I spin around and, to my utter displeasure, find myself face-to-face with Hector.
“W-what are you doing here?” I ask.
Hector leans forward, leering at my décolletage. I gasp, trying to cover myself, and Hector lets out a short, dry laugh.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “Even with a pretty bow a rat is still a rat. Nothing more than a vessel for the plague.”
“Yes, well, even rats have standards,” I say, drawing myself up as I recover from my shock, “and you don’t even meet those.”
Hector gives me a toothy grin but his stare remains flat. “There is something you can do for me, however,” he says. Before I can react, he grabs my arm painfully hard and twists it behind my back until I’m pressed firmly against him, his other hand at my throat. For a second, I think I feel Arthur’s pendant pulse against my chest, but the feeling is quickly gone, replaced by a twinge of fear and copious amounts of irritation.
“Get your filthy paws off me, you miserable wretch,” I say through gritted teeth.
Hector’s hand tightens around my throat, choking any further insults off. “Let your master know that his reign is over,” he whispers into my ear.
I hiccup in surprise as he shoves me away before storming off.
“What did he want?” Arthur asks, suddenly at my elbow, startling me.
“What is it with you people always trying to scare me?” I ask back, feeling somewhat unsteady on my legs.
Arthur leans into me and sniffs, like a dog choosing its next fire hydrant to mark. “How much have you had to drink?” he asks me, frowning.
“I’m fine,” I say, trying to bat him away. “It’s just this dress is too long, my heels too tall, and it’s too stuffy in here.”
I pull on my neckline uncomfortably, only to have a suddenly reddening Arthur take off his coat and put it around my shoulders.
“I said I was hot,” I say indignantly.
“We’re going to get you some fresh air,” Arthur retorts as he leads me to the patio where Percy and Blanchefleur are now standing—this time, the knight’s got his hand around the taller Fey’s waist, and she doesn’t seem to mind. I snort. Guess someone’s taking advantage of this most horrid evening.
“D’ya need us to come along?” Percy asks as we walk past more of those saurian oghams blowing fire to keep the guests warm in the otherwise frigid air.
“No, just keep your eyes and ears peeled,” Arthur says.
Percy nods, and I realize that both he and Blanchefleur are perfectly positioned to keep a discrete eye on both the revelers inside and those who’ve decided to take a stroll in the gardens.
The winter wind howls around us as we go down the steps towards the snow-covered gardens, and I hug Arthur’s jacket closer to myself.
“Now tell me, what did Hector want?” Arthur asks, finally releasing me.
“I don’t see why it should matter to you,” I say, louder than I’d anticipated.
“It does matter to me,” Arthur retorts. “You’re my squire, and part Fey. People are bound to look for ways to use you against me, and against yourself.”
“Whatever,” I say, moving away from him only to slip on a patch of ice.
I catch myself on the handrail, Arthur’s coat slipping off my shoulders. Curse these stupid shoes Keva made me buy—I want my boots back!
“I still don’t like to see you linger about him,” Arthur says.
“Linger?” I say, my voice growing in volume. “I didn’t linger, he sought me out! And just to insult me, might I add.”
“Nevertheless, you should stay away from him,” Arthur says, helping me back into his coat. “You should also steer clear from Lugh and his crew. Fraternizing with the enemy in public isn’t going to get any points in your favor.”
“The enemy you’re trying to join forces with,” I retort, shooing him away.
“Until we’ve made the pact, they’re our enemy,” Arthur says curtly, “and that is how everyone else sees them.”
“Not Lady Tanya,” I say.
“She’s different,” Arthur replies.
“Why?” I ask bitterly. “Because her blood isn’t tainted?”
“Because she’s the head of her Order,” Arthur says. “Lugh’s here on a temporary truce, so until a decision’s reached in our favor by the Board, you stay away from him. Your file’s already long enough as it is, you don’t need to add traitor to the list.”
“Ha! Embarrassed about me, are you?” I ask, crossing my arms. “But speaking about files, I noticed something strange about the one you gave me on my father.”
