Mirrorworld

by Daniel Jordan

  With a snort, the Master sat up from where she had been clearly dropping off to sleep on her sofa, which had at some point transformed into a canopied swing seat. Holding a sleeve back with one hand, with the other she made an elegant gesture, and a steaming hot cup of coffee materialised out of nowhere in front of her. She completed the movement by picking the cup out of the air, taking a sip, going “ahhhh” and sliding back down into her drowsing position.

  Marcus was thankful for the show, as it gave him time to fight off that echoing memory. Even from amidst a battle within his mind, he had to admit that it was impressive. “Is it safe to be here when she’s falling asleep like that?” he asked.

  “Oh yes, it’s fine.” Eustace chuckled roguishly. “She does her best work half asleep. It’s actually a very interesting area, but never mind that. See, there are Masters who can handle the paperwork, and there are Masters who are actually bloody good Linewalkers to boot. There aren’t many who can handle both. There are skill levels to this business, you see. Some have it naturally, some can learn it, some will be eternally hopeless. I knew I was destined for the scholarly life as soon as I discovered that the extent of my abilities was opening a portal barely big enough to step through. I’m sure you can sympathise.”

  “Meaning?” Marcus asked, tearing his gaze away from the Master’s delicious looking coffee.

  Eustace laughed again. “Don’t get twitchy, boy. I’m just saying. In theory anyone can learn to be a Viaggiatori, but in most instances you’ve either got it or you don’t. Linewalking is an art. You can teach geniuses to play it safe, but you can’t teach genius. And since you’re just sitting there looking unimpressed at pretty much everything, I feel I’m quite within my rights to declare that you, my boy, will never be a Viaggiatori. So I’m lead to wonder, what are you doing here?”

  “I honestly haven’t got a bloody clue,” Marcus said flatly. “Your Master said I was important for something, but never got round to telling me what. Pretty much all I know is what you’ve just told me. I didn’t ask for this. I was quite happy drinking myself to d- into a stupor. Then you people whisked me up with your crazy magic and dropped me here and started chasing me, then hitting me, now insulting me. Thanks for that. A real homely welcome.”

  “Ah, so the boy does have a little punch,” Eustace said with a grin. “Jolly good. Well, yes, I might happen to have some idea what all that’s about, but I’ll leave that one for Eira to explain. I’m going to have to disabuse you of your rampant stereotyping of magic, though, lad, because that’s some terribly Earthman thinking right there. ‘Magic’ isn’t some sort of convenient catch-all term to explain stuff you don’t understand. Magic is complicated. It’s a force, it’s energy, it’s something that has to be researched and understood before it can be controlled. In any case, ‘magic’ as you understand it.. that’s pretty far from what we do. Wizards do magic. We do science. The dimensional science of the Mirrorline. That’s our area. How it all works, how the worlds fit together, what the concept of balance even means outside of abstract terms, all that jazz. It’s taken decades for us to solidly configure reliable instant connections for travelling between worlds, for example, and we’re still ironing out the creases there. That’s to say nothing of the times that the Mirrorline decides to randomly explode and dump people and places from one world into the other. The more we know, the more we can prevent that kind of thing from happening, because if we don’t, then-“

  Eustace was at this point cut off in mid flow, as a herd of horses charged past between himself and Marcus, knocking Marcus’s rocking chair over backwards in a shower of wicker and sweat.

  “What the hell was that?” Marcus asked, as the herd stampeded off into the abyss.

  “That,” Eustace said, “means story time is over for today. It seems that Eira has fallen completely asleep, and so her control over the Mirrorline is now being dictated by her unconscious mind, meaning that the things that will be happening in her dreams..”

  “Happen here, to us?”

  “Yes, that would be a largely correct assumption.”

  “She said this place was safe!”

  “It is,” Eustace said cheerily. “But I hardly think it’s an appropriate place for us to continue talking now that anything could feasibly happen. What say we wake her up and get out of here?”

  “Yes,” Marcus agreed, “that sounds like an idea I could get behind.”

