The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,173

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