The Obsidian Mirror

by Catherine Fisher

  Piers gasped.

  He looked down at himself, howled a syllable of rage, flung out both spidery hands.

  Maskelyne sidestepped, made a sigil of his fingers.

  Piers was an outline, a glimmer. He was a faint after-image in the air of the corridor. He mouthed curses, but no words came.

  Maskelyne took the jar and lifted the lid. It smelled of the ghosts of roses. He stopped the spell, took a breath, and commanded.

  “Enter.”

  Piers, faint as dust, fixed him with a furious glare. And then he was gone, though Maskelyne felt scorched, as if that wrath had burned right through him.

  Hands shaking, he put the weapon away, fixed the lid on the jar, and stood it on the sill. Then he sat down beside it so fast, he felt as if his legs had given way, and put his head in his hands.

  He had not made such a dark magic for centuries.

  He was surprised to find he still had it in him.

  The noise was terrible. Coins fell like rain, bouncing and rolling, rattling on the bare boards.

  The thieves were awake in seconds, Moll screeched, and Jake only managed to stop his fall by grabbing the twisted cable so tight, the snake bracelet bit into his hand. Hot rope scorched him.

  The men saw him; they swore and yelled. One—the smaller—ran and grabbed the end of the rope and jerked it so ferociously, Jake could hardly hold on. If he fell, he was finished. If they had a weapon, he was finished.

  Then Moll struck.

  She came out of the ruined wings like a spitfire, kicking, spitting venom. She had some sort of cudgel of wood; she cracked the thin man from behind across the back of his knees so that he staggered and fell, howling. She dragged her weapon up and turned, but the big man was there.

  With one backhanded blow, he floored her.

  Jake roared with rage. Forgetting safety, he slid down the rope, hitting the stage so hard, his knees buckled; in seconds he had the thick cable looped around the man’s throat and was hauling him back, throttling, dodging the flailing fists and clutching fingers.

  The thief made choking, animal noises; he scrabbled desperately at the rope. Jake clung on, but the man’s strength was too much. With one convulsive jerk he turned, and a knife slashed so close to Jake’s neck, he felt the whistle of air.

  Moll yelled, “Jake!”

  He leaped back.

  Breathless, he confronted the thief. The man tossed the knife into his right hand and plucked another from his back pocket. The blade slicked out. Menacing, grim with anger, he moved in.

  “Down, Jake!” Her screech was so shrill, it sounded like the monkey’s. He gave one glance back, then threw himself aside with a yell and the vast stage curtain swept over him like a smothering tidal wave of darkness and dust. For a moment he was drowned in it, and then he had rolled free and she was grabbing him, dragging him up. “Run! Run!”

  Half blind, he crashed into the ramshackle scenery; through lopsided battlements, through a tilted doorway cut in a cardboard cottage. Behind, the big thief roared and floundered under the curtain, swearing death and revenge, but already they were fleeing through heaps of painted graves, tombs adorned with skull and crossed bones, through flimsy flats of gnarled trees and fairy rings and a vast sprouting beanstalk.

  Moll giggled.

  “You’re crazy,” Jake gasped. “He could have killed you!”

  “He never. And he won’t.”

  She grabbed him away. “Down this way. Smart now.”

  A narrow grating in the wall. She had tugged it open and was swarming through; Jake slid after her, feet-first into a pitch-black stinking space, a slit barely wide enough to squeeze inside, descending at a steep angle.

  As they scraped themselves down and down they slowed, gasping in the fetid air, until at last they stopped, and Jake heard, far behind, the big man slamming at the tiny grid with chilling rage.

  He heard a small creaky sound in the darkness beside him. Moll, it seemed, was laughing.

  He realized he was sore, one hand badly rope-burned. But the bracelet was safe. He touched it, in the dark, then shoved it deep in his inner pocket. The thought of how close he had been to losing it forever turned him cold. He gazed up the filthy tunnel.

  “How far does this go?”

  “Into the gutters,” she said, snuggling up tight to him. “All the runnels and sewers, the new ones, they all meet down here. This is where the meat-men live, and the rat-boys too. But don’t fret. I knows a way up that will bring us near the posh streets, the ones you want.”

