‘He’s gone,’ Snorri said, heaving me up.
‘What the hell were you doing?’ I screamed.
‘Testing.’
‘Well test with your own damn self next time!’ I straightened my shirt, then rubbed tentatively at the scrapes Cutter John’s fingers had left on me. They hurt. Wincing, I looked up to see Snorri taking my advice, stepping forward, axe-haft held across his chest like a bar to ward off attack.
The figure rose almost immediately, the ground opening, swallowing itself to reveal a fissure like that at the back of Eridruin’s Cave on the Harrowfjord, the one that had swallowed Kelem’s shade back into Hell.
Out scrambled Einmyria, muddy and howling, an awful noise that made me want to drive a knife into each ear to kill my hearing. As Snorri’s child raised her skinless face to us flies rose all about her, vomited from the pit in tens of thousands. I saw her hands, the end of each finger darkening into a cruel black claw. And then I saw nothing but buzzing flies until Snorri hurtled back across the yellow crosshatching and the whole nightmare broke into fading wisps like smoke rising into still air.
Snorri, back against the wall once more, stood doubled over, his face hidden behind the dark fall of his hair. For a long minute no one spoke. I watched the mirror, the false calm of Mora Shival’s inner sanctum, praying that the Lady Blue would not return from whatever business kept her elsewhere in her tower and see us as we saw her.
‘I’m sorry.’ Snorri spoke at last. ‘It was wrong of me to push you forward. It can be hard to understand the depth of another person’s fear.’
‘We could throw something to break the mirror…’ Hennan suggested.
‘I’m all out of rocks,’ I said. ‘And I’d rather not lose my sword. Plus, there’s no guarantee the mirror will break…’ I shot Snorri a sideways glance. ‘An axe is a good throwing weapon…’
Snorri scowled and, stepping away from the wall, plucked the dagger from its scabbard on my hip then flung it at the mirror. It hit dead centre with enough force to bury it hilt-deep in a man … and bounced off to come skittering back over the painted boundary.
Kara moved between us as I picked up my dagger.
‘If I set this to the mirror,’ Kara opened her palm to reveal an iron rune tablet no larger than my thumbnail, ‘and say brjóta – which means “break” in the old tongue, it will break.’
I gestured toward the mirror. ‘Be my guest.’
Kara narrowed her eyes at me, then advanced toward the boundary, arm extended, one finger reaching out to touch. She moved so slowly that sometimes I thought her motionless. Even so, the effect proved sudden. Darkness blossomed where her fingertip brushed the shield’s limits, spreading like drops of ink in water. Within moments night had swallowed the space beyond and a pervasive silence wrapped us.
No sound. I held my breath. And then the faintest creak. Perhaps a floorboard beneath a foot.
Kara pulled her hand back as if bitten. ‘I can’t go in there,’ she whispered. I shivered at the thought of a darkness that could scare a dark-sworn mage. The fear made her look older, as if something precious had been sucked from her. She drew a deep breath as the darkness evaporated.
‘I’ll go.’
I whipped around.
‘I’ll do it.’ A small voice, but firm. Hennan held out his hand to Kara. ‘Give me the rune.’
‘You can’t.’ Snorri shook his head. ‘You saw what it’s like in there. And it’s not what you saw that you should be worried about, it’s whatever is in you that’s going to come out. The effect is so much stronger down here than it was on the surface…’
Hennan ignored Snorri, holding Kara’s gaze. ‘You told them I should come. You said, “what could be more valuable than someone whose family has resisted the pull of the Wheel for generations?”’
‘Yes but…’ Kara faltered. ‘This is something different. You saw—’
‘Anyone who comes close to the Wheel can call themselves a wrong-mage.’ Hennan spoke over her. ‘Jal made the ground open up and swallow someone.’ He mimed it with his hands. ‘But most of them aren’t wrong-mages for very long. The Wheel kills them.’
‘Too right!’ I said. ‘And it’s not a good death either. You’re mad if you want to go in there.’ I found I didn’t want to watch the boy die.
