The Emperor of all Things Read online

  Nor did Quare linger, afraid she would return, either alone or with allies who would not let an unasked question keep them from their objective. He set off at once for the guild hall, retracing his path across the roofs, cursing himself for having misloaded the pistol. He had been lucky many times over this night.

  He moved slowly, thanks to his injured leg, which had resumed bleeding and soon stiffened into the bargain. All the while, he debated what to tell Master Magnus. It was crystal clear to him that he couldn’t relate all that had occurred, not if he wished to continue as a regulator, or, for that matter, a journeyman in good standing. He knew there was no way he could make the master understand why he had not captured or killed Grimalkin; he did not really understand it himself. It wasn’t because he had found himself facing a woman – or not only because of that … and there, too, was a thing better left unsaid; without proof, no one would credit such an outlandish claim. Grimalkin a woman? He scarcely believed it himself. As for her warnings about the clock … What were they but the ravings of a lunatic? Even if the workings of the timepiece belied its plain exterior, he did not see how this clock, or, indeed, any clock, could be a weapon, unless the woman had spoken metaphorically, referring to some martial use to which the secrets of its mechanism might be put, beating ploughshare into sword, as it were, but even that possibility did not seem of sufficient gravity to warrant such desperate words.

  No, he would say nothing of that, either. He would hand over the clock and leave the rest to Master Magnus. Yet he would have to mention Grimalkin; Lord Wichcote was the sort of man who would take a perverse pride in having been robbed by the notorious Grimalkin, and he would no more be able to resist boasting of his attic encounter than he had of possessing the clock that had occasioned it. The news would no doubt spread quickly, reaching the ears of Master Magnus in short order. So he must confess that much, at least. And, too, there was his wounded leg to explain. It occurred to him that the latter might serve as an excuse for his failure to kill or capture Grimalkin.

  Thus it was that by the time he returned to the guild hall, Quare had concocted the story, a blend of truth, lies, and omissions, that he had related to Master Magnus while suffering the none-too-gentle ministrations of the man’s surgeon. And thus it was that he had found himself caught in the strands of his own web – or, rather, swept up in the larger web of Master Magnus, who, after seeing his wound treated, had ensnared him in a further fabrication, this one directed at no less a target than Grandmaster Wolfe himself. As Quare took a carriage home in the early morning hours, a luxury provided by Master Magnus, he’d cursed the luck that had caused this night’s mission to fall into his lap; the result of his success had not been the praise and advancement he deserved but an injured leg and recruitment into a power struggle between two giants who could crush him as thoughtlessly as he might crush a fly.

  He had sought to make his own way in the Worshipful Company, beholden to no faction but to his talents only; no doubt he had been naïve. But that was finished now. Or would be, once he was called before the Old Wolf to give his report, a summons that Master Magnus had advised him to expect by the afternoon at the latest. Then he would relate the fabrication he had been rehearsed in and suffer the consequences of it – disgrace, suspension, perhaps outright expulsion – all in the service of a scheme whose purpose was as obscure to him as were the plans of the Almighty. Yet as he lay back on the cushions of the carriage seat, it was not the base machinations of guild politics that whirled feverishly through his brain but instead the features of the woman he had discovered behind Grimalkin’s mask.

  Those exotic features were still present in his mind, or at the back of his mind, seeming, as it were, to gaze down over his shoulder as he examined the hunter that Master Magnus had placed into his hands. The woman’s dire warnings echoed in his memory. They seemed crazier than ever now that their object had been revealed to be a pocket watch barely thicker than his dagger’s blade; yet though he could not credit her warnings, neither could he dismiss them, any more than he could dismiss the memory of the woman herself: her vernal voice, the quickness of her wit and of her movements, the sense that there had been, and perhaps still was, a connection between them, one that went deeper than words unsaid, questions unasked, and ancient compacts born of a moonstruck fancy: a bond brought into being by the shedding and , as she had put it, the mingling of blood, as though what had passed between them on that rooftop had been some kind of ceremony and not a shabby paroxysm of violence that had left her unconscious from a blow to the head and himself run through the leg and lucky to be alive. He wondered if he would ever see her again, and though he felt no certainty that he would survive a second encounter, he found that he desired it almost as much as he desired to possess the secret of the timepiece he had taken from her.