  “Go on then, important man. Go wake her up.”

  “What? Why me?”

  “Because,” Eustace said with a wicked grin, “I’ve had to do it before. Good luck! I’ll be right here, not being murdered.”

  “Great,” Marcus said, and turned to walk over to where the Master’s swing stood, only to find it was now in a completely different direction and quite a bit further away.

  “You know how space and time blend in a dream, Mr. Important? That’s another thing that gets passed over into the Mirrorline. Most of the control we exhibit over it is entirely mental, y’see.”

  “Great,” Marcus said again, trudging his way over to the Master. As he got closer, four huge, grotesque, half-rotted figures in purple robes appeared in the sky above him, and started barking and screeching incomprehensible orders down at him, before turning on each other in a display of colour and shape that far surpassed the hyperactive clouds from earlier.

  “Now those,” came Eustace’s voice from behind him, “look suspiciously like our very own dear council, or rather, how they would look envisioned through the sleep-deprived mind of someone who has the dubious honour of dealing with them every day. Interesting what we can learn through dreams, isn’t it?”

  Marcus ignored him. He reached the Master, who had spilt her coffee all over herself in dropping off to sleep. Tentatively, he reached out, and touched her on the shoulder. Nothing happened.

  “And now,” Eustace continued, “they seem to have dissolved into some sort of pastiche of Portruss itself, slowly melting apart. Bits are dripping on me, Mr. Important. Do hurry up.”

  Marcus shook the Master a few times. She murmured softly to herself, and somehow managed to throw the remnants of her coffee down Marcus’s trousers.

  “Oh, now this is interesting. Erm, Marcus..”

  Marcus snapped his head back around in Eustace’s direction, suddenly worried by how for the first time the old man had sounded less than entirely confident. As he span, the air suddenly filled with hideous, screeching laughter that blocked out anything else the old scholar might have said. Marcus looked around, frantically searching for the source of the arcane chortling, and found it in the silhouetted shape that was descending from the convoluted mess of the sky. Man-shaped, yet with dimensions far surpassing that of the average human, this striking figure was robed in dark flames that were blown out spasmodically by the sudden piercing winds that had struck up, and all seemed to be blowing inwards towards this vision, circling it upon arrival with whiplash intensity. The figure emanated a sense of menace and distress that dwarfed anything Marcus had felt from his staff, and he stood there rooted in terror against the protestations of his hind brain, sure that Death had caught up with him.

  But no – this figure already had a staff of its own, a long, knobbly thing quite unlike Death’s smooth scythe. Also, though the head was little more than blackest shadow, it was un-hooded, and framed by a shock of long hair flashing about in the wind. And there was the laugh.. it hit notes of bitterness, madness and evil despair that seemed quite unlike any sound Death would make. It was unmistakeably human. Marcus thought he might have laughed that laugh once before.

  “Marcus,” came Eustace’s voice, now somewhere beside him, “I really do think we should be leaving now.”

  “What the hell is that?” Marcus yelled back, loudly into a sudden silence as the laughter abruptly cut off. Turning back to look at the dark vision, he was horrified to see it studying him in an almost contemplative manner, head cocked to one side. “What is it doing
?”

  There was no response but the old scholar’s distressingly panicky attempts to awaken the Master. Marcus tried to turn and help, but he was transfixed by the curious gaze of the figure, and stood frozen on the spot as it drifted closer. That dark face suddenly broke into a wide, jigsaw grin, and without further warning the figure swung its staff up over its head, rotated it a few times, then bought it down pointing squarely at them and blasted forth white light from its end. Marcus barely had time to think ‘not again,’ before the shockwave hit, passed through him onto Eustace and Eira, and blew them all apart into fragments of dreams.

  5

  “Do you remember our first date?” Alice asked, as they lay in the snow, waiting for day’s light to fade.

  “Of course,” Marcus answered, gently extricating his arm from under her and attempting to massage some life back into it. “You told me that you’d never actually been on a proper date before. I didn’t realise at the time how transparent of a hint it was, but it certainly worked.”

