The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,4

the collar of the grey hood.

‘Well, Henrietta,’ whispered the thief. ‘Let us see what hatches out of—’

A muffled footfall. Grimalkin spun, blade already sliding from scabbard …

Too late. With a sharp crack, the hilt of a rapier slammed into the side of the grey hood. The thief crumpled without another word.

1

Honour

DANIEL QUARE, JOURNEYMAN of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers and confidential agent of the Most Secret and Exalted Order of Regulators, stood in flickering candlelight and listened to the synchronized ticking of the dozens of timepieces that filled the room. The longer he listened, the more the sound suggested the marching of a vast insect army to his weary yet overstimulated brain. He could picture it clearly, row upon row of black ants, as many of them as the number of seconds ordained from the Creation until the Last Judgement. He felt as though he had been standing here for a substantial part of that time already. His injured leg, which had stiffened overnight, throbbed painfully.

Before him was an oaken desk of such prodigious dimensions that a scout from that ant army might have spent a considerable portion of its life journeying from one side to the other. An immensely fat man wearing a powdered wig and a dark blue greatcoat sat across the desk from him in a high-backed wooden chair of thronelike proportions. The windowless room was stifling, with a fire burning in a tiled fireplace set into one wall amid shelves filled with clocks and leather-bound books. It might have been the dead of winter and not midway through an unseasonably warm September. Quare was sweating profusely.

So was the man behind the desk. The play of light across his features made it appear as if invisible fingers were moulding the soft wax of his face. At one moment he seemed a well-preserved man of sixty, flush with vigour; in the next, he had aged a good twenty years; and which of these two impressions, if either, struck closest to the truth, Quare did not know. Moisture dripped from the man’s round, red, flabby-jowled face, yet he made no move to wipe the sweat away or to divest himself of his powdered wig or greatcoat, as if oblivious to the heat, to everything save the disassembled clock spread out before him. He examined its innards closely, hunched over the desktop and squinting through a loupe as he wielded a variety of slender metal tools with the dexterity of a surgeon. Jewelled rings flashed on the plump sausages of his fingers. Occasionally, without glancing up, he reached out to shift the position of a large silver and crystal candelabrum, drawing it closer or pushing it away. His breathing was laboured, as if from strenuous physical activity, and was interspersed with low grunts of inscrutable import.

Quare had been ushered into the room by a servant who’d announced him in a mournful voice, bowed low, and departed. Not once in the interminable moments since had the man behind the desk looked up or acknowledged his presence in any way, though Quare had cleared his throat more than once. He did so again now.

The man raised his head with the slow deliberation of a tortoise. The loupe dropped from an eye as round and blue as a cephalopod’s. It came to rest, suspended on a fine silver chain, upon the mountainous swell of the man’s belly. He scrunched his eyes shut and then opened them wide, as if he were in some doubt as to the substantiality of the young man before him. ‘Ah, Journeyman Quare,’ he wheezed at last. ‘Been expecting you.’

Quare gave a stiff bow. ‘Grandmaster Wolfe.’

The grandmaster waved a massive hand like a king commanding a courtier. ‘Sit you down, sir, sit you down. You must be weary after last night’s exertions.’

That was an understatement. Quare had returned to the guild hall late, and had not repaired to his own lodgings, and to bed, until even later – only to be summoned back two hours ago, at just past eight in the morning. Still, that was more sleep than Grandmaster Wolfe had managed, by the look of him. Quare perched on the edge of an armchair so lavishly upholstered and thickly pillowed he feared it might swallow him if he relaxed into its embrace.

‘Comfortable, are you?’ inquired Grandmaster Wolfe with the same look of sceptical curiosity he had worn while examining the clock. He seemed to be considering the possibility that Quare was a timekeeping mechanism … and a