The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,160

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,