The Emperor of All Things

PART TWO





8

Wachter’s Folly



I REACHED MÄRCHEN with the last echoes of the hour still haunting the air. Snow was falling, as it had done on and off during my ascent of Mount Coglians. I was exhausted, hungry, chilled to the bone. My rucksack seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. Even my hat was heavy. Yet I was in high spirits. I had been back in Europe for some months, having sailed from Africa to Italy, then made my way up the peninsula and across the Italian Alps into Austria. Winter was drawing nigh, and I was glad to be away from the oppressive heat of the climes in which I had spent much of the last year. I was travelling incognito, in the guise of a journeyman, following the clues – or riddles, rather – left by that nameless horologist whose footsteps I had dogged halfway round the world. Wherever I went, I found evidence that he had preceded me. Among the timepieces brought to me for examination and repair in each new town or city, I would find one or two that bore the unmistakable signs of his touch – strange, capricious-seeming alterations whose only purpose, as far as I could tell, was the introduction of random inaccuracies.

By random I mean simply that they were not regular, as, for example, the loss of a certain number of minutes in a day, but rather unpredictable from day to day and even moment to moment. A clock might run fast and then slow, then speed up again, for instance, all within the space of an hour. Needless to say, the mechanisms responsible for such variation were impressive, and quite often beyond my understanding – I sent drawings back to Magnus, and he incorporated many of them into subsequent inventions of his own. Always there would be a clue concealed somewhere in the timepiece itself, or in its altered functioning, that, once divined, led me to my next destination. And this was true, by the way, regardless of the type of timepiece. Not just mechanical clocks driven by springs or weights but clepsydrae and other water clocks, hemicycles, hourglasses, even gnomons. Nothing, it seemed, was beneath the interest, or beyond the expertise, of my quarry.

I did not expect to end my quest in Märchen. Indeed, I was not even aware of the town’s existence until, travelling on foot across the lower slopes of Mount Coglians, I happened to hear, from out of the cloud-steeped heights above me, the tolling of bells that struck an hour at odds with what my pocket watch assured me was the correct time. I paused to examine my map but could find no trace of a town anywhere near by, save for the place I had spent the previous night. Of course, I could have been hearing the echo of a clock from elsewhere: the peaks and valleys of the mountains had a way of playing tricks with sound. Still, I decided to investigate. Over the next five hours, as I picked my way up the side of the mountain, following trails that seemed better suited to sheep than men, the clock struck thrice only. And not once did the tolling of the bells – one tone overlying the next, echo building upon echo to extend across the frozen surface of the air, then dispersing by an equivalent subtraction until no trace remained – coincide with the true hour.

Märchen turned out to be a small village; it almost had to be, perched so high, in the shadow of an immense glacier. All the way up the mountain, amidst snow flurries, I had watched the sun progress towards that distant upthrust dagger of ice until, at last, it seemed to impale itself there. Now, in the waning light, skirls of snow and ice crystals unfurled from the glacier’s jagged edge like blood from a wound in the sky. I topped a ridge, and as quickly as that, with a suddenness that took my breath away, I found myself on the outskirts of the village. Even at the time, it seemed strange to me that there had been no warning, no sign that I was drawing near to a place of habitation. No rubbish such as one might expect to find at the edge of a settlement, no pastured animals, no stray dogs, not even wagon tracks. I looked back the way I had come, but all was lost in mist and snow; I might have been in a different world altogether from that in which I had started.

The few people I saw on the streets were bundled against the weather and hurrying to be out of it; they did not stop to talk, shooting me curious but not unfriendly glances. I nodded as I passed by, taking note of their simple but well-made clothing. The houses and other buildings of the town shared these qualities. There was nothing ostentatious about them; everything I saw bespoke the quiet confidence of long-standing prosperity, as if the bloody tides of war that had surged back and forth across the lands below had never risen high enough to splash Märchen’s well-kept streets.

Street lamps glittered through the snow, which had increased, whipped by a biting wind that made me clutch my cloak to my throat. Upon reaching what I took to be the central square, I saw a lone, dark-cloaked figure kindling the lamps around its periphery from a sputtering flambeau. The man was scarcely more than four feet tall and required a stepladder to perform his task; he carried this implement with him, slung over one shoulder, which gave him a hunchbacked appearance as he trudged from post to post with an uneven gait, the flickering torch held before him, his dark cloak flapping behind. For an instant, I thought I was seeing Magnus, and that, by some incomprehensible circumstance, my friend and former master had preceded me here.

At the centre of the square stood the clock tower, a square, monolithic structure about fifteen feet to a side that rose to a height of perhaps thirty feet. Such monumental clocks are usually part of a town hall or prominent church, but this one stood alone in the middle of the square – where I would have expected to find a statue or fountain – as though proclaiming its independence from all secular and religious authority. The façades of the surrounding buildings, as far as I could make out, were clockless.

I approached, the chill forgotten. I think I knew already – and not just from the evidence of my eyes, but on an instinctive level, by the pricking of my thumbs, as it were – that I was in the presence of a horological masterpiece, and, moreover, an eccentric one. This impression was bolstered by the tower’s appearance, which, though it revealed nothing of the mechanism within, nevertheless confirmed my sense of an idiosyncratic personality at work, for it more than made up for any lack of ostentation in the other structures I had seen so far. I did not doubt for an instant that I had found another example of the wizard’s work – the purest example yet, for this was no mere addition to something made by a lesser craftsman, as was the case with the other timepieces I had encountered in my travels: this masterpiece could only have come from the hands of the wizard himself, or so I imagined.

