The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,158
fingers around it, ignoring the pain – no, revelling in it, for her sake. ‘Let no one know of it,’ she went on, her gaze holding mine, ‘not even your closest friend. Not even your wife.’
‘You are my wife,’ I told her. ‘I shall have no other.’
‘Beware of what you say here,’ she admonished. ‘Words can become reality.’
‘If saying you are my wife will make it so, why would I be silent? You are the only woman I desire or ever will desire.’
At that, she smiled but did not otherwise respond to my declaration. Instead, she returned to the subject of the watch. ‘Do not attempt to open it; do not seek to learn its secrets.’
‘But what is it?’
‘Infinity bounded in a nutshell. My father will seek it ceaselessly, but as long as it sleeps, locked in matter, he cannot find it. Without it, he cannot win his war. Keep it secret, Michael. One day I – or, it may be, another – will come to claim it. But be on your guard, for my father has agents mortal and otherwise, and they will fool you if they can, or take it by force if they must.’
‘But if it isn’t you who comes to claim it, how will I know it is not some emissary of your father’s?’
Before she could reply, there came a roar of anger such as I had never heard, like an earthquake wrapped in a tornado and fired from a cannon as big as a ship-of-the-line. At this, Corinna wasted no time, but flung open the door and shoved me through before I could protest or even gather my wits. There was a blinding flash, then the sensation of falling; I screamed, my vision aflame with all the colours of the rainbow, a shimmering display behind whose rippling folds I saw, or seemed to see, geometric shapes floating and tumbling as though suspended in an ocean of light. I could not grasp the size of them – at one instant they seemed huge as mountains; the next, no bigger than motes of dust drifting through a sunbeam. What they were, I knew not – but that they were aware of me, I did not doubt; I felt their attention, their interest. They turned towards me with purpose, coming together like the pieces of a puzzle, or the parts of a machine. Yet their movements were slow and ponderous; or perhaps it was that I was moving so fast, blazing like a comet across their sky. Remembering how Hesta in her dragon aspect had flinched away from the pocket watch, I raised my fist, brandishing the timepiece like a shield or rather a weapon … one I had no idea how to use. In Corinna’s hand, the watch had shone like a star; in mine it was dead as a stone. But even so, those living geometries drew away and let me pass through their midst, just as Adolpheus and his army had done.
How long I fell, I cannot say. Time had no meaning in that place, that Otherwhere. My vision never cleared; the colours never faded. It came to me after a while that I was the source of them: like a meteor flaring with a fiery peacock’s tail, I was shedding colour as some otherwise ineffable part of me was burned away, ablated. This only increased my terror, for it seemed to me that I must be consumed entirely, in hideous ruin and combustion, as the poet says. Yet I never felt so much as a twinge of heat or pain as I fell, faster and faster it seemed.
Then came another flash, as blinding as the first. Only, if that flash had signalled my entrance into a kind of dream, suffused as it was with menace and wonder, this one signalled my emergence from it. What blinded me now was the simple, pure light of the late morning sun peeking over the tops of mountains I had despaired of ever seeing again. Thus did I awaken and find myself stretched on a cold hillside at the foot of Mount Coglians in the Carnic Alps. I was home. Corinna had kept her promise.
I had arrived at Märchen at the turning of the season, autumn giving way to winter, but the chill in the air now was of a different quality, and the frost-rimed grasses and wildflowers that blanketed the hillside in soft splashes of colour, the lowing of distant cattle and the hollow clanking of cowbells