Arthur watches me warily, a few fat snowflakes landing in his dark blond hair before melting away.
“It seems someone’s tampered with it,” I continue, observing him carefully for any sign of guilt. “As in someone’s torn the last few pages out.”
“I never noticed that,” Arthur says.
“Oh please, don’t start that with me again,” I say. “I’m tired of being lied to.”
“I’m not—”
“First about my parents, and now about my father’s death?” I yell.
“Hush,” Arthur says, casting a quick look at the balcony above where a few people have gathered to watch us. “There’s never been anything more in there beyond the mention of Duke Gorlois’s death.”
His eyes suddenly slide to a spot over my shoulder and he quickly steps away from me. Looking around, I find Sir Leo and Jennifer climbing down the patio steps to join us in the gardens, their attendants flocking in behind them.
“Darling?” Jennifer asks when they reach us, her eyebrows arched questioningly in my direction. “Trouble with your squire?”
“Not at all,” Arthur says. “Just a few last minute orders to give out. Nothing consequential.”
I clench my hands into fists. I’ll show him nothing consequential!
Arthur smiles at Jennifer, his besotted look plastered back onto his face, and she grabs his arm possessively.
“Father wanted to speak with you about your alliance,” she says sweetly, the perfect image of the dutiful daughter and loving fiancée.
Arthur bows to Sir Leo and they cross the pathway to disappear back inside the building through a side entrance, their retinue filing in after them. Before I can storm away, however, a figure lingers behind, drawing near me.
“Don’t forget,” Sir Neil mouths at me, pointing at the large watch circling his wrist.
And as he slips inside after the others, I suddenly remember the strange message he gave me. My hands ball into fists inside Arthur’s overlong sleeves. I’m tired of being bounced around like a bloody ping-pong ball. Trap or no, I’m going to find out what these people want from me, and take things into my own hands. Period.
Chapter 27
Standing before the door in the empty hallway, I can hear my own heart pounding. I check once more that this is the only other door around apart from the auditorium’s, just to make sure Percy didn’t fib about the location. This must be it, I tell myself, garnering up my courage. But my hand still pauses on the handle, the cold seeping through my glove as I try to sense any movement on the other side, any sign that I may be walking straight into an ambush.
My hand slips on the handle as I push it down but the door opens without a sound, and I find myself staring at a thousand pairs of golden eyes.
I blink in surprise and the thousand pairs of eyes blink back at me. I break out into a low laugh—of course, dummy, it’s the Hall of Mirrors.
I quickly slip inside and steal softly down the long hallway. Mirrors of all shapes and sizes cover every inch of the walls, red lanterns hanging from the ceiling making dim pools of light on the tiled floor. As I move in front of them, the mirrors brighten to form disparate landscapes—empty rooms, the inside of a cave, a mountain ridge, a leafy forest—before dimming away again as I leave them in my wake.
I follow the corridor as it folds over itself like a giant, coiled-up snake, my curiosity growing with every step
. It seems all these mirrors are being used for constant scrying; I’ve seen Arthur and the others do it enough to tell.
A light pink flash draws my attention away from a platypus floating about in a clear river. Ears perked for any sign of approach, I draw near to the low-hanging, oval mirror over which the light keeps flashing, and freeze midstride as a face blooms into view in its shimmering surface. A man, his features distorted in a scream of anguish, is staring straight at me.
I watch, transfixed, as a strange orange halo grows him. The man’s jabbering to me now, but no sound’s coming through. I see him duck, the image going blurry for an instant, and I realize the glow behind him is the result of explosions.
“Help!” I cry out, touching the mirror’s surface in a desperate attempt to turn on the sound. “What’s going on?” I ask more loudly, my gloved fingers now tracing the gilded frame’s intricate woodwork. “Where are you?” I ask louder, helplessly.
The man in the mirror suddenly turns around, his back taking up most of my view. My hands clench around the mirror until it’s shaking.
