It was nearly time to go again.
CHAPTER 53
THE COBURG IVORIES
Mr Sharp stooped over a table in front of the glass cabinet, stripped to his waistcoat with his sleeves rolled up. His coat was neatly folded on the chair at his side, and he was honing his blade on an oiled whetstone with long precise strokes. He was quietly whistling a melancholy tune which anyone listening would have identified as an old ballad known as “The Parting Glass”.
Emmet stood beside him, not looking like he was listening, or indeed looking at anything in particular. He had mended the mirror, working without a break for days, painstakingly sticking the pieces back to the frame with a fish glue that was still adding its unpleasant odour to the shuttered room despite a fire he had kindled in the grate to draw the air up the chimney.
“You will please be so kind as to guard the house especially vigilantly when I am gone,” said Mr Sharp. “And I would be greatly obliged if you made sure no harm comes to Miss Falk, whether by the agency of others or by her own hand should her mind become sufficiently unstable as to make that a possibility, which I greatly fear it may.”
Emmet nodded.
“Thank you, my old friend,” said Mr Sharp, testing the blade with his thumb. Satisfied, he slid it into the left-hand sheath hanging from a leather harness looped flat around his shoulders. A matching knife hung on the right. He ignored that blade and reached down to his boot from which he extracted a third blade which he began to sharpen with the same deliberation as the other.
“Do you know how the Murano Cabinet came to be here?” said a voice from the doorway.
Mr Sharp turned his head without breaking rhythm with the knife on the stone. The Smith was standing with a leather-wrapped package in his hands, watching him.
“No,” said Mr Sharp, turning back to his honing. “And I had hoped they would not try and get you to persuade me not to go into the mirrors. I assure you my mind is made up, and my resolve adamantine.”
“Well, Jack,” said The Smith. “Adamantine, eh? You’re quite the poet these days.”
“I cannot be cajoled out of this,” said Mr Sharp, aware that The Smith, and indeed no one else, had called him by his true first name since he was a child.
“I shouldn’t dream of it,” said The Smith. “I think you’re right.”
The rhythmic sound of steel on stone stopped abruptly.
“You think I’m right?” Mr Sharp said, voice hollow with surprise.
“Desperate measures for desperate times,” said The Smith cheerily. “Go down fighting. It’s what we always do, if you think about it. It’s not as if The Oversight hasn’t dwindled to less than a full Hand before. I remember thinking the same thing the last time…”
“The last time?” said Mr Sharp.
“In the old premises. On Pudding Lane.”
“Before the fire?” said Mr Sharp. “Before the Great Fire?”
“That’s the one,” said The Smith. “About half a minute before the damn thing started, as a matter of fact.”
He beamed at the younger man.
“Nice knife,” he said.
“Wayland,” said Mr Sharp slowly. “How old are you?”
“Older than most, younger than some,” said The Smith.
“And why haven’t I asked you this before?” said Mr Sharp, looking as though he had just found something unexpected and unwelcome at the back of his mind. “Why has this not… occurred to me?”
“People don’t and it doesn’t: ask and occur, I mean,” said The Smith. “You’re not the only one who gets into folks’ minds and draws a veil over some things…”
Mr Sharp slid the knife back into his boot thoughtfully.
“Then I must really be in great peril,” he said, “if you’re revealing this to me now. You must think I really am not coming back to talk about that with the others. I mean I know there’s always been a smith in The Oversight. I just hadn’t thought it was the same smith…”
“When things are calm, I go away for years at a time, travel the highways and byways, a traveller, the wayland smith. People forget and then welcome me back. It just needs a little thought adjustment and it works well enough,” said The Smith with a self-deprecating shrug. “But we’re not here to talk about that.”
“Why drop the veil now then?” said Mr Sharp.
“Because you need to know that I know what I’m talking about, and do what I tell you,” said The Smith. “I’d much rather you came back, and came back the way you left. Seems I’m fond of you, for all your stiff, proud ways. And just coming back’s hard enough. You need to come back to the right here, the right now, and you need to come back as the right you.”