‘My grandfather’s grandfather was Lotar Vale. He worked his magics closer to the Wheel than almost any before or since, and he did it for ten years – then found the strength to leave! That’s why my family don’t feel the pull. Lotar’s blood runs in our veins. The horrors don’t come for us.’ It would take a practised liar to spot the hesitation, but I could tell he was just guessing.
‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ Kara said.
‘Let him try,’ Snorri rumbled.
‘What?’ Kara took the boy’s arm, as if he might throw himself across the boundary at any moment.
‘He’s old enough to know his own mind. In two years he’ll be a man. Unless we fail here in which case nobody will be anything in two years’ time.’ Snorri waved at the mirror. ‘If we don’t break it and the Blue Lady sees us, you think she’s going to take him on as her little helper? Or kill him with the rest of us?’
Kara said nothing but held out her hand, the iron tablet dark against the whiteness of her palm. Hennan took it, brushed a hand up through the red shock of his hair, glanced nervously back at Snorri and me, then put a foot over the boundary. Took another step. Wholly inside the unshielded area now, he looked back, lips twitching toward a smile.
‘Hurry!’ Kara waved him on.
The air began to seethe around Hennan as he turned back toward the mirror, with quick steps, hands out in front of him as if he were breaking through cobwebs. Half-seen shapes moved around him like figures made of glass, seen only as a confusion of surfaces catching and distorting the light.
As he neared the mirror one of the shapes darkened, taking on colour. Something snake-like wrapped his wrist as he reached out with the tablet.
‘No!’ Hennan sounded angry rather than scared. The snake, or tentacle, or tendril became glassy as he stared at it, turning insubstantial again, and Hennan pressed the tablet against the mirror’s surface.
‘Brjóta.’ For a moment the word hung in the air, trembling through the half-glimpsed horrors as the Wheel tried to give them form. In the next moment the mirror cracked with a splintering bang that left my ears ringing. A spiderweb of fractures ran across it, top to bottom. Immediately a klaxon rang out, strident, the light turning from a constant white to a pulsation of reds in shades from hot coals through to scarlet.
Hennan spun away, shaking off translucent hands, brushing past or through figures that loomed on all sides. He ran for us, each step slower than the next as if he were wading through a swamp. The air grew misty around him, but red as blood with the light’s warning.
‘Don’t stop!’ I roared.
A yard to go now. A thin crimson line opened along his cheekbone as a glassy claw sliced him. The mist took on a deeper stain.
All three of us stood at the boundary, screaming for him to push on.
He made it another foot, moving with agonizing slowness, before another cut opened up, this one deeper, running across his forehead, leaking blood.
We reached for him, though thankfully I had the sense to do it a split second later than the other two. Kara was quickest, lunging shoulder deep into the profound darkness that bloomed the moment her fingers crossed the boundary. Dark or not, she caught the boy and dragged him to us. I caught her in turn as she fell back. Her arm seemed unmarked but she lay in my lap, trembling as though dipped in the Norseheim sea, unable to catch her breath, eyes wide and staring.
‘You’re all right.’ Snorri lifted her from me.
I got up, pulling Hennan to his feet. With a rag from my pocket I wiped the blood from his eyes. We stood for a minute, all of us waiting for our hearts to stop trying to batter their way out of our chests. Kara shook herself free from Snorri and starte
d to treat Hennan’s wounds with some paste from a leather pouch, the frightened girl banished once more to whatever part of her mind Kara kept her in, the völva back with us again, all business.
‘We need to move.’ I started back out through the door. Grandmother said the Silent Sister would know when the mirror broke. They would be beginning their final assault on the tower now and I wasn’t keen to find out if the Lady Blue had any more tricks up her sleeve.
Hennan brought up the rear and, glancing back, I saw the air around his shoulders mist briefly then fade, as if the shields that had once held to the painted boundary might now be failing, fractured as profoundly as the mirror.