The ragged pulse of lamplight and shadow through the curtain of falling snow imparted a semblance of activity to the figures that covered the tower’s exterior. I couldn’t tell at first if they were castings or carvings, nor if they were painted; they seemed to sprout from every inch of the façade and came in a variety of sizes: the smallest no larger than my finger, the largest as big as life, or bigger. Men, women and children were represented, but also gargoyles that mixed human and bestial aspects, winged devils and cloven-footed demons, as well as angels, and skeletal figures, too, wielding scythes or hourglasses that seemed no less dangerous. Twining through and about them all was the coiling body of an immense serpent … or perhaps a dragon, though it lacked wings as far as I could see. Never had I beheld the sufferings of the damned depicted so persuasively, for such, it appeared, was the artist’s subject. The crowd of tormentors and tormented blurred before my eyes into a single undifferentiated mass, as if those inflicting pain and those seeking to escape it suffered alike the agony of exile from God’s presence even as they remained subject to His will, fixed in place for ever by a judgement that permitted neither escape nor appeal.

As I gazed at the tableau, a feeling of horror stirred in my breast, and I shivered beneath my cloak. Despite my admiration for the artistry, or what I could discern of it, I found myself hesitant to undertake a closer examination. Indeed, I felt an impulse to step back, as if I were in the presence of something dangerous or vile, and though I stood my ground, I did not draw any nearer.

The decorated portion of the tower rose to a height of fifteen feet or so, where an opening gaped, wide and dark as the mouth of a cave: daylight would no doubt reveal a recessed stage there, across which, at the stroke of some predetermined hour, figures emerging from within would progress along inlaid tracks in jerky pantomimes of living movement. I had seen such parades of dolls and automatons hundreds of times in my training and my travels, and knew them inside and out, but I felt certain that whatever display emerged from this particular tower would be like nothing I had witnessed before.

Above the proscenium, the pale clock face floated in mid-air like some smaller sister of the moon seduced down from the heavens. I tried to make out the time, but I couldn’t see the hands clearly, much less the numbers to which they pointed. Rising out of the mix of snow and shadow, in which feathery black flakes seemed to be falling alongside the white, was the apex of the tower: a campanile open on all four sides. Clustered within, dimly visible, were the pear-shaped silhouettes of five bells. The two largest hung motionless, but the three smaller ones were swinging slowly back and forth, each following a rhythm of its own. Though there was no sound of striking clapper, faint pings and clicks reached my ears through the keening of the wind – a forlorn music.

‘Tempus Imperator Rerum,’ rasped a voice from behind me in German-accented Latin.

I jumped, startled; lost in reverie, I had not heard the man’s approach. Turning, I saw the lamplighter looking up at me with a sly expression, as if pleased to have surprised me. This close, there was no mistaking him for Magnus: he was younger, for one thing, with a full and vigorous reddish-brown beard (in which snowflakes winked and melted), a bulbous red nose and glittering blue eyes beneath a battered brown tricorn. Unlike Magnus, he was a true dwarf, his head disproportionately large for the rest of his body, as were his hands. Yet he might almost have been a dwarf of legend.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.

In one gloved hand, the man held the knotted end of a hempen rope by which the ladder was slung over his shoulder; in the other, like a club, he carried the flambeau, now extinguished. ‘Tempus Imperator Rerum,’ he repeated. And then, in an English that bore the same accent as his Latin: ‘Time, Emperor of All Things. Is that not the motto of your guild?’

‘What guild would that be?’ I asked in turn.

He laughed aloud, flashing teeth as white and large as those of a horse, or so it seemed to me. The combination of physical exhaustion and mental stimulation made everything dreamlike and unreal. ‘Come now, lad,’ he chided, although he did not appear any older than I. ‘Do you think I don’t know a member of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers when I see one? Why try to hide it?’

‘I’m not hiding anything,’ I replied. ‘I’m merely curious as to how you came to that conclusion, as I carry no badge or mark of identity.’

‘Do you not?’ he asked, still grinning. ‘Who else but a clockman would be standing here in the middle of a snowstorm, oblivious as a pilgrim in a cathedral? And you are English, as I deduced from your manner of dress, and as your speech confirmed. Finally, you recognized the Latin motto. Thus, you are an English clockman. Thus, you are a member of the Worshipful Company. Quod erat demonstrandum.’

‘You are here,’ I pointed out. ‘You speak English and are acquainted with the motto. Does that make you a member of the guild?’

The man gestured with the charred flambeau. ‘I have to be here, don’t I? No matter the weather, the lamps must be lit. But now my work is done, and I’m for the hearth and home. You’d best come along, before you freeze to death.’

I confess I was taken aback at the invitation. ‘That’s very generous of you,’ I said, ‘but if you could just direct me to a good inn …’

Again he laughed, expelling gouts of steam from the thicket of his beard. ‘Why, where did you think we were going? To my hearth and home? The missus would have my head on a platter!’ Chuckling, he started off across the square, moving with the lurching gait I had noticed earlier, as if the ladder slung over his shoulder was a lot heavier than it looked.

‘What’s your name, clockman?’ the man inquired once I had caught him up.

I gave him my alias. ‘I am Michael Gray.’

‘Adolpheus.’

I wondered whether this was a first or a last name. No clarification was forthcoming.

