She sat on the bench before the fire, and her mind went blank for a very long time. She was only roused when a voice cut through the numbness, and only then after it spoke her name twice. She roused only after she felt the warmth of an arm against her arm, a hip against her hip.
“Demial. Demial.”
She found Quinn sitting beside her, hands dangling between his knees. She wiped the dried blood off her face, trying to disguise her movements, but Quinn was looking away. He wasn’t paying attention to her.
It was very late. The fire was only a small fluttering of flames, a dying fire. Death. Dying. It wasn’t morning yet though. Quinn had left the door open, as she had, and she could see that it was still dark outside. No stars were visible in the inkiness, just darkness. Shadows. Like death.
“She’s gone,” Quinn said. His voice was quiet but strange, as if he could just barely contain his sorrow, as if he might at any moment break down and sob.
“Yes,” Demial agreed. “It was very peaceful.” She roused herself, knowing she had to gather her strength. The one thought that was clear in her mind, despite her numbness, was that she ought to tell Quinn the truth. All of it. Everything. “She said to say ‘I love you,’ and then she said, I’m ready.’ Then she died. It was what she wanted.”
Quinn sighed and turned away from her, as if the pain was going to eat him in half and he didn’t want her to witness it. “Oh, gods. .” he breathed.
She swallowed. She tried to lift her hands and put them on him, to soothe him and console him. Her arms were heavy, but she managed to lift one. She could touch him, while he would still allow it. Before she told him.
She put her hand on his broad back, feeling the strength there, the muscles moving under the skin as he shook. She liked his back. She’d always liked his back. It was broad and strong, and since she was a child, she’d dreamed of laying her face on his back, of resting her weight on him. So she did now. After a lifetime of dreaming such a thing, she let herself lie against him, resting her weight and her sorrow and her fear on his good, broad, strong back.
He sighed, and she felt the movement beneath her face, a ripple of muscles against her cheek, a rush of air into lungs, and the thump of his heartbeat.
“I killed her,” he said.
The words came to her as a shock. They were said so calmly, so easily, that she must surely have misunderstood. Perhaps he was only expressing guilt, or. . She drew in a quick, sharp breath. Surely he hadn’t guessed what she’d done! Demial drew back, and hesitated.
He shifted back on the bench, moving farther away, and his face was strange. His mouth worked, eyes bright as the embers in the fireplace and as weirdly hot.
She braced herself for his grief, his accusation, and he shocked her even further by chuckling.
“I killed her,” he repeated again, almost with glee, almost with pride. “I wished her dead, and it worked. Like magic. It worked!”
Demial shook her head, too confused to speak. Was it just that her mind was too tired, or was it that he wasn’t making any sense? “Quinn, I’m sorry. I’m so tired. Please. I don’t understand what you’re saying.” She reached out to touch him. “I know you always said your heart was with her, in the grave. . ”
The chuckle gave way to outright laughter. “Demial, don’t tease me. I know you weren’t fooled by all that. You always saw right through me.”
She gaped at him.
He covered her hand with his larger ones. “You’re joking with me, but I suppose I deserve it.” He brought her fingers up to his lips and kissed them lightly.
Her fingers were roughened from working in the mine. Just hours ago, she could have used the staff to make her skin soft and sweet again. Now all she did was stare dumbly as his lips moved on her scarred knuckles.
He sighed playfully. “All right, I can see you’re going to force me. I’ll say the words. I didn’t love Taya. I never did. I only said those things about her to keep other women interested. When you came back, I began to say them especially for you. I knew that remembering her made you jealous, and it pleased me to see the fire in your eyes when I mentioned her. Now I know. It’s always been you I loved.”
Her heart would have leaped, would have tasted the joy of her triumph, but he said it with such callous lack of emotion. “I don’t understand.”
