The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,187

own volition or banished by the effect of the watches, he did not know.

Stumbling forward with a groan, Quare put out a hand to steady himself against the cavern’s rocky side. Dark spots flashed before his eyes; a mass of bees seemed to have chosen his head for a hive. He gulped air, afraid he would be sick. At some point, he had dropped his torch; it lay guttering on the ground.

Longinus’s voice reached him through the buzzing. ‘What is it, Mr Quare? Are you all right?’

He nodded, speech beyond him. Nor, he found a moment later, when the buzzing had receded and he could speak again, was he able to relate what had happened. The dragon’s geis prevented him … another ghostly hand, or rather claw, this one squeezing his throat. But he did not doubt that the hunter had made its presence felt at last. One more power seeking to pull his strings.

‘I have seen this before,’ Longinus said meanwhile. ‘There are those who cannot bear to abide beneath the ground for any length of time. It is not a question of cowardice; here, the stoutest heart may quail without shame. If you cannot go on—’

‘I can,’ Quare interrupted, his voice echoing hollowly. He stooped to retrieve the torch, which blazed up again once clear of the ground. His arm, his whole body trembled, though the buzzing had subsided, dwindling to a kind of background hum. His heart felt bruised. Helpless he might be, but that did not make him any less angry; on the contrary. He was seething with rage. He lacked only the means to express it, and a target on which to focus it. Both, he felt sure, lay ahead. ‘By all means, let us continue.’

Longinus held his gaze with his own, then nodded and slid into the passage.

Thus began a journey that Quare would always remember as a kind of dream. With his vision curtailed by the narrow fissures they squeezed through and the caverns into which those fissures opened, only to contract again, it was easy to imagine that they were not moving at all, but instead walking in place while the subterranean world moved around them, changing its shape and even its substance from moment to moment under a torch-spun magician’s cloak of shadow and darkness, as if Longinus had brought him back into the Otherwhere. And it occurred to Quare that perhaps this was as close to the Otherwhere as could exist in what he had always thought of as reality but which now seemed to him merely, as it were, a special (and necessarily lesser) case of a realer real, like Plato’s shadows cast upon the cave wall. Here was the primordial stuff of the planet, out of which the world above and its myriad wonders, living and unliving, had arisen … and into which they would all return, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, just as this reality itself would one day be enfolded back into the Otherwhere if Doppler – or, he suspected, Tiamat – gained possession of the hunter.

Yet how could he deny Tiamat the hunter, assuming they were able to retrieve it from the Old Wolf? He had seen how fruitless it was to fight the geis Tiamat had laid upon him. Every detail of their encounter was engraved upon his memory, so much so that he felt the creature’s reptilian presence still, as if it were lurking somewhere near by, for if there was ever a place that a dragon might find hospitable, this was surely it. He half expected, each time they entered a cavern, to see a pile of bones and treasure with a scaly form coiled on top of it like a sovereign seated on a throne.

Longinus set a fast pace, and Quare had to hurry to keep up. There was no time to study his surroundings or even to mark the path. If he were separated from Longinus, or if the other man were captured or killed at the guild hall, he would not be able to find his way back through this underground maze. He thought to mention this to Longinus but then decided to hold his tongue, afraid that anything he said, however softly, would find its way to their enemies, mortal or otherwise. In any case, he felt that as long as Tiamat had need of him, it would not abandon him here; if he called to it, it would come: it had promised –