  “Why should I want them?”

  He caught the glimmer of her grin, patient and knowing. “Because that’s where he lives, don’t he? The one you want. The cully what took the mirror.”

  Sarah paced the tiny scullery, furious.

  Wharton had been polite but utterly firm. He had taken her arm, marched her in here, and locked the door. She gave a small scream of frustration. They had no idea what they were dealing with.

  She stopped.

  Taking a glove off, she pulled the gray notebook from her coat pocket and for a moment, stared at it.

  Reluctant, she opened it. The page was covered with the sloping script of Janus.

  I’M SORRY, SARAH. MY REPLICANT IS IN THE HOUSE NOW. AND THANKS TO THAT LITTLE SUBTERFUGE OF YOURS, WHICH OF THEM WILL TRUST YOU ANYMORE? THE BLUFF TEACHER, THE LITTLE GENIE, THE REMARKABLY CURIOUS LOCAL GIRL? GIVE UP, SARAH. OR YOUR PARENTS WILL PAY.

  Icy with dismay, she stared at the words, then slammed the book shut and flung it from her as if it were infected.

  She had to get out!

  She ran to the door and rattled the handle, strained at the lock. Maybe if…

  “Girl from the future.”

  A quiet, amused voice. She stood very still. She said, “Who is that?”

  “Gideon.”

  Her hands clasped tight on the handle. She said, “What’s happening? I have to…”

  “You can’t get to the mirror. Rebecca and Wharton have gone down there and he’s armed.”

  “You could let me out.”

  He sounded as if he was laughing, a cool, rare laugh. “Why should I?”

  “Listen to me, Gideon. Open this door. Take me into the Wood. Take me to Summer. That’s what I want you to do. And in return, if I get Jake and Venn back, then I promise I’ll get you home. Back to your family. Before this nightmare ever began.”

  He was silent so long, she thought he had gone. When he said, “Summer is far too dangerous,” she almost cried with relief.

  “I have to try. Please.”

  A rattle of sliding bolts. She stood back. The door opened and he stood there, in his moss-green ragged coat, looking at her.

  “Will you betray me too, Sarah?”

  “Of course not,” she lied.

  19

  And you would not believe the pleasant happenings! On Christmas Eve the waits came and sang, and then late at night, the mummers with their old play, all dressed in ragged costumes, and then—rather eerie this, my dear—the Gray Mare, a horse’s skull on a pole, carried by villagers. And all the while the land lies deep in winter snow under the roundest of moons…

  Letter of Lady Mary Venn, 1834

  LIKE A SHADOW, Maskelyne crept down the Long Gallery.

  Again he stopped and looked back, swiveling the weapon.

  The house was dark, and only moonlight slanted through its casements, reflecting here and there in dim polished wood, the angled smiles of framed faces.

  Twice he had thought he had heard a footfall, the faintest tread. And once, a snuffle, a sinister, animal breathing. Quietly he said, “This will kill you, Replicant. Do you hear me?”

  Nothing.

  He hurried on, letting the mirror draw him. He felt its disturbance like ripples in his mind, like an ache in his bones. It was close now, closer than it had been since that night when the stout, pompous man he had thought such a fool had tricked him out of it.

  And he had thrown himself in, guideless.
<
br />   He came to the covered alcove and drew the curtain aside. There was a door, and it was locked.

  He worked quickly. Years in the thieving underworld of London had taught him many skills; he had the door open and closed behind him in seconds.

  The Monk’s Walk, its grim cold Gothic stone, made him smile, because this was familiar. He had explored many vaults like this, broken through all too many crumbling sepulchers.

  He walked on, carefully.

  The room beyond was vast, and dark. He paused in the doorway, listening. Had they left the mirror unguarded?

  Because there it was. He could not stop himself, he pushed hastily through the feeble remnants of Venn’s safety web, ducking under broken threads and snapped green cables.

  After years, after centuries, after Symmes’s betrayal and his own bitter, stretched arrival, here it was.

  His Chronoptika.

  He walked right up to it and it showed him his own warped reflection, his face twisted and ugly and then in a shiver of moonlight, handsome and whole.