“I was just teasing you, before, saying all that about missing her and my heart being with her. In the end, I hated her, Demial,” he said lightly. He released her hand and leaped to his feet. He quick stepped across the small space between her and the fireplace, jittering with unspent energy. He wiped his hand across his mouth. “She was my childhood friend, my perfect friend. That was long ago. I wish she’d been killed in the war. I wish I’d never had to see her like that. I wish I could have remembered her the way she was. I hate her for coming back, for making me see her that way. I wanted. . I wanted her to die quickly so that my life could go on! Oh, I stayed with her. I played the part of the true and faithful lover, the way everybody expected me to, but I hated doing it, and I hated her.
“Gods! All those hours in that horrible, little room, listening to her ravings. . I wished her dead, and now she is. I wished her dead, and it worked, and now we can be together.”
He looked at her expectantly, but Demial sat, still and stunned. Numbness was nothing compared to this. This was like being dead. Except. . her chest was still rising and falling with breath, and her back was cool from the breeze, and her shins were warm from the fire. Warmth and cold and air, did the dead feel those things?
He came to her. He went on one knee before her, leaned in, and laid his cheek against her shoulder. “So?” he asked, voice muffled against the robe that still smelled of Taya and death.
Demial didn’t move away as his breath seeped through the cloth, as it moistened her skin, sliding across her shoulder and down towards her breast and up along her neck. “So. . what?”
“I said ‘Now we can be together,’ and you’re just sitting there as if you’re paralyzed. Don’t you realize what this means? I’ve almost done what I was supposed to do, done what the whole village expected of me. Soon the mine will be finished. It’s what I’ve been waiting for, the perfect moment to cement my plan. Now they’ll follow my leadership. We’ll open the mine again and make this village better than it was before.”
Demial stared at the fire and felt a little spark, hot and orange, flare up in her breast. It was the first hint that she was going to come back to life, that she was going to be able to feel something again. It wasn’t joy that her perfect plan was within her grasp. It was laughter-cold, hard laughter.
All her diligent work at the mine had given her the acceptance she wanted. Everyone in the village respected her now. She could have the man she’d always wanted. All the pieces of her perfect plan had fallen into place, like the wooden shapes of a child’s puzzle. And she would have the man she’d always wanted, because it wasn’t going to be safe to do anything else. She was going to have to take him, just to keep an eye on him. Her perfect mate thought, after all her hard work at the mine, he was going to step back in and take over where he’d left off, that he’d become the leader, and she’d fall into place as his perfect follower.
She shifted, moving so that his forehead no longer had the support of her shoulder, forcing him to sit up. “I’m tired right now, Quinn,” she said coolly. “I want to sleep for days and days. We’ll talk about it then.”
His surprise was plainly visible on his handsome face. “All right.” He stood slowly, giving her time to change her mind, say something, to reach for him. When she didn’t, he touched the top of her head, so lightly he barely stirred her hair. He kissed her just as lightly. “We’ll talk about it later, Dem.”
He was gone, long strides taking him away into the darkness, and she was alone again.
The dying fire was all red and orange and yellow, without even a hint of blue to the flame that would have reminded Demial of Taya’s eyes or of magic. As she watched the fire dance,
the rain began. Drops fell down the chimney, into the golden flame, sizzling angrily as the fire ate them.
The Thief in the Mirror
Richard A. Knaak
He felt so cold, and she looked so warm. He wanted to reach out and touch her, just as he had always wanted to touch the others before her. However, Mendel did not permit him that; the cursed little bald man didn’t want him to take any chances. Vandor Grizt was expected only to watch and wait, wait to obey his master. Wait and obey, that was all Vandor was permitted.
The gem-encrusted brooch she wore he once would have coveted for himself, but as Vandor could not keep it and Mendel would have no use for it, his interest in the jewelry swiftly faded. He had come here for something else, something more important.
She stared past him, amber eyes admiring her reflection. He knew her name, but only because Mendel had told it to him. That she had reason to be vain was obvious. But such mundane observations were beyond his purpose. . at least so he told himself.
