The Emperor of All Things

13

The Productions of Time



HAND IN HAND, we fled the hearth and home. Though Corinna’s touch had lost its uncanny power over me, a chilly blue light continued to radiate from her, a reminder – were any needed! – that she was more than just the simple girl I had known, or thought I had known.

The inn appeared empty, abandoned. There was no sign of Inge, for which I was glad enough, and Hesta was gone from her customary place beside the fire, or what was left of it: glowing embers in a bed of ash. As we hurried through the common room, a flicker of movement behind the bar drew my attention; the door of the cuckoo clock stood open, and the tiny dragon whose appearance had so delighted me on previous occasions was flitting around the clock face in excitement or distress. It came at me without warning, its wings beating about my head and shoulders, its hot breath scalding my neck, burning my hair. I cried out, swatting one-handed at the flames as the infernal creature harried me with the crazed persistence of a mother bird defending its nest.

Then we were outside, in the network of covered passageways that had turned the snow-blanketed town into a maze. The dragon did not follow. I could feel that my scalp and neck had been burned, though how badly I did not know.

‘This way,’ Corinna said and ran off before I could say a word.

I hurried after her. The lamps of the passageways had all gone out, and the only light came from Corinna; it illuminated our immediate surroundings but no more than that. The result was that I had soon lost my bearings. All the while, the bells of the clock tower rang out in disarray, and the ground shook with the measured tread of whatever enormity was approaching. It seemed that we were rushing straight towards it.

‘Corinna,’ I gasped, reaching out to grab hold of her shoulder. ‘Please, talk to me. I feel as though I’ve gone mad – or the world has!’

She shrugged me off but slowed enough for me to come alongside her. She addressed me as we loped onwards. ‘Haven’t you realized that you are no longer in your world?’

I could make no coherent reply to this.

‘Märchen,’ she continued, ‘is like a town that straddles the border between two countries. You crossed from one into the other.’

‘Crossed … how?’ I asked.

‘Through the tower clock. It is the gate – one of the last gates.’

‘But I never entered the clock,’ I protested. ‘My foot was caught!’

‘You had already passed through,’ she told me. ‘Adolpheus didn’t find you lying unconscious in the snow all those weeks ago. He knocked you out and carried you across the threshold, from your world into this one.’

‘But why? Why me? Why … everything?’

She shook her head. ‘So many questions! There is no time to explain, and even if there were, you would not understand. But we had need of you, and so you were brought here.’

‘Like Dr Immelman?’ I asked, remembering the doctor’s warnings.

‘His name is not Immelman,’ she said. ‘Nor is he a doctor. He is, or was, the very man you have been searching for – Herr Wachter.’

Now I was more confused than ever. ‘You were to be his replacement,’ she said. ‘But now that can never be.’

‘Because of Inge?’ I asked.

‘No – though she should have left you alone. But she has always been a glutton, unable to control her appetites. And you are so very tempting – all of your kind. You are a drug to us, Michael. You must know that. You are a sickness that we crave; you give us, for a short while, the only thing we lack: a taste of mortality. Of time.’

‘Who … what are you?’

‘We have many names in your world. Some call us the Fair Folk. To others we are djinn, demons, angels. Gods. But these are mere words – human words for something as far beyond human words as beyond humanity itself. As to what we call ourselves, you lack the language to express it. We are old and fierce and forever.’

I was not a religious man, yet I had been raised in the Church of England, and I felt a need of its strong support just then, like the buttress of a cathedral. ‘There is but one God,’ I said, as much to reassure myself as to contradict what Corinna had told me. ‘If you are angels, it can only be the fallen kind.’

‘Risen, rather,’ she said. ‘That is our crime – our original sin, if you will. I repent of it most heartily now, perhaps too late. But I have made my choice at last. I spurn my father and all his works. I will fight him. And you will help me.’

She was right – I understood nothing of what she was telling me. I asked only, ‘What is to become of me?’

‘Why, I am sending you back across the border,’ she said. ‘I am sending you home. No more questions now,’ she added, for we had come to an exit that I recognized – beyond it lay the town square, and the clock tower. ‘Whatever happens, stay close to me, meet no one’s eye, say nothing, and follow my every command.’

‘It sounds as though you are expecting a fight.’

‘A fight?’ she echoed, and laughed grimly. ‘Michael, I am expecting a war.’