  He leaped back. “Rebecca?”

  She had been there, a slant of anxious eyes. He turned, saw her, took one step toward her when a voice said, “Stand perfectly still and drop that weapon. Or you get both barrels.”

  The big man, Wharton, had a shotgun pointed right at him.

  Maskelyne took a breath. He crouched, and slowly laid the glass weapon on the floor.

  “Move away from it,” Wharton barked.

  He took one step.

  “Rebecca. Get it.”

  She slipped out from the shadows and ran and picked it up, gingerly, as if it were hot.

  “Now.” Wharton came forward into the light, cradling the shotgun; he took the weapon from her and looked at it, grim. “I want to know how you got in here. And who the hell you are.”

  Maskelyne was silent. He felt so weary, he wasn’t sure if he could speak.

  It was Rebecca who spoke. Facing Wharton, she drew herself up and she was nearly as tall.

  “Actually, he’s sort of from the past. And he’s with me.”

  Symmes’s house was a large one, in a wide London square. From the darkness of the gardens opposite, Jake staked the place out, noting its pillared porch, the black railinged servants’ area in front with its worn steps, the lofty windows—one, on the first floor, cozily lit behind its looped curtains.

  Moll breathed noisily at his back.

  They had crossed a London of nightmare that he had barely recognized. Great rookeries of filth and squalor, sudden tangles of slums, and then at a turn of a corner a gracious street, a wide avenue he knew in his own time. But the foul stench of the place, its rumbles and clanks, even its voices, had an alien note; they seemed to hang too long in the air, to be pitched too high. The books he had read—Sherlock Holmes, even Dickens—had not prepared him for the sheer brutality, the hundreds of horses, the opulence of the women’s dresses, the scrawny crossing-sweepers with their sickly, pocked faces.

  Now he looked down at Moll. Her breathing was harsh after the running. What would happen to her? Consumption? Smallpox? He had a sudden mad idea of getting her back through the mirror with him, seeing Piers’s astonished alarm, when she said, “He’s got a visitor.”

  He turned.

  The house front was lit by a solitary gas-lamp; in its cone of light he saw a man walk along the street and pause at the steps, then stride up and rap impatiently at the door knocker.

  “Closer,” he muttered.

  They crossed the road. Tree-shadows from the gardens rustled over them.

  The man was tall; he wore a dark hat, and as he swept it off and the hall light fell on his fair hair and lean face, Jake took a breath of surprise.

  “Who is it?” Moll whispered.

  “It’s Venn.”

  He was intensely relieved, and then filled with bitter envy. Venn obviously hadn’t been set on by thieves; judging by his Victorian outfit, it had been he who had done the stealing.

  Jake moved along the railings. “Venn!” he breathed.

  Venn turned, fast, but at that instant the door opened and a servant in a dark suit said, “Yes?”

  Venn swung back. “My name is Oberon Venn. I’d like to see Mr. Symmes.”

  The butler looked doubtful, but Venn’s height and bearing seemed to reassure him; still he said, “Mr. Harcourt Symmes does not receive visitors at this hour.”

  “He’ll receive me.” Venn took out a small card and wrote something on the back. “Give him this. Tell him it’s urgent I speak with him now.”

  The butler vanished. Instantly Venn turned. “Jake? Where the hell have you been!”

  “Where have I been? Getting robbed, beaten up…”

  Venn’s icy glare took in Moll. “Listen. Get inside. Through the servants’ entrance. I need to look at Symmes’s setup for the mirror, and…”

  The door opened; he turned. Jake shrank into the shadows.

  “Mr. Harcourt Symmes will see you, sir.”

  Venn flashed one look back into the dark street. Then he ran up the steps and the door closed behind him.

  Jake turned, against the damp railings. He breathed out in anger. “How am I supposed to get inside?”

  Moll looked at him, pitying. “Watch and learn, Jake, luv. Watch and learn.”

  The Wood was a network of ice. Frozen branches crisscrossed above Sarah’s head; in the black sky, the stars were brilliant as jewels. Gideon looked back. “Not far now. Are you cold?”

