The Emperor of All Things by Paul Witcover

the clock and leave the rest to Master Magnus. Yet he would have to mention Grimalkin; Lord Wichcote was the sort of man who would take a perverse pride in having been robbed by the notorious Grimalkin, and he would no more be able to resist boasting of his attic encounter than he had of possessing the clock that had occasioned it. The news would no doubt spread quickly, reaching the ears of Master Magnus in short order. So he must confess that much, at least. And, too, there was his wounded leg to explain. It occurred to him that the latter might serve as an excuse for his failure to kill or capture Grimalkin.
    Thus it was that by the time he returned to the guild hall, Quare had concocted the story, a blend of truth, lies, and omissions, that he had related to Master Magnus while suffering the none-too-gentle ministrations of the man’s surgeon. And thus it was that he had found himself caught in the strands of his own web – or, rather, swept up in the larger web of Master Magnus, who, after seeing his wound treated, had ensnared him in a further fabrication, this one directed at no less a target than Grandmaster Wolfe himself. As Quare took a carriage home in the early morning hours, a luxury provided by Master Magnus, he’d cursed the luck that had caused this night’s mission to fall into his lap; the result of his success had not been the praise and advancement he deserved but an injured leg and recruitment into a power struggle between two giants who could crush him as thoughtlessly as he might crush a fly.
    He had sought to make his own way in the Worshipful Company, beholden to no faction but to his talents only; no doubt he had been naïve. But that was finished now. Or would be, once he was called before the Old Wolf to give his report, a summons that Master Magnus had advised him to expect by the afternoon at the latest. Then he would relate the fabrication he had been rehearsed in and suffer the consequences of it – disgrace, suspension, perhaps outright expulsion – all in the service of a scheme whose purpose was as obscure to him as were the plans of the Almighty. Yet as he lay back on the cushions of the carriage seat, it was not the base machinations of guild politics that whirled feverishly through his brain but instead the features of the woman he had discovered behind Grimalkin’s mask.
    Those exotic features were still present in his mind, or at the back of his mind, seeming, as it were, to gaze down over his shoulder as he examined the hunter that Master Magnus had placed into his hands. The woman’s dire warnings echoed in his memory. They seemed crazier than ever now that their object had been revealed to be a pocket watch barely thicker than his dagger’s blade; yet though he could not credit her warnings, neither could he dismiss them, any more than he could dismiss the memory of the woman herself: her vernal voice, the quickness of her wit and of her movements, the sense that there had been, and perhaps still was, a connection between them, one that went deeper than words unsaid, questions unasked, and ancient compacts born of a moonstruck fancy: a bond brought into being by the shedding and , as she had put it, the mingling of blood, as though what had passed between them on that rooftop had been some kind of ceremony and not a shabby paroxysm of violence that had left her unconscious from a blow to the head and himself run through the leg and lucky to be alive. He wondered if he would ever see her again, and though he felt no certainty that he would survive a second encounter, he found that he desired it almost as much as he desired to possess the secret of the timepiece he had taken from her.
    Now, after clearing a work space on the cluttered table, he set loupe and hunter down and pulled from an interior pocket of his waistcoat a well-worn leather-bound wallet tied shut with a length of dark ribbon. This he untied, placed on the table to one side, and flicked open with practised ease.