Once I had them moving I let Kara lead the way with her map, and slipped into the middle of our little group just behind Hennan. ‘Good work there, lad.’ I punched his shoulder in the way I’d seen Snorri dish out approval. ‘If I’m still marshal when I get back to Vermillion I’ll recommend you for a medal.’ I rolled the word ‘when’ silently in my mouth. I still didn’t know for sure what I would do once the key was in that final lock. I might have cut the Lady Blue off from coming to visit through the fractal mirror, but her words could still reach me. I could be a god in the new world – or burn with the peasants in the old…
‘Look!’ We reached one of the facets of the fractal mirror, finding it covered by a radial web of cracks, but Kara was pointing to the room beyond rather than the damage.
‘I don’t see—’ Then I did. The whole room gave the faintest of shudders and fine white clouds of plaster dust began to sift down over the polished furniture. ‘Come on!’ Everyone’s time had been running out faster and faster. Now the Lady Blue’s time had run out, and somehow I didn’t think she would go gentle into her last goodnight.
32
Kara led us through the bulk of the sleeping leviathan, the engine that had broken free the Wheel that once steered the ship of the universe on its straight path through the unending night. The engine that even now nudged the Wheel further and further from true, threatening at any moment to steer us over some precipice into a fall that could shatter worlds.
The pulsing light throbbed throughout the structure, the siren penetrating all corners, making speech almost impossible.
‘We have to hurry!’ I shouted the words at Kara’s back in order to be heard. ‘We don’t have much time.’ Since we broke the mirror I had been hearing various parts of the great engines come to life, or rather feeling it through the soles of my boots. Beneath the siren the labouring mechanisms groaned and whined, an unhealthy edge to the sound.
Kara turned away from the door in front of her and narrowed her eyes at me over Hennan’s head. ‘Perhaps the person with the key that opens everything should go first?’
I could hand the key over, but that would feel like handing over my choices. Instead I squeezed past and held key to door until the hidden locks surrendered and the metal slab slid out of my way.
We passed half a dozen facets of the mirror, positioned as if they might be windows into the interior of the Builders’ creations, but each showing the Lady Blue’s sanctum. Twice more I saw the room shudder and on the second time larger pieces fell from the ceiling, along with several mirror frames, and innumerable glittering shards as the broken mirrors had their teeth shaken from them.
‘Up?’ I looked up the narrow shaft, pulsing red.
‘Up.’ Kara nodded.
‘Will Snorri make it? He’s quite fat.’
Snorri growled, the light gleaming on muscles slick with sweat as the temperature rose around us.
I drew a deep breath, and regretted it. ‘Smells like the rest of the Builders came in here to die.’
The tight confines of the shaft muted the siren, but as I clambered into the small chamber at the top it returned with full force. I stumbled to the mirror facet set into the wall and slapped the key onto one of the dead screens below it. ‘Make it stop!’
That last ‘stop’ burst out into a silent room. Kara looked up at me as she climbed out of the hole.
‘Well done.’ Rubbing her ears, she stepped back to let Hennan out.
‘Thank the gods for that.’ Snorri squeezed out of the shaft, flexing his shoulders.
‘We’re close now. The central chamber is next but one. Through there.’ Kara pointed to a peculiar opening, tall, narrow, leading into what looked to be a small cupboard.
The sound of a door crashing open spun us all around. The Blue Lady stood in the doorway of the room beyond the mirror, arms spread as if about to cast some terrifying spell, grey hair in disarray, a cloak of midnight blue swirling around her. Her age shocked me. I knew her to have more than a hundred summers under her belt, but I’d not seen her like this, like something that might be piled in the corpse cart at the back of a debtors’ prison: bones wearing old skin that wrinkled up around each joint. Worse than her age was the way she moved, possessed of unnatural vitality, avid, eyes full of fever. She sprang at the surface between us, covering the distance in a moment. Her face filled the mirror, shrieking curses at us in a language I was glad I didn’t understand.
I took a step back as two gnarled hands covered the mirror facet and the whole thing grew dark. ‘What’s she doing?’ Mora Shival might look a shadow of herself – not a shadow, more as if she had been scraped too thinly across the day – but she still scared the hell out of me. ‘What’s she doing?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kara said. ‘We should keep going though.’
