,’ Longinus returned.

‘As you said, I have an affinity with the timepiece.’

‘Can you discern its location?’

Quare pointed upwards.

17 The Song of the Hunter

LONGINUS ASKED NO more questions but drew his grey scarf over his mouth and nose. It was astonishing how the man vanished behind the mask; Quare could not have guessed, had he not already known, the age or even the sex of the person who stood before him. Longinus was gone: there was only Grimalkin, a lithe, shadowy figure exuding quietly coiled menace. As Quare drew his own mask into place, he wondered if he presented a similarly forbidding aspect.

Now, from one of the pouches at his belt, Longinus produced a glass vial whose contents were aglow with the same greenish light that emanated from the powder coating the unconscious Morecockneyans cap-a-pie. He gave this a shake, at which the light brightened; holding it upraised before him, he set off down the passage. From Quare’s perspective, trailing close behind, it was as if they were being led by a flitting firefly, or perhaps a fairy.

The latter association seemed all the more fitting in that the call of the hunter continued to beckon him onwards, or rather upwards, growing clearer and more enticing with every step, so that he had to keep himself from rushing ahead. The song was like no music he had ever heard; it was closer to birdsong, he decided, in that it seemed the spontaneous expression of a nature shaped to give voice to just that sound and no other; there was joy in it, a wild and carefree delight in being that lifted his heart on echoing swells, but there was also urgency, as if the watch were calling out for something needful, whose lack left it incomplete.

He recalled the words of Tiamat: It is just what you have called it: a hunter. It hunts . Was it hunting him? And, if so, for what purpose? It will answer to you now , the dragon had said, protect you … but do not imagine yourself its master. It is a weapon, a very great weapon – too great to be left in the hands of men . But was there ever a weapon that sang so sweetly?

He would not have stopped or turned back now even if it had been possible, impelled as much by his own curiosity as by any geis laid upon him by Tiamat or the hunter. Anticipation grew in him with every step. He felt that he was advancing to meet his destiny. I am coming , he thought, wondering if the hunter could hear him or sense his approach somehow. Perhaps his thoughts, too, made a kind of music.

At last, after a steady but not precipitous upwards climb, they reached a solid wall of packed stones. Longinus put his ear to the wall and listened. Then, satisfied, he set the glowing vial upon the ground to one side and began to prise out certain of the stones. Though they had appeared to be tightly wedged together, the stones slid out with ease, and soon there was room enough for the two men to crawl through, which they wasted no time in doing, Longinus still leading the way, the vial once again held before him.

The passage on the far side of the barrier looked no different than it had before, yet Quare sensed they had entered the precincts of the guild hall. The oppressive atmosphere lifted; it was as if they’d left a dense and gloom-ridden forest behind and, though still among the trees, had reached the outskirts of civilization. Perhaps, he thought, it was a subtle change in the hunter’s song that communicated this knowledge to him; he could not say for certain, but he did feel that the song, though wordless, had meaning … just as birdsong had its own meaning, hidden as it might be to human ears.

Longinus set a faster pace now, though he continued to move with the stealth and silence of his feline namesake. Quare, try as he might, could not match him in either respect, and he winced more than once as an errant footfall broadcast his presence. But no voices were raised in challenge, and he saw no glimmer of torchlight from ahead, just the lambent glow from the vial, preceding them like a will-o’-the-wisp.

The rough stone of the passage gave way to cut stone, and then to the long corridor of cells he’d last visited little more than a day ago – it seemed another lifetime! The corridor, too, was lightless, nor was there any hint of illumination behind any of the cell doors. He wondered if Longinus meant to make use of the same stair-master by which the two of them had escaped to the rooftop, but it appeared not, as the man passed cell after cell and made straight for the doorway at the end of the corridor.

‘Hsst! Who goes there?’ came a quavering voice from the last cell on the left.

Quare froze, as did Longinus; the green light winked out in an instant.

‘Who’s there?’ the shaky voice repeated from out of the dark. It was a voice Quare recognized but had not thought ever to hear again.

Receiving no reply, the voice grew louder, edged with panic. ‘For God’s sake, say something! Stop this damned torture and show yourself!’

Quare kept silent, following Longinus’s lead. But questions were swirling through his brain, clamouring to be asked.

‘Answer me, damn you!’ the voice cried angrily. ‘If you mean to kill me, come and try, you damned cowardly curs!’

At this, Longinus spoke at last. ‘Hsst! Quiet, man. I have no interest in killing you. I have no interest in you at all.’

Quare did not recognize this voice: a deep, intimidating growl. The voice of Grimalkin.

It did not intimidate the prisoner, however. ‘You’re not one of the Old Wolf’s gang, are you? Listen, if you get me out of here, I swear I won’t betray you!’

‘I could be a French assassin for all you know, come to murder your grandmaster.’

‘I don’t give a fig if you are! The bloody bastard means to murder me!’

‘You say you would not betray me, yet already you have offered to betray your country.’

‘This is not my country! I wasn’t born here, and I have no desire to die here. Let me out, damn you, or I’ll bring the whole nest down on your heads, I swear it!’

‘These walls are thick. No one will hear your cries.’

‘Let us put it to the test, shall we?’ And he began to scream: ‘Help! Murder! Help! Treason!’

‘Quiet!’ Longinus said. ‘Very well, I will see what I can do. Step away from the door.’

‘Gladly,’ said the voice.

The green light rekindled; by its glow, Quare saw Longinus approach the door of the cell. He hurried towards him. Longinus glanced at him and motioned for him to stay put. But he stepped close and laid a restraining hand on Longinus’s arm.

‘I know this man,’ he whispered. ‘It’s—’

‘Yes, there is no mistaking that uncouth accent,’ Longinus whispered back.

‘What do you mean to do to him?’

‘I’ll put him to sleep, as I did the Morecockneyans.’

‘We must question him first,’ Quare said.

‘There is no time.’

‘What’s going on out there?’ the voice demanded. ‘How many of you are there?’

‘I told you to step away,’ Longinus replied in the stentorian tones of Grimalkin. Reaching into another of the pouches at his waist, he produced an iron key and fitted it to the lock. There was a dull clank of tumblers turning. Then, after replacing the key, he drew his dagger. Quare drew his own. Stepping back, Longinus gestured for Quare to open the door.

The heavy door swung inwards; both men tensed, as if expecting the prisoner to hurl himself upon them, but no one emerged. Cautiously, the glowing vial held before him like a shield, dagger at the ready, Longinus stepped into the room; Quare followed, swinging the door shut behind him.

There, blinking in the weak light, stood Gerald Pickens.

Though Quare had recognized the voice and its bland American accent, seeing the man in the flesh was a shock. He had thought Pickens dead, murdered by Aylesford along with Mansfield and Farthingale that horrible night at the Pig and Rooster. But here he stood, very much alive – though the worse for wear. His once-fine clothes were torn and stained with what looked to be blood, and his once-handsome face bore the marks of a thorough beating. His left arm hung useless in a sling; the other was upraised as if to fend off a killing blow.

‘Who are you people?’ he asked now. ‘Why are you wearing those masks?’

‘You wound me, sir,’ growled Longinus. ‘Have you not heard of Grimalkin?’

‘I have … But I had not heard there were two of him!’

‘Who is to say there are not three, four, a hundred Grimalkins? But we mean you no harm,’ Longinus continued. ‘Who are you, and how did you come to be here?’

‘I’m Gerald Pickens, a journeyman of this company. As to how I came to be here, why, I scarcely know myself! But it seems I am a pawn in a larger game – a pawn about to be sacrificed.’

‘What do you mean? Quickly, now!’

‘Have you not heard of the foul murders that have set the whole city on edge? You called me traitor, but the real traitor is still at large somewhere in London!’

‘You mean Aylesford,’ said Longinus.

‘Aylesford?’ Pickens shook his head. ‘He is dead, another victim of the traitor, or so I am told.’

‘What traitor?’

‘Why, the infamous Quare, of course.’

‘What?’ The word burst from Quare before he could help himself.

‘Another journeyman of this company,’ Pickens explained. ‘A friend – or so I thought. But would you believe it, in the pay of the French all along. It was he who murdered Aylesford and the rest – including poor Master Magnus, God rest his soul. Only, don’t you see, the man has fled. To where, who can say? Back to his masters, no doubt. But now, with the city in an uproar, the powers that be require a scapegoat. You are looking at that unfortunate man. Quare attacked me at the Pig and Rooster – from behind, the blackguard! – and left me for dead, but I was only stunned. I survived. And this is my reward! I am to hang for the crimes of another man. My name is to be blackened, my family dishonoured. So much for the king’s justice!’

‘This is intolerable,’ Quare said.

‘There is naught to be done about it now,’ Longinus said.

‘Take me with you!’ Pickens cried. ‘I won’t give you away – I swear it! And I can help you navigate the twists and turns of this infernal labyrinth of a guild hall! I must be free to clear my name – to find Quare and bring him to justice.’

‘You have found him,’ said Quare, and pulled down his mask even as Longinus called out ‘No!’

Pickens sagged back as though struck a blow. Then, gathering his courage, he said, ‘So, traitor, have you come to finish the job?’

‘I am as innocent as you are,’ Quare said. ‘I, too, was meant to be a scapegoat for these heinous crimes, but I escaped … with the help of Grimalkin here – the real Grimalkin.’

‘Why would a thief help you escape?’

‘He is no thief, any more than I am a murderer.’

‘Then who …?’

‘Aylesford,’ Quare said. ‘He confessed as much to me across swords, but I was unable to dispatch him. He is the traitor – a Scottish loyalist in the pay of the French.’

‘Can you prove this?’ Pickens demanded.

‘Alas, no,’ Quare said. ‘I cannot yet clear my name – or yours, for that matter. The conspiracy against us goes beyond the Old Wolf, all the way to Mr Pitt … or so I am reliably informed.’

‘It is true,’ Longinus said. ‘It may well be that His Majesty himself, misled by others, has ordered your sacrifice, Mr Pickens.’

‘Then why have you come here,’ Pickens asked, ‘if not to clear your name? Do you mean to kill the Old Wolf after all?’

‘To answer that would be to unfold a story we do not have the time to tell – nor would you be likely to believe it in any case,’ Quare said.

‘The question is, rather, what shall we do with you, Mr Pickens?’ asked Longinus. ‘We cannot simply render you unconscious, as I had planned, since Mr Quare has revealed himself to you, and you would surely, whether willingly or not, reveal this in turn to the Old Wolf under questioning.’

‘You cannot mean …’

‘I should hate to murder a man in cold blood, especially an innocent man. But I will do so if there is no alternative.’

‘Take me with you,’ Pickens implored. ‘I may be injured, but I can still be of help. I dare say I know the guild hall as well if not better than Quare does, and if it comes to a fight, why, I am right-handed and not unskilled with a blade. I am – or, rather, was, as I have now been expelled from the Most Secret and Exalted Order – a regulator. I suppose it can do me no harm to confess that now.’

‘I, too, was a member of that order!’ Quare said. ‘Master Magnus, God rest his soul, recruited me.’

‘As he did me,’ Pickens said with a grin rendered ghastly by the green light and the bruises covering his face. ‘I know I used to tease you about being a regulator, Quare, but I swear it was only as a joke, to deflect any suspicion from myself! I had no inkling that you might really be one!’

‘Nor I you,’ said Quare, grinning himself.

‘Enough,’ Longinus interjected in Grimalkin’s growl. ‘There may be a way. But know this, Mr Pickens: if you betray us by word or deed – or even by thought – I shall know it, and I shall know how to repay it. In that case, you will be the first to die.’

‘I shall give you no cause to doubt me, I swear it,’ said Pickens.