  Now, after clearing a work space on the cluttered table, he set loupe and hunter down and pulled from an interior pocket of his waistcoat a well-worn leather-bound wallet tied shut with a length of dark ribbon. This he untied, placed on the table to one side, and flicked open with practised ease. Laid out within was a tidy assortment of files, calipers, pliers, tweezers, wires, springs, small glass vials containing various chemicals, a watchmaker’s hammer, an equally diminutive screwdriver, and other items needful for the interrogation and repair of timepieces. He glanced at Master Magnus for permission.

  The master inclined his head while continuing to stroke the cat in his lap. ‘Have you enough light?’

  Quare nodded; the single candle, while not ideal, would suffice for now. Turning back to the table, he screwed the loupe to his left eye and bent to his work. In one hand he held the watch; in the other, a long, scalpel-like tool he had adapted for horological use from a surgeon’s kit. Many of his most useful tools were based on or even made from surgical implements; the clockmaker and the surgeon, he had found, had much in common. But before he could begin in earnest, a movement to one side startled him, and he stepped back as a small black cat leapt onto the table.

  Behind him, Master Magnus laughed. ‘Why, it would appear that Calpurnia wishes to observe your technique!’

  The small cat sat regarding him through unblinking green-gold eyes, its tail curled primly about its front paws. It might almost have been a marble statuette, save for the vigorous purring that seemed to emanate from its entire body. ‘That is a very large purr for such a small cat,’ Quare remarked. ‘But if she has any advice, I would welcome it.’

  ‘Cats do not advise,’ said Master Magnus. ‘They command.’

  At present, Calpurnia seemed inclined to do neither. Once, Quare would have found the animal’s presence a distraction, but among the many things he had learned from Master Magnus was a tolerance, even a kind of grudging affection, for cats. The master had an absolute mania for the creatures; he could identify each of his vast menagerie by name, and seemed to prefer their company to that of human beings.

  ‘They accept me for who I am,’ he had once told Quare. ‘They do not judge by appearances but see past the surface of things. Dogs have no choice but to love us; it is how they are made. Despite their many fine qualities, one cannot help but pity them. A cat, however, bestows its affections where it will. Thus the companionship of a cat is to be more highly valued, for cats are like mirrors in which we may see ourselves as we truly are, not as we appear to others, and still less as we would prefer ourselves to be.’

  The cases of most pocket watches were easily removed, opening from the back, but in this, too, the watch at hand proved an exception to the rule: the case was all of a piece. The crystal came away without trouble, but once he had laid it upon the inside flap of his tool kit, Quare was baffled. There seemed no way inside. The edge of the dial met the side of the case precisely, and not even the fine, sharp edge of his scalpel could find purchase there. He did not probe too forcibly, however, for fear of scratching the dial.

  He straightened with a sigh, replacing the loupe on the table, and rubbed his watering eye as Calpurn
ia gave a querulous miaow.

  ‘Giving up so soon?’ Master Magnus echoed rather smugly.

  Quare couldn’t help but glare. ‘I suppose you opened it right away, without any trouble.’

  ‘On the contrary, it took me the better part of an hour.’

  ‘And you expect me to do it faster? You must have a higher opinion of my abilities than you’ve admitted so far, Master Magnus.’

  ‘No higher than your own,’ the master replied.

  Quare opened his mouth to answer, then thought better of it; he couldn’t decide if he’d just been complimented or insulted. He returned his attention to the watch. It was infuriating but at least would not talk back. Cupping it in one hand, he used the scalpel to push the fancifully shaped hands around the dial, once again experiencing that strange disinclination to focus upon the glyphs painted there; his gaze glided over each one as smoothly as did the hands themselves … which, as he now ascertained, moved with equal facility in a counterclockwise direction. But these idle exercises brought him no nearer to his goal. What was he missing? He ground his teeth in frustration. Again he thought of Grimalkin. He did not doubt for an instant that she would have already prised the watch open somehow. He felt clumsy and stupid, like a thief standing before a locked steel vault deep in the bowels of the Bank of England.