She got one. Or the makings of one, anyway, for when she opened the door and stepped through, taking me by the hand and drawing me along beside her – and a good thing, for I could not have taken a step under my own power – I saw a great armoured host filling the square. The clash of sunlight off their armour and the weapons they held was blinding. But then I realized the light was radiating from the host itself, like Corinna’s light only a thousand times brighter because it came from a thousand separate sources. And hotter, too, for the snow was melting all around us with a loud hissing, and steam rose into the air.

Even Corinna seemed taken aback by the sheer numbers confronting us, a bristling silver wall of swords and pikes, shields and helms. Upon those shields, and on banners that fluttered from standards scattered throughout the throng, I saw the same figure of a gearlike sun, or sun-like gear, that I had seen on the cover of Herr Doppler’s book. Like that cogwheel sun, these, too, were turning.

Corinna paused as if gathering her resolve, then strode forward, pulling me along with her. No one in that glittering array spoke as we advanced towards them hand in hand. It was only then, in the crashing silence, that I realized the bells had stopped tolling. The ground was still. Whatever had been approaching seemed to have arrived. Yet I saw no giant; perhaps, I thought, it had been the heavy, measured tread of the army arrayed before us, marching into position, that had so shaken the earth. The square as I remembered it could not have contained such a vast throng, yet it did not otherwise appear any different; the buildings looked the same as they always had, as did the hulking shapes of the mountains beyond, their tops lost in a blanket of grey cloud heavy with snow. Of the sun there was not even the palest hint in that gloomy, threatening sky. The resplendent soldiers facing us were the sole source of light. We might almost have been underground.

‘Fear not, Michael,’ Corinna whispered to me. ‘Take courage. They dare not stand against us.’

But she squeezed my hand as she spoke, and I felt she was exhorting herself to courage as much as me. I returned the pressure in the same spirit.

As we drew near, a figure detached itself from the rest and advanced to meet us. Though armoured and wearing a full helm, like some knight of old, its diminutive stature put me in mind of Adolpheus, and my supposition was proved correct when, at a distance of a dozen feet or so, he stopped and lifted his visor. The face thus revealed was both the face I knew and one I did not recognize, as if the Adolpheus I had seen and spoken with had been only a rough sketch for this one, as crude a likeness in its way as the automaton I had seen atop the clock tower. Like Corinna, he had somehow diminished himself in my presence, made himself less than he truly was. But now I was seeing him unveiled, in all his glory, shining like a little sun, his size no indication of his power but rather a necessary component of it, as if he were a god of small things. I felt a familiar stirring in my loins, a lustful quickening. This was no man, I told myself. This was something else, something that only wore the shape of a man, that tugged at me as a lodestone tugs at an iron filing. And then, as fast as that, the pull was gone. I glanced at Corinna and saw that she had resumed her former splendour; she stood once more like a queen of ice and moonlight, and though her cold blue radiance did not outshine his light, it did blunt it, shielding me from his glare.

‘Do not do this, Corinna,’ he said. ‘We do not wish to fight you. Return to the Hearth and Home and all will be forgiven. It is not too late.’

‘I have made my choice, Adolpheus,’ she replied. ‘Join me or stand aside.’

‘I will do neither,’ he said. ‘Your father has given me the power to stop you. I will use it if I must.’

‘You are welcome to try. But first there is something you should see.’

‘And what is that?’ he asked.

Rather than answering him, she whispered to me, though she did not take her eyes from Adolpheus. ‘Look away, Michael. Fix your eyes upon the ground, and keep them there on your life. Watch my feet, and when you see me walk, walk with me.’

I dropped my gaze. Thus I cannot tell with certainty what it was that she showed to Adolpheus, though I can guess readily enough. I heard Adolpheus gasp in something like horror, and heard that sound echoed from what seemed ten thousand throats. Meanwhile, shadows stretched and writhed across the ground as if struggling to pull free of what had cast them.

‘O, infamous daughter!’ cried Adolpheus. ‘Traitor and thief!’

The very air seemed to groan.

Corinna began to walk forward. I followed. It was difficult to keep my balance amidst the shifting patterns of shadow and light that danced over the ground. A kind of battle, it seemed to me, was being fought there. A silent and insubstantial battle that was nevertheless as much in earnest as any bloody clash of arms. The sight of it filled me with dread, yet, mindful of Corinna’s warning, I forced myself not to look away, though my every instinct screamed to do so. I do not know why I trusted her, but I did; she had said that she was sending me home, and I clung desperately, fervently, to that hope, as a madman clings to a single idea though everything in the world should testify against it.

