The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,14
drawn in the second Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which had ended the War of the Austrian Succession ten years before, in 1748 – boundaries the current conflict had rendered irrelevant. The map’s surface bristled with pins that had variously coloured ribbons attached, giving the appearance of a half-unravelled tapestry; these indicated the locations of regulators dispatched across the Channel as well as other spies and agents in the master’s wide-flung network of informants. The wall opposite was given over to bookshelves that stretched from floor to ceiling; so packed were the books in this space that Quare doubted a mouse could have wriggled between them. Master Magnus had charge of the guild library, and he treated its contents as his personal property. Though the other masters grumbled at this presumption, the Old Wolf tolerated it for reasons beyond Quare’s understanding.
Quare, picking up a candle along the way, trod a careful path across the room to the shelves, still favouring his wounded leg, and let his eyes rove over the books assembled there. They were not organized by title, author, date of publication, or any other discernible bibliographical system; they weren’t even all upright, with spines facing outward for ease of inspection, but jammed higgledy-piggledy wherever there was space, like fieldstones in a wall. It bothered Quare to see books treated like stones; there were treasures in the library of the Worshipful Company that could be found nowhere else in the world, ancient horological texts long forgotten or believed irretrievably lost, as well as more recent publications and private correspondence by some of the greatest minds of Europe, the Orient, and the New World. Master Magnus respected knowledge, indeed had an insatiable appetite for it, but he was less than scrupulous about books, like a connoisseur of wine who cared nothing for the bottles it came in. Why, there, wedged into a space that would not have easily admitted a volume half its size, was the Horologium Oscillatorium of Huyghens! Quare reached for it.
‘I have always maintained, if one wishes to discover the true character of a man, it is but necessary to set him loose in a library and let him think himself unobserved.’
Quare turned towards the voice, a smile on his lips. ‘Your pardon, Master Magnus. I did not see you.’
‘Few do,’ came the reply, ‘unless I wish to be seen.’
Across the room, beside the desk, a vigorous-looking elderly man as slender and hooked as a sickle stood hunched over a pair of stout black walking sticks. The pronounced curvature of his spine forced him to look up at Quare, although if he could have stood unbowed he would have been Quare’s equal in height. His dark breeches were finely tailored but could not disguise how twisted were the legs within, and from the cut of his blocky shoes it seemed more likely that they contained pig’s trotters than human feet. He had a pronounced humpback, a nose that echoed his posture in miniature, and a wild if thinning mane of white hair that framed his craggy face as if the area around his head were subject to violent crosswinds. A pair of round, dark-tinged spectacles reflected the flames of the candles scattered about the room, giving Quare the disconcerting impression of being stared at by a creature with eyes of fire. Little wonder that fearful, malicious apprentices had bestowed the nickname Master Mephistopheles upon him. Twining in and out of the space between his legs and the two sticks were a number of cats that, like the man, seemed to have materialized out of thin air. The notion that this person could make himself inconspicuous or unseen would have been laughable were it not for the fact that Quare had ample evidence of its truth.
‘The moving closet, master,’ he burst out, navigating his way past piled books and manuscripts on which certain of the cats – there seemed to be more of the animals by the second – had taken up residence; some ignored him, others regarded him through slitted eyes with something like contempt, a few hissed at his passage. ‘Is it your invention? How does it work?’
Master Theophilus Magnus bared white teeth in the feral grimace that served him for a smile. Those teeth were the only uncrooked thing about him. ‘You like that, eh? Just a little something I threw together. Employs the same principle as the gravity escapement. Saves me the trouble of climbing stairs. I call it the “stair-master”.’