paw. This he kept pointed squarely at Quare’s chest as he heaved himself to his feet, his sweaty face grimacing with the effort. ‘Who are you, Mr Quare? Not the ordinary journeyman and regulator you have taken such pains to appear to be, I’ll warrant. No matter – you have caused me more than enough trouble. I find my patience has reached its end.’ And he pulled the trigger before Quare could say a word or so much as blink an eye.
The impact of the ball striking his chest knocked Quare off his feet. There was no pain, just an immense, stunning shock. The next thing he knew, he was flat on his back, gasping for breath and gazing up into Pickens’s battered face, which wore an expression of horrified concern that was anything but comforting. The stink of spent gunpowder was heavy in the air; a grey haze of smoke drifted before his eyes.
‘Quare! Good lord, man, are you all right?’
He managed to nod, sucking air into his burning lungs. Then erupted in a paroxysm of coughing.
‘Lie back, man. Lie back.’ Pickens was pulling one-handed at the shredded remnants of his shirt, frantically trying to get a clear view of the wound. ‘I … I don’t see any blood – yet how could he have missed at such close range?’
But he hadn’t missed. Quare could feel the ball lodged inside him, a heavy, aching wrongness lying alongside his heart. He felt, too, an urgent throbbing in his hand … the hand that held the hunter. He forced his eyes down. His whole hand seemed to be on fire, so brightly was the timepiece glowing. He could see the bones of his fingers. The hands of the watch had resumed their insectile back-and-forthing, as if they were not so much registering the time or anything analogous to time as he understood it but rather feeling out a path, like a blind man with a cane tapping his way through a maze.
Now Pickens noticed it, too. ‘What in the name of …?’ He drew back. But not far or fast enough.
Quare felt it happening, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. No warning he could give. His hand came up of its own accord and pressed the glowing hunter to Pickens’s chest. The man uttered a small sigh, shuddered once, then collapsed to the floor beside Quare. Where the hunter had touched, his shirt was shredded and blackened, as was the skin beneath. Quare gasped at the sudden absence of the ball from inside him, even as blood began to well up from a wound in Pickens’s chest that hadn’t been there an instant ago. And that blood streamed into the hunter like a river pouring into the sea.
Something snapped in Quare, then. He scrambled for the door on all fours, like a beaten cur fleeing more blows. He felt the hunter resist him, as if it were not finished drinking Pickens’s blood. But Quare was finished. He pulled away, and the hunter did not haul him back but let the leash play out.
Reaching the door, he stood on shaky legs to open it.
‘Quare!’
He glanced back at the forceful cry. On the far side of the room, Longinus and the Old Wolf were crossing swords – and the grandmaster seemed to be proving a formidable opponent despite his bulk; at least, neither man had yet drawn blood. Longinus seemed about to say something more, but now, seeing his adversary’s attention fixed on Quare, the Old Wolf struck, sliding his blade into Longinus’s torso. An expression of surprise and disaste came over the aristocratic features, as if to be skewered in this way were a faux pas of the very first order; then his eyes rolled up into his head. But his body had already responded like a mechanism designed for just such a purpose, and though the Old Wolf knocked the riposte aside, he was not able to avoid the thrust of the dagger held in Longinus’s other hand, which plunged into his side and remained there as the body of the man who had wielded it winked out of sight.
The Old Wolf gave a startled shout at this uncanny disapparition, then toppled to the floor with a crash as the drug coating the dagger took effect.
Quare did not wait to see if Longinus would return from the Otherwhere. The wound he’d received had appeared to be a mortal one … but Quare had experienced too much of