‘Stand aside, Uncle,’ Corinna commanded. This time there was no defiance from Adolpheus. Instead, I heard the clanking of armour as he complied. At that, the army behind him followed suit, splitting into two wings that, as they retreated step by noisy step, pivoted towards us with the precision of well-drilled troops on parade, fashioning a narrow corridor that led to the clock tower.

Corinna did not hesitate. Neither did she hurry. With every appearance of calm, as if reviewing troops assembled to do her honour, she walked with regal assurance through the mass of fighters who could have killed us in an instant. They did not strike at us, however, not even with a word, and so motionless were they on either side – though my gaze was lowered, I could see their silver-plated legs, numerous as the trees of a petrified forest – that I could not help but wonder if they were machines, an army of automatons.

Their shadows, meanwhile, stretched and twisted out of all semblance, continued to make war with each other, or, perhaps, with something else I could not see, and finally, to preserve the crumbling bastions of my sanity – for I could no longer tell my own shadow from the others, and it had begun to seem to me that I was being drawn into their war, or was already a part of it – I shut my eyes and, like a blind man lost in a foreign land, let Corinna lead me where she would.

She stopped walking, and I bumped against her, reflexively opening my eyes. We had passed the army and now stood before the tower clock. Once, in what I had taken for a dream, I had watched a great dragon uncoil itself from the tower. Now that dragon faced us. Its long, scaled body, brown as burnished walnut, and haloed in a soft yellow glow, was looped around the edifice in an intricate knot my eyes could not unravel.

The beast would have towered over us, but it had lowered its flat head to our level to regard us serpentwise, and indeed it seemed more snake than dragon, wingless as it was. One of its eyes was gone, a pitted scar testifying to some ancient injury; the other was a glittering orb bigger than my hand, darker than dark. The warring shadows through which we had walked were gone now, yet I felt as if they had not vanished but only withdrawn into the inky depths of that solitary eye, for the longer I looked, the more I seemed to see movement there, smoky and serpentine. It called to me, that alluring movement, tugged at me with a strength I couldn’t resist, and I took a step forward, and then another before Corinna hauled me back.

‘I told you not to look,’ she hissed, passing her hand before my eyes; it was as if a razor had cut whatever bound me to the dragon’s greedy gaze. I gasped and looked away, yet I did not close my eyes as I had before. Instead, I let them roam over the dragon’s body, trying to trace the sinuous, scaled, knotted immensity of it, as if it were a riddle I might solve. It was in constant motion, rippling like the surface of a river, which moves and yet stays still. Locked within its looping coils I saw the shadowy figures of men and women writhing as though in torment. The air shimmered with heat; I felt I stood on the very border of hell.

Meanwhile, Corinna addressed the monster. ‘I would not fight you, faithful Hesta,’ she said, and I started at that, not just because she had called the dragon by the name of the dog but because, when she did so, I perceived that they were one and the same, or, rather, aspects of each other, like two shadows cast by a single object; I could see the shadows, but the object itself remained hidden to me. But that was not the whole of the riddle.

At the sound of its name, the dragon growled low in its throat, and a smell of hot metal and oil gusted over me. It was an automaton. Another of Wachter’s incredible, impossible machines, or so I surmised. It opened its jaws, and I cringed, fearing its breath, for I could see a fiery glow deep in its gullet. But instead the creature spoke in a voice as sinuous as its body, as mesmerizing as its eyes. The voice of a woman, I would have said, an empress … had I not seen the source of it.

‘Go, faithless daughter,’ the dragon said. ‘I cannot harm you, nor will I impede you. But know this. Leave now and the way back will be for ever barred to you. You will never look upon Märchen again.’

‘There are other gates,’ Corinna replied. ‘I will be back. And I will not be alone.’

‘Others have said as much. Where are they now?’

‘I shall find them,’ Corinna said.

‘Then you will die with them,’ the dragon said, and there was sadness in its voice, but also resolution. ‘And what of you, human?’ it asked then, addressing me. ‘Will you share this rebel’s fate? You may stay with us if you wish. There is a place for you here. She cannot compel you to go, whatever she may have told you.’

‘Do not answer,’ Corinna warned.

Too late. ‘I did not ask to be brought here,’ I said, careful to avoid the dragon’s eye. ‘I merely wish to go home.’

At which the creature laughed, a low, thunderous rumble. ‘You sought us out. You found us. You may leave, but you will never go home again.’

‘She lies,’ Corinna told me. ‘Do not listen to her, Michael. I will bring you home, I swear it.’