  Then Quare smiled. Of course. The master himself had provided a clue. Watches and locks were not so different, after all. Not inside, where it counted. He gave a little laugh of admiration at the cleverness of it.

  ‘Got it, have you?’ asked Master Magnus.

  ‘We’ll see.’ What if the number inscribed on the inside of the cover, 1652, was not just a date but a combination? It was both obvious and ingenious; yet there were many possible ways of representing that number, or sequence of numbers, using the hour and minute hands of the watch. For all he knew, some complicated formula was required. But he would eliminate the obvious choices before worrying about more arcane possibilities. Could it be as simple as moving one hand to sixteen and the other to fifty-two? The strange glyphs on the face of the watch had no meaning to him in themselves, but that did not mean they could not correspond to the numbers he knew; after all, there were twelve of them, just as with any ordinary timepiece. But on further reflection, that solution made no sense … for then the case would automatically open twice every twenty-four hours, whenever the minute and hour hands, in their quotidian revolutions, passed over the necessary points on the watch face: not at all the sort of feature typically valued by purchasers of pocket watches.

  Indeed, this objection held for any sequence of numbers arrived at by rotating the hands in a clockwise direction. Thus, Quare reasoned, the numbers of the combination, or at least one of them, must be arrived at by means of a retrograde motion, by which the locking mechanism would be engaged or disengaged. He began to try various possibilities, moving the hands backwards and forwards around the dial until, after no more than five minutes, to the accompaniment of a sharp click, he felt the back of the watch detach from the case and drop into his palm.

  ‘Bravo,’ said Master Magnus. ‘Well done!’

  ‘You provided the clue,’ Quare acknowledged, grinning, ‘when you challenged me to unlock the secrets of the watch. Otherwise I could never have opened it so quickly, if at all.’

  ‘You would have hit upon it sooner or later,’ the master said. ‘But that is only one mystery solved. You have work yet to do.’

  Quare nodded and turned back to the table, feeling quite pleased with himself – an opinion not shared by the black cat, Calpurnia, who was grooming herself fastidiously, taking no notice of him whatsoever. A man could not get too full of himself, Quare reflected, in the company of a cat.

  Placing the scalpel on the table beside the loupe, Quare shifted the watch to his free hand and set the detached back of the case on the flap of his tool kit alongside the crystal he’d placed there earlier. Only then did he turn the watch over to reveal the exposed movement.

  His initial impression was of a three-quarter plate construction, with overlapping wheels and pinions neatly packed into the available space, all of a silver so pale that it seemed almost translucent. Yet no clockmaker with an ounce of experience or common sense would choose silver over brass and steel for the inner workings of a watch. But then, he thought, perhaps the metal was not silver after all. He was reaching for his loupe when a sudden hissing caused him to start. ‘What the devil?’

  Beside him, standing with spine arched, tail stiff, ears flat, and fur gone all spiky, a hissing and growling Calpurnia eyed the watch in Quare’s hand as if it were a serpent poised to strike.

  ‘God in heaven, what’s got into the beast?’ Quare demanded.

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Master Magnus. The black and white cat in his lap had fled at Calpurnia’s outburst, and now Calpurnia herself did likewise, springing down from the table and rushing headlong away. Her fear had transmitted itself to the other cats, and, in the blink of an eye, the study became a roiling mass of fast-moving felines and their shadows, the two not always distinguishable in the candlelight. Yowls and hisses filled the air. Stacks of books and papers toppled, which further agitated the cats, who in turn knocked over more stacks in a chain reaction that continued for some time as Quare and Master Magnus looked on in astonishment.

  ‘That didn’t happen when I opened the case,’ the master commented when things had quieted somewhat. He sounded almost regretful. ‘But then,’ he continued, ‘no cat was as near to the watch as Calpurnia was just now. She smelled the strangeness of it, no doubt. Or saw something. They are perspicacious creatures, cats.’