‘Come to fix our clock, have you, Master Gray?’

‘I’m no master,’ I told him. ‘Just a journeyman. But yes, I’d like to try.’ That seemed the safest way to answer the question.

‘Climbed all this way, did you? Afoot, with no horse to bear you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’re fortunate. Each spring we find the frozen bodies of those who stray off the track in some snowstorm or other.’

‘I didn’t realize it was so dangerous.’

Adolpheus grunted but said no more. He led me through a maze of steep and narrow lanes, all of them deserted, past closed-up shops and dwellings whose curtained windows glowed warmly through the falling snow, which had increased in intensity, along with the wind. If it didn’t qualify as a snowstorm yet, it would soon do so.

At last, following my guide around a corner, I found myself facing a two-storey dwelling whose windows were ablaze with light. The inn – or so I judged it to be from the clapboard sign that hung above the door, which depicted a dog lying curled before a fire and was flapping vigorously back and forth as though determined to break loose and fly away, a creature tethered against its will – seemed to promise more than mere hospitality, as if every species of earthly delight were to be found within.

‘The Hearth and Home,’ Adolpheus said, bustling forward. He unslung his ladder and leaned it against one wall, where snow was already piling up, then laid the dead torch across the top rung. Motioning for me to precede him, he flung the door open.

A wave of warmth and conversation rolled out. Smells of wood smoke, tobacco, cooking meat, mulling wine and cider, and spilled ale mingled with the steamy odours of wet garments drying in the heat of a roaring fire. I paused on the threshold, dizzy, dark spots and bright sparks dancing before my eyes. A hush descended, not hostile, but not welcoming, either. A dog barked once, sharply.

In my travels, I had of necessity become a connoisseur of silences. Being able to judge them correctly can mean the difference between life and death to a stranger entering a place whose customs and language may be other than his own. This silence was made up of curiosity and suspicion in equal measure. I guessed that more than one of the hushed conversations had concerned my identity and purpose – news of a visitor spreads fast in small towns, along with the wildest of rumours. In such cases, it is imperative to make the proper first impression. People are ever eager to believe the worst.

I removed my hat, but before I could say a word, Adolpheus pushed me forward and entered behind me, slamming the door against the wind. ‘Bless all here,’ he said in German, vigorously brushing the snow from his beard.

Voices chorused a welcome: ‘Doooolph!’

‘I’ve been known to look in from time to time,’ he confided to me in English with a wink and a grin as he tugged off his gloves.

My eyes had cleared, the dizziness lifted, and now I saw that there were a dozen or so men seated at tables in the inn’s common room, and an immensely fat, middle-aged woman who stood behind a long and unoccupied bar. All their eyes were fixed on me through a drifting bluish haze, but I sensed no animosity in their regard; thanks to Adolpheus, I had been accepted, accorded the provisional status of guest rather than intruder. I nodded a generalized hello, and the buzz of conversation resumed.

A medium-sized but rotund brown and white terrier, which I assumed was the same dog that had barked at my entrance, came waddling up like a sausage with legs, and Adolpheus chuckled and scratched behind the animal’s foxlike ears. ‘Hello, Hesta, old girl.’

The dog had but a single eye; the other, to judge by the scars surrounding the empty socket, had been lost in a fight. She wagged her stubby tail, basking in the attention, then gave my outstretched palm a sniff and allowed herself to be patted on the head before retreating, satisfied, to what was plainly her accustomed spot before the fire.

‘It’s she who truly owns the place,’ said Adolpheus, tucking his gloves into the pockets of his cloak. ‘The great Frederick himself couldn’t stop here if Hesta didn’t approve.’ He unfastened the cloak and shrugged it off, then handed it to me, indicating with his eyes a row of wooden pegs along one wall, above his reach, where other cloaks were hanging, dripping onto the wooden floor. ‘Would you mind?’

‘Not at all,’ I told him in my rough German. At his raised eyebrows, I added, ‘You see, I am as adept in your language as you are in mine.’

‘Then perhaps we can misunderstand each other equally,’ Adolpheus replied – in German – with a laugh. He had taken off his hat and tucked it beneath his arm, revealing a full head of hair the same reddish-brown as his beard.

I hung the cloak on an empty peg, then hung my own beside it. I shrugged out of my rucksack and stamped clinging snow and ice from my boots, toes tingling as they began to thaw. Meanwhile, the woman from behind the bar came forward to greet us. I tried not to stare, but I had seldom seen a woman – or man, for that matter – of such prodigious girth. Her bare arms were the size of hams; her neck and chin were lost in rolls of rosy pink flesh; the movement of her bosom beneath the tent of her blue and white smock, with its colourfully embroidered designs of mountain wildflowers, was positively oceanic. Seeing her across the room, I had assumed she was in her mid-to-late forties, perhaps somewhat older, but up close she appeared younger than that – or, no, not younger, but as if the range of her possible ages was wider than I had at first supposed, just as she herself appeared to widen as she approached, glowing with health and vigour. Her cheeks were like firm red apples, her eyes were blue as gentians, and thick brown braids, like wreaths of fresh-baked bread, curled about ears that were translucent, pink, and incongruously small, like souvenirs of a dainty girlhood otherwise unimaginable.

‘Well, and who’s your handsome friend, Dolph?’ she asked in German, appraising me with a frank and, or so it seemed, flirtatious stare. She was nearly my own height, but she must have outweighed me by two hundred pounds or more. She smelled like beer and bread. What would it be like, I found myself wondering, and not entirely without interest, to bed such an enormous woman?

