Neither dragon paid him the slightest heed.
‘Where is it?’ the black thundered. ‘What have you done with my eye?’
Or was it ‘egg’? Quare, half deafened, was not sure what he had heard.
‘I do not have it,’ Tiamat replied. ‘Sister, move aside.’
‘You lie,’ the black raged. ‘You reek of time and generation! Give back what is mine – or I will take it!’
Before Tiamat could answer, the black struck. The two dragons twined together in a murderous flux, slashing, biting. They rose entangled, knotting and unknotting. The noise of their roaring was a physical thing.
The claws caging Quare came open; he fell.
He watched the dragons, still locked together, dwindle above him to a single speck. Then he began to tumble. The air swaddled him in a rough silence all its own. A flash of blue sky and sun gave way to the tawny pelt of a brown landscape leaping to meet him. Then he saw blue sky again, only a different sky, in which two suns blazed; but in the blink of an eye, this impossible vision was replaced by a slate-grey ocean stretching endlessly, wave upon wave. Another blink, and he was gazing at a night sky spangled with strange stars. Blink: a city greater than London lay buried beneath a blanket of unspoiled snow. Blink: a fleet of great ships depending from greater balloons, like Magnus’s Personal Flotation Device on an immense scale, glided through the air.
With each revolution of Quare’s tumbling body, the scene changed, as if he were flipping between worlds. But then it came to him that he wasn’t falling at all, that he was hovering in place as the dragons had done, and the sights he was seeing were glimpses of what lay beyond the spinning windows of the standing stones between which Tiamat had carried him. For all the time he had been here, for all the distance Tiamat had carried him, still he was somehow at the very centre of those stones. And if that were so, why couldn’t he just, as he had done the last time he’d been in the Otherwhere, choose a path out of it? The windows … or doors, rather, were here before him, offering themselves in swift succession. Were their shapes in some way symbolic of what they led to, like the alchemical symbols of planets and stars? If so, it was a code he could not decipher. He would have to trust to luck.
Now, without understanding what he was doing or how, as if in the grip of an instinct he hadn’t known he possessed until the moment came for its exercise, Quare groped towards a doorway, not caring where it might lead. He only knew, with a blind, animal certainty he did not question, that he could not remain here. He must escape or die. He reached out with his mind, or some aspect of his mind, like a drunken man fumbling to fit a key into a door. He thrust, thrust again. Felt himself slip in. He turned, or the world did.
All was darkness. And cold. And then it was as if he had been falling the whole time, after all. For he struck ground, or something as solid as ground, with a force that snuffed the candle of his consciousness.
Epilogue
WAR HAD COME to the village, stayed a while, and then moved on. What structures remained were little more than skeletons, blackened shards of timber and stone standing desolate beneath a grey sky from which flakes of snow drifted down like ash to settle upon wreckage half locked in ice, as though these ruins were of no recent vintage but had passed long centuries at the heart of a glacier only now, begrudgingly, yielding them back to the world. Nothing stirred in the frozen, stark tableau. Not the faintest whisper of wind could be heard. If whatever battle had been fought here had left survivors, it seemed they had long since fled, taking the bodies of their dead with them. Even the birds had departed.
Into the silence came a keening, a rising wail that split the air like the cry of an angel cast out of heaven. A shining arc traced a steep descent, ending in an explosion of snow and ice and billowing clouds of steam.
The ground shuddered.
A bell began to toll.
The steam thinned, returning to the ground as a new and whiter dusting of snow that clung to a grey-garbed man sprawled on his back in a soup of half-melted ice and snow at the base of a clock tower that hadn’t been there before, as if it had crashed to earth along with the splayed and unmoving figure beside it.
The tower, like the surrounding buildings, was heavily damaged. Gaping holes punctured its sides where cannonballs had bitten deep, leaving splintered fragments of carved figures whose postures and expressions seemed to reflect the horror of the instant in which their artistry had been obliterated, while the proscenium, where once automatons would have paraded, was a jumble of stone and exposed machinery in which could be glimpsed portions of those same automatons, an arm here, a leg there, heads and torsos mixed willy-nilly, like a graveyard after an earthquake. The clock itself, which had been set above the proscenium, had also been struck. Its face was as pocked and cratered as the moon. Most of its numbers were missing, and its metal hands were bent and twisted, pointing outwards, away from what was left of the clock, as though registering a time that could not be represented there. Yet despite the carnage, the campanile was intact, and it was from there that the single bell rang out its insistent summons, as if to wake the man lying at the foot of the tower, half sunk in a bloody slush already re-hardening to ice around him.
But the man did not wake. Instead, a door opened at the base of the tower, and from its interior emerged an elderly man in a powdered wig and gold-framed spectacles, dressed all in black. He hurried to the prone figure as if he’d been expecting just such a visitation. He was so thin, his movements so jerky, that he might almost have been an automaton. All the while, the bell in the campanile kept up its ringing.
This man was more supple than his angular appearance or evident age indicated; stronger, too, for he stooped and lifted the fallen man with ease. Cradling his burden, he retraced his steps to the tower and slipped back inside, turning as he entered to ensure that no portion of the limp and lanky body in his arms would brush against the doorway.
The door closed behind him.
The echoes of the bell faded. The devastated village stood silent and still under a feathering of falling snow.
Meanwhile, in a moonlit attic filled with a variety of clocks, no two of which told a common time, so that the air was thronged with a quarrelsome murmur of ticking and tocking, a peal of bells began to ring. Every clock able to announce the hour in some fashion or other did so now, as if, despite the discordant times displayed upon their faces, they had come to an inner agreement … or were reacting to a common stimulus , like a London crowd that in one instant fuses its separate members into a single organism able to cry out with one voice at the passage of a king or the hanging of a highwayman.
As abruptly as they had rung out, the clocks quieted. Silence reigned in the attic. Even the sounds of ticking had ceased. The hands on every dial had stopped dead, pointing straight up at XII.
A whisper of air, like a sigh, as the casing of a tall clock swung open.
A groan, as a grey-clad figure slumped from within to the sawdust-covered attic floor. And began to crawl, ever so slowly, across it.
Leaving a bloody trail.
A second whisper, exactly like the first, as another casing opened in a clock that stood alongside the other.
A second grey-clad figure slumped groaning to the floor and began to crawl after the first.
‘Lord Wichcote,’ called this second figure. ‘Wait.’
At which the first figure halted and, with visible effort, using a nearby table for leverage, pulled itself erect and turned to face the other, a dagger in hand.