The Emperor of all Things

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.

Which, too, had pulled itself erect by similar means. And held a rapier en garde.

The two stood in mutual trembling regard in a dim fall of moonlight that concealed more than it illuminated. Each might have been the reflection of the other. At their feet inky shadows spread.

‘What do you here?’ asked Lord Wichcote. ‘Have you not stolen enough from me already?’

‘We need not be enemies, you and I,’ the other said, and just then the room brightened, as if a mask of cloud had been pulled away from the face of the moon, revealing a young blonde-haired woman with skin like porcelain, her expression one of suffering stoically endured. Upon her shoulder, tucked against her neck, sat a mouse.

Lord Wichcote staggered back against the table. ‘Corinna?’

‘Her daughter,’ answered a dwindling voice, ‘and yours.’ The woman dwindled along with it, falling in a slow faint. The mouse had already vanished into the shadows by the time the rapier clattered to the floor. It rolled a half turn on the wheel of its guard, then lay as still as its owner.