‘We are about the business of the kingdom this night, Mr Quare and I, and the fate of crown and country may well hinge upon our success,’ Longinus said. ‘If you would aid us, then you must swear to obey me without question or hesitation, on your honour as a journeyman of this company, by the oath you swore to be true to His Majesty, so help you God.’

‘I swear it. So help me God.’

‘Very well.’ Longinus put up his dagger and made his way to the back of the cell. There he paused, examining the wall, though Quare could see nothing of note there, just blocks of heavy stone mortared into place. This cell was both smaller and less well appointed than the one in which he had been held: there was no desk, no pallet, no fireplace. Clearly, after his escape, the Old Wolf had intended to take no chances with Pickens.

‘I say, Quare, is it really the fabled Grimalkin?’ Pickens asked him meanwhile in a whisper.

‘None other,’ Quare said.

‘Who is he behind that mask?’

‘I cannot say,’ Quare replied. ‘He is a man of unexpected talents. A regulator, in fact, if you can believe it.’

‘I … scarcely know what to believe any more.’

‘I know the feeling.’

‘Ah, here it is.’ Longinus’s gloved fingers moved over the wall; with a sudden grinding sound that made Quare start, a single block of stone, at chest height, slid into the wall, leaving a hollow space. ‘Mr Quare, Mr Pickens, if you please, gentlemen.’

The two men glanced at each other and then approached Longinus.

‘I am no stranger to this place,’ he said, addressing Pickens. ‘As Mr Quare has told you, I, too, have been a regulator in my time, recruited, like yourself, by Master Magnus.’ As he spoke, he reached into the hollow, then withdrew his hand.

Pickens stepped back with a cry as a narrow section of wall, extending from floor to ceiling, pivoted in silence, like a door swinging on oiled hinges, to produce an opening where none had been before. Quare, who had by now almost come to expect such surprises where Longinus was concerned, looked on with curiosity. Was this another stair-master?

‘Every cell has its secrets,’ said Longinus. ‘The guild hall is riddled with hidden rooms and passages added piecemeal over the centuries by men whose names have been as thoroughly forgotten as their constructs – but not by me. Thus I have prepared these cells against the eventuality of my ever being imprisoned here.’ He stepped into the opening, taking the wan light with him, which dwindled and then winked out altogether.

Pickens’s voice wavered out of the dark. ‘Where has he gone, Quare? What the devil is he up to? Does he mean to abandon us?’

Grimalkin’s gruff voice replied from within the wall before Quare could answer. ‘Quiet, Mr Pickens. From this moment, you will say nothing unless it is in reply to a question I have asked you.’

The light reappeared, a distant, solitary star whose shine increased until Longinus emerged back into the cell. In his arms he carried a dark bundle. ‘Mr Quare, you will help Mr Pickens into these clothes.’

Pickens looked somewhat sceptical at this but did not protest or speak a word as, with Quare’s help, he dressed himself in the clothing provided . His torn and bloodstained clothes he handed to Longinus, who, pinching them between his fingers with evident distaste, flung them into the opening, where they vanished as if into an abyss.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Longinus when at last Pickens was fully dressed, ‘your masks, if you please.’

Quare tugged his mask into place; Pickens did likewise; and suddenly three Grimalkins stood in the cell where only two had entered.

Longinus studied Pickens thoughtfully. ‘You’ll do, Mr Pickens. I do not trust you sufficiently to provide you with a weapon, but if all goes well you shall not need one, and if things go badly the lack is not likely to matter much. Now, sir, have you heard or seen aught of an unusual watch in the possession of the Old Wolf – a hunter, in point of fact?’

‘N-no,’ stammered Pickens.

‘That watch is our objective,’ Longinus said. ‘It will likely be hidden, in which case an extra pair of eyes will not go amiss.’

‘What does it look like?’

‘Mr Quare?’ Longinus invited.

‘It appears at first to be an ordinary pocket watch,’ Quare said. ‘Its casing is of silver, but without outward embellishment or ornamentation. Yet two peculiarities are evident upon closer inspection. First, the watch is unusually thin. Second, it lacks a stem or indeed any winding mechanism. Should you find it, do not open it for anything.’

‘If you find it, Mr Pickens, you are to alert Mr Quare or me at once,’ Longinus added. ‘Is that clear?’

‘Absolutely … and yet not at all. What is the significance of this watch? Does it hold some secret message?’

‘Perhaps we shall take you more deeply into our confidence once you have proved yourself worthy of it. But that is all you need to know at present. And now, gentlemen, let us return to the matter at hand. I will take the lead; Mr Pickens, you will follow; Mr Quare, you will bring up the rear. Remember: not a word, not a sound. You will keep your dagger to hand, Mr Quare, and if it seems to you that Mr Pickens is about to betray us in any way, you will use it at once, without hesitation.’

‘I won’t,’ Pickens said.

Quare nodded, his mouth dry.

Longinus stepped past them, to the door of the cell, where he listened for a moment before opening it and slipping out into the hallway. Pickens followed, then Quare, who closed the door behind him. Regarding the grey shape before him, Quare drew his dagger, wondering if he could really stab the man in the back should it prove necessary. He hoped he would not have to find out.

Longinus led them to the end of the corridor, where a large, heavy door blocked their passage. He put his ear to it, and, after a moment, satisfied, produced the key that had opened the door to Pickens’s cell; it proved effective here as well. They passed through in single file, Quare again bringing up the rear and closing the door behind him.

In the excitement of finding Pickens, the song of the hunter had faded to the back of Quare’s mind. Now it surged forward again, louder and more insistent, as if some fresh urgency had arisen. He did not know how to communicate this to Longinus without speaking, and yet he did not dare say a word; they had entered a more frequently travelled area of the guild hall, one lit by candles burning in sconces, though this passage was deserted now. Ancient oil paintings and tapestries decorated the walls, their subjects faded to mere suggestions of shape and colour.

Longinus glided like a fog across the floor. Pickens could not match him but acquitted himself well enough, as did Quare, whose attention was divided between the summons only he could hear and the back of the man he might at any moment be called upon to murder.

They traversed one corridor, then another, then climbed a flight of stairs, all without encountering a soul. But just as they reached the top of the stairs and entered another candlelit hallway, this one lined with doors, a man came around the far corner, short and rotund, waddling with haste. It was Master Malrubius, the Old Wolf’s sycophant and shadow.

Malrubius stopped short at the sight of them, as did the armed servant who stepped into view beside him an instant later. Quare and Pickens also froze, but Longinus accelerated.

Quick as lightning, two blurs shot down the corridor; each found its mark, and the two men stiffened and collapsed before they could cry out a warning or indeed make any sound at all. By the time they hit the floor , Longinus was kneeling beside them to retrieve what he had thrown. He glanced up as Quare and Pickens arrived at a run, putting a finger to his mask for silence.

‘Have you killed them?’ Pickens demanded in a breathless whisper.

‘They are merely unconscious,’ said Longinus.

‘Good.’ With no more warning than that, Pickens drew back his boot and delivered a vicious kick to the unprotected face of Master Malrubius. And then another. Quare heard the crack of the man’s nose breaking. By which time he had resheathed his blade and locked his arms about Pickens from behind, pinning his arms to his chest and hauling him back.

‘Let me go!’ Pickens said, still whispering, though he did not struggle to free himself. ‘My arm—’

He fell silent as Longinus, who had risen to his feet, stepped up and laid the edge of a dagger against his throat.

‘You are making me regret my decision, Mr Pickens,’ he said.

‘You saw what that swine did to me,’ Pickens gasped out in reply. ‘He doesn’t deserve to live. Give me a dagger and I’ll finish the job.’

‘We have not come here to murder anyone if we can help it,’ Longinus said. ‘Personal vendettas have no place in our mission. If you cannot restrain your temper, I shall have no choice but to give you the same treatment I have already administered to these gentlemen.’

It was a moment before Pickens replied. He sighed, and Quare felt the tension drain from his body. ‘Very well, Grimalkin. I’ll put vengeance aside … for now.’

‘Let him go, Mr Quare,’ Longinus said. Quare did so. Yet Longinus had not removed his dagger, and thus Pickens did not dare to so much as twitch.

‘This is the last interruption I will countenance,’ Longinus said, gazing into the other man’s eyes. ‘You will follow my commands with alacrity, keep silent, and otherwise give me no cause to employ this dagger, for I assure you, Mr Pickens, I will not hesitate to use it, and you will not receive another warning before I do. The substance coating this blade will put you to sleep in an instant, and we will leave you behind, to the tender mercies of Master Malrubius, which you are already so well acquainted with. Is that clear?’

‘Quite.’

Longinus put up his dagger. ‘Very well. I think it time that we take a less public route. Mr Pickens, you will keep watch. Mr Quare, if you would assist me …’

Longinus unlocked one of the doors off the hall and pushed it open; then he and Quare, with some difficulty in the case of Malrubius, dragged the two bodies into what, it became evident, by the greenish light of Longinus’s vial, was an old and disused storeroom containing oak barrels caked with dust and rat droppings. Malrubius left a trail of blood across the stones of the floor, but there was nothing to be done about it now, Quare supposed. Pickens, meanwhile, looked on from behind his mask, dividing his attention between them and the empty hallway.

‘Come along, Mr Pickens,’ Longinus said at last from inside the room.

Pickens stepped forward but balked at entering the storeroom, as if afraid that Longinus meant to leave him there after all, slumbering alongside Malrubius and the guardsman. Nor, Quare reflected, was that fear unfounded, for the room had no other visible exit. But he had experienced enough of Longinus’s surprises to feel confident another was imminent.

‘It’s all right, Pickens,’ Quare said. ‘One thing I’ve learned about Grimalkin: he always leaves himself a way out.’

‘Mr Pickens, if you please,’ Longinus said.

Pickens entered the room. Longinus nodded to Quare, who closed the door behind him. They stood uncomfortably close in the small, ill-lit space, the two unconscious men sprawled at their feet.

The guardsman was quiet as a corpse, but Malrubius was making small sounds of distress, rather like a piglet rooting in the ground; Quare thought his breathing must be impeded by his broken nose, or perhaps by blood draining into his throat. He had no more love for Malrubius than Pickens did, but neither did he care to stand by while the man choked to death. Kneeling, he repositioned the head so as to improve the man’s air flow.

Longinus, meanwhile, had turned to rummage behind a stack of barrels that reached from floor to ceiling. A sharp clicking sound, and the front of the stack slid into the back, exposing a half tube, like a chimney, that rose into darkness. ‘Now we ascend,’ Longinus said. ‘I will go first. Then Mr Pickens. Mr Quare, you will bring up the rear.’

Quare glanced up at this. ‘Shall we not first bind and gag your latest victims?’

‘No need,’ Longinus said with a shake of his head. ‘They will not wake for hours, and our own time grows most pressing; the bulk of the night is already behind us. Take this, Mr Quare.’ He passed over the glowing vial, which Quare, standing, accepted. ‘Gentlemen, I will await you above.’ With that, Longinus stepped into the half tube and turned to face them, arms at his sides. There was another clicking sound, and suddenly, to the accompaniment of rattling gears, he was rising, borne swiftly out of sight.

‘What wizardry is this!’ exclaimed Pickens.

‘No wizardry,’ Quare replied with a chuckle. ‘Merely common horological principles applied on a grander scale.’ Though saying that did not diminish the wonder he too felt.

‘Who built this mechanism?’ Pickens demanded. ‘And how is it that Grimalkin should know of it?’

Quare shrugged. ‘I cannot say.’

‘I thought I knew the guild hall as well as anyone,’ Pickens said. ‘I see now that I was mistaken. About that … and other things.’

As he spoke, the rattling sound returned, bringing with it the platform, empty now.

‘You next,’ Quare told him.

‘Is it quite safe?’

‘Grimalkin did not hesitate.’

‘That is far from reassuring. The man is rash and impulsive.’