“I…” said Mr Sharp.
“No, you don’t,” said The Smith. “Sit down and listen.”
Mr Sharp sat. The Smith opened the doors of the cabinet.
“I asked if you knew how this blessed Discriminator cabinet got here,” he said. “Any idea?”
“No,” said Mr Sharp.
“It was a gift from one of the Rabbi Falk’s friends. A fellow freemason and Kabbalist and what-not,” said The Smith. “All that stuff and nonsense by which clever men miss the truth. Anyway, he was a Venetian, hence it’s Murano glass, and he certainly was clever. He was called Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt, and as much of a mouthful as his name was, he was more than twice the handful. Never could keep his fingers off anything he took a fancy to, always picking up the tools and such in my workshop and putting them back wrong. Anyway, water under the bridge; he’s dead and gone now. Thing of it is, he knew this cabinet here was powerful, but didn’t know how to use it. Lost a woman he loved in it once, hiding from her husband who surprised them up to no good, and never got her back.”
He reached out and touched the candlestick on the back wall of the cabinet. The wick lit instantly and the light which blazed from it was stronger than anyone would have expected from a single flame.
“The Discriminator,” he said. “The Blood Key, the flame that only kindles for those with enough of the old supranatural blood in them to give them more than normal powers. Because only those with enough of the blood can travel into the mirrors.”
“I do know that, Wayland,” said Mr Sharp.
The Smith smiled at him.
“You know the esoteric power of the thing, but its practical application is more mundane but equally important. It sheds a light.”
He plucked the candle from the holder. It immediately extinguished.
“If you’re in the cabinet and the doors are closed, then you need a light to see the reflections in the mirrors. So without the candle, and any old dip will do, the cabinet won’t work. The Key is the holder, not the candle. That said, your travels may take you into other dark cabinets or rooms. So always travel with a candle somewhere about your person.”
He pointed to the mosaics on the floor and ceiling of the cupboard: the tesserae which made them were black and white and brown, strangely dull and at odds with the freshness of the pale glass swags and twisted pillars that adorned the outside of the cabinet.
“There’s a cathedral in Venice, though it’s not as Christian a place as you might think. These are the same mosaic tiles as they have on the floor there. It’s not a flat floor like you might find in our St Paul’s; it’s a rolling floor, hummocked like the swell of the very sea that Venice sits on. And these compass roses, they’re to guide your travels as you set off on your voyage into the glass.”
He pointed at the floor.
“That one sets where.”
He pointed at the ceiling.
“That one sets when.”
“When? I think I’m lost,” said Mr Sharp.
“You won’t be if you do as I say,” said The Smith, unwrapping the rawhide lace that kept his leather package tied up. “Long as no one changes those mosaic dials, you have a chance of coming back to the right place and time.”
“But the mirrors,” said Mr Sharp. “I thought the mirro
rs just opened into a series of tunnels between different places where mirrors were set up facing each other.”
“That they are,” said The Smith. “But that’s just the smallest part of it. You can move along the tunnel of mirrors and choose the one to step out of, but you can also stop between mirrors and look at right angles to the tunnel you’re in.”
“What do you see?”
“Another infinite tunnel of mirrors,” said The Smith. “It’s a web of shortcuts behind the world’s scenery–that’s the way I think about it–or a grid. Or a maze. More like a maze really, because the trick is not getting lost.”
He dropped the leather wrapping onto the table and placed the object it had hidden in front of Mr Sharp.
“Don’t lose it, and it won’t lose you,” he said.
“It” was an object that looked at first sight to be an ivory ball about the size of an ostrich egg perched on top of a long stand, somewhat like a candlestick. The stand was elaborately turned, with a spiral-fluted column and a flared base, itself highly decorated with concentric ridges and pierced holes which gave it the look of lacework.
