by Naomi Cyprus
Nalah could think of only one other place to look for answers: Zachary Tam’s mansion on the hill.
She dropped the leather apron and gloves on the floor and left the house without looking back. The last time she’d walked to Tam’s house, she’d been jumping at shadows, seeing enforcers on every corner. This time, she wasn’t afraid. She knew perhaps she should be, but there simply wasn’t time for that. The Hokmet would surely have questions for her if they knew, but imprisonment, death, even torture held no threat for her right now.
If the answers to her questions were not in Zachary Tam’s house, if she wasn’t smart enough to figure this out, she might never see Papa again.
She began to run. Just as she turned off the main street, she heard a voice.
“Nalah! Hey, Nalah!”
Marcus.
She stumbled to a stop and turned around to see him running toward her. “I was coming to see if everything went all right . . . ,” he said, his words trailing off as he came closer. “Where are you going? Did Tam not turn up?”
“He came,” Nalah said numbly. “He’s gone. He took my father.”
Marcus’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “What do you mean, he took him?”
Nalah shook her head, afraid to say more. She looked around—there were no enforcers on the street, but there were people. A woman pushing a baby in a black carriage threw them a concerned look and hurried on. Nalah reached up and tried to smooth back her hair—it was wild and tangled, and there was sand in it.
She grabbed Marcus’s hand. “We’re going to Tam’s house. I’ll explain on the way.”
Marcus looked down at his hand in hers, and Nalah could have sworn she saw him blush. But then he simply looked up at her and nodded silently. Marcus could be annoying, but she trusted him. And it was a relief not to be doing this alone.
As they climbed the road under the bending trees, she told him everything. Dumbstruck, Marcus stared at her.
“It sounds crazy, but that’s what happened,” she said. “I have to find a way through the mirror. There must be a clue at Tam’s house.”
They reached the top of the hill, and the huge, tumbledown house came fully into view, looking so much more menacing than it had just a couple of days ago. Nalah was making for the front door when Marcus pulled her back.
“Wait—look!” Marcus said, pointing at one of the windows.
Nalah squinted at the grimy window and saw it—a shifting shadow moving inside the house. “Who could it be?” Nalah wondered. “Tam’s gone!”
“A servant, probably,” mused Marcus. “He must have somebody helping him keep up such a huge house.”
Nalah tried to breathe evenly as her mind raced. “We can’t turn back now,” she whispered. “We’ll have to get in without being seen.”
At the back of the house, the bushes and palm trees grew tall and wild, but there was a cleared path like a green tunnel to a peeling white door. Nalah crept up and peered into the tiny window at the top of the door. She let out a relieved breath.
“It’s the kitchen! I’ve been here.” It was here Tam convinced me to make the mirror, she thought, as she gingerly turned the handle and pushed open the door. She could almost see herself, sitting at his table, eating his stupid frozen cherries, and she longed to yell back through time: Don’t do it! He’s lying to you!
She shook off the feeling and beckoned to Marcus. “There’s no one here. Let’s go!”
They stepped out into the corridor full of Thauma metalwork, and Marcus’s intake of breath seemed to ring off the polished surfaces.
“Don’t touch anything,” said Nalah quietly.
“Don’t worry,” said Marcus, shrinking a little as he passed a display of gleaming silver swords. “Who knows what any of this stuff is enchanted to do?”
They hesitated at the door to the main hall, and Nalah listened as hard as she could.
There were footsteps coming from the end of the hall. Nalah ducked back and pressed herself against the wall, dragging Marcus along with her.
“Kith?” called a young man’s voice. “Are you down here?”
Nalah’s heartbeat rang in her ears. Don’t come in here, she prayed. Please don’t.
“In the tapestry room, Javid,” came the reply. An older, female voice. The footsteps drew closer—two pairs, converging on the hall by the front door.
“I finished Mr. Tam’s bedroom and the library,” said the boy, Javid. “Do you think I should just look in on the east wing study? It’s been a whole week, and—”
“What did I tell you about the study?” said Kith, stern.