“What do you need?” I shout, but the man can’t hear me.
Something or someone’s there with him—I can see a blue shadow growing on his other side, then the man’s projected backward, into the mirror, shattering its surface.
I scream as the man’s limp form falls back down, out of sight, and the blue shadow draws nearer. A face forms inside the fragmented image, one I have no trouble recognizing.
“Mordred,” I whisper, unable to move.
The blue-tattooed Fey’s predatory smile reflects through the shattered pieces like in a kaleidoscope. Then his lips draw together, forming a word.
Soon.
◆◆◆
“Morgan?”
I wheel around at the unknown voice, almost expecting Mordred to be standing there. I let out a choked sob as I realize it’s only a middle-aged man hurrying over, his military haircut emphasizing the squareness of his jaw. The man glances at the mirror now only showing our own reflections, the pink light above it dark.
“What happened?” he asks.
It takes me a few tries before I can answer him. “Th-they got him.”
“Who got who?” he asks tensely.
But my vocal cords seem to have gotten all tangled up again and I shake my head.
The man’s eyes soften. “Let’s get you seated so you can calm down some,” he says, leading me away, “then you can tell me what you saw.”
The corridor opens up into a large room, mirrors of all sizes hanging by solid wires from the domed ceiling in different clusters like hundreds of windows giving out onto different parts of the world. People dressed in white lab coats move from one to the next, plugging strange, coppery stethoscopes to the mirrors then taking notes on their clipboards. Huddled around a large, multi-sided panel set in the middle of the wide room, more people are analyzing the data and piecing together the constant flow of information.
“Sit,” the stranger tells me, pushing me down onto a metal chair. “Now tell me what you saw. In detail.”
“A man,” I say, my mouth dry. “He was killed in front of me. He…he tried to say something but I”—I lick my lips—“there were explosions and…there was a Fey….” I shake my head, sniffling, then wipe my leaky nose on Arthur’s jacket.
The man’s face grows paler. “Margueritte! Emmerich!” he shouts and two of the people at the giant pinboard turn around. “Mirror sixty seven went down. Fey attack. Go check it out!”
“But that’s Newgrange, sir,” the woman, Margueritte, says with a hitch in her voice.
The man who found me nods. “Have Lamorak go on location to check it out ASAP. It seems Darragh tried to contact us before going down.”
“Yes, sir!” Margueritte and Emmerich say in unison, before dashing away in opposite directions: Margueritte back down the hallway we came from, Emmerich to a simple, rectangular mirror standing in the nearest corner.
I watch as he grabs his strange-looking stethoscope from around his neck, puts the eartips in then plugs the other end into the bottom of the frame. He then grabs a large copper cone attached by a tube to the stethoscope and puts it up to his mouth. Runes around the cone’s surface glow briefly and, a second later, the mirror’s surface shimmers and I know he’s scrying someone.
“Are you feeling better?” the square-jawed man asks, drawing my attention back onto him.
I nod slowly, the shock of seeing Mordred kill that man receding enough to make way for an increased sense of unease at being found in a place where I obviously don’t belong.
“I’m sorry you had to witness such a sight,” the man says. “But in times of war….” He frowns, his voice trailing off, lost in dark thoughts. “Things might’ve been different if they hadn’t insisted on having this mockery of a parade upstairs this year again. But politicians always think their first priority is to reassert their sense of dominance by prancing about like peacocks instead of working toward a solution.” He looks down at me then, as if suddenly remembering I’m there. “At least it has given me the opportunity to finally meet my niece.”
My stomach seems to drop somewhere below my chair. “You’re my…uncle?”
The man nods. “I’m Sir Cade,” he says, then drops his voice to a whisper, “Gorlois’s brother.”
My lungs seem to have forgotten how to work, making me dizzy. “How come nobody’s ever told me about you?” I ask.
“I’ve made it a point to hide the fact,” Sir Cade says bluntly. “You see, our father, bless his soul, had a wandering eye. I happen to be the product of one of the wild oats he sowed. I don’t even think he knew about me, or he didn’t care. Either way, it’s your father who came to find me, when I was half your age.”