The ball was pierced with large circular holes, each about the size of a plum. Through those holes, on closer inspection, Mr Sharp could see that the ball contained, seemingly impossibly, a whole diminishing series of other ivory balls, each with their own holes bored into them; each of these balls seemed to have a thickness little greater than watercolour paper.
“Know what it is?” said The Smith, watching Mr Sharp examine the intricate object. “You can pick it up. The handle comes out of the stand.”
Mr Sharp lifted it out of the base and felt the nested balls shift as he moved it.
“It looks like the Chinese balls that the tea clippers sometimes bring back,” said Mr Sharp. “Except those are thicker and crudely carved with dragons and such.”
“I suspect that if we were to find others like us among the Chinee, we’d find these balls serve the same purpose,” said The Smith. “It’s a get-you-home.”
“A what?”
“A get-you-home,” repeated The Smith. “Made by a German called Eisenberg, a long time ago. You line the holes up to start, and then as you enter the mirror tunnels, each time you step out of a mirror, one sphere rotates. Step into another mirror? Next sphere rotates. When you want to come back, the holes turn and guide you home. Seven spheres, seven hops. More than that, you’re on your own.”
Mr Sharp took a tighter grip on the fluted handle.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Thank the Venetian,” said The Smith. “He ended his days in Bohemia as court librarian. When he was cataloguing some oddments he came across two of these. They were known as the Coburg Ivories. He sent them to Rabbi Falk, with his suspicions as to how they were to be used.”
“Where’s the other one?” said Mr Sharp.
The Smith looked a little uncomfortable.
“The Disaster,” he said. “They took it with them. It never came back.”
CHAPTER 54
BURNT AS A WITCH
It was, as Charlie had said, a sad town. The buildings weren’t especially mean, and it didn’t seem more afflicted by poverty than any other place they had visited, but it did have a heavy air of melancholy which bore down on everything within it: dark gabled buildings jutted over the pavement like storm-clouds, and the trees lining the wide main street were sickly and beginning to lose their prematurely yellow leaves even though it was not yet autumn. The people who walked beneath them all had faces like closed doors, faces that gave nothing away, neither a smile nor a scowl, and the shopkeepers watched passers-by as if they were something to be defended against rather than welcomed as potential customers. The smell of the local brewery was equally oppressive and entirely unavoidable to anyone possessing a functioning nose: its musty sourness mixed with a heavy sweetness was so thick it seemed to stick to your skin.
Maybe that was it, thought Lucy, maybe the smell is why they all look so miserable. Maybe they need the money from the brewery and just have to bear it; maybe their faces are so blank and shut because they’re trying to seal out this horrible and invisible malty cloud they’re living in.
She felt the money in her pocket and looked at the signs jutting from the louring buildings in the hope of finding a shop selling gloves. She threaded her way between the trees all the way to the town hall at the end of the street, and then retraced her steps up the other side in case she’d missed something, but there seemed to be no haberdashers or clothes shop of any sort. She went into an ironmonger in case they had any work gloves, but all she was shown–grudgingly, by a suspicious looking shopkeeper–was a thick pair of rough suede blacksmith’s gloves. She might as well have tied flour-sacks to her hands, she thought. She asked if there was a more suitable lady’s shop somewhere off the main thoroughfare and he admitted there was, without offering to tell her where it might be. When she asked for directions he bristled as if spotting a ruse, perhaps one by which she was trying to lure him into the street to point the way while she darted back in and stole a barrel of penny nails or a bundle of mattock handles. With a knowing sigh, he stamped on the floor which produced–with startling rapidity–a small defeated-looking boy who he directed pointedly to “watch the blessed shop” while he stepped out from behind the counter, shooing Lucy ahead of him as he leant into the street and grudgingly pointed her on her way.
She thanked him and walked into the narrow side-street he had indicated. She was so busy trying to remember the intricate sequence of lefts and rights he had fired at her that she stopped watching where she was going. Her foot hit something and she stumbled forward, going down hard on one knee before bracing herself with her hand to stop pitching all the way onto the ground. She winced and stayed down for a moment, rubbing the pain away.