  “Well, you’d have sat there on your end of the computer and been content to IM me forever if I hadn’t done something about it. I got tired of waiting.” Marcus could barely make out her expression, so well was she wrapped up, but in the little gap between scarf and woolly hat he caught a glimpse of her smile. Alice had a full complement of attractive smiles, but this one was one of his favourites, a crooked grin that put him in the mind of a cat that had been caught eating the gerbil and regretted nothing.

  “I’m still claiming that one,” Marcus said. “You can have the second date. That was all you.”

  “Oh yes. We went to the movies. What did we go see?”

  “I have no idea,” Marcus confessed, and lay back down with a soft crunch. A westerly wind had swept the storm into the city with little warning, and the snow had been coming down with aplomb for most of the day, but within the hour the worst had passed. The blizzard had lessened to a gentle caress of fallen flakes on a whitewashed world, and they’d decided to go to the park.

  “You were the perfect gentleman, that first night,” Alice murmured after a moment. “Paid for the taxi, seated me, paid for everything, walked me home. We were at my front door, and you gave me a hug and ran away. I felt like a princess. A rather chaste princess, but a princess nonetheless.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Marcus said wistfully, “I did want to kiss you.” He did so then.

  “Let’s never leave this place,” Alice said later. “Let’s live on this hill forever. Let’s live in the hill.”

  “We don’t have any supplies,” Marcus pointed out. “Ow,” he added.

  “Don’t say that,” Alice said, punching him in the side again. “That unwavering dedication to practical rationality will ruin you, Marcus. You should dream a little more freely sometimes.”

  Marcus hesitated at her words, stricken suddenly by a strange feeling that some far-off iteration of himself had seen her words come to life, her casual prophecy come true. He shivered, his sense of whimsy dispelled. “Do you really think so?” he found himself asking.

  “I do,” Alice said solemnly, twisting to look into his eyes. “Sometimes it seems like you’re moving through life in a daze, interacting with but never quite touching the world. Poor Marcus, at once removed from his own life. I worry, sometimes, that one day you might be like that with me. I worry that you’ll come to prefer the world in your head to the real one, and disappear into it.”

  I think I have, Marcus thought sadly, in tandem with his past self. Then anew: Why did I have to relive that one? No answer was forthcoming, and he could only watch as the memory began to dissolve back into its rightful place in his mind, and the world of the present rebuilt itself in her place.

  Coming back this time was painful, and Marcus wasn’t sure he even wanted to. He could feel the different parts of himself, scattered across whatever now passed for reality, and seriously considered leaving them out there.. but the vision had passed, and he could feel the tug of normality trying to reassert itself, so he let it happen. Slowly, at first, and then with increasing speed, reality began to leak back in around him, and rebuild itself into the form of a small square room, where he stood with two other people. Details carefully layered themselves back in, revealing the room as empty but for a large, broken mirror, and the other people as Eira and Eustace, the former staring into space and the latter carefully attempting to recover his serenity.

  “Still not dead, then?” Marcus ventured, checking his limbs and hoping he didn’t sound too glum. “What just happened?”

  “I do believe,” Eustace replied, wobbling slightly, “that we just broke the training room.”

  “We broke the – the Mirrorline?”

  “Oh, no, where we were wasn’t actually the Mirrorline, thankfully. It was an artificial construct, exactly the same as the real place, but with a safety net. We were perfectly safe at all times. As I said, training room.”

  “Oh, good.” Marcus relaxed. “Wait, hang on, you were terrified.”

  “I just had the strangest dream,” Eira interjected. “You were both there, you know?”

  “Yes,” Marcus and Eustace said together, “we know.”

  “I had a coffee as well,” she added with a sigh. “So,” she continued, appearing to come out of her reverie, “what happened? Did I fall asleep?” Eustace nodded. “And you let me?”