‘He is also our only chance to get through this in one piece.’

‘Good point.’ Pickens stepped into the half tube just as Longinus had done. And was carried as quickly aloft.

As he waited for the platform to return, Quare focused again on the song of the hunter. Its urgency was unabated, as was its beauty. How the music was made, how it reached him, and him alone, were mysteries he could not unravel; he knew only that the watch was a mechanism that made Magnus’s marvels seem crude by comparison. He had examined it, seen its workings stir inexplicably to life, experienced, for the briefest instant, the release of its uncanny destructive power – which, despite everything, he could not help thinking had been merely a fraction of what it was capable of, under the right conditions … whatever they might be. He imagined whole armies laid to waste in the blink of an eye, proud cities reduced to rubble. And here he was now, closer than ever to claiming it for himself … or, rather, he reminded himself with a sinking heart, for a creature of the Otherwhere, whose unwilling agent he had become. Like it or not, when he finally held the hunter in his hands, he would call for Tiamat … and he had no doubt that the dragon would come to claim its prize.

The rattle of the returning platform roused him. He stepped in, then turned to face outwards, arms at his sides. He heard a click, followed by the ratcheting of gears, and felt the gathering force of the mechanism an instant before it engaged and lifted him more smoothly than he would have thought possible. The pallid green light of the vial he clutched in one hand slid upwards along with him like sap rising in the trunk of a tree.

Then the platform slowed and halted, and there was Longinus, pulling him into a storeroom the twin of the one he had left behind, save that this one was lit by a solitary candle set in an iron brace upon one wall. Quare, standing beside Pickens, watched as Longinus reached behind the stack of barrels from whose hollow insides he had just emerged; another click, and the missing front of the stack swivelled around and back into place.

Longinus turned to them, his eyes hard and glittering as chips of flint. ‘Here is where it gets interesting, gentlemen,’ he whispered. ‘I regret to say that there is no secret entrance to the Old Wolf’s den. Or, if there is, even I do not know of it. Nor will my key unlock that door. I must pick the lock. While I am doing so, we will be at our most vulnerable. If we are discovered, and an alarm is raised, we shall have no recourse but to fight our way back out. I do not rate our chances highly in that regard. Thus, it is essential that anyone who stumbles upon us be silenced before they can give warning. As I will be otherwise occupied, and Mr Pickens is unarmed, that duty falls to you, Mr Quare.’

He nodded.

Longinus produced a watch from within the folds of his cloak. ‘It is almost three o’clock. I do not think we can safely tarry more than an hour.’

‘But what if the hunter we seek is not here?’ Pickens asked. ‘What if the Old Wolf has taken it to his chambers for the night?’

‘It is here,’ Quare said before Longinus could reply.

Pickens threw him a sharp glance. ‘How can you know that?’

‘Let’s just say I have a feeling. A very strong feeling.’

‘But—’

‘Enough,’ interjected Longinus. ‘Let us be about our business, gentlemen.’

He listened for a moment at the door of the storeroom before cracking it open and slipping out. Pickens followed, and Quare came after, emerging into an empty hallway. The candles in their sconces had been extinguished for the night, and the greenish light of the vial in his hand gave everything a murky, underwater glow. Pickens and Longinus held vials of their own. Longinus was already halfway down the corridor, heading for the door of the Old Wolf’s den, Pickens as close behind him as a shadow. Quare made to draw his blade, then, reconsidering, unslung his crossbow instead, armed it, and hastened after them, his heart keeping time with the song of the hunter, which had, once again, ratcheted up its intensity, as if sensing his approach.

Longinus reached the door and knelt before it. Pickens stood at his back, holding his vial up to illuminate the lock while glancing up and down the corridor, though little was visible beyond the nimbus of their chemically generated lights.

Quare’s skin prickled with the sense of unseen eyes upon him. He had always felt this way in the guild hall – and not without reason. But there was no obvious sign of observation now. The doors on either side of the corridor, as far as he could tell, remained closed, and no sound intruded on the hush of the great house or the music of the hunter that only he seemed able to hear. Luck, it appeared, was with them.

A faint click from the door announced Longinus’s success. He stood, tucking his lockpick away and then drawing his sword. He locked eyes with Quare and Pickens in turn. Then, with a nod, he cracked the Old Wolf’s door open just wide enough to slip through. Pickens pushed in after him, and Quare followed, once again shutting the door behind him.

The instant he did so, sparks flared out of the darkness. Suddenly torches were ablaze, revealing perhaps a dozen guardsmen with pikes – and, in some cases, pistols – pointed in their direction. Revealed as well was the Old Wolf, who regarded them from behind his desk with a smile of predatory satisfaction on his fleshy, florid face.

Quare took this in through senses dulled by the wild din of the hunter; its song had skidded into a shrill caterwauling that had him pressing the hand that held the vial to the side of his head as if its light might somehow penetrate and soothe his skull. It occurred to him that perhaps the hunter hadn’t been calling to him at all. Perhaps it had been warning him away.

Pickens cursed, at which the Old Wolf heaved himself erect.

‘Drop your weapons, gentlemen. I shall not ask twice.’

Longinus seemed to consider his chances for a moment, then complied with the command. Quare followed his lead, lowering the crossbow to the floor.

Grandmaster Wolfe’s smile widened, and he leaned forward over the wooden desk, his large hands, with their glittering rings, laid flat on its surface. ‘I had hoped my little trap might snare the great Grimalkin, but I did not think to catch three. How positively profligate! Is this all of you, or should I be expecting more?’

No one answered.

‘Remove your masks,’ the Old Wolf said. ‘I would see your faces.’ After a moment, he added: ‘Do it, or I will have it done, and none too gently.’

‘You mean to kill us in any case,’ said Longinus in the gruff voice of Grimalkin.

‘Of course. But not before you are put to the question. A good deal of unpleasantness lies ahead for you, I’m afraid. A good deal of pain and suffering. But it need not begin now.’

Longinus pulled off his mask and flung it defiantly to the floor.

‘Lord Wichcote,’ said the Old Wolf without batting an eyelid. ‘I cannot say I am surprised. Your involvement in this affair has been most suspicious from the start. You should have stayed ensconced behind the walls of your estate, my lord. Your title will not protect you here, nor will His Majesty intervene.’

It struck Quare that the grandmaster had not recognized Longinus, the servant, but saw only the lord. Class, it seemed, could be a more effective disguise than any mask.

When Longinus did not reply, the Old Wolf shifted his gaze to Quare and Pickens. ‘And what of these two? Who else have we caught in our web? Shall I guess? Nay, it is no guess. If Wichcote is here, Quare cannot be far behind.’

Quare tugged his own mask down.

‘The prodigal returns. Alas, I’m afraid I cannot welcome you with open arms, Mr Quare. No fatted calf for you. But never fear: you shall receive the welcome you deserve.’ He looked to Pickens. ‘And you, sir? I confess, I cannot imagine who you might be. The servant who spirited Mr Quare away? Or the real Grimalkin, perhaps?’

The mask came off.

‘Mr Pickens,’ said the Old Wolf, straightening up and seeming surprised for once. ‘I am disappointed to find you in such disreputable company. For all your protestations of innocence, it would seem you are a traitor after all.’

‘It is you who are the traitor,’ Pickens shot back.

‘Keep a civil tongue in your head, sir,’ the grandmaster growled, ‘or I shall keep it for you – in a jar.’ He addressed Longinus. ‘What game are you playing, my lord? Coming here dressed as Grimalkin like some urchin on Gunpowder Night! I suppose Mr Quare must have brought you.’

‘I am playing no game, I assure you.’

The Old Wolf chuckled, a phlegmy rumble. ‘Why, am I to believe that you are Grimalkin? A man of sixty or more? It is absurd on its face, quite apart from the fact that Grimalkin – the real Grimalkin – stole the very watch from you that you have come here to reclaim. Or was that theft a charade? Are you, perhaps, in league with Grimalkin? Is he likely to join us after all?’

Longinus shrugged but said nothing.

‘I have set guards outside this door, my lord. No one will be getting in – or out – unless I give the word.’ As he spoke, he gestured to one of the guardsmen, who began to move about the room, lighting candles from his torch; when he had finished, he extinguished that torch, as well as the others, so that the garish illumination was replaced by a more mellow flickering of light and shadow.

‘You will answer my questions truthfully,’ the Old Wolf said meanwhile. ‘If not here and now, then later, in circumstances much less pleasant … for you.’

‘Your threats do not frighten me,’ Longinus rejoined. ‘I have faced far worse in my time. It is you, Sir Thaddeus, who should be afraid.’

This elicited another chuckle. ‘What, of a toothpick like you? Why, I could snap you in half with my bare hands! As for your associates’ – he gestured to the guards – ‘I think I may rely on these gentlemen to protect me.’

‘I am speaking of the watch,’ Longinus answered. ‘The hunter.’

‘Yes, the watch. A most intriguing timepiece. I confess I have been unable to unlock its secrets.’

‘Then you should count yourself most fortunate,’ said Longinus. ‘Be wise as well, Sir Thaddeus, and return the watch to me. It is my property, after all. No real harm has yet been done. Let me take it back and keep it safe.’

‘I think not,’ the Old Wolf said. ‘If the watch is a weapon, as Mr Quare avers, and as I do believe, then it belongs to England, especially now, in her hour of need. If you were a patriot, my lord, you would see that and help me discover how to use it.’

‘It is because I am a patriot that I do not.’

‘Bah. I do not think you know the first thing about this watch, despite having had it in your possession. I think it defeated you as much as it does me. But it did not defeat Magnus, did it?’

‘No.’ Quare spoke up now, ignoring the clamour in his head. ‘It killed him.’

‘But not, I suspect, before he communicated the secret of its operation to you.’ He nodded, and six guardsmen stepped forward as one to take hold of Quare, Longinus and Pickens while the remainder of their brethren kept pistols aimed at them. Pickens struggled, to no avail, as did Quare, though Longinus offered no resistance. Grandmaster Wolfe, meanwhile, opened a drawer of his desk and produced a small leather-bound tool kit. He laid this out on the surface of the desk and then stepped to one side, nodding again to the guardsmen. ‘Bring him,’ he said.

The pair of guardsmen who had taken charge of Quare frogmarched him around the desk and pushed him down into the Old Wolf’s voluminous chair. They remained standing to either side of him. Longinus and Pickens were similarly flanked.

‘Now, Mr Quare,’ the grandmaster said, stepping forward again. ‘I find I have been too lenient with you in the past. I shall be taking a firmer hand now.’ As he spoke, he took a pocket watch – the pocket watch, as Quare saw at once – from his waistcoat and turned it in his pudgy fingers, the silver casing winking like a coin. ‘Strange to think that such a small thing could possess power enough to win a war. I have examined this watch most thoroughly, and a more curious and confounding timepiece I have never encountered. It appears to be nothing more than a child’s toy. It lacks a winding mechanism. It has no recognizable numbers painted upon its face, only sigils of arcane significance. My finest tools could not prise open its casing – yet behold how that same casing springs open of itself when the hour and minute hands are properly aligned.’

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 .’

‘ But Master … do you imagine a dragon will be welcomed with open arms – a creature of legend suddenly made real? You will be seen as a demon, a monster to be slain. Indeed, I can well imagine that your presence might end the war between England and her enemies – but only so that they may unite against you .’

‘ Let them try. They shall learn to fear – and to obey. But I will not be restricted to the body of a dragon, Mr Quare. Dragons are protean creatures, or so I now perceive. I will walk the Earth as a man – as the man I should have been, my outer form at last a match for my inner qualities. People will follow such a man willingly – perhaps not all of them, but enough .’ Again the darkness took the shape of a godlike man.

Quare felt a shudder pass through him. ‘ Listen to yourself, Master – you are talking like a tyrant, not the man I knew … the man whose death I mourned .’