Adolpheus introduced me as Michael Gray, a journeyman of the Worshipful Company. The woman’s name, I learned, was Inge Hubner.

‘A pleasure to meet you and enjoy such warm hospitality,’ I told her with a gallant bow. I spoke in German, and the rest of our conversation took place in that tongue; indeed, unless I mention otherwise, you should assume that all the conversations I report to you were conducted thus.

Inge laughed, her chins jiggling. ‘You’re a long way from home, Herr Gray. But I’ll bet I can guess what brings you to Märchen. You’ve come to try your luck with Wachter’s Folly, haven’t you?’

‘She means the clock,’ Adolpheus put in. ‘That’s what we call it hereabouts, after its maker, Jozef Wachter.’

‘I should very much like to meet him,’ I said.

‘Why, you should very much not!’ Inge said. ‘The man is dead and gone almost half a century now, with that old clock, his monument, growing crazier by the year … by the day, I sometimes think. Can you set it to rights?’

‘With God’s help,’ I made modest answer.

‘Worshipful indeed!’ Her blue eyes twinkled with a teasing good humour that brought a blush to my cheeks – and even in those days, I was not a man given to blushing.

Adolpheus chuckled. ‘You’re embarrassing the lad, Inge.’

‘Nonsense.’ She winked at me, and for a moment I was afraid that she was going to reach out and give my cheek a pinch. ‘Have I embarrassed you, Herr Gray?’

‘Not at all, Fraülein—’

‘Herr Gray!’ interrupted Inge with a little shriek, as though scandalized; she held up her hand to display a fat gold band around a sausage-sized finger. ‘I’m a married woman!’

‘My apologies, Frau Hubner.’

‘Just call me Inge; everybody does. Now, I suppose you’ll be wanting a room? At this time of year, you can take your pick. Six pfennigs a night; eight, with meals included. You’ll do no better, I promise you.’ She grinned; her teeth were small and white, like kernels of Indian corn. ‘The Hearth and Home is Märchen’s only inn.’

‘And a fine one, by the looks of it,’ I said, nor was I flattering my hostess. The common room was clean and comfortably appointed. It had an atmosphere of cosy geniality, from the fire roaring in the large stone fireplace, to the mugs lined up above the mantel, to the oil paintings – of pristine Alpine vistas full of tumbling waterfalls, stark precipices, stands of pine, verdant meadows dotted with wildflowers, and wide, blue skies – hanging on the oak-panelled walls; all affirmations of the town’s prosperity. The men gathered companionably at their tables gave me the impression of belonging nowhere else, and the steady murmur of conversation and laughter that rose from them seemed as intrinsic to this place as the crackling of the fire. There was even a cuckoo clock behind the bar; its hands indicated eighteen minutes past the hour of seven. Fishing out my pocket watch, I was surprised and impressed to find only a small, but quite acceptable discrepancy between them.

‘Not every timepiece in Märchen is in need of repair,’ remarked Adolpheus. ‘Herr Gray, I’ll leave you in Inge’s capable hands. Once you’ve got him settled, Inge, I’ll have a cup of your excellent mulled wine.’

‘I’m grateful to you, Adolpheus,’ I said. ‘You must let me buy that wine.’

‘With pleasure.’ He gave me a smart bow, which I returned. Then the little man moved off towards one of the tables, still walking with his lopsided gait. Only now did I perceive that he was crippled; one leg was shorter than the other, and his right shoe had been built to correct the defect, which it did but imperfectly.

‘I’ll take you upstairs,’ said Inge. ‘Don’t worry about your cloak; it’s safe where it is. You’ll find no thieves in Märchen.’

I followed the ponderous sway of Inge’s massive hips up the creaking stairs and down a passage lit by the candle she held before her. She unlocked a door at the end of the corridor and went in, hips squeezing past the sides of the frame. After a moment, the tremulous light within grew stronger, and she called my name. Was it my imagination, or did she press herself against me as I entered the small room? It was impossible in any case to avoid her. As I brushed by, breathing in her yeasty smell, I had the sense that, if she chose, she could engulf me like rising dough swallowing a raisin. The image, however ridiculous, was not entirely without appeal. Again, I felt myself blushing. Nor was that the only physical response she had provoked. I like women with meat on their bones, yet I had never imagined that my tastes ran to such an extreme.

I turned away as soon as I could, embarrassed by an attraction I couldn’t account for, and set my rucksack on the wooden floor, leaning it against the wall to one side of the door. Inge gave no sign of having noticed anything amiss. Perhaps she, too, was embarrassed.

The room may have been small, but it was neat and snug, with a narrow bed along one wall, a painted cupboard whose insides smelled of cedar and saxifrage, a boxy ceramic stove so hot that the air around it shimmered, making its diamond-patterned red and white tiles seem to undulate, and a table upon which sat a wash basin, a covered pitcher of water, and an upside-down glass, along with a folded towel and an oil lamp that cast a shivery light. There, too, Inge had set her candle. The chamber pot, she told me, was under the bed. Outside the window, the snow was coming down so thickly that I couldn’t make out the street below, only the smudged glow of street lamps that might have been wrapped in muslin.

‘Quite a blizzard,’ I commented, taking the opportunity to place my damp hat upon the edge of the table nearest the stove.

‘Blizzard?’ Inge scoffed. ‘Why, this is but a flurry!’