With a sweep of her long, silver hair, the noblewoman rose from her mirror and departed the chamber, no doubt on her way to visit the lover her much older and generally absent husband knew nothing about. Vandor watched her as she paused to admire a tiny sculpture, then look herself over one more time in another mirror.
He ducked away, shivering from the ever-present cold. Her chance glance at the second mirror had nearly put them eye to eye. She probably wouldn’t have been able to see him, but one could never tell. . and Vandor Grizt had no desire to taste Mendel’s anger.
At last she stepped out of the chamber, closing the door behind her. Vandor eyed the prize he sought, the very sculpture the noblewoman had stopped to admire. It had been given to her not by her lover but by her husband, and she could not suspect that it contained latent magical forces. Probably even her husband had not known it when he had purchased the sculpture. Mendel, though. . Mendel had learned of its existence only two days after the sculpture had arrived in Lauthen. Mendel always knew, Chemosh take him!
Vandor shifted position, knowing he would not have long to act. The ungodly chill made him feel stiff and clumsy, but he could no longer hesitate. He had to do it and do it now.
The mirror melted away from his hands as he reached out and seized his master’s prize.
Fingers tingled as blessed warmth coursed over those parts of his arms that protruded from the mirror world. Without meaning to, he paused to savor that warmth, allowing it to spread even a little to the rest of his body. How delightful to be warm again, however briefly, to feel even some hint of the real world!
The warmth grew until the heat no longer pleased Vandor, but rather began to burn. Tendrils of smoke rose from his hands, and his sleeves began to shrivel and blacken. With a sudden sense of urgency, the thief picked up the statuette, an intricate figurine of a dryad and her tree, and drew it into the mirror.
As ever, it took some gentle forcing to make the object pass through the mirror. Once it was done, Vandor Grizt folded his arms, cradling his prize, and turned around to stare at the chamber from which he had stolen the statuette. Here, inside the mirror, everything lay bathed in cold, blue light. The statuette, which had been brightly colored, almost lifelike, now resembled some frost-covered miniature corpse.
Vandor shivered and, turning from the mirror surface that separated reality from reflection, returned to Mendel.
The journey took but a thought. Where, before, the dark-haired thief had stared into a room of rich furnishings and elegant appointments, he now looked into an old, decrepit chamber lined with row upon row of dusty bookshelves. Once those shelves had been lined with scrolls, tomes, and artifacts, the envy of almost any mage, whatever color his robes, but necessity had, over the past few decades, obliged its aging master to utilize much of the collection. What remained were only the vestiges of greatness, just as what remained of Mendel was only a shadow of the black-robed terror who had dominated this region for more than a lifetime.
Mendel’s power might be dwindling, yet over Vandor it remained absolute, even some thirty years or so after the Chaos War.
Looking around, Vandor could see no sign of the cadaverous little man, the foul rodent who had kept him in absolute servitude since that fateful day some ten years after the War of the Lance. In the past, Mendel had precisely scheduled his every waking moment. He could be counted on to know how long Vandor’s errands took and when he would return. Mendel was beginning to slip. Where was he now?
In his hands, the figurine grew colder, even colder than usual. Knowing what would happen if he waited much longer, the thief pushed the prize against the mirror before him. The mirror resisted at first, as it always did, but then both Vandor’s hands and the statuette came through. He quickly stood the dryad on the small wooden table on the other side of the mirror, the one that Mendel had placed there years ago to ensure that his slave would never again have an excuse for losing one of the treasures.
As Vandor’s hands pulled back into the pale, cold world behind the mirror, the once-great Mendel stalked into the room. He had lived more than two normal life spans, and it had been during the second half of that overly lengthy existence that so many changes in the man had occurred. Where once he had stood taller than Vandor, who was six feet, Mendel had somehow shrunk to barely more than five. He moved hunched over, which accounted for some of that height loss, but Vandor often wondered if the man’s deep ties to the old magic of the gods had had something to do with what had happened. Magic had all but vanished from Krynn, and Mendel was clearly shrinking.