‘ In that, you were too hasty – though I appreciate the sentiment, of course. But as to the other: perhaps you did not know me as well as you thought. Perhaps I did not know myself. My perceptions were as stunted and twisted as the body that was my prison. But now I have escaped from both .’

‘ This is monstrous ,’ Quare said.

‘ Miraculous, rather. Yes, science has its miracles, too! For what else is this mechanism but a thing of science – an artificial egg, incubator of dragons, of gods? ’

‘ Of madness .’

‘ You disappoint me, Mr Quare, indeed you do. You, too, have known what it is to be mocked and scorned, to have the particulars of your birth held against you. Why would you not rejoice at the prospect of a world in which an orphan or a bastard could rise as far as his talents might take him? ’

‘ That world I would welcome. But you speak of fear and compelled obedience. I will not be part of such a world .’

‘ You are part of it already. When the hunter – the egg – drank our blood, it tasted us. It sifted our qualities and judged us. It chose how to use us in its great work of growing a dragon .’

‘ You speak as if it were intelligent .’

‘ Is a clock intelligent? A loom? This is a device, Mr Quare. A machine. It does what it was built to do – no more, no less .’

‘ Built by whom? ’

‘ That I do not know … yet .’

‘ But you knew the hunter was no ordinary timepiece. You’ve known that for years. You and Longinus – Lord Wichcote, that is – worked together once to discover its secrets. He has confessed as much to me. Surely he must have told you of his experiences in Märchen. Of the Otherwhere. Of Wachter, Doppler, and the rest .’

‘ Of course he did – though now I perceive, for everything you know is known to me in this place, that his lordship omitted some choice information. That extraordinary foot of his, for instance. And to think that Grimalkin was under my nose all that time! ’ His laughter rumbled. ‘ But Lord Wichcote is a man who likes his secrets. No matter. For many years, we did work together, as you say. If one of us had spilled even a drop of blood during those investigations, things might have gone very differently! But we had no inkling that blood was the key. No clue whatsoever. And finally, out of frustration, or greed, or an excess of caution, perhaps, fearful of drawing the attention of Doppler or some greater power, Lord Wichcote stopped cooperating. He refused to grant me access to the hunter, or even to tell me where he had hidden it. We continued to work together on other matters – he remained a key asset of the Most Secret and Exalted Order. But a certain mutual trust was spoiled .’

‘ Is that why you sent me to his house that night? To steal the hunter, so you could resume your investigations? ’

‘ I had no delusions on that score. Even at his age, Lord Wichcote is a deadly swordsman, a consummate fighter. I doubt there is a regulator alive who could best him. Certainly not you. No, you could never have stolen the hunter from him .’

‘ What then? Did you expect him to simply give it to me? ’

‘ In point of fact, yes, I did .’

‘ And why should he have done that? ’

‘ Have you not marked the resemblance between you? Lord Wichcote is your father, Mr Quare .’

Quare had not thought he could be any more discomposed than he was already. But in that, he had been wrong. ‘ Lord Wichcote … Longinus … my father?’

‘ You are his bastard by-blow. I tracked you down, brought you to London, trained you in the skills of a journeyman and regulator – all so that I might have a trump card with his lordship. It is always wise, I have found, when dealing with the gentry, to do so from a position of strength. They do not generally feel themselves bound by honour or any other constraint when dealing with those they perceive to be their inferiors .’

‘ But you are wrong. I asked Lord Wichcote himself if he were not my father. I put the question to him directly, face to face. He denied it .’

‘ Of course he did. Such is the way of the world. But make no mistake: you are his son, his bastard, and he knows it well .’

‘ Has he always known? ’

‘ No. He had not known of your existence until the very day I dispatched you to him. That same afternoon, I sent a confidential note to his lordship detailing the particulars of your parentage and informing him that you would be paying him a visit later that same night. Knowing that there are men in this world who do not welcome their by-blows with open arms, I warned him in no uncertain terms that if any harm befell you, I would release all the details to His Majesty … and to the vultures of Fleet Street. If he wished to avoid disgrace or worse, he need only hand over the hunter to you. I did not like to resort to blackmail, but there was no choice. Time was running out, you see. Others were on the trail of the hunter, among them, or so I thought, the notorious Grimalkin. I did not have faith in my old friend’s ability to keep the hunter safe from this paragon of thievery. And was I not right to be concerned? So it was that I decided the time had come to play my trump card. And I feel certain that his lordship would have given you the hunter, Mr Quare … if Grimalkin – a false Grimalkin, as it appears, and a woman no less! – had not got there first .’

‘ Why didn’t you tell me any of this before? ’ Quare demanded. ‘ I trusted you … looked upon you as I might have a father .’

‘ Yes, that made it all very easy, I must say. You would do well in the future, Mr Quare, to be a good deal less trusting. At least you need not search for a substitute father any longer. And after all, haven’t things turned out for the best? You retrieved the watch from the female masquerading as Grimalkin and returned it to me. I pricked my finger in examining it, and discovered the secret key I had looked for in vain all those years. Thanks to you, I have shed my ruined body and will soon enjoy a better one, along with the power to reshape the world. I owe you much – and never let it be said that I do not repay my debts .’

‘ How – by killing me and bringing me here? ’

‘ Did I not say that the hunter had saved your life? I sensed the moment Aylesford’s dagger slid into your heart, Mr Quare. I watched your essence – your soul, for lack of a better word – crawl like a moth from its chrysalis. I called it to me, and it came, a poor blind thing drawn along a bloody umbilical. I grasped it in my hand. I hold it still .’

At this, he extended one hand. There, on a palm as black as midnight, sat a fragile moth the colour of blood – the only bit of colour Quare had glimpsed since he had awakened here. The sight of it sent a shock through him; though he had never before seen such a thing, still he recognized it, felt instinctively that it was a part of him. The moth seemed to recognize him as well. It fluttered its wings but could not rise from Master Magnus’s palm, as if held down by an immense weight. Its blood-red colour flared as it struggled, like a cooling ember fanned by a breeze, but almost at once the colour ebbed, fading from scarlet through rouge to a pale rose, as the moth subsided in exhaustion. Magnus closed his fingers around it, caging it within.

‘ I know about the dragon Tiamat and the compulsion laid upon you. But I have broken its hold. That jealous creature has no dominion over you any more – not as long as I hold this part of you, and you hold the hunter. Thus joined, no man or dragon can stand against us. We are invincible, Mr Quare! I will protect you from your enemies. From death itself. In return, you will be my agent in the world. My protector. My voice. And more. For you see, I cannot hatch from this egg alone. I need your help. I must grow stronger, and for that I require sustenance .’

Quare felt a chill. ‘ You mean blood .’

‘ Only then will I be strong enough to hatch. You will be midwife to that birth. That is your purpose, your glorious destiny! ’

‘ Glorious? It is obscene. Is that how you would usher in your bright and shining age of reason? On a tide of blood? ’

‘ There is no birth without blood. But I will kill no one .’

‘ No, I suppose that is to be my task .’

‘ You will carry me across the Channel, into the thick of the war. There I dare say we shall find a sufficiency of blood – blood that will be put to a better use than fertilizing some farmer’s field .’

‘ I won’t do it ,’ Quare said. ‘ The Master Magnus I knew would never have considered such a vile scheme. You are no longer the man you were – no longer even human – you have become what the others called you: Master Mephistopheles! If you are trapped here, so much the better. I will not help to loose you upon the world. Kill me if you like – I won’t lift a finger to help you .’

‘ We are both part of something greater than we were ,’ Magnus replied. ‘ Embrace that truth or fight against it – in the end it matters not. Our wants count for nothing against the needs of the dragon. That, too, I have learned. Now you will learn it .’

With that, Quare found himself back in his body. How much time had passed, he did not know, but he was still seated at the Old Wolf’s desk, grasping the hunter in his maimed hand. But that hand was no longer bleeding, though the wound had not healed. He could see the raw, ravaged flesh, the white wink of bone …There was the stub of his finger on the desktop, just where it had been sliced away … but now shrivelled and dark as a raisin, as if every drop of vitality had been drained from it.

The hunter had lost its crimson glow and faded to a pale roseate hue, like the moth that Magnus had held in his hand. Quare could feel the flutter of its pulse, twinned to the rapid beating of his heart as if it were some kind of parasite sucking the life from him. The ornate hands of the watch were crawling in no ordered progression, moving neither clockwise nor counterclockwise but instead seeming to quest about the face of the timepiece like the roving antennae of a blind insect, pointing with unguessable intent towards those strange symbols he could not decipher … could barely even focus on, as if they, too, were in motion, squirming to escape his sight. Once he had gazed admiringly on those hands, carved with such exquisite craftsmanship into the shape of a dragon, but now he felt only revulsion. He tried to fling the hunter away, but his fingers would not open. They disobeyed his will; they had another master now, it seemed. Nor would his arm obey his command to smash the timepiece down upon the desk.

He pushed the chair back and stood … then froze.

Bodies lay strewn about the floor – including, beside him, that of the Old Wolf. The guards were down, lying motionless as dead men. Pickens, too. And Longinus.

Father …

Either Magnus had lied to him, or Longinus had. But which one? What was the truth? If Longinus was dead, killed by the hunter, he might never know.

Quare moved to the older man and knelt beside him. He was breathing shallowly, his eyes open, the pupils dilated. Quare shook him by the shoulder with his free hand. ‘Longinus – wake up. Longinus!’

A faint groan was his only answer.

And what of the others? Quare moved from one fallen form to another, finding that all of them were, like Longinus, unconscious. He took the opportunity to rearm himself, then hesitated, debating what to do next.

‘ Waste not, want not, Mr Quare .’

The voice was as intimate as his own thoughts, yet entirely unnatural. It was as if a worm had burrowed into his brain – or, no, a tongue … He could feel it rasping repulsively across the inside of his skull. He bent over, retching, his stomach emptying. But he could not purge himself of the invader. When he was done, the voice returned.

‘ These titbits will lend savour to the coming feast .’

Now, just as he had been unable to force his fingers to drop the hunter, so, too, was he helpless to resist as a will more powerful than his own exerted control over his body. He – or, rather, the puppet he had become – drew his dagger and proceeded methodically to cut the throats of the guards. Quare’s right hand did not so much as quiver as it went about its grisly business, though he fought against it with every ounce of strength he possessed.

As before, the hunter drew the streams of blood into itself; he could not believe how much blood a human body held … nor how quickly it could be drained. Not a drop was wasted. And also as before, the timepiece began to glow as it drank, until it hurt to look upon. Yet Quare could not tear his eyes away. The fierce light shone right through the skin of his hand, so that he could see the bones, the veins, the blood within the veins. All the while, in his head, he heard the dragon singing. That was the only word for it. It was the same song that had called him here, only indescribably more beautiful … and terrible, as if he were watching a ravishing maiden bathing in a pool of blood. He felt himself stiffen within his breeches. Then, as had happened in the bath, when he had conversed with Tiamat, he was spilling his seed, convulsed with a pleasure that overwhelmed but did not eliminate the shame he felt. And the horror. For just as it drank the blood of his victims, so, too, did the hunter take into itself this other vital essence. Tears ran down his cheeks.

When he came to himself again, the blade was poised above the throat of the Old Wolf. His hand, which had been so firm, trembled now.

‘ Not him ,’ came Magnus’s voice. ‘ We do not need his blood. We do not want it .’

Quare realized with a jolt that Magnus was not addressing him. He was not commanding. He was entreating. It appeared that he, too, had a master. But if that master made reply, Quare could not hear it.