  ‘They’re only animals, master,’ Quare said with a laugh. ‘They start at moonbeams and chase shadows. They know nothing of watches.’

  ‘What do any of us know?’

  ‘Master?’

  He shook his head. ‘Go on, Quare. The test isn’t over yet.’

  ‘Is that what this is? A test?’

  Now it was the master’s turn to laugh. But he did not otherwise answer, merely gestured with one hand for Quare to get back to work.

  Quare bent close over the watch. With the aid of the loupe, he saw that, as he’d begun to suspect before Calpurnia had gone mad, the wheels and pinions and plates of the movement were not made of silver. Indeed, they did not appear to be made of metal at all. The substance looked more like wood … which perhaps accounted for the lightness of the watch. Yet the grain was curious, like no wood he was familiar with, and not even birch had such a silvery shine. Nor, as far as he knew, was wood of any kind suitable for the stresses and strains, the wear and tear, of a watch movement: even less so than silver, in fact. But perhaps the wood had been treated with some chemical unknown to him to give it added strength and resilience. He set down the loupe and retrieved the scalpel. He scraped softly at one wheel, to no effect. Whatever it was, it was hard . He gave the wheel a cautious tap with the tip of the scalpel. ‘Why, it’s hollow!’ he exclaimed in wonder, looking to Master Magnus, who, after his peculiar fashion, grinned – that is, grimaced – in reply. Quare tapped the escapement, the fusee. ‘They’re all hollow! Master, I don’t believe this is a real watch at all.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘I confess I thought at first that it might be self-winding, but now I perceive that it lacks a winding mechanism of any kind. There is simply no source of power. Yet the wheels turn easily; the teeth of the gears fall smoothly into place; the escapement, the fusee – all else is as it should be. This is a model of a watch, a toy, not the thing itself. And even if it could be wound, what time would it keep, with its parts all of hollow wood?’

  ‘What kind of wood is it, then, Quare, at once light, hard, and hollow?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m no wood-carver.’ An idea struck him: ‘Why, he wasn’t a clockmaker at all! The mysterious JW, I mean. No wonder he wasn’t mentioned in the archives. He must have been a master wood-carver.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Master Magnus, lurching to h
is feet with an abrupt rocking motion. He swayed for an instant, then planted his walking sticks on the floor and hauled himself over to Quare, again seeming to wade through some invisible medium sensible to himself alone, as if the air around him were as thick as mud. ‘But do you know, I don’t believe it is carved of wood.’

  ‘Indeed? What then?’

  ‘Bone.’

  ‘Bone?’ Quare glanced at the watch in his hand and shook his head sceptically. ‘What kind of bone is so hard, yet so light?’

  ‘That I cannot say. But I have examined the movement under the microscope, compared the grain of the stuff with samples of wood and of bone, and though I did not find an exact match, it is unquestionably closer in nature to the latter than to the former.’

  Quare shrugged. ‘Even so, it is still no more than a curiosity, a toy.’

  ‘Do you suppose I would attach so much importance to a mere curiosity? Would Lord Wichcote risk so much to possess it, or the thief you encountered upon the rooftop go to such trouble to steal it?’

  ‘I don’t understand …’

  ‘I wonder if I might borrow that sharp little tool of yours.’

  ‘Of course.’ Quare reversed the scalpel and held it out.

  Resting his weight on one stick and letting the other fall back against his hip, the master took the tool in a rock-steady hand. Before Quare could react, the hand darted out.

  Quare yelped, more in surprise than pain, and watched a bead of blood appear on the tip of his finger. ‘What—’

  ‘Quickly,’ Master Magnus interrupted. ‘Hold it over the watch!’

  Quare was too stunned to do anything but obey. Drop after drop of his blood dripped into the pale silver insides of the watch. It pooled there like the shadow of the sun creeping across the face of the moon in swift eclipse, a dark stain that must soon spill over.