  “No,” she muttered, sarcastic.

  He grinned.

  They had slipped out of the house and run; though she was wearing a coat, gloves, and Jake’s school scarf, she was still shivering, hugging herself against the terrible, knife-sharp winter.

  It was Christmas Eve, but here in the deep tangle of greenwood, it could have been any time, a pre-pagan Neolithic silence, of cracking branches and crunched puddles of ice aslant the path.

  She gasped, “How do you…stand this?”

  “I don’t.” He reached back and took her hand, leading her through the briars. “I live in the Summerland. See?”

  Between a step and a step, the world changed.

  She crossed a threshold that wasn’t there and the Wood was green, the sky blue. Bees buzzed in the throats of flowers. Warmth enfolded her, a relief so deep, she wanted to cry out with the delight of it.

  “Incredible!” She turned, staring. “It’s like paradise! Where are we?”

  And yet there were rooms in it, and buildings, that seemed to obtrude at crazy angles, corners of temples and museums and libraries, slabs of castle. As if these places began in some other dimension and ended here. As if they had slid in here, coming to a halt in the tangled Wood, snagged in brambles, held by honeysuckle.

  He didn’t answer, and she saw he was gazing over her shoulder, with a dismayed, defiant look.

  She turned.

  Summer stood there in a dress of red, a brief, floaty thing. Her feet were bare. She smiled, charming. “Who have you brought me this time, Gideon?”

  He shrugged. “She brought me.”

  Sarah went to speak, and found she couldn’t. She tried to move, and nothing would work. In silent, suffocating panic she stood trapped in an immobile body, even unable to turn her own eyes and watch as Summer slowly circled her.

  “A strange child indeed. So old, and so young.” Summer came around, reached out a finger and jerked Sarah’s chin up, studying her face. “A plotter and planner. A mad girl, of water and weeds.”

  Her hand dropped. Then Sarah felt the lightest of touches, and realized the faery woman had lifted the broken coin from her neck and was examining it carefully.

  “Zeus. I met him once. Another fool who came to nothing.”

  She looked up, and Sarah looked for a moment deep into her eyes, and they were green and no light reflected in them.

  Then, as if she had lost interest, Summer turned, and Sarah, with a gasp, could move.

  She looked around. The cleari
ng was grassy. There were fallen trunks and a sweet cascade of honeysuckle. Under it a fountain splashed into a deep well where salmon swam; hazelnuts fell from a bush above and floated in the water. On the grass a selection of chairs stood, rough and wooden, an ornate gilt stool, a toppled plastic garden chair, a faded painted throne that might have been Egyptian or from some film-set. Summer sat on the stool and spread her bare toes luxuriously in the warm grass. “So. Sarah. What do you want with us? Not many mortals have the gall to come here.”

  “I need a favor.”

  “From the Shee?” Summer laughed. “We don’t do favors. Bargains, perhaps. Is this about Venn?”

  She nodded, trying not to sound too anxious because she sensed already how this creature seemed to feed on that. “Last night Venn and Jake entered the mirror. They haven’t come back.”

  Summer’s laugh was a tinkle of spite. “So he finally got to seek his lost love. How I hope he rots in some brutal age forever.”

  “He won’t,” Sarah said quietly, “and you know that. You’re jealous.”

  Summer stood, swift as a cat. “I am not jealous. Of a woman!”

  “Did you ever meet Leah? Did you know her?” Sarah’s curiosity was sudden and real; she saw Gideon glance at her quickly, a warning.

  Summer shrugged. “Human women are all the same. I don’t remember.”

  “But Venn…”

  “Venn is one of us. Our music is in him. When he gets tired of his obsession with the mirror, he’ll come home.” Summer frowned. “Don’t I know you? Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? Among the ruin of Wintercombe maybe, the burned hall, the ashes of the Gallery?”

  “No.”

  “I think I have.”

  Sarah went and righted a garden chair and sat on it. It was yellow plastic, from some cheap supermarket. Angling it to face Summer, she said, “You seem to know about the past.”

  “All times are now to us.”

  Sarah nodded. This was a huge risk, but she had to take it.