‘No,’ Quare said, and this time, though it was his voice that spoke, the will behind it belonged to another. And that will was not Magnus’s, either. Magnus was part of it, but looming behind Magnus like a mountainous shadow was something stronger, vaster, older … and yet, Quare sensed – because he, too, was part of it – something that was still taking shape, not fully formed, simultaneously ancient and new, like a possibility that had existed from the beginning of all things but was only now on the verge of being realized. Of being born. ‘We don’t want this one.’
Pickens drew back. ‘Don’t we? Got something else in mind for him, Quare?’
‘Mr Quare is not himself,’ Longinus said, advancing upon him, sword at the ready.
‘Isn’t he?’ Pickens blinked owlishly. ‘Who is he, then?’
‘I should very much like to know that myself.’
It was the Old Wolf. He rolled to a sitting position, a pistol held in one meaty 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 late to place any credence in mortality. Nor was he thinking clearly enough to consider what he should do now that the Old Wolf was once again helpless before him. Instead, the sight of the blood leaking from the Old Wolf’s side inspired only a frantic need to get away before the hunter could begin to feed again. He turned back to the door, wrenched it open, and staggered through.
A pair of guardsmen lay unconscious or dead just outside; he didn’t stop to check their condition but stumbled past them down the corridor , until he reached the closet by which he, Longinus and Pickens had entered this floor of the guild hall in quest of the object he now possessed – or, rather, that possessed him. He ducked inside.
The candle Longinus had lit was still burning, and by its light Quare opened the hinged false front of the stacked barrels that concealed the mechanism responsible for bringing them all here. He stepped in without hesitation, and the platform, registering his weight, began to descend into darkness.
When it stopped, he fumbled about his person until he produced the vial Longinus had given him – he shook it, and in the bloom of greenish light beheld the storeroom and the still-unconscious bodies of Master Malrubius and the guardsman. He feared the hunter would add these men to its ever-growing list of victims, but it seemed sated for now – though it also seemed to Quare that he could sense the watchful presence of Magnus and whatever entity lurked behind him – not the dragon, for that was as yet unborn, but some primal consciousness, dimly awakened, out of which the dragon would emerge, shaped by the blood and will of the humans it had consumed … and not only the humans, for he sensed Magnus’s cats as well, arrogant and disdainful and savagely competent killers. Magnus would never control such a creature, Quare knew: he might at best hope to influence it. But it seemed clear that the stronger influence went in the other direction, and Magnus had already been warped far out of true.
At any rate, Magnus kept his silence for now, no doubt because Quare was doing what he would have wished him to do in any case. He was bringing the hunter out of the guild hall. He was taking the first steps that would lead him across the Channel, to fresh horrors. Quare thought with dread of those who waited there, English and French alike, soldiers and civilians, none of them suspecting the doom he was about to bring upon them. Yet what choice did he have? He could not protect them; he could not even protect himself.
There was no courage left inside him. All was madness and despair. As if to underscore his helplessness, Quare felt a pulse from the hunter prodding him on. He was not just holding the thing any more – or so, at least, it seemed to him. The hunter, the egg, was part of him now, as if his fingers had sunk into its substance and fused with it as intimately as the flesh and bone of Longinus’s leg had meshed with his artificial foot. He would have cut the hand from his arm if he could, but he knew that he would never be permitted to free himself in such a manner. Nor could he call to Tiamat; he could not even shape the dragon’s name in the privacy of his thoughts. His thoughts were no longer private.