Javid paused, and Nalah thought she heard the sound of a foot scuffing on the wooden floor. “Mr. Tam said not to enter it,” the boy mumbled.
“Under any circumstances,” Kith reminded him. “Mr. Tam was quite clear. What if he had some dangerous Thauma artifact in there, and you went blundering in?” She tsk-tsked. “A little dust will do no harm.”
“Sorry, Auntie Kith,” said Javid. “I just thought—”
“If you’re so keen to dust something, come and help me with the silver,” Kith said.
Their footsteps and Kith’s voice faded, until there was the sound of a door clicking shut.
“East wing?” whispered Marcus, with a grin.
“East wing,” said Nalah, nodding. If Tam’s secret was kept anywhere, it was most likely in this forbidden study. She took a second to orient herself—the sun set over the Hadar Sea, so east must be the opposite direction from the bay. “Upstairs and to the right,” she said.
They crept as quietly as they could down the corridor until they found a grand, curving staircase. Nalah sped up, feeling exposed in the open, airy hall. At the top of the stairs they turned right. Nalah took one side of the corridor and Marcus the other, and they opened every door they came to.
Nalah’s first was the library—not the room she was looking for, but her eyes went wide at the number of ancient tomes on Tam’s shelves, and she noted where it was in case she needed to come back. Next was a bathroom, with a claw-foot tub. Then a room that made Nalah’s heart leap in her chest. As she opened the door, the air stirred the glass chimes hanging from the ceiling. Every shelf was full of glass. Vases and cups, glass eyes, mirrors. The ringing sound vibrated around the room, almost below the level of her hearing, harmonics dancing together.
If only Father could see this! she thought, and then, a split second later, the memory hit her like a hot ball of lead to the stomach.
But Father is gone.
She bit her lip angrily at the thought that Tam could visit this room anytime he liked, and keep it safe from the Hokmet, just because he was rich. He thought he could do anything—including kidnapping her father. Well, he wasn’t going to get away with it. Not this time.
“Nalah,” said Marcus, from a little way down the corridor. “Pretty sure this is it.”
Nalah closed the door on the room of glass and hurried over to join him.
This was definitely Tam’s study. Every other room had been scrupulously clean and well organized, but not this one. Books and papers were piled haphazardly on a desk of black wood. A cracked-leather armchair sat in one corner, surrounded by more papers. The window was open, and along with the hot, petrol-and-jasmine smell of New Hadar, a little gang of buzzing flies had come in, and were circling lazily in the air.
Thauma artifacts lined the shelves. They were labeled, but didn’t appear to be sorted in any way—a wooden figurine of a woman danced next to a glass orb that glowed with dark, shifting colors and a pair of golden rings that seemed to be vibrating gently.
In one corner, a large, empty frame stood propped up against the wall. Nalah went over and lightly touched the wood. Could it have held the original Transcendent Mirror? But where were the other pieces? And how was the mirror broken?
“You check out the desk,” said Marcus. “I’ll look on the shelves. Maybe there’s a key, or a secret safe or something.”
Nalah nodded and
went to the desk, wondering where to start.
What would her father do?
Don’t rush, he’d say. Take it slow. Look at everything. That way you won’t miss something important.
His voice was so strong in her imagination that she had to pause, her face turned slightly away from Marcus, to blink away the tears.
She began to move the pieces of paper and the books, checking each one before putting it aside.
At first glance, a lot of the papers seemed to be notes on the properties of Thauma objects—nothing about doorways or Transcendent Mirrors.
After ten minutes of searching, Nalah found herself gazing at a metal vase. It was delicate and beautiful, with spiraling stripes of copper and silver worked into the surface. The single white lily perched within seemed too fresh to have been here for a week or more. As Nalah looked closer, she realized there was no water. The lily was simply floating, held up and kept alive by magic alone.
At the base of the vase was a yellowing card, folded once, with a picture of a lily drawn on the front. She picked it up and unfolded it.
To Zach, it read, in looping handwriting. For when you forget to go outside!—Rina xx
Nalah stared at the short message, her mouth agape.