‘ Please, anyone but him! I could not bear to know his blood had a part in making us … ’

For a long moment, Quare’s shaking hand hovered over the exposed white flesh. Then, steady again, it lowered the blade, wiped it dry upon the Old Wolf’s waistcoat, and sheathed it. As the dagger slid home, Quare felt the control of his body returned to him.

‘ Best be off, Mr Quare ,’ came Magnus’s voice, restored to its customary authoritative tone. ‘ No time to dawdle .’

‘Who were you—’ Quare began.

‘ The dragon ,’ Magnus interrupted, and now Quare detected, or thought he detected, a hint of fear in the voice.

‘Why, you are as much in harness as I,’ Quare said.

‘ You understand nothing ,’ Magnus replied. ‘ Is the hand a slave to the arm? The arm to the body? The body to the mind? ’

‘Whom are you addressing, Mr Quare?’

He turned, startled, to find that Longinus had regained consciousness and climbed to his feet while Magnus had been busy pleading for the Old Wolf’s life – less, it seemed, out of any impulse towards mercy than from the same deep-seated hatred and sense of rivalry that had always characterized relations between the two men. ‘What?’

‘Who is it that is as much in harness as you?’

Only then did Quare realize that his half of the conversation with Magnus had been spoken aloud. He had assumed that the two of them were conversing mind to mind – but that was evidently not the case. Longinus must think him mad. And telling the truth would confirm his opinion. ‘Never mind that,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you later. We’ve got to get out of here before anyone else comes.’ It wasn’t his own safety that concerned him, but rather the bloodbath that would ensue if the hunter once more began to feed.

Longinus did not reply. Instead, he glanced about the room. ‘You have been busy,’ he said at last, inclining his head towards the nearest guard. ‘You seem to have overcome your squeamishness about cold-blooded murder. The Old Wolf would be pleased. Or perhaps not, seeing as how you have cut the throats of his personal guards.’

‘That wasn’t me. It was …’ He wasn’t sure how to explain.

‘The hunter?’

He was still holding the timepiece, his fingers locked around it. He raised it now, held it out before him as if in explanation. It was no longer glowing … and the hands had ceased their motion. It might have been no more than what it appeared to be. Except, of course, it wasn’t.

‘Your finger is no longer bleeding, I see,’ Longinus went on. ‘In fact, there is a conspicuous absence of blood all around, considering the abundance of slit throats. The hunter again?’

Quare gave a resigned nod.

‘You had best give it to me, Mr Quare.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Suddenly, Quare was facing a drawn sword. He had not noticed that Longinus, too, had rearmed himself. ‘The hunter, sir. Hand it over, if you please.’

Again Quare felt an invading presence slip into his skin like a hand inserted snugly into a glove. That hand drew his sword. ‘I cannot.’

Longinus nodded, as if his suspicions had been confirmed. ‘Because you are in harness, as you said. The hunter controls you. That much is plain to see. And I see as well that there is no hope of mastering it. I was a fool to think otherwise. What is it, Mr Quare? Can you tell me that, at least?’

‘An abomination,’ he said. ‘It is no weapon. It is—’

‘Oh, my aching head!’

Pickens climbed to his feet, rubbing his head with one hand and looking curiously from Quare to Longinus and back again. ‘What the deuce is going on? For God’s sake, this isn’t the time to squabble amongst ourselves! You’ve got what you came for – can we please just get out of here?’

‘He’s right,’ Quare said, eyes fixed on Longinus. ‘Surely you can see that.’

‘’Course I’m right,’ said Pickens, stooping to help himself to the sword of one of the dead guards. ‘Afraid I didn’t see how you turned the tables, Quare, old boy,’ he added, seeming to take stock of the situation for the first time, ‘but well done. Well done indeed! Only, you forgot the Old Wolf. I’ll just carve him a second smile, shall I, and we can be on our merry way …’

‘No,’ Quare said, and this time, though it was his voice that spoke, the will behind it belonged to another. And that will was not Magnus’s, either. Magnus was part of it, but looming behind Magnus like a mountainous shadow was something stronger, vaster, older … and yet, Quare sensed – because he, too, was part of it – something that was still taking shape, not fully formed, simultaneously ancient and new, like a possibility that had existed from the beginning of all things but was only now on the verge of being realized. Of being born. ‘We don’t want this one.’

Pickens drew back. ‘Don’t we? Got something else in mind for him, Quare?’

‘Mr Quare is not himself,’ Longinus said, advancing upon him, sword at the ready.

‘Isn’t he?’ Pickens blinked owlishly. ‘Who is he, then?’

‘I should very much like to know that myself.’

It was the Old Wolf. He rolled to a sitting position, a pistol held in one meaty paw. This he kept pointed squarely at Quare’s chest as he heaved himself to his feet, his sweaty face grimacing with the effort. ‘Who are you, Mr Quare? Not the ordinary journeyman and regulator you have taken such pains to appear to be, I’ll warrant. No matter – you have caused me more than enough trouble. I find my patience has reached its end.’ And he pulled the trigger before Quare could say a word or so much as blink an eye.

The impact of the ball striking his chest knocked Quare off his feet. There was no pain, just an immense, stunning shock. The next thing he knew, he was flat on his back, gasping for breath and gazing up into Pickens’s battered face, which wore an expression of horrified concern that was anything but comforting. The stink of spent gunpowder was heavy in the air; a grey haze of smoke drifted before his eyes.

‘Quare! Good lord, man, are you all right?’

He managed to nod, sucking air into his burning lungs. Then erupted in a paroxysm of coughing.

‘Lie back, man. Lie back.’ Pickens was pulling one-handed at the shredded remnants of his shirt, frantically trying to get a clear view of the wound. ‘I … I don’t see any blood – yet how could he have missed at such close range?’

But he hadn’t missed. Quare could feel the ball lodged inside him, a heavy, aching wrongness lying alongside his heart. He felt, too, an urgent throbbing in his hand … the hand that held the hunter. He forced his eyes down. His whole hand seemed to be on fire, so brightly was the timepiece glowing. He could see the bones of his fingers. The hands of the watch had resumed their insectile back-and-forthing, as if they were not so much registering the time or anything analogous to time as he understood it but rather feeling out a path, like a blind man with a cane tapping his way through a maze.

Now Pickens noticed it, too. ‘What in the name of …?’ He drew back. But not far or fast enough.

Quare felt it happening, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. No warning he could give. His hand came up of its own accord and pressed the glowing hunter to Pickens’s chest. The man uttered a small sigh, shuddered once, then collapsed to the floor beside Quare. Where the hunter had touched, his shirt was shredded and blackened, as was the skin beneath. Quare gasped at the sudden absence of the ball from inside him, even as blood began to well up from a wound in Pickens’s chest that hadn’t been there an instant ago. And that blood streamed into the hunter like a river pouring into the sea.

Something snapped in Quare, then. He scrambled for the door on all fours, like a beaten cur fleeing more blows. He felt the hunter resist him, as if it were not finished drinking Pickens’s blood. But Quare was finished. He pulled away, and the hunter did not haul him back but let the leash play out.

Reaching the door, he stood on shaky legs to open it.

‘Quare!’

He glanced back at the forceful cry. On the far side of the room, Longinus and the Old Wolf were crossing swords – and the grandmaster seemed to be proving a formidable opponent despite his bulk; at least, neither man had yet drawn blood. Longinus seemed about to say something more, but now, seeing his adversary’s attention fixed on Quare, the Old Wolf struck, sliding his blade into Longinus’s torso. An expression of surprise and disaste came over the aristocratic features, as if to be skewered in this way were a faux pas of the very first order; then his eyes rolled up into his head. But his body had already responded like a mechanism designed for just such a purpose, and though the Old Wolf knocked the riposte aside, he was not able to avoid the thrust of the dagger held in Longinus’s other hand, which plunged into his side and remained there as the body of the man who had wielded it winked out of sight.

The Old Wolf gave a startled shout at this uncanny disapparition, then toppled to the floor with a crash as the drug coating the dagger took effect.

Quare did not wait to see if Longinus would return from the Otherwhere. The wound he’d received had appeared to be a mortal one … but Quare had experienced too much of late to place any credence in mortality. Nor was he thinking clearly enough to consider what he should do now that the Old Wolf was once again helpless before him. Instead, the sight of the blood leaking from the Old Wolf’s side inspired only a frantic need to get away before the hunter could begin to feed again. He turned back to the door, wrenched it open, and staggered through.

A pair of guardsmen lay unconscious or dead just outside; he didn’t stop to check their condition but stumbled past them down the corridor , until he reached the closet by which he, Longinus and Pickens had entered this floor of the guild hall in quest of the object he now possessed – or, rather, that possessed him. He ducked inside.

The candle Longinus had lit was still burning, and by its light Quare opened the hinged false front of the stacked barrels that concealed the mechanism responsible for bringing them all here. He stepped in without hesitation, and the platform, registering his weight, began to descend into darkness.

When it stopped, he fumbled about his person until he produced the vial Longinus had given him – he shook it, and in the bloom of greenish light beheld the storeroom and the still-unconscious bodies of Master Malrubius and the guardsman. He feared the hunter would add these men to its ever-growing list of victims, but it seemed sated for now – though it also seemed to Quare that he could sense the watchful presence of Magnus and whatever entity lurked behind him – not the dragon, for that was as yet unborn, but some primal consciousness, dimly awakened, out of which the dragon would emerge, shaped by the blood and will of the humans it had consumed … and not only the humans, for he sensed Magnus’s cats as well, arrogant and disdainful and savagely competent killers. Magnus would never control such a creature, Quare knew: he might at best hope to influence it. But it seemed clear that the stronger influence went in the other direction, and Magnus had already been warped far out of true.

At any rate, Magnus kept his silence for now, no doubt because Quare was doing what he would have wished him to do in any case. He was bringing the hunter out of the guild hall. He was taking the first steps that would lead him across the Channel, to fresh horrors. Quare thought with dread of those who waited there, English and French alike, soldiers and civilians, none of them suspecting the doom he was about to bring upon them. Yet what choice did he have? He could not protect them; he could not even protect himself.

There was no courage left inside him. All was madness and despair. As if to underscore his helplessness, Quare felt a pulse from the hunter prodding him on. He was not just holding the thing any more – or so, at least, it seemed to him. The hunter, the egg, was part of him now, as if his fingers had sunk into its substance and fused with it as intimately as the flesh and bone of Longinus’s leg had meshed with his artificial foot. He would have cut the hand from his arm if he could, but he knew that he would never be permitted to free himself in such a manner. Nor could he call to Tiamat; he could not even shape the dragon’s name in the privacy of his thoughts. His thoughts were no longer private.

A second, more forceful pulse sent him scrambling from the platform and out of the storeroom. He did not pause to determine if the passage outside was clear; he did not bother to try to keep quiet; he fled headlong, as if pursuing Furies were at his back. But nothing pursued him. Whatever Furies there were, he carried with him.

Thus did Quare retrace the route by which Longinus had spirited them into the guild hall. He did not encounter another person and soon found himself at the stone wall separating the lowest level of the hall from the London underground. He did not pause there, either, but scraped through, hurrying into the rough-hewn passage that led downwards, into the domain of the Morecockneyans.

19 Magic of a Most Ordinary Kind

IT WAS NOT until he’d left the passage behind and burst into the cavern beyond that Quare remembered Cornelius and Starkey. He’d left the two men bound and gagged near the entrance to the passage, but they were bound and gagged no longer. Now they faced him, swords drawn.

And they were not alone. A dozen men or more stood with them, some holding torches, others swords or crossbows.

Quare skidded to a halt.

‘Well, if it ain’t Mr Quare,’ said Starkey with a grin that promised all sorts of unpleasantness. ‘What’s yer ’urry, eh?’

‘Where’s Grimalkin?’ Cornelius demanded, gesturing with his sword. ‘I’ll whittle ’im down to a splinter, see if I don’t!’