‘Will it last long?’

‘A day, a week; who can say? Perhaps it will be over by morning. Perhaps not until spring.’ She gave me a wink. ‘You may be with us for a long while, Herr Gray!’

I confess I hadn’t considered the possibility of becoming trapped here. The prospect was worrisome. ‘Surely there must be means of transport up and down the mountain.’

Inge shrugged. ‘We’re self-sufficient here. We have to be. For us, winter is a siege. All summer long, we lay up supplies. Then we sit tight and wait the winter out. But if someone wants to tempt fate and go down the mountain, who can stop them?’ She twisted the front of her smock in her beefy hands. ‘Sometimes people go a little … mad. The shadow of the glacier falls across their souls. A desperation fills them, a desire to be gone from the endless snow and ice, the howling winds, that clock that keeps its crazy hours. It’s a sickness, a fever. Some flee suddenly, in the dark of night; others plan obsessively, in minute detail, before setting out. Either way, few who descend the mountain in the dead of winter reach the bottom alive.’

‘How horrible! Does it happen often?’

‘Often enough. Herr Hubner, my husband, disappeared seven winters ago. His body has yet to be found.’

‘I’m sorry. It must be terrible not to know what happened, whether he’s dead or alive. I suppose that’s why you still wear your ring: a token of hope that he might return one day.’

Inge laughed, her teeth glinting like seed pearls. ‘The explanation is not so romantic, Herr Gray! I wear my ring because I can’t get it off my finger – I was but skin and bones all those years ago, when I first put it on. Besides, in my profession, a wedding ring is an asset. It lends a certain … respectability. But truthfully, if my husband were to walk into Märchen tomorrow, I’d kill him myself, the swine. He robbed me, you see. Emptied the till when he left – took every last pfennig. I know what you’re thinking. How can it be robbery when it was all his own property?’

‘I’m no lawyer, thank God,’ I told her, for I had not been thinking any such thing.

‘He left me nothing,’ she insisted. ‘Only debts. I would have lost this place if not for Herr Doppler, the burgomeister.’ Inge shook her head as if reluctant to let go of the subject. ‘Never mind. He won’t be back. He didn’t make it down the mountain.’

‘If his body was never found, how can you be sure?’

‘I saw it in a dream.’

‘And do you always believe your dreams?’

‘You may be an educated man, Herr Gray, but you don’t know everything. I watched Hans fall; I saw him lying broken at the bottom of a crevasse. He wasn’t dead, either; not yet he wasn’t. Just paralysed. Eyes aglitter with pain and terror, he was gazing up as the snow fell down, covering him like a shroud. That was my dream.’

‘It sounds more like a nightmare.’

‘I’m not ashamed to admit that I woke up with a smile,’ Inge said, and for just a second, or so it seemed to me in the shifting light, her eyes became coals of feral satisfaction, like a cat’s. ‘It was the answer to my prayers, that dream. Haven’t you ever had such a dream?’

‘I have many dreams,’ I told her. ‘In some I fly. In others, beautiful women desire me. Once I took a journey to the moon! Alas, none of them are real.’

‘Perhaps they are more real than you know.’

I laughed. ‘Do you suppose I visited the moon after all?’

‘Or the moon visited you. Some believe dreams come from there.’

‘The moon is a globe of rock, Inge. I have examined its bleak surface through a telescope. It is a dead place, a battered wasteland, as though a great war was fought there long ago. A war that left no survivors.’

‘I didn’t say I believed it,’ she answered. ‘Still, I don’t suppose you’d deny that God can send us true dreams if He wishes it.’

‘By all means. But why should He wish it? Is there some flaw in His design that requires personal intervention?’

‘I wouldn’t know, Herr Gray. I’m a simple woman. I only know what I saw.’

‘But then why not go to the spot you dreamed of and dig up the body? Get your money back?’

She wagged a finger under my nose. ‘Now you are teasing me. The dream didn’t supply me with a map. I saw a crevasse, one of hundreds. Every year there are avalanches. Crevasses fill up. Others open. Should I waste my time searching for something that might not even exist any more? No, I have an inn to run.’ She picked up the candle from the table. ‘Now, shall I have some supper sent up, or will you eat downstairs?’

‘I’ll be down in a moment,’ I said. ‘I’m starving.’

‘A bowl or two of my stew will fix that.’ Inge removed the key from the door and handed it to me. ‘As I said, you’ll find no thieves in Märchen, but if there are any valuables you’d care to safeguard, purely for your own peace of mind, I keep a strongbox.’

‘Just my tools,’ I told her, glancing towards the rucksack. ‘But I carry them with me at all times. And this as well.’ I patted my hip, where I wore a long dagger in a leather sheath.

‘Och, you’ll not need that pigsticker here,’ Inge protested.

‘I’m sure I won’t, but I feel safer with it just the same.’

‘Well, as long as you keep it sheathed. I don’t want you waving a blade around under my customers’ noses!’

‘Not unless someone’s waving a blade under mine.’

‘Then we’ll have no trouble, Herr Gray. I’ll leave you to get settled in now.’ Executing a curtsy, Inge withdrew, shutting the door behind her. The floorboards trembled to her retreating footsteps.

I strode to the door and locked it. I thought it odd that my hostess would confess to having been robbed, albeit by her own husband, and then assure me that there were no thieves in town. But then, Herr Hubner wasn’t in town, was he? Whether his corpse lay entombed in ice at the bottom of a crevasse, or, more likely, he was enjoying a new life, with a slimmer wife, somewhere far away, the man was not to be found in Märchen. And if he knew what was good for him, I thought, remembering the fierce look that had kindled in Inge’s eyes, he never would be.