“Rina,” she whispered. When Marcus turned and frowned at her, she added, “My mother gave him this.” How could she have been so wrong about him? He was her friend!
Marcus’s eyes widened.
“She must have made it herself.” Nalah longed to touch the lily, to feel the bit of her mother’s magic that the vase kept within, but she resisted the urge. The last thing she wanted was to break another part of her family. She had already broken so much.
Instead she picked up the book that was on top of the pile. Something heavy clattered loudly onto the floor, making Nalah jump. It must have been balanced behind the books. Nalah bent down beside the desk and picked it up.
It was a sheathed dagger. Obviously Thauma work—its sheath and handle were made of stone, and were tightly locked together with iron clasps. Nalah looked around on the desk and on the floor for a label, but she couldn’t find one.
She knew she should leave the dagger alone, but something tugged at her, urging her to draw it out. As if in a trance, Nalah unclasped the sheath and pulled out the blade.
It was made of obsidian. Volcanic glass, Nalah thought. Forged in the hottest fires in nature. She remembered something about it from Great-Grandpa Xerxes’s book, some section she’d read while searching for answers about the mirror. Thauma-crafted obsidian was incredibly powerful. Nalah’s thumb reached up from the handle and gently touched the flat of the blade.
Marcus vanished.
Nalah stumbled back, reaching out to steady herself against the windowsill—but her hand passed right through it. What was happening?
All around the room, things looked different. The flies were gone. And in the leather armchair in the corner of the room, his nose buried in a book, was Zachary Tam.
Nalah stumbled back, stifling a scream.
He looked much more like the way Nalah remembered him from his visits when she was little. The neat, pointed beard was gone, replaced by a bushy, unkempt one. His clothes were rumpled and threadbare. There was a little less weight on him, and a lot less poise. He was hunched over the book, talking to himself, scribbling notes on a piece of paper.
Behind him stood the Transcendent Mirror, whole and unbroken in its original frame. Nalah expected to see herself reflected in its surface, but she was shocked to see an empty room instead. Gingerly she reached out and tried to touch the windowsill again. Once more, her hand passed through as if she was made of nothing but smoke.
I’m not really here, she concluded. Is this the past? Or some kind of vision?
Nalah’s eyes widened as a movement over Tam’s shoulder caught her attention. The Transcendent Mirror was rippling, like a sheet in the wind. Nalah smelled Thauma smoke, and the mirror began to glow, warm yellow sunlight spilling out into Tam’s study, just like it had in her father’s workshop.
Nalah watched in horrified fascination as Zachary Tam completely failed to notice the magic happening right behind his back. The surface of the mirror pulled apart like a veil, and something began to emerge—two brown hands, then a body, and a face. A familiar face.
Nalah took a step back before she remembered that she wasn’t really there.
The man was dressed in a flowing silk robe the colors of a sunset, a perfect gradient from bright gold at his feet through pinks and oranges to deep, dark blue at his shoulders. On his head he wore a glimmering golden turban, studded with gems.
It was Zachary Tam. Another Zachary Tam. The same man who’d eyed her from across the marketplace. Who’d strolled through her father’s workshop like he owned the place, stroking his pointed, neatly trimmed beard.
“What?” breathed Nalah.
Nalah’s jaw dropped as the puzzle pieces fell into place in her mind. The Zachary in the chair was her mother’s friend, the reclusive collector who had fallen out with her father. But it was this new man—this Zachary Tam—who’d asked her to fix the mirror. The man who she’d just seen step lightly from a mirror exactly like the one she’d made.
The new Tam, in his resplendent robes, reminded Nalah of a prince from her favorite illustrations in The Collected Tales of the Great Magos. He looked down at his shabby twin in the chair, and his eyes glinted.
He pulled something from the sleeve of his robe, something long and sheathed in stone. Nalah shivered. It was the dagger. The same one Nalah gripped in her hand.
He silently unclasped the sheath, raised the blade above his head, and brought it down into the back of the old Tam’s neck.