‘Oi, look, ’e’s ’oldin a watch!’ Starkey said before Quare could reply, turning to address someone behind him. ‘I told yer they was goin’ ter fetch it right to yer, didn’t I?’

‘So you did, Mr Starkey.’ The man pushed forward into view.

It was Aylesford.

‘Surprised to see me, Quare?’ Aylesford asked as he drew his blade with a flourish.

Quare felt the hunter pulse in his hand. He groaned in despair. ‘Run,’ he gasped out. ‘All of you – before it’s too late!’

This provoked a chorus of mocking laughter and catcalls.

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ said Aylesford when the general mirth had subsided. ‘Hand over the watch, and I’ll spare your life.’

‘’Course, me and Corny might not be so mercerful,’ added Starkey.

‘I don’t feel much inclined in that direction, to be sure,’ Cornelius admitted.

Quare drew his sword. ‘You should have left London, Aylesford. You should have gone back to France and kept on going.’

‘Oh, I mean to return – just as soon as I have the hunter.’

‘It is the hunter that will have you,’ Quare said grimly. ‘All of you.’

‘He’s barmy,’ someone said.

‘Just shoot ’im,’ another voice suggested. ‘Make ’im inter a pincushion!’

Aylesford raised a forestalling hand. ‘You may do what you like with him once I am through, gentlemen. But I have the prior claim. Quare and I have unfinished business.’

‘Go on, then,’ Cornelius said. ‘’Is Majesty said you was ter ’ave carte blanche, Mr Aylesford, and carte blanche you shall ’ave.’

‘His Majesty is most gracious. I won’t forget it … and nor will my prince.’

‘This man is a cowardly murderer and an agent of the French,’ Quare said, glancing over the knot of men arrayed against him. ‘By helping him, you are aiding the enemies of your king and country. Is there no loyal Englishman among you?’

‘We’re Morecockneyans,’ Cornelius answered. ‘ This is our country. Not up there – down ’ere. And we’ve got our own king, fank yer very much.’

‘Enough words,’ Aylesford said, advancing on Quare with his sword at the ready, the tip inscribing tight circles in the air. ‘I prefer to let my blade do the talking.’

Quare readied himself. He knew from his previous encounter with Aylesford that the Scotsman was the better swordsman, but that would not matter now. Aylesford was in for a nasty surprise. They all were. The throbbing of the hunter had grown stronger, more insistent.

‘Gorblimey, ’is ’and!’ exclaimed Starkey, pointing. ‘Look at ’is bleedin’ ’and!’

Quare’s hand rose of its own accord, elevating the hunter like a beacon. It cast a blood-red light upon Aylesford, who came on with a resolute expression despite the fear Quare saw in his eyes. He was right to be afraid. He just wasn’t afraid enough. Quare almost pitied him.

Aylesford was gripping the hilt of his sword with both hands now. He shouted something in his own language that was incomprehensible to Quare as he stepped up and swung with all his might.

Quare watched as if from a safe remove as the blade passed through his wrist. His severed hand spun through the air in a spray of blood. Absurdly, he tried to reach for it, to catch it, with the stump. Yet he felt as if he were the one being cast away, as if his own hand had rejected him.

Then the pain took him. He dropped to his knees with a strangled, disbelieving cry, cradling the stump to his chest as if to smother the flow of blood. Aylesford meanwhile darted to where the hand had fallen. It lay on the ground like something hewn from a statue, the fingers still locked tight about the hunter.

‘Stand back!’ Aylesford cried out in warning to the Morecockneyans, who needed no encouragement on that score and were retreating en masse from the grisly trophy as if from a fizzing grenado. ‘Mr Starkey, if you please.’

Starkey edged forward, holding out a sack of some kind at arm’s length.

Aylesford reached for it …

And someone stepped to block Quare’s view. He glanced up dully. Cornelius loomed over him. ‘Nighty-night, Quaresie.’ The pommel of his sword came down hard on Quare’s skull, and he saw no more.

Quare awoke shivering in a heap of damp, filthy, foul-smelling straw. His head hurt abominably, and there was an excruciating ache in his left hand, as if his fingers were cramping. Yet when he raised his arm, he saw that it ended in a swath of bloodstained bandages even filthier than the straw, if that were possible. He bolted upright as memories flooded back of the confrontation in the Old Wolf’s den, his headlong flight, its gruesome conclusion. Even so, it took him a moment to absorb what he was seeing … or rather not seeing. Then shock at the absence of the hand whose cramping he still felt gave way to gut-wrenching sobs so primal in intensity that he seemed merely to be their conduit, rather than their source. At the same time, the visceral certainty that he was free of the hunter and its control filled him with giddy joy, so that laughter mingled with his tears. He rocked back and forth, weeping and giggling like a madman.

After a time, drained alike of energy and emotion, he subsided into the straw and took in his surroundings. He was in a cell carved out of solid rock, or perhaps it was a wide natural crevice adapted to the purpose of confinement. He could not see much more: the only light came from a flickering torch set outside a barred door across from where he lay. An iron cuff around his right ankle chained him to one stone wall, but he would have been too weak to attempt an escape in any case. It took all the effort of which he was capable to roll onto his side, fumble his breeches open with his remaining hand, and piss away from himself. The acrid smell of his urine did not improve the stench of the straw.

He wondered what had become of the hunter. Why had it failed to protect him as it had done in the Old Wolf’s den? He didn’t understand it. But it was not his problem any more. He no longer felt the slightest connection to it. He was free of that burden. Yet the knowledge that it was still out there weighed on him. Aylesford carried it now, or so he assumed. Perhaps he had already departed, heading back to his masters across the Channel. But Aylesford would soon discover, if he hadn’t yet, that he had a new master now. Nor would that be the end of it. Only the beginning. The beginning of the end of everything. For as bad as things were now, Quare did not think they would improve once the dragon hatched out of the egg.

And Quare was the only one left who understood the threat. Pickens was dead, murdered by Quare’s hand, his blood and his essence absorbed into the egg to nurture the monstrosity growing there. Longinus was gone, vanished into the Otherwhere with a wound that must surely prove mortal. Now Quare would never learn if Magnus had told him the truth about Lord Wichcote. Had the man really been his father, despite his denial when Quare had asked him point-blank? Not that it mattered. Not any more. Even if the Morecockneyans didn’t kill him outright, his wound required better medical attention than he was likely to receive here.

Quare shouted, calling out for his captors, but there was no reply. It seemed he was on his own.

Or was he?

Magnus had removed Tiamat’s geis, but that did not mean Quare could not call upon the dragon now, of his own free will. He did not know what that would accomplish, if Tiamat would even hear him – or, if it did, heed his call. He did not know what would happen if he brought a dragon into the world. But all things considered, it could hardly make things worse. Perhaps it would take a dragon to defeat a dragon.

‘Tiamat,’ he said, gazing at the shadows cast by the flickering torch outside the door of the cell, as if searching for a portal into the Otherwhere. ‘Tiamat, if you can hear me, I need your help. Please.’

‘Oi, ’oo yer talkin’ to?’ came a rough voice that startled Quare. The door banged open, and in barged his old friend Cornelius. ‘Whatcher up to, eh?’

‘Just praying,’ Quare said. ‘A man can pray, can’t he?’

Cornelius shrugged. ‘Pray all yer like.’ He was carrying a wooden tray, and as he spoke he squatted, placed the tray on the ground, then stood again and nudged it towards Quare with the toe of one stained boot, as if afraid to draw too close to his prisoner … or to the no-doubt vermin-infested straw on which he lay. Upon the tray was a wooden bowl of grey and greasy porridge and a wooden mug filled with something that had the look of small beer. ‘Go on,’ he urged when Quare made no move to take the tray. ‘It ain’t gonter kill yer.’

Quare wasn’t convinced of that. But he had other things on his mind than hunger and thirst. ‘Where’s Aylesford?’

‘Gone, ain’t he?’ Cornelius replied. ‘’ippity-opped back ter Froggy land wif that ticker o’ yers. Good riddance, says I. Give me the creeps, it did, glowin’ like the devil’s own pocket watch!’

‘He must be stopped, Mr Cornelius! The hunter must be destroyed. Surely he can’t have got far by now! We have to go after him before it’s too late!’

Cornelius gave an ugly laugh. ‘You been dead to the world for more than a day, Quaresie, old boy. Mr Aylesford is on ’is way across the Channel by now and no mistake.’

‘Then I demand to speak with your king at once. There is no time to lose.’

‘Perhaps you’ve not noticed that you are chained ter the wall in a prison cell. That is ’cause you are a prisoner. As such, Mr Quare, you are not in a position ter demand anyfing – certainly not an audience wif ’is Majesty.’

‘Then you must take him a message. Tell him—’

Cornelius kicked suddenly and viciously at the tray he’d deposited on the floor, scattering everything on it. The bowl struck Quare in the shoulder, dumping its slimy contents along the side of his face and down his neck; the thick goop smelled of mushrooms. ‘What, do you fink I’m to be ordered about like a bleedin’ errand boy? You fink ’cause I’m a lowly Morecockneyan, that makes you my master? Is that it?’

‘No …’

Cornelius ignored him. ‘You surface dwellers are all the same. Fink you’re better than us ’cause yer ’appen ter live under open sky. Well, that’s about ter change, fanks to ’is Majesty.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ Quare protested, angry himself now. ‘Granted, you live below the surface of London … but this is still English soil, is it not? English blood runs in your veins. The bonds of history and family tie you to the surface and those who live upon it, burrow however deep you like. Yet you conspire with England’s enemies; indeed, you have given them a weapon more potent and deadly than you – or they – know.’

‘’At’s where you’re wrong, Quaresie. ’Is Majesty knows more than you fink. More than Aylesford finks.’

‘Who is your king?’ Quare asked.

‘Wouldn’t yer like ter know,’ Cornelius replied, laying a thick finger alongside his carbuncle of a nose. ‘Suffice it ter say, ’is Majesty knows very well what is likely to transpire when Mr Aylesford reaches France. Indeed, I dare say ’e is countin’ on it.’

‘Does he imagine, then, that what is about to be loosed upon the world will stop at the surface, and that you people will be safe from it here? If so, I fear he is very much mistaken.’

‘Might be ’e is. Might be ’e ain’t. I reckon we’ll just ’ave ter wait and see. But if I was you, I’d be finkin’ less about Mr Aylesford and more about me own prospects.’

‘I don’t imagine they are any too bright.’

‘They are not bright at all, Quaresie. In fact, you might say they are black as pitch.’

‘So, you mean to kill me, then.’

‘There’ll be a trial first. We ’ave judges and juries ’ere, just like up above.’

‘And what am I charged with?’

‘A capital crime. Trespassin’.’

‘What? Trespassing? You would kill a man for that?’

‘Aye, we would. If Mr Pitt should ’ear of us, ’e’d ’unt us down like so many rats. Don’t fink it ain’t ’appened before.’

‘Why not just kill me now and get it over with?’ Quare said bitterly.

‘That would be murder, not justice. ’Oo knows? Perhaps yer barrister will speak wif such eloquence as ter persuade the jury ter acquit – though I wouldn’t count on it. I wouldn’t count on it at all.’

‘And why is that?’

‘Because ’is Majesty ’as done me the great ’onour o’ appointin’ me ter act in that capacity,’ Cornelius said. With a mocking bow, he turned to go.

‘Wait,’ called Quare.

Cornelius looked back from the doorway.

Quare raised his bandaged stump; he could not help but notice that the bloodstains had grown darker since he had awakened. His arm felt as if it were on fire. ‘I find I am more in need of a physician than I am a barrister …’

‘I regret we do not ’ave one available at present.’

‘But … what then am I to do?’

‘The trial is set for tomorrow,’ Cornelius said. ‘Until then – well, a man can pray, can’t ’e?’

