Paul Witcover - The Emperor of all Things

Malrubius stopped short at the sight of them, as did the armed servant who stepped into view beside him an instant later. Quare and Pickens also froze, but Longinus accelerated.

Quick as lightning, two blurs shot down the corridor; each found its mark, and the two men stiffened and collapsed before they could cry out a warning or indeed make any sound at all. By the time they hit the floor , Longinus was kneeling beside them to retrieve what he had thrown. He glanced up as Quare and Pickens arrived at a run, putting a finger to his mask for silence.

‘Have you killed them?’ Pickens demanded in a breathless whisper.

‘They are merely unconscious,’ said Longinus.

‘Good.’ With no more warning than that, Pickens drew back his boot and delivered a vicious kick to the unprotected face of Master Malrubius. And then another. Quare heard the crack of the man’s nose breaking. By which time he had resheathed his blade and locked his arms about Pickens from behind, pinning his arms to his chest and hauling him back.

‘Let me go!’ Pickens said, still whispering, though he did not struggle to free himself. ‘My arm—’

He fell silent as Longinus, who had risen to his feet, stepped up and laid the edge of a dagger against his throat.

‘You are making me regret my decision, Mr Pickens,’ he said.

‘You saw what that swine did to me,’ Pickens gasped out in reply. ‘He doesn’t deserve to live. Give me a dagger and I’ll finish the job.’

‘We have not come here to murder anyone if we can help it,’ Longinus said. ‘Personal vendettas have no place in our mission. If you cannot restrain your temper, I shall have no choice but to give you the same treatment I have already administered to these gentlemen.’

It was a moment before Pickens replied. He sighed, and Quare felt the tension drain from his body. ‘Very well, Grimalkin. I’ll put vengeance aside … for now.’

‘Let him go, Mr Quare,’ Longinus said. Quare did so. Yet Longinus had not removed his dagger, and thus Pickens did not dare to so much as twitch.

‘This is the last interruption I will countenance,’ Longinus said, gazing into the other man’s eyes. ‘You will follow my commands with alacrity, keep silent, and otherwise give me no cause to employ this dagger, for I assure you, Mr Pickens, I will not hesitate to use it, and you will not receive another warning before I do. The substance coating this blade will put you to sleep in an instant, and we will leave you behind, to the tender mercies of Master Malrubius, which you are already so well acquainted with. Is that clear?’

‘Quite.’

Longinus put up his dagger. ‘Very well. I think it time that we take a less public route. Mr Pickens, you will keep watch. Mr Quare, if you would assist me …’

Longinus unlocked one of the doors off the hall and pushed it open; then he and Quare, with some difficulty in the case of Malrubius, dragged the two bodies into what, it became evident, by the greenish light of Longinus’s vial, was an old and disused storeroom containing oak barrels caked with dust and rat droppings. Malrubius left a trail of blood across the stones of the floor, but there was nothing to be done about it now, Quare supposed. Pickens, meanwhile, looked on from behind his mask, dividing his attention between them and the empty hallway.

‘Come along, Mr Pickens,’ Longinus said at last from inside the room.

Pickens stepped forward but balked at entering the storeroom, as if afraid that Longinus meant to leave him there after all, slumbering alongside Malrubius and the guardsman. Nor, Quare reflected, was that fear unfounded, for the room had no other visible exit. But he had experienced enough of Longinus’s surprises to feel confident another was imminent.

‘It’s all right, Pickens,’ Quare said. ‘One thing I’ve learned about Grimalkin: he always leaves himself a way out.’

‘Mr Pickens, if you please,’ Longinus said.

Pickens entered the room. Longinus nodded to Quare, who closed the door behind him. They stood uncomfortably close in the small, ill-lit space, the two unconscious men sprawled at their feet.

The guardsman was quiet as a corpse, but Malrubius was making small sounds of distress, rather like a piglet rooting in the ground; Quare thought his breathing must be impeded by his broken nose, or perhaps by blood draining into his throat. He had no more love for Malrubius than Pickens did, but neither did he care to stand by while the man choked to death. Kneeling, he repositioned the head so as to improve the man’s air flow.

Longinus, meanwhile, had turned to rummage behind a stack of barrels that reached from floor to ceiling. A sharp clicking sound, and the front of the stack slid into the back, exposing a half tube, like a chimney, that rose into darkness. ‘Now we ascend,’ Longinus said. ‘I will go first. Then Mr Pickens. Mr Quare, you will bring up the rear.’

Quare glanced up at this. ‘Shall we not first bind and gag your latest victims?’

‘No need,’ Longinus said with a shake of his head. ‘They will not wake for hours, and our own time grows most pressing; the bulk of the night is already behind us. Take this, Mr Quare.’ He passed over the glowing vial, which Quare, standing, accepted. ‘Gentlemen, I will await you above.’ With that, Longinus stepped into the half tube and turned to face them, arms at his sides. There was another clicking sound, and suddenly, to the accompaniment of rattling gears, he was rising, borne swiftly out of sight.

‘What wizardry is this!’ exclaimed Pickens.

‘No wizardry,’ Quare replied with a chuckle. ‘Merely common horological principles applied on a grander scale.’ Though saying that did not diminish the wonder he too felt.

‘Who built this mechanism?’ Pickens demanded. ‘And how is it that Grimalkin should know of it?’

Quare shrugged. ‘I cannot say.’

‘I thought I knew the guild hall as well as anyone,’ Pickens said. ‘I see now that I was mistaken. About that … and other things.’

As he spoke, the rattling sound returned, bringing with it the platform, empty now.

‘You next,’ Quare told him.

‘Is it quite safe?’

‘Grimalkin did not hesitate.’

‘That is far from reassuring. The man is rash and impulsive.’

‘He is also our only chance to get through this in one piece.’

‘Good point.’ Pickens stepped into the half tube just as Longinus had done. And was carried as quickly aloft.

As he waited for the platform to return, Quare focused again on the song of the hunter. Its urgency was unabated, as was its beauty. How the music was made, how it reached him, and him alone, were mysteries he could not unravel; he knew only that the watch was a mechanism that made Magnus’s marvels seem crude by comparison. He had examined it, seen its workings stir inexplicably to life, experienced, for the briefest instant, the release of its uncanny destructive power – which, despite everything, he could not help thinking had been merely a fraction of what it was capable of, under the right conditions … whatever they might be. He imagined whole armies laid to waste in the blink of an eye, proud cities reduced to rubble. And here he was now, closer than ever to claiming it for himself … or, rather, he reminded himself with a sinking heart, for a creature of the Otherwhere, whose unwilling agent he had become. Like it or not, when he finally held the hunter in his hands, he would call for Tiamat … and he had no doubt that the dragon would come to claim its prize.

The rattle of the returning platform roused him. He stepped in, then turned to face outwards, arms at his sides. He heard a click, followed by the ratcheting of gears, and felt the gathering force of the mechanism an instant before it engaged and lifted him more smoothly than he would have thought possible. The pallid green light of the vial he clutched in one hand slid upwards along with him like sap rising in the trunk of a tree.