Alone, I performed my ablutions, then poured a glass of water and gulped it down. The water tasted pure, ambrosial; so cold, despite the heat of the room, it made my teeth ache down to the roots. Drawn, no doubt, from some pristine mountain spring. I poured a second glass. The contents glittered in the lamplight and went straight to my head like a liquor distilled from glacial ice, frozen instants aged to a ravishing potency. I leaned into the table, steadying myself against the prickly aurora that crystallized behind my eyes. It melted away in a slow, shimmering ebb, leaving me dizzied, breathless. My heart tolled in my chest.

A dazed weariness stole over me, all those miles I’d climbed catching up at once. That, and the stifling heat. I made my way to the bed, intending to sit for a moment before returning to the common room for a bowl of Inge’s stew, but the downy mattress had other ideas, seeming to pull me in as I had imagined Inge herself doing. I let myself fall back into its embrace, closing my eyes, in my ears a soft hissing that, already half asleep, I attributed to snowflakes expiring against the windowpanes over my head rather than to the efficiency of the stove.

I awoke to a faint, persistent rasping, as of something heavy being dragged across the floor. Someone was in the room. But the lamp had gone out; I couldn’t see a thing. I listened as the sound continued, seeming to draw nearer by slow inches – drag, pause, drag, pause – until it reached the foot of the bed. Then it fell silent.

I held my breath. The only sound was the hissing of the stove. Had Inge sent a man to murder me, intending to steal my possessions? Such crimes were not unheard of. Or was the purpose of this visitation to administer a beating, a warning from the wizard I had been following to meddle no more in his affairs? Either way, I would not be an easy victim. I drew back against the headboard, pulling my dirk from its sheath. ‘Who’s there?’ I growled. ‘I’m armed, I warn you.’

A light kindled, like no earthly light I had ever seen. This was no enemy of darkness, no flame of lamp or candle to send shadows scurrying like bedbugs or blind my eyes. It was as though a star had drifted down through the ceiling, shining with a cool, silver-blue radiance that penetrated the dark without dispelling it, revealing the bed, the cupboard, the blade I held in a trembling hand … which shook not just from fear but because the temperature had plunged in an instant. Only, there was no star, nor any other single source of light. Rather, the light seemed to be an inherent property of the objects themselves. It covered their surfaces in a frostlike rime whose glow radiated outwards like a visible manifestation of the cold I felt so keenly that my teeth had begun to chatter. Even the stove seemed a font of frigidity now, and the fog of my breath glimmered as if with crystals of ice. It was beautiful but also terrible, like a glimpse into some wintry netherworld.

Beautiful and terrible, too, was the woman who stood at the foot of the bed, gazing at me with eyes of smoky green, like malachite. Her skin was pale as alabaster, her lips the blue of lapis lazuli, her long hair blacker than the darkness that seemed not just her rightful habitation but her sovereign domain. And indeed, she wore a gown such as the queen of midnight’s kingdom might wear, of deep, wine-dark velvet and white, diamond-studded lace that bloomed around her slender neck in intricate latticework patterns and tumbled in frothy swaths from her shoulders and arms like abundant drifts of snow. Had I been standing, I would have fallen to my knees; as it was, my nerveless fingers could not retain their grip on the dirk, and it fell into the bed-sheets beside me. Surely, I thought, I was in the presence of an angel! Feelings of worshipful awe came streaming into my heart, filling its chambers, stretching its walls. Yet so exquisite was the pain of this ravishment, so unreservedly did I give myself up to it, that I yearned for the process to go on and on, even if it meant my swollen heart must burst. Or, no, I wanted it to burst, ached to lose myself in a blissful annihilation …

But the explosion, when it came, involved another organ. I felt the first shuddering spasm and looked down, only then realizing that my member was as hard as iron. I had never spent myself so violently, so prodigiously. I groaned as much in shame as in ecstasy, for the feelings kindled by the sight of my visitor had been pure, exalted, spiritual in the highest sense, and yet some faulty mechanism of my body had translated those feelings into the grossest sort of animal display. But I couldn’t cover the spreading stain, couldn’t move so much as a finger. And this was just from the mute aura of her presence. If she should speak or touch me, I felt that I would expire …

I raised my eyes to her face, expecting to see disgust and anger written there, afraid I had committed a sin for which the punishment would be swift and of utmost severity, though the gravest punishment I could think of was the loss of her. Instead, she was smiling, and her green eyes seemed kind, alive in a way they hadn’t been before, as if I’d made her a rich offering, a tribute that she accepted not just as her due, but with true gratitude: because it was needful somehow, precious to her despite its base origin … or, perhaps, because of it. I didn’t know. I only knew that I would do anything to please her, to keep her looking at me that way.

‘Please,’ I whispered. ‘Please …’

She seemed about to speak, but then she gave a start, as if at a noise only she could hear. Alarm and fear rose in her features. This shocked me, for how could such a perfect being be afraid … and of what? I realized at the same time that she was younger than I had thought: was, in fact, younger than I. Had she always been so? A rosy blush infused her skin; her lips glistened as if with the juice of blueberries; the green of her eyes was no longer that of cold stone but a shade at once more vibrant and more fragile: an audacious springtime green. She seemed to be in the throes of a transformation, as though something frozen in her had begun to melt; and even as I had this thought, tears welled up in her eyes, spilling down her cheeks.