I swallow hard. I want to ask him why he’s decided to tell me all of this now, but instead what comes out is, “What was my father like?”
“Impetuous, strong-headed, somewhat cocky,” Sir Cade says, something I have no trouble believing considering what I’ve just read about him. “But he also had a strong sense of what was right, and he had the art to make all of us feel like we were at the same level as him.” He brushes his hand through his short-cropped hair and I wonder briefly if my father had the same habit. “In fact, that’s why I asked to meet you tonight, to discuss the matter of his legacy, and yours.”
“My legacy?” I ask, getting more and more confused. Surely he can’t want to talk to me about my father’s money like that Abigail girl.
Sir Cade casts a quick look at the large grandfather clock behind his desk. “Let’s get going. It’s past ten fifteen and we’ve got an appointment to keep.”
We cross the room, passing first behind a man talking excitedly into his mouth piece to what appear to be a couple of Tibetan monks, then by a short woman entrenched behind a screen of black. As we walk by, the image in her mirror erupts in fire, and for a second I fear that it’s from another Fey attack.
“Don’t worry, it’s just an oil field,” Sir Cade says, forcing me to increase my pace.
“They set fire to it?” I ask, unable to tear my eyes away from the mirror’s now bright surface.
Sir Cade’s face remains impassive. “If we control the amount of oil production or, in this case, that of our competitors, we control its price.”
“You’re burning up somebody else’s oil?” I ask, as we engulf ourselves into a narrow corridor. “But that’s stealing!”
“It’s how we make our money,” Sir Cade says, his voice cold and businesslike. “Think of it as the stock market. Except here, instead of manipulating stock prices, we’re going straight for the commodities. No middleman, so to speak.”
“It still doesn’t sound right to me,” I mutter, not sure I like my uncle after all.
Sir Cade shrugs. “It’s how the families have made and kept their fortunes over the centuries. Defending humanity is costly, Morgan.”
“That’s a stupid reason,” I say. “Slavery was also a tradition
passed on for centuries, but people finally got their heads screwed on right and abolished it. Besides, I heard those evil scrooges on the Council, and they don’t want to spend a penny if they can’t see a way to make themselves profit from it.”
“You sound like your father,” Sir Cade says with a light chuckle.
“He tried to stop all that?” I ask, jerking my head back towards the Hall of Mirrors.
“He did, despite his own fortune’s origins,” Sir Cade says, and I feel a burst of pride. “But his death put an end to his motion to stop the use of Fey as slave laborers.”
“You mean—”
“Those fires you just saw?” Sir Cade says as the floor suddenly dips. “Caused by Caorthannach, the fire-spitter. Gnomes make for excellent miners, perfect for mining ore or hitting the right pockets of oil. Of course, we switch elementals depending on the job at hand. Works like a charm and the lay authorities never doubt a thing. Although Carman’s release has made things a tad more difficult to control lately.”
We stop in front of a small door. Set above it is a translucent glass bowl inside which I can distinguish the outline of a salamander, its small body inflating and deflating with every breath, making the light suffusing the corridor pulse.
Sir Cade pulls out a large ring from under his lab coat and proceeds to tap it to the door, on top of a seal burned into its wood where the lock should be.
“Thurisaz,” he whispers.
There’s a dark blue flash and the door opens with a soft click.
“Welcome to my humble abode,” Sir Cade says, revealing a tiny room with but a bed, a chair and a small desk above which is a single painting of a pale woman dressed in somber clothes.
All that security for a monk’s room?
“Just in time,” Sir Cade says, going straight for the portrait which has started glowing.
But when he takes the painting down, I realize the light is coming from yet another mirror, an old, wrinkled face already waiting for us within its polished copper surface.
A feeble voice that seems to be coming from everywhere at once wheezes, “Did she come?”
Morgana Trilogy Complete Series Page 72