‘Where?’ I asked.
Kara pointed to the slot she had indicated before.
‘But it’s just a cupboard or something…’
‘The map says it’s through there.’ She glanced down at the paper in her hand, frowning.
‘Fine.’ I pushed past Snorri and stuck my head through the slot. ‘There’s room for one person to stand in here, and no other way out.’
‘Maybe it goes up,’ Snorri said.
I didn’t like the sound of that.
‘Get in there and try it.’ At least he refrained from pushing me in this time.
‘That should do it.’ An unfamiliar voice behind me.
Turning, I saw the hands draw back from the mirror facet, revealing the Lady Blue’s haggard face and bright eyes once again. ‘That should do it,’ she repeated, her voice like a rasp, no trace of the culture and humour I remembered from the Red Queen’s memories.
‘Do what?’ I wanted to ask but my tongue stuck as my mouth went dry. I could see some of the thinnest hairline fractures closing up.
‘The mirror’s healing itself.’ Kara stepped back. ‘Go! Hurry!’
Keen to be away now, I slid into the space past the slot, folding my arms across my chest. I stood in a vertical tube a little taller than myself. A silver panel with no markings was set into the curving wall before me. Lacking any other ideas, I pressed the key to it. ‘Open.’ The structure shuddered. ‘Open!’ The panel turned black. ‘Open, damn you!’ Something began to move with the sound of tortured steel, an awful scraping noise that put my teeth on edge.
‘Jal!’
I turned my head just in time to see Snorri vanish as the inner cylinder rotated, with me inside, sealing away the opening slot. I kept the key pressed to the panel and prayed hard to any god that would have me. The light stuttered and died. I’ve known weeks pass more quickly than the thirty seconds that followed. Eventually a bright vertical line appeared, broadening with agonizing sloth into a gap wide enough for me to press myself through as the slot in the inner cylinder rotated into alignment with the slot affording access into the next room.
‘Decontamination cycle complete.’ A lifeless voice spoke in the cylinder as I stepped out.
The first thing to hit me was the stink, as if something had crawled in here to die. Fortunately that was also the only thing to hit me. The chamber was larger than I had expected, with irregular walls giving on to narrow convoluted passages trailing off beyond the reach of the pulsing red light. A time-star floated at head-height in the cen
tre of the chamber, burning blue above a black disc set in the silver-steel floor. I kept myself from looking at it, sensing the thing could hook a person, leaving them to spend the rest of their life staring at it.
A facet of the fractal mirror had been set in one of the few flat sections of wall. The spiderweb of fractures continued its slow healing process and for a moment the Lady Blue turned her attentions to her sanctuary’s door. On the walls around her a dozen or more unbroken mirrors now hung in spots where the original occupant of the space had been shaken down. All of them the same: a plain mirror in a cheap pine frame… The same mirror I had seen hanging in a score of places in Tuttugu’s cell as he lay dead.
In the section of wall directly opposite me was a valve like the one I had just come through, next to a large black rectangular panel. I pressed the key to the outer casing of the valve that had admitted me. ‘Keep turning.’ The thing ground on with agonizing slowness, fighting every inch of the way.
In the mirror the Lady Blue’s door shuddered beneath a great blow. Then another. On the third hit it shattered as if it had been made of glass, wickedly sharp chunks flying in all directions. The Silent Sister stood revealed in the doorway, stooped in her greying rags as always, the hint of that enigmatic smile gilding the thinness of her lips, one eye dark and penetrating, the blind eye glowing as if her head were full of light. Behind her, taller, broader, armoured in crimson half-plate, the Red Queen, smoke rising from the mantle about her shoulders as if she might at any moment burst into flames.
‘Alica.’ The Lady Blue tilted her head to acknowledge her visitors. ‘And your sister. I never did quite catch her name.’
Behind me Kara slipped out of the valve which kept on turning, rotating its opening back toward Snorri and Hennan. ‘Don’t look at the star,’ I hissed, pushing her face away from it with one hand.