After that, Quare was left alone … in a manner of speaking. Fever took him, and he sank into a fitful half slumber in which figures from his distant and more recent past appeared in the cell to harangue him in so tedious a fashion as to constitute a form of torture. Though he was aware for the most part that these interminable one-sided conversations – for he could not get a word in edgewise, try as he might – were hallucinations, that knowledge proved insufficient to escape from them. Fellow orphans he’d known in the workhouse, whose very existence he had consigned to oblivion, returned to tax him with the crime of having forgotten them, of having left them behind to suffer while he went on to a life of luxury as the apprentice of Master Halsted. And here came old Halsted himself, walking him step by step through the most rudimentary clock repairs, as if he were once again the untutored apprentice he had been so long ago. Grandmaster Wolfe, meanwhile, berated him yet again for having bungled his rooftop opportunity with Grimalkin. Master Magnus chimed right in, as if the two men were allies now. Nor was Longinus absent – in all his various guises, each more critical than the last. Aylesford, too, was present, as were Pickens, Mansfield and Farthingale, along with Arabella and Clara. Even Mrs Puddinge put in an appearance, hectoring him about the fate of her late husband’s second-best coat … and there as if on cue came the malodorous thing itself, flapping through the air like a disreputable ghost. Indeed, the cell was full to bursting with ghosts, not only people Quare recognized and remembered but others who seemed to be perfect strangers, as if another person’s hallucinations had spilled over into his own. They seemed to be getting on very well together, having a grand old time. Most disconcerting of all was the return of his missing hand. Yes, there it was, back on the end of his wrist, as if it had never left. Except now it seemed to have only perched there, for to his amazement it rose like a bird and took flight, joining the coat in its airborne perambulations even as it dripped blood with the perfect regularity of a clepsydra on all those below.

So vivid were these apparitions that it was some time before Quare became convinced a particular voice among the throng was real. Or at any rate so insistent that it compelled his attention away from all the others. Especially since it was accompanied by a stinging slap across his cheek. And then another.

‘Mr Quare! Can you hear me? Wake up!’

Quare attempted to focus his bleary gaze. Gradually the ghosts faded from view, until he found himself looking into fierce, dark eyes in a grey-masked and hooded face. His mouth worked to shape a name.

‘Drink this.’ A grey-gloved hand tipped a wooden mug to his lips. He drank the cool water, spluttering in his haste.

‘Easy.’ A strong hand slipped behind his head.

He swallowed until the mug was empty. Then spoke, his voice so faint as to be barely audible. ‘How …?’

‘Come on.’ The mug clattered to the floor. ‘We’re getting out of here.’

‘Can’t.’

‘I think you can.’

Quare found himself hauled to his feet. ‘No.’ He shook his head, trying to clear it. ‘Chained.’

‘Not any more.’

Sure enough, the cuff was gone from his ankle. Quare took a faltering step, then another, leaning heavily against his rescuer. He felt himself slipping back into his fever dreams and fought to remain anchored in the here and now. His tongue was swollen, his thoughts muddled, and his words slurred, but still he forced them out. ‘Aylesford. He’s got the hunter.’

‘Shh. Save your strength.’

‘We’ve got to stop him, Longinus. There’s no one else but us.’

‘Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not Longinus.’ The rescuer reached up and pulled hood and mask aside. Blonde hair tumbled free.

‘You!’

It was the young woman from the rooftop. The false Grimalkin. Her expression was almost mischievous as she regarded him. The corners of her lips ticked upward in the hint of a smile. Then, compounding his shock, she leaned forward and pressed her mouth to his.

The result of this kiss was even more astonishing than the fact of it. Blessed coolness radiated out from the touch of her lips, and Quare felt his fever retreat before it, all the way to the end of his arm, where it pulsed distantly.

The woman pulled away. ‘Better?’

He was – so much so, in fact, that whereas mere seconds ago it was the struggle of marshalling his sluggish thoughts into speech that had impeded him, now it was the rapidity of thought that made articulation difficult. ‘I … How …’

She laughed. ‘You may ask as many questions as you like – only not here. Not now. My kiss is no cure – you require more help than I can give. We must away, before your captors return.’

‘But … who are you? How did you know to find me here?’

‘You called, and so I came, as was promised.’

But he hadn’t called her. The only one he’d called was …

‘My God. Tiamet?’

‘You may call me that if you like,’ she said with a smile and a sly sideways glance, as if enjoying his befuddlement.

Quare’s questions – of which he had many – were brushed aside by this self-assured if not imperious young woman who went by the name of a dragon. She led him out of the cell and into a narrow, torchlit corridor extending in one direction only. They followed it, coming to a room whose sole occupant – the turnkey, Quare assumed – lay dead or unconscious upon the floor.

‘How did you get in here?’ he asked.

‘The same way we are getting out.’

‘But why did you not come sooner? I could have used your help that night at the Pig and Rooster, and many times since then.’

‘I am sorry,’ she said, wincing as if at a painful memory. ‘I was unavoidably … detained. But no more questions, Mr Quare – in fact, it would be best if you not talk at all. The Morecockneyans have sharp ears, among other things.’ She accompanied her words with a gesture, as if flicking away an insect, and Quare felt – as he had before – the sovereign weight of an implacable will descend upon him, sealing his lips. ‘Stay close,’ she whispered, pulling her hood and mask back into place so that she was once again, to all outward appearances, Grimalkin. ‘Stay quiet.’

She had given him no choice but to obey, yet he did so gladly, eager to be gone. He could tell that time was short, not only because it seemed certain that his escape would be noticed, or, even if it were not, that they would encounter one or more Morecockneyans along the way to wherever it was they were going, and so raise a general alarum, but also because he could feel the hot tingle of his banished fever creeping back up his arm. It would break upon him again, and sooner rather than later. He did not want to be here when that happened.

Leaving the room behind, Tiamat led him with utter assurance through a maze of passages that would have left Quare baffled had he been forced to navigate them on his own. The most he could say was that they seemed to be descending rather than climbing towards the surface. But it was plain that Tiamat knew where she was going. Equally if not more amazing was the fact that, once out of the room, she moved with confidence not only through the spaces lit intermittently by torches but through longer stretches that were sunk in near-darkness, illuminated only by phosphorescent spores of the sort with which the Morecockneyans dusted their bodies. The vial that Longinus had given to Quare was gone, no doubt taken from him along with his weapons, and lacking it he felt all the more dependent on his guide. He stuck to her like a shadow.

From time to time as they descended, Tiamat would halt, or backtrack, or pull him into a side passage – all in response to some warning signal he had not heard or seen. Twice groups of Morecockneyans walked by their hiding place, talking and laughing among themselves as if they were strolling down any busy London thoroughfare, and once a silent, armed patrol stalked past, glowing like grim spectres. More than once Quare reproached himself for not having thought to take a weapon from the turnkey, though in his present condition, weak as he was, and with the fever flowing back inch by inch, already beginning to cloud his thoughts again, he doubted that he would be much good in a fight.

At last, after what might have been hours, the sound of a great hunting horn reverberated from behind them, its urgent echoes multiplying even as the blast was repeated again and yet again. Quare knew then what the fox must feel.

‘Pity,’ Tiamat remarked. ‘I had hoped we might have a bit more time. I’m afraid it’s going to be a race now, Mr Quare.’

Yes, but a race to where?

He could not ask, could only follow as she picked up the pace, pulling him along. The horn continued to blow, further harrying them. Perhaps it was the exertion, or just the fading effects of Tiamat’s kiss, but Quare’s head was soon buzzing, and his stump was throbbing so painfully with each step that he could barely think at all … though he did wonder why it was that a dragon would be running from anything, and why Tiamat, who plainly possessed more than ordinary abilities, did not simply whisk them away through the Otherwhere as Longinus would surely have done.

After a while, Quare noticed a yellowish glow in front of them; it was hard to say just how far away it was, but it seemed to be growing brighter. Tiamat slowed, then halted. ‘Just a little farther, Mr Quare. Can you manage it?’

He nodded, though in fact he was anything but certain of how much longer he could stay on his feet.

‘You have suffered much,’ she said now, and he could feel her gaze upon him though shadows hid her features. ‘Much has been asked of you. Little has been offered in return. That is about to change.’

He heard her take a breath as if about to say more, but instead he felt the soft pressure of her lips on his own again. This time there was no cooling effect, no ebbing of his fever, but there was or anyway seemed to be magic of another sort, for his heart swelled with courage, and he felt himself ready to do anything she asked of him, and more. Though perhaps that was not magic at all. Or if it was, only magic of a most ordinary kind.

She pulled away. ‘They are behind us. We must hurry.’

Quare glanced back and, indeed, could see faint glimmers dancing in the dark.

‘Ahead lies an ancient structure,’ she informed him matter-of-factly. ‘As soon as you can, run to the centre of it.’

‘And what of you?’ he asked – for he found that her kiss had unlocked his tongue.

‘I will join you when I can.’

‘If there is fighting to be done—’

‘I will do it. You are not fit. Nor do you have a weapon. Trust me, Mr Quare.’

‘I do,’ he said and meant it.

She did not reply but was already pulling him onwards. Soon enough he could see that the light was coming from around a corner. Tiamat did not pause but broke into a loping run, leaving Quare to follow as best he could.

When he came around the corner, he stopped in astonishment. He stood at the entrance to a huge cavern – the largest by far that he had seen in his time underground. The floor and walls – and, as far as he could make out, the ceiling, too – were blanketed in mushrooms that emitted the yellowish glow he had noted earlier. A constant bright haze of incandescent spores drizzled down from the ceiling. It took him a moment to grow accustomed to it, as if he had emerged blinking into the light of day. But once his vision had adjusted, his gaze was drawn to the centre of the cavern, where stood a circle of dark stones such as were popularly believed to have been deposited upon the plains of England and Scotland by giants or fairies or druids in bygone days. One such site – the Nine Stones – was located on the outskirts of Dorchester, and as an apprentice Quare had sometimes ventured there to study his books and dream of clockworks and more than clockworks: of ages past, when magic had suffused the land, and of ages yet to come, when a science more wondrous would hold sway. But those had been small and stunted stones, lichen-covered, precariously tilted, two or three even toppled into the grass, so that the effect had been rather like a cemetery gone to seed. Not so here.

These stones, half again as tall as a man, stood straight and true, as if they had been erected yesterday. There were twelve of them, irregular in shape but evenly spaced, forming a circle that must have been at least fifteen yards in diameter. They had been polished to an extraordinary shine, like obsidian; yet they did not seem to reflect the light of the mushrooms so much as swallow it, giving them the look of empty, gaping holes, doorways cut into the air. There was something familiar about the shapes of the stones, but he could not quite bring it to mind.

What held Quare frozen in place despite Tiamat’s clear instructions to make for the centre of this strange and imposing edifice was less the shock of coming upon such a thing deep below the metropolis of London than the sight of her at work amidst the mushrooms, single-handedly fighting what appeared to be at least a dozen robed figures. They looked like monks in heavy brown cassocks but moved more like soldiers … or, rather, like seasoned regulators: men trained to fight and to kill with brutal economy and grace. Yet they might have been blind bumblers compared with the grey-clad demon who moved among them like a tiger – or, he thought, like a dragon.