‘What is it?’ I asked, pierced to the heart by this evidence of vulnerability and filled with a fierce desire to protect her; indeed, at that moment I would have laid down my life for her without question or hesitation. ‘What are you afraid of?’

She answered in a breathless voice that was nothing like I had imagined it might be – beautiful, yes, but humanly so … which made it seem even lovelier, and made her seem lovelier, too, nearer to me, not an angel but a woman. ‘He approaches.’

‘He?’

A booming shudder passed through the bed, the inn, the world. And then another. Like the rolling thunder of an avalanche. Or the footsteps of a giant.

‘My father,’ she said, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘If he should find me here … I must go!’

‘But who are you? I don’t even know your name—’

Another footstep, much closer, as if from just outside the window behind me. I turned, but could see nothing through the glass, which was thoroughly befogged. The whole room, in fact, was filling with fog, and when I turned back to the girl, I saw that the source of it was her gown. The air had grown warmer, and I heard the steady hissing of the stove again. Or not the stove, but the gown itself, the icy fabric melting, dissolving, turning translucent as it thinned, so that I could see the outline of the body within, willowy and white, the pink buds of breasts visible for an unforgettable instant before, raising one arm to cover herself, the girl turned with a cry and fled the room.

‘Wait,’ I called, but she was gone, vanished into the billowing mist. As I moved to follow, I felt the unmistakable sensation of being observed, and so powerful was this intrusive presence that I turned back to the window, afraid that I would see a gigantic eyeball pressed to the glass. But the swirling fog was too dense. Whatever was out there, watching me, I could not see it, though the force of its dreadful regard immobilized me, held me in its grasp so that I could not even breathe.

Then the pressure withdrew. I coughed, sucking air into my lungs as I heard and felt the ponderous footsteps drawing off. I was limp with relief, drenched in sweat. Yet I could not forget the girl was out there, pursued by a father (for so she had named him) that she feared. I was afraid as well, I won’t deny it, and a part of me wanted nothing more than to pull the sheets up over my head and, like a trembling boy, take refuge in a cosy darkness of my own making. But I would not be ruled by fear. I paused only to pick up my dirk before plunging into the already dissipating mists after my beautiful visitor. She would not face her father alone and unprotected.

She proved easy to follow: her melting dress had left a wet trail across the floor that glowed with a silvery-blue phosphorescence. I lost my footing once and almost fell as I hurried down the stairs and into the common room … which was empty save for the hound, Hesta, asleep before the glowing coals of the fire, her fat old body twitching in the throes of some doggy dream. Curtains of fog made slow undulations in the air. I wondered how late it was, how long I had slept, but I couldn’t make out the face of the cuckoo clock. Nor did I linger for a closer look or check my pocket watch. Instead, I hurried out of the inn.

The snowstorm had grown worse. I did not think even Inge would have balked at the word blizzard now. Driven by the wind, icy flakes smacked into my face from all sides, like an insect swarm. I sheathed my dirk and pressed forward, my hands raised in a useless attempt to ward off the snow. I managed a few stumbling steps before halting, overwhelmed, in a snowdrift that reached to mid-thigh, so disoriented I wasn’t sure I could find my way back to the inn. The sweat had frozen upon my body, so that I felt rimed in ice, and the seed I had spilled was so cold against my skin that it almost seemed to burn. Perhaps I should have given up then, or at least returned to the Hearth and Home for my cloak, but then a fresh blast of wind tore the white swarm asunder long enough for me to pick out the trail again: a shimmering path that twined across the mounds and swells of snow like the track of a sledge. All at once, at the end of that trail, I saw the girl rise into view as if emerging from out of a hole in the ground; she was far away, a small glowing figure that skimmed over the snow like a skier. I cried out, but the wind tore my words away, and then she swerved around the corner of a building and was gone.

I pushed after her. The trail I had seen was a narrow path of ice whose thin crust stretched unbroken by so much as a footprint over the new-fallen snow. It did not bear my weight as it had hers, and I felt rough as an ox as I lumbered in her wake through drifts that reached to my hips, fighting the wind every step of the way, pulling myself forward with my arms as if wading through a river.

After a time impossible to measure, I saw what I took to be crows or ravens flapping frantically inside glass cages, and I stopped, aghast at the strangeness and cruelty of the sight, wondering at its purpose. But then I realized that I was looking at the street lamps Adolpheus had lit earlier, their flames so black it was as if darkness itself had caught fire. This seemed even stranger than my first, mistaken impression, and I felt my courage quail. But though I no longer heard or felt the earthquake footsteps of the girl’s father, I believed she was still in danger, still in need of my help.

Redoubling my efforts, at last I turned the corner where I’d lost sight of her. The clock tower loomed ahead. Wachter’s Folly, Inge had called it. Like everything else except the flames of the street lamps, it glowed a spectral blue … only the light appeared more intense than elsewhere, as if I had found its source. I hadn’t thought the night could get any colder, but now, as I approached the tower, the temperature dropped further, and the air actually seemed to grow denser, as if in transition from gas to solid. The wind, too, opposed me, pushing back until I was no longer advancing but struggling just to hold my ground.