‘You will be hunted,’ the dragon promised. ‘Both of you.’

Corinna raised her hand again, displaying what she held clenched in her fist; thin beams of blue-white light streamed between her fingers, and the dragon hissed and shied away as if from a weapon it feared to so much as gaze upon. ‘I will be waiting, Hesta,’ Corinna said, a promise of her own. Then she took hold of my hand again and stepped forward, advancing towards the dragon. The creature drew back with each step, flattening itself against the façade of the tower. By the time we reached the base, there was only the elaborate wooden carving that had always been there, of a dragon whose coils seemed to encompass hell itself.

Corinna placed her hand against the carving, and a door appeared, summoned by her touch. ‘Open it,’ she told me. I heard a strain in her voice I hadn’t heard before; glancing at her, I saw that she appeared once more as a young woman, her face pale and drawn, as if she were nearing the end of her strength. She had never looked so beautiful to me, and I felt my heart go out to her, wanting to protect her, to sustain her with my own strength, paltry as it might be. I wondered why Hesta, seeing her weakness, did not strike now, or Adolpheus, who stood at our backs with his army. And where, I asked myself, was Herr Doppler? Why wasn’t he trying to stop us?

‘Hurry,’ Corinna hissed.

A wooden hand extended from amidst the dragon’s coils like that of a drowning man grasping for salvation; as there seemed to be no other knob or handle, I took hold of it and pulled. The door swung open; beyond was darkness, and a noise like the pumping of a great bellows … or a mighty heart. Though my greatest desire since I had arrived in Märchen had been to plumb the insides of the tower, I paused now on the threshold of attaining it. The blackness was absolute, dimensionless, all-engulfing. I feared that it would swallow me up, snuff me out.

Corinna, however, hastened through, pulling me along willy-nilly. The door shut behind us of its own accord. We were in a corridor, a wooden passageway like the ones in town, right down to the oil lamps set at regular intervals along the walls. I hadn’t known what to expect upon entering the tower, but it had not been this. I looked around in confusion; really, to all appearances we might have stepped out of the Hearth and Home. The only heartbeat I could hear now was my own.

‘What do you see?’ Corinna asked.

I told her.

‘Good. If you saw it as I do, you would undoubtedly go mad. Come now.’ And she set off down the corridor at a hurried pace, pulling me along beside her.

‘What do you see, then?’ I inquired as we went. We passed doors and sidepassages, each identical to the others, but Corinna ignored them all. I wondered where they led. Into other worlds? Other times?

‘Nothing that would make sense to you,’ she answered. ‘Your language lacks the words to describe it, just as your senses lack the capacity to perceive it.’

‘But how is it that we see different things?’

‘This is an in-between place. In your language, I suppose you might call it the Otherwhere. It has not had the stamp of reality placed upon it. It can be anything, or many things. Whoever enters gives it shape, whether unconsciously or by an act of will.’

‘You mean that I can change what I am seeing?’

At this, she laughed. ‘Only our kind has the strength of mind for that. We are creatures of the Otherwhere, you see. It is our home.’

‘I thought Märchen was your home.’

‘That is a home we have made. This is the home that made us.’

‘Made you? You talk as if it were alive.’

She laughed again. ‘Everything is alive, Michael. Alive and always. Only, some things have forgotten it and need to be reminded – woken up.’

‘What things?’

‘All the productions of time. There – I have told you the great secret.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘That is why I have told you.’ She stopped, and I bumped against her. We stood before a door; she turned to me and fixed me with a gaze at once imperious and tender. I felt she loved me then, but it was a love that reached down to me, as it were, from an immense distance, one I could not cross; it was, in short, a love that could not be truly reciprocated, for it was not equal. It could only be accepted and endured. The knowledge of this, too, was in her eyes, and it seemed to sadden her.

‘Corinna,’ I began, wanting to declare my feelings for her once more, as I had in simpler, happier times, to tell her that I loved her and to place myself at her service in whatever manner she might require. But she interrupted me.

‘Here we must part,’ she said. ‘I deeper into the Otherwhere – you back to your world. Listen, now, Michael. My father will soon awaken and discover what I have stolen from him.’

‘Has he not already awakened? Those footsteps …’

‘The tread of Adolpheus’s army. My father, great as he is, sleeps deeply and is slow to wake. But if he should find us here, there can be no escaping, for his will is the strongest of all and can impose itself on everything, including me.’

‘Take me with you,’ I said. ‘I would help, if I can.’