It was because she was hunkered down that Georgiana Eagle didn’t see her. Georgiana was standing in front of a shop and rattling the door-handle, evidently frustrated that it was closed. She stood back, clearly hoping to see someone moving inside. Frustrated, she turned away from the locked door, looked quickly up and down the dim alley and then hurried off without a backward glance. Lucy was a connoisseur of furtive glances, having spent much of her life hiding and watching people who didn’t think themselves observed, and there was something in the hot immediacy of Georgiana’s look that piqued her interest so sharply that she forgot, for the moment, all thoughts of gloves and began to follow her.
Lucy stayed far enough back not to be seen, but just close enough not to lose her. This worked well enough until the narrow alley they were walking down ended in a small open square with a tall crumbling stone cross in its centre, overlooked at one side by a squat ill-favoured church, and on the other by a low bow-fronted shop whose double windows advertised “Finest Wines” in flaking gold leaf on one side of the narrow door, and “Remedies and Cure-Alls” on the other. It was into this establishment that Georgiana disappeared, with a cheery tinkle of the bell on the shop door. Lucy thought she saw her flinch at the bright tell-tale noise, but that might have been just her fancy. From the glimpse of bottles and jars stacked within, she could see it was an apothecary shop. Why Georgiana was being so circumspect, when all the show-people drank freely, was another mystery to her. In order that she wasn’t discovered when her quarry retraced her steps, Lucy slid into the square and walked along the side towards the church with the intention of sheltering in the mouldering shadows of the lych-gate until Georgiana emerged with whatever it was she was so keen not to be seen buying.
It was that cheery bell that almost saved her. She heard it ring behind her, and without needing to think or turn, stepped quickly sideways into the nearest doorway. It was the door to some kind of shop because she saw a thin mirror on the side lintel with lettering on it, but she did not read what it said at first, instead using it to observe Georgiana’s progress across the square over her shoulder without having to expose her own face.
She saw her gripping a small
blue bottle, a squat thing, not a wine bottle at all but the kind of thing used for potions or medicines. It was quickly disappeared beneath her cloak and stowed somewhere safe. Again Georgiana checked the ground around her for observers, and then she suddenly felt something in her dress, squirming as though a mouse or some other unwelcome creature had just announced its presence in her underclothes. She gasped and reached within her garments and removed the offending object.
It was Lucy’s turn to gasp. Held in Georgiana’s open palm was a piece of liquid fire, the grey-green colour of a midwinter wave: it blazed light across the dim square for an instant before Georgiana clamped her fist shut on it, but in that moment Lucy not only knew exactly what it was, but felt the answering heat in her pocket. She looked down and saw the amber light of her own heart-stone flash an answering warning. She closed her hand over it on reflex but there was no doubt in her mind, though the fact of it hit her like a poleaxe, stunning her for a moment: Georgiana Eagle also had a heart-stone.
This must explain the connection she felt towards her. It was not just the common or garden attraction to a superbly beautiful person that anyone of either sex might feel.
It was more.
It was that Georgiana was also a Glint.
She saw Georgiana turn towards her and realised she must have betrayed herself with a gasp. She flattened herself further into the dark alcove of the shop door, and in so doing reached back with her hand and felt the narrow, twisted pillar behind her through the hole in her gloves, rough stone worn by the passage of weather and time. It was clammy with damp, but it was not that that made her shiver and give herself away. What did that was the old thing, the bad thing, the blood-curse she always tried to guard against, the treachery of her ungovernable ability to touch the past hidden in stone and have it rear up and bite her.
She stiffened and felt her face jolt into a stiff rictus of anticipation before the pain itself hit as the past slammed into her in the familiar, hated series of shards and slices. Her neck jerked painfully as she saw—
The Oversight Page 31