Nalah yelped and threw her hands over her mouth. The rumpled man didn’t make a sound. He spasmed once and fell forward off the chair onto the wooden floor, the papers by his feet scattering like a flock of startled doves.
The new Tam shook the knife, and several drops of blood slipped off the obsidian blade as easily as the blade had slipped into flesh. He raised his hands, staring at them, as if waiting for something to happen.
Then, impossibly, his eyes began to glow.
The glow crept over his skin, making it shine like polished brass. He laughed—an ugly sound—and then suddenly his expression changed from a look of triumph to one of pain. His hands clenched and he doubled over with a moan. The light filled the room in a blinding flash. Nalah shielded her eyes.
There was a thunderous booming noise, loud enough to break glass. And that’s what it did.
Nalah looked up just in time to see the Transcendent Mirror shatter into a hundred thousand pieces and blow out of the frame like a breath of air on a freezing night.
Then, as suddenly as they’d appeared, the light and the glass and the body of Zachary Tam were all gone, and Marcus was back in front of her, his eyes full of fear.
“Nalah, wake up!” he was saying, his face pale. “Wake up! Talk to me!”
“I-I’m okay,” Nalah stammered.
“What happened? You picked up that dagger and then you were in some kind of trance!”
How do I explain? Nalah looked from him to the obsidian blade in her hand. She quickly sheathed the dagger once more and set it back on the table.
“I saw something,” she said after a moment. “I saw Zachary Tam. Actually, I saw two Tams. And one of them killed the other with this very knife!”
Marcus gave her a skeptical look. “Are you sure it wasn’t some kind of hallucination?”
“I don’t think so,” Nalah said. “It seemed so real! It’s almost like the knife was showing me the last moments of a life it took away.” She walked around the desk and stood in the middle of the room, staring at the armchair and the place the mirror had been. There was a thick rug on the floor right in front of it.
That rug wasn’t there in the vision.
On a whim, she reached down and tugged it aside. What she saw on the floor underneath made her stomach turn
. The floorboards were stained with something dark and brownish. Blood. A fly zipped past Nalah’s ear and she waved it away.
“Is that what I think it is?” Marcus said, covering his mouth with one hand.
“Yes.” Nalah looked around the back of the chair. The leather was studded with glinting pieces of broken glass, each one no bigger than her thumbnail. “He must’ve swept the floor and gotten rid of the body.”
Marcus shook his head, bewilderered. “How did you know?” he asked.
“I told you,” Nalah answered. “The knife showed me.”
Marcus walked to the desk and hefted the dagger, waiting. But nothing happened. “Huh,” he said, disappointed. “Why did it work for you and not for me?”
“I don’t know,” Nalah admitted, her stomach fluttering uncomfortably. Why did she suddenly feel like something important was happening?
“Do you think it’s because of your . . . you know . . .” Marcus looked pained.
Nalah knew he was talking about her uncontrollable powers. Her problem. But she hadn’t made these objects; she’d only touched them. Surely touching something couldn’t awaken powers that it didn’t already have! But what other explanation was there?
“Okay, so let’s say what you saw was real,” Marcus began. “You’re telling me that there are two Zachary Tams, and one murdered the other right here in this room? How can there be two? Are they twins?”
“I—I don’t know,” Nalah said again. “They would have to be, wouldn’t they? But it was the one who took Papa who was the killer. He somehow walked through a mirror just like the one I made and stabbed the old Tam. Then he started glowing, and the mirror exploded.” She paused. “I guess now we know how it got broken.”
Marcus was silent for a moment, staring at the empty frame. “You know what? That actually kind of makes sense,” he said.
Nalah stared at him. “Does it?” she said. “Please explain it to me, then, because I’m beginning to feel like I’m losing my mind.”
“Think about it.” Marcus walked around the study. “Tam—the one we met—he was desperate for you to make that mirror. He offered you riches beyond your wildest dreams. You saw him come through the mirror in the vision, but then the mirror broke. He needed you to re-create it so he could go back through it again. It was his only way home!”