‘Then take this,’ she said, and thrust what she held into my hand. It was, of course, Herr Doppler’s pocket watch. It felt cold as ice, or colder, burning against my palm. Yet I clenched my fingers around it, ignoring the pain – no, revelling in it, for her sake. ‘Let no one know of it,’ she went on, her gaze holding mine, ‘not even your closest friend. Not even your wife.’

‘You are my wife,’ I told her. ‘I shall have no other.’

‘Beware of what you say here,’ she admonished. ‘Words can become reality.’

‘If saying you are my wife will make it so, why would I be silent? You are the only woman I desire or ever will desire.’

At that, she smiled but did not otherwise respond to my declaration. Instead, she returned to the subject of the watch. ‘Do not attempt to open it; do not seek to learn its secrets.’

‘But what is it?’

‘Infinity bounded in a nutshell. My father will seek it ceaselessly, but as long as it sleeps, locked in matter, he cannot find it. Without it, he cannot win his war. Keep it secret, Michael. One day I – or, it may be, another – will come to claim it. But be on your guard, for my father has agents mortal and otherwise, and they will fool you if they can, or take it by force if they must.’

‘But if it isn’t you who comes to claim it, how will I know it is not some emissary of your father’s?’

Before she could reply, there came a roar of anger such as I had never heard, like an earthquake wrapped in a tornado and fired from a cannon as big as a ship-of-the-line. At this, Corinna wasted no time, but flung open the door and shoved me through before I could protest or even gather my wits. There was a blinding flash, then the sensation of falling; I screamed, my vision aflame with all the colours of the rainbow, a shimmering display behind whose rippling folds I saw, or seemed to see, geometric shapes floating and tumbling as though suspended in an ocean of light. I could not grasp the size of them – at one instant they seemed huge as mountains; the next, no bigger than motes of dust drifting through a sunbeam. What they were, I knew not – but that they were aware of me, I did not doubt; I felt their attention, their interest. They turned towards me with purpose, coming together like the pieces of a puzzle, or the parts of a machine. Yet their movements were slow and ponderous; or perhaps it was that I was moving so fast, blazing like a comet across their sky. Remembering how Hesta in her dragon aspect had flinched away from the pocket watch, I raised my fist, brandishing the timepiece like a shield or rather a weapon … one I had no idea how to use. In Corinna’s hand, the watch had shone like a star; in mine it was dead as a stone. But even so, those living geometries drew away and let me pass through their midst, just as Adolpheus and his army had done.

How long I fell, I cannot say. Time had no meaning in that place, that Otherwhere. My vision never cleared; the colours never faded. It came to me after a while that I was the source of them: like a meteor flaring with a fiery peacock’s tail, I was shedding colour as some otherwise ineffable part of me was burned away, ablated. This only increased my terror, for it seemed to me that I must be consumed entirely, in hideous ruin and combustion, as the poet says. Yet I never felt so much as a twinge of heat or pain as I fell, faster and faster it seemed.

Then came another flash, as blinding as the first. Only, if that flash had signalled my entrance into a kind of dream, suffused as it was with menace and wonder, this one signalled my emergence from it. What blinded me now was the simple, pure light of the late morning sun peeking over the tops of mountains I had despaired of ever seeing again. Thus did I awaken and find myself stretched on a cold hillside at the foot of Mount Coglians in the Carnic Alps. I was home. Corinna had kept her promise.

I had arrived at Märchen at the turning of the season, autumn giving way to winter, but the chill in the air now was of a different quality, and the frost-rimed grasses and wildflowers that blanketed the hillside in soft splashes of colour, the lowing of distant cattle and the hollow clanking of cowbells that echoed from the heights – all testified to the burgeoning of spring. I thought of the old tales of Fairyland and how time flowed so capriciously there. Perhaps I had been gone for years, decades, entire lifetimes.

Yet I was not thinking so much of what awaited me in the world to which I had been returned. No, all my thoughts were bent towards the world I had left behind – and Corinna.

I got to my feet – I felt as hale as I ever had in my life – and retraced my steps up the mountain, determined to enter Märchen again despite all that Corinna had told me. I was not thinking clearly. I was not thinking at all. It was the yearning of a broken heart, bereft and disconsolate, that drove me. But when I reached the spot where I had first set eyes on Märchen, there was nothing. I knew I was in the right place, for I could see the icy dagger of the glacier upthrust and glittering in the sun. But of the town not a trace remained, as if it had never been there at all.