  “Eira, you know the whole concept of dream space is incredibly interesting. Even if you don’t like it, it can tell us a lot about not just the Mirrorline, but-“

  “But also about the extremely private factor of my dreams. And look,” she said, pointing to the broken mirror, “your ‘experiment’ has cocked up one of our training rooms. Nice work, genius.”

  “Eira..”

  “I believe the proper form of address is ‘Master’ in this circumstance, Eustace. What does it say on my desk?”

  “Well, actually it says Master Eira..”

  “Ah, then we’re on first name terms, that’s good. Now, do you have any other critically short-sighted explanations for why you decided to try and get us all blown up?”

  “Look,” Eustace said, tugging on his beard. “I think, as you do, that we should be looking to expand past the vision of the soulless automatons that have set the standards of this organisation, and that to do that we need to look into these new ways of doing things. Right, Marcus?”

  Marcus, whose mind had wandered back again to the more painful aspects of the memory he’d just forcibly relived, blinked at this sudden inclusion. Glad of the distraction, he attempted a gesture implying that he’d love to contribute, but his experience with the subject matter extended only to ten minutes in a rocking chair and everything Eustace had just said. It came out as an anarchic sequence of arm flailing and odd expressions that neither of the others actually saw, as they were already engaged in a stare-down for the ages.

  “Eustace,” Eira said pleasantly. “Bugger off.”

  “Pfft,” the old scholar said, “You’ll hear from me again about this.” Mustering his dignity in the face of being told off by someone roughly fifty years his junior, he strolled off in an obvious huff.

  “No doubt,” Eira mused quietly, “and then again and again and again. Anyway,” she said, clapping her hands and narrowly avoiding becoming entangled in her own sleeves again, “shall we return to my study, Marcus? There’s coffee there, and I can tell you the rest of the story.”

  “There’s more?”

  “There’s always more.”

  This time, Eira sat at the other desk, the one surrounded by bookcases. As Marcus flopped into a comfortable armchair he’d dragged over from by the window, he noted that one of the strange contraptions he’d seen on the other desk actually appeared to be some sort of kettle. It was now on this desk, teetering on a pile of books, whilst Eira scouted around for where she’d left the sugar.

  “Go on then,” she said, when they were settled and she was stirring her drin
k. “Ask me.”

  “Ask you what?” Marcus asked, yawning.

  “About my dreams. If I saw them, and you in them, then you saw them too.”

  “Do we have to do this riddling all the time? Can’t you just tell me?”

  Eira smiled crookedly, a slow grin that Marcus found disconcertingly familiar. “I’m sorry, Marcus. I’m pretty sure that I mentioned not being very good at explanations. I thought I might do better with source material, you asking questions and me answering them. It’s either that or we call for Eustace again. Please don’t make me do that.”

  Marcus sighed. Outside, the sun was setting, casting long dark shadows across the room, and he was very much feeling that it was time to go to bed. But it seemed he had some miles yet to go before sleep, so he may as well hang in there and try to take it all in. “Alright. Horses.”

  “That’s an easy one. I like horses.”

  “Stampedes of horses?”

  “Technically, it’s a herd. I like wild horses, they’re beautiful animals.”

  “What,” Marcus asked, unable to fully believe he was pursuing this line of inquiry, “is wrong with domesticated horses?”

  “Nothing, really. But everything looks better in the wild.” With this, Eira shook her hair down over her head and stared into her coffee cup. “What else?”

  “Look, why are we doing this? Is this going somewhere?”

  Eira nodded.

  “Alright, fine. Purple-robed screeching zombies. Eustace said they were a council.”

  “Ah,” Eira said, draining her cup and slamming it down onto a pile of books. The whole stack promptly collapsed and avalanched off the desk, eliciting a ‘tch’ of annoyance before the Master turned back to Marcus. “Yes. The council. The four most senior Viaggiatori are elected as a sort of elite council to work with and guide the Master. By which I mean ‘attempt to prevent them from doing anything vaguely outside the boundaries of what they’ve spent their entire lives doing’.”