He had never seen such fighting skill. He had never imagined it. Even Longinus would have stood no chance against her – and he was by far the best swordsman Quare had ever faced. She fought with a peculiar short sword in one hand and a long dagger in the other. The two weapons wove about her in a blur that no assailing blade or whip – for the men fought with both swords and braided ropes worn about their waists like cinctures – could penetrate. Yet notwithstanding the completeness of her defence, she somehow found or made opportunities to go on the attack. And in this she was more impressive still, as the blood of her enemies attested. She was in constant motion, her entire body a weapon: darting, tumbling, leaping, at times seeming almost to fly. Her speed was uncanny; there were moments it seemed that her opponents were standing still. This was death-dealing brought to the highest level of art … or even beyond art, to a kind of mechanized perfection. It was beautiful and terrible to watch. Her brown-robed adversaries were brave: they did not cry out, did not make any sound at all, as if they had taken vows of silence. They continued to fight even after it must have been plain to them that they stood no chance. Quare could not help but pity them. Yet he did not tear his eyes away as they fell like stalks of wheat before a merciless scythe.

So engrossed was he in this consummate display of killing craft that he forgot about the pursuing Morecockneyans until a crossbow bolt clattered off the wall beside him. Looking back, he saw a group of palely glowing men charging up the passage – which, luckily for him, was so narrow as to compel them to come in single file. That was why he had faced only a single bolt rather than half a dozen. But his pursuers would soon have ample room to spread out and fire upon him without fear of shooting each other. Cursing under his breath, he turned and ran into the cavern, making for the circle of stones.

It was not easy to run through the mushrooms; his boots crushed them into a slick paste that made every step perilous. His progress consisted more of slipping and sliding than it did of running. But he managed – just – to keep his feet. The constant rain of glowing spores from above, added to those stirred up by his passage, had soon turned his grey clothing into a suit of light. He could not help breathing the spores in; their brightness seemed to concentrate inside him, coming together into a single point of light behind his breast, hot and focused as a small sun, and it occurred to him that he might be turning into a spore himself and would soon float up from the ground. But then he thought that must be the influence of his fever rather than any transformation effected by the spores.

As he ran, too intent on keeping his balance to spare a backward glance for his pursuers, one of the remaining brown-robed men noticed him and broke away from Tiamat, angling towards him through the field of mushrooms. He was not glowing as Quare and Tiamat were; the brown robes, it seemed, were proof against the shining of the spores, which winked out like sparks settling on water upon alighting there. Quare did not think he would reach the stone circle before the man was upon him, and in any case he had no reason to believe the monument would afford him any protection from attack. Tiamat had told him that she had come this way to find him; he wondered how – assuming that were true – she had managed to avoid these silent, stalwart defenders. It was beginning to look as though he would not have the opportunity to ask her, however, for the man was close enough now that Quare could make out his features: a bulbous nose, dark eyes that regarded him with fierce, unreasoning hatred, lips bared in a soundless howl, displaying teeth filed to sharp points and an empty space where a tongue should have been. The man had lost his sword in the fight with Tiamat but was whipping his cincture in a wicked circle over his head as he came on; the thick hempen rope, Quare saw now, had an iron clasp at the end. It filled the air with a low, ominous thrumming that he felt in the very marrow of his bones.

As he tried to swerve aside, Quare’s feet shot out from under him and he went down, hearing, even as he fell, something whistle past his head. He hit hard and slid on one hip through the mushrooms, still moving in the direction of his attacker – who, he was certain, would have gathered the cincture back by now and made ready to cast it anew. But when he had slowed sufficiently to look up again, holding his bloody, rag -wrapped stump out before him as if to deflect the blow by a mute appeal to the loss he had already suffered, he saw, instead of the iron clasp descending towards his skull, his attacker falling backwards, clawing at a crossbow bolt buried in his throat. Had Quare not slipped when he had, the bolt would have struck him between the shoulder blades.

The stone circle was close now: no more than fifteen or twenty yards away. Suddenly he remembered where he had seen those shapes before. They were the same as the symbols on the hunter. And, like those symbols, the more he tried to focus upon them, the shakier they became, like living things intent on eluding his grasp, even if it were only visual. The stones, he realized, were moving, vibrating, spinning so fast that they appeared to be standing still.

He tried to pick himself up and go on, but he had landed badly, twisting his ankle, and it would not support him. Nor, he found, did he have the strength to crawl. He felt weak as a newborn babe. He lay on his back, gazing up at the ceiling of the cavern, which was lost in the sunny glow of the mushrooms growing there and in the steady downward drift of spores. There was something restful about it, like lying at the bottom of a huge hourglass as warm golden sand trickled down to cover him.

Then he was being lifted in strong arms. It was Tiamat. She did not speak, but swept him up and ran for the stone circle, shielding him with her body. Quare felt the jolt of crossbow bolts hitting home – once, twice, three times – and each time she was struck, Tiamat grunted in pain … but it was a sound that did not have much that was human about it, not at first and even less each subsequent time he heard it, as if she were casting her humanity aside like a hindering cloak, shrugging out of it as she ran. And indeed the arms that held him seemed to be changing, becoming larger, fingers lengthening into claws, the grey costume of Grimalkin toughening into leathery skin.

But was Tiamat shedding some fleshly disguise, or, instead, was the stone circle stripping it from her, skinning her alive? For the closer they drew to it, the more the air resisted them, as if the spinning stones had conjured a wind, a gale that pushed back unrelentingly. Tiamat snarled and pressed on. It seemed to Quare that she was trying to force herself through a space too small to admit her, a narrow opening or channel in the world … or rather out of it, the sides of which were scraping her raw. And yet the shape that was emerging seemed larger by far than what had contained it. It made no sense. Quare could not tell any longer what was real and what the product of his fever. The spores that had been falling like a gentle dusting of sand now pelted them like hailstones, forcing him to bury his head in the crook of his bandaged arm. Then he heard Tiamat snarl again as her body shuddered with the impact of more bolts than he could count. She gathered herself and, with a deafening roar, gave a mighty leap.

She did not come down.

Quare was in the grasp of claws larger than his body. They held him in a gentle but unbreakable grip, like the bars of an iron cage. On the other end of those claws was the dragon he had first seen in the vision he’d experienced at Lord Wichcote’s house. Tiamat, as she truly was: sleek, sinuous, serpentine, with scales as blue as the sky … so blue they seemed translucent. She was huge; he did not see how she could have squeezed herself into the body of the woman who had kissed him.

As before, the effect of her presence was immediate and intense. He had no sense that resistance was possible; it was not a matter of will or even desire but instead the plain working of some natural – or supernatural – law to which he was subject by virtue of being human. It had been no different inside the egg; there, too, he had yielded up his seed in reflexive paroxysms that were anything but pleasant. For a time, he was lost in it, swallowed up.

But at last there was nothing left. He was limp, wrung out, fever-stricken. Only then did Quare begin to take in his surroundings, though in a dreamy kind of way. Tiamat was flying with a peculiar wingless grace, seeming to swim through the air like a snake squirming through water; she did not glance down at him or seem to be aware of him at all other than by the fact that she did not drop him. There must have been a dozen or more crossbow bolts embedded in her body, but she seemed unaware of them as well. They were like thorns in the hide of an elephant.

Quare knew at once that he was back in the Otherwhere. Not so much by anything he saw – the desert landscape of reddish sand and rolling dunes far beneath them, over which Tiamat’s stark shadow glided, clinging to every indentation and swell, might have been the sands of some African or Asian desert undulating below the baleful, white-hot sun – as by the overwhelming impression he had that everything could change in an instant, that the underlying reality of the scene was very different from what his senses were equipped to perceive. He had felt the same way when Longinus had first taken him into the Otherwhere, and it had been much the same within the egg.

The egg that Aylesford was carrying to France.

At that, recalled to the urgency of things, Quare called to Tiamat, but his voice was too weak, his words borne away by the blast of the wind that was the sole indication of the dragon’s prodigious speed. Where was she taking him? And what would become of him when they got there? Much has been asked of you , she had told him. Little has been offered in return. That is about to change . But Quare had had enough change to last a lifetime. He didn’t want any more.

The desert stretched ahead without end. The sun might have been nailed to the sky.

Tiamat flew on. She did not slow, did not seem to tire. She did not once address a word to him, or glance in his direction. He wondered if she had forgotten about him. Racked by fever, he shivered and baked by turns.

It was in this state that he noticed a second shadow on the sand below. It was small, and at first he thought it was not a shadow at all but something physically present on the ground, a herd of horses, perhaps, or a caravan. But it grew, spreading like a black stain … or an angry cloud rising up to confront them. Or no, he realized dimly, with a certain distant interest, not rising but rather falling …

Tiamat swerved as something big came roaring past. At once, all was confusion. Buffeted within the cage of the dragon’s claws, Quare saw flashes of ground and sky and what might have been a living shadow, night poured into flesh. The air rang with shrieks and bellows until he thought his eardrums must burst.

Then Tiamat stopped dead in the air and hung there, her body eeling slowly, the movement somehow keeping her aloft. Streaks of a silvery liquid trickled down her blue scales. An angry hiss escaped her massive jaws.

Hovering a hundred feet away or less was a black dragon even bigger than she was. It exuded age and power. Silver ichor dripped from its claws. Its head was like a sun-blasted mountainside scored with fissures and ravines. One eye was a pearlescent orb whose surface rippled like the placid mirror of a lake disturbed by the movement of some hidden swimmer. Where the pair of that eye should have been was a dark, gaping pit into which Quare thought he might fall for ever without touching bottom. To gaze into its abyssal depths was to already be falling into them, or so it seemed. He felt himself stiffening despite his terror; then he was coming again, burning with humiliation at his helplessness, hating his human frailty, this flesh that responded without his leave, slave to masters he did not know.

Neither dragon paid him the slightest heed.

‘Where is it?’ the black thundered. ‘What have you done with my eye?’

Or was it ‘egg’? Quare, half deafened, was not sure what he had heard.

‘I do not have it,’ Tiamat replied. ‘Sister, move aside.’

‘You lie,’ the black raged. ‘You reek of time and generation! Give back what is mine – or I will take it!’

Before Tiamat could answer, the black struck. The two dragons twined together in a murderous flux, slashing, biting. They rose entangled, knotting and unknotting. The noise of their roaring was a physical thing.

The claws caging Quare came open; he fell.

He watched the dragons, still locked together, dwindle above him to a single speck. Then he began to tumble. The air swaddled him in a rough silence all its own. A flash of blue sky and sun gave way to the tawny pelt of a brown landscape leaping to meet him. Then he saw blue sky again, only a different sky, in which two suns blazed; but in the blink of an eye, this impossible vision was replaced by a slate-grey ocean stretching endlessly, wave upon wave. Another blink, and he was gazing at a night sky spangled with strange stars. Blink: a city greater than London lay buried beneath a blanket of unspoiled snow. Blink: a fleet of great ships depending from greater balloons, like Magnus’s Personal Flotation Device on an immense scale, glided through the air.

With each revolution of Quare’s tumbling body, the scene changed, as if he were flipping between worlds. But then it came to him that he wasn’t falling at all, that he was hovering in place as the dragons had done, and the sights he was seeing were glimpses of what lay beyond the spinning windows of the standing stones between which Tiamat had carried him. For all the time he had been here, for all the distance Tiamat had carried him, still he was somehow at the very centre of those stones. And if that were so, why couldn’t he just, as he had done the last time he’d been in the Otherwhere, choose a path out of it? The windows … or doors, rather, were here before him, offering themselves in swift succession. Were their shapes in some way symbolic of what they led to, like the alchemical symbols of planets and stars? If so, it was a code he could not decipher. He would have to trust to luck.

Now, without understanding what he was doing or how, as if in the grip of an instinct he hadn’t known he possessed until the moment came for its exercise, Quare groped towards a doorway, not caring where it might lead. He only knew, with a blind, animal certainty he did not question, that he could not remain here. He must escape or die. He reached out with his mind, or some aspect of his mind, like a drunken man fumbling to fit a key into a door. He thrust, thrust again. Felt himself slip in. He turned, or the world did.

All was darkness. And cold. And then it was as if he had been falling the whole time, after all. For he struck ground, or something as solid as ground, with a force that snuffed the candle of his consciousness.