The flowing brown hair, broad, sharp nose, and strong chin had given way to a vulturelike head with heavy brows, under which peered bitter black orbs. Mendel still wore the black robes of his office, but they were worn and not of the best quality. He could replace the robes readily enough, thanks to the precious objects Vandor stole for him, but never the power those robes had once represented.
“So, returned at last!” rasped the mage, leaning on his formerly magical staff. “You’ve kept me waiting too long, dandy!”
As Mendel’s appearance had changed he had become increasingly prone to making disparaging remarks about the thief’s time-frozen features. Vandor’s handsome, patrician face, his piercing emerald eyes, coal-black, shoulder-length hair, elegant mustache, and expensive gentleman’s garments had served him well during his life, garnering him entrance to both a superior class of maidens and an even more superior class of valuables. However, to be envious of Vandor’s good looks hardly seemed fair. Vandor did not change because he could not change. He remained the reflection of what he had been that day when, fool of fools, greediness and, especially, vanity, had made him linger to inspect Mendel’s intricate and bewitching mirror. Not until too late did he discover that the mirror had been set as a trap for just such a one as he.
“I came as quickly as I could. The Lady Elspeth remained far longer at her table than we’d thought, Mendel.”
“A vain crone!” the black robe snapped, referring to a woman whose beauty any other man would have admired. “So in love with herself is she that she failed even to notice the rarity of such an artifact under her very nose!”
“I doubt she has any sense of magic, Mendel. To her, the figurine seemed only an exquisite work of-”
Mendel waved him to silence. “When I want your opinions, Grizt, I’ll wring them from you!” The wizened man clutched a large, diabolical-looking medallion dangling on his chest. “Quit wasting my time with your prattle!”
Vandor clamped his mouth shut. One thing could affect him here in the world of mirrors, and Mendel held it in his hand now. Not only did the medallion keep Vandor under control, but the mage could use it to punish the thief. The cold, cold world Vandor inhabited would seem a blessing in comparison to that punishment, he knew.
Seeing that his slave had quieted, Mendel nodded. “All right, then, dandy! What of more important matters? What of the Arcyan Crest? Did you find it? Did Prester have it, as my stone indicated?”
Of the few artifacts the once-great wizard still possessed, the onyx scrying stone remained the most useful, if only because it aided Mendel in hunting down the magical items so desperately needed by mages these days. When the gods departed after the Chaos War, they took with them much of the magic of the world, but a little magic remained in once-powerful artifacts. If a mage could locate an artifact and channel its latent power, he could still cast spells of a potentially great magnitude. Inevitably, the magical object would be drained of power, but few spellcasters gave thought to that.
This was the course Mendel had dedicated himself to, soon after the departure of the gods. Over the years he had forced Vandor to scour many places in search of the artifacts whose existence was hinted at by his scrying stone. One such piece was legendary, and it had eluded the black robe’s grasp. The Arcyan Crest was said to be the size of a medallion with the symbol of the House of Arcya set upon it. Its creator, Hanis Arcya, had used the crest to augment his formidable powers until his death. Unfortunately, as Vandor had heard too often from his master, the first great Cataclysm had ended the House of Arcya, and since then the crest had been a thing of rumors, glimpsed here, reported there, never proven to be anywhere.
Now Mendel’s stone had indicated to him that the crest might be somewhere in the vicinity of the palatial abode of Thorin Prester, a former red robe who still seemed adept at having matters turn out to his benefit. The stone’s murky directions plus his own driving envy had made Mendel adamant on this point-Prester had to have the artifact, and if Grizt could not find it that was because he was not searching hard enough.
Even knowing the possible fury his response might unleash, the thief in the mirror replied, “I have searched his place from top to bottom, Mendel, from side to side, comer to corner-wherever I can find a reflection from which to spy, even from puddles in the rain. I’ve haunted his entire sanctum again and again, and I can state categorically that he does not have-”
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