The girl’s trail led straight to the base of the tower, a good ten yards away … and vanished. Had she entered the structure somehow? Or climbed its intricately adorned surface, seeking shelter from the blizzard and her father in the recess of the upper platform or among the bells of the campanile? I glanced up, shielding my eyes, and saw that the hands of the clock were spinning wildly, out of all proper relationship to each other, as if following different measures of time. The hour hand flew by the minute hand, which was itself turning at an abnormally fast speed.

This was no malfunction. I had seen enough examples of the wizard’s work to know that the clock was operating as it had been designed to do. I was convinced that I had found what I had been searching for – if not the wizard himself, then a timepiece built by his hand, or to his specifications. I needed to get closer, to get inside the tower, where I could examine the machinery. I would need no lamp or candle in the otherworldly blue light, which did not fall from without but instead seemed to have its mysterious origin deep within each object, a radiance arising from the heart of all matter. Then it struck me. And shook me to my soul. For what else could be the source of this eldritch light but time?

Surely, I thought, this was how God and His angels apprehended the world! Within this clock tower, preserved like a corpse within a glacier, lay the secret for which I had been searching, the grail I had followed halfway round the world: a mechanism by which time itself could be mastered, transcended. I was sure of it. And the same intuition that told me the end of my quest was waiting within the tower assured me the girl was a part of it all … and, what’s more, always had been: that without ever suspecting it, I had been searching for her as well as the wizard. I did not know who – or even what – she was: whether woman or angel. I only knew she was essential to me, that I would never possess the secret of this clock until I possessed her. She was the secret, I sensed, or a facet of it, a part inseparable from the whole. To gain one was to gain the other.

By now the spinning hands had lost their individuality, melting into a silver-blue blur that seemed distinct from the clock itself, detached from it, a cloudy, pearlescent sphere hovering in the air before me like a cyclopean eye. I shuddered, feeling that I had come once again under the scrutiny of whatever had observed me earlier, in my room at the inn. The girl’s father, whose footsteps had shaken the ground like an avalanche and sent her fleeing in terror. But where was he? What was he? I could not tear my eyes away from the floating orb, could not move so much as a finger.

And then, with mounting horror, I perceived that the orb was not merely like an eye but was in fact that very thing, and the tower likewise was no tower but a serpentine body coiled tightly upon itself. The campanile was the crest of a huge head, and what I’d taken to be a recessed platform, a stage across which automatons would parade in stiff, mechanical pantomime, was a cavernous mouth that could swallow me at a gulp. As I could see only a single eye, I assumed at first that the beast was peering at me sideways, its vision monocular, like a snake’s. But then the great head stirred, rose, and came gliding towards me without haste, inescapable as fate, and I realized that the dragon was staring at me full-on and that there was just the one eye, the other socket empty, as if the eye once housed there had been put out long ago by the lance of a questing knight. Its breath washed over me, redolent of hot metal and oil, and for a second, deep in the monstrous gullet, I saw a silvery glimmer, like a chain of stars. Then what might have been a cloud of bats came winging towards me from out of that long tunnel, hundreds, thousands of flickering shadows. I quailed, remembering the black flames trapped in their glass cages. But there would be no caging these flames, no escaping them. Paralysed with terror, I awaited incineration.

It did not come. No fire shot from between the gaping jaws. Instead, a pleasant warbling filled the air, as if, despite its size and appearance, what faced me was nearer to bird than dragon. Sweet music tumbled over me, an avalanche of pure, ringing tones …

It had been, of course, a dream, as I realized the instant I came awake, bolting upright to a cascade of carolling bells. My heart thumped, and sweat clung to my skin in the overheated room. Outside, Wachter’s Folly was tolling some no doubt outlandish hour. In the strong and shifting winds, laden with their cargo of snow, the sounds seemed near one second and far off the next, as if the tower were being blown about like a kite on a string. But those winds couldn’t touch me here, claw as they might at the windows, rattling the panes. The lamp on the table across the floor glowed a warm, welcome yellow, and its steady light illuminated the furnishings and other objects it fell upon, just as proper light should do. The stove sighed contentedly in its corner.

I rubbed my eyes, wondering how long I’d slept. According to my pocket watch, it was well past midnight. Dream images fluttered through my mind. I recalled the head of the dragon drawing near, the baleful effulgence of its solitary eye. And the girl … How beautiful she had been! Majestic, like a queen of ice and darkness … yet vulnerable, and all the more desirable for it.

Desirable indeed, for as I rose from the bed, a certain intimate dampness testified to one way, at least, in which the dream had not been entirely a thing of fancy. Succubus-like, the girl had ravished my body even as she seduced my mind.

I made my way to the table, where I laved water from the basin over my face; though lukewarm now, it brought me fully awake. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten all day. I turned to leave the room, intending to go in search of food, perhaps some of that stew Inge had mentioned … and froze, hackles rising.

Water was puddled on the floorboards at the foot of the bed. A trail of smaller puddles led to the door.

Someone had entered my room, tracking in snow from outside, and stood at the foot of the bed, watching as I slept. I assured myself that my purse had not been cut, thinking with a shiver that it was fortunate I was such a deep sleeper; had I woken, it could very well have been my throat that was cut. But some intimation of the intruder’s presence had reached me nonetheless, insinuating itself into my dream. The girl, the menacing sense of being observed, even the tread of footsteps …

The thought of my tools intruded, and I crossed to where I’d left my rucksack. It was, I saw at once, open; I knelt and rummaged through it, cursing under my breath as my worst fears were realized.

My tools were gone. Stolen.