Mirrorworld

by Daniel Jordan

  I need to know more. Marcus latched onto this thought as a welcome distraction. Staring unseeingly past the slightly translucent man across the way who kept trying and failing to engage the attention of passers-by, Marcus tried to decide what to do. Who might be able to tell him about Death? The Viaggiatori has caused all this, but it didn’t seem like they’d meant to, and going back to them would be letting them snare him up in their talk of his supposed destiny. Perhaps, then, the wizards were a better option. Helm had suggested that they had a lot of arcane knowledge, and this definitely seemed like an arcane situation. And no wizard knew or cared who Marcus Chiallion was, so he could go to them risk-free.. it was as good a plan as any. Marcus felt better for having made it. Now, if only he could figure out what the deal with that ghost was..

  Marcus blinked as his thoughts caught up with eyes, and focused again on what he’d been watching for the last few minutes. The slightly insubstantial figure of the man who couldn’t seem to get anyone to pay attention to him was still there, still failing to acquire any acknowledgement of his presence. Several times, the man seemed to have a thought and attempt to walk off, but he only ever got so far before something seemed to pull him back into Marcus’s line of sight.

  Marcus glanced around. Nope, not a single person other than he seemed to find the sight curious, or even to register it at all. The man was now attempting to steal some food from a nearby stall, but his fingers closed only over empty air, passing through a stack of croissants as if they were fog. With a howl, the man turned and ran, struggling against whatever strange force pulled him back until he seemed to snap free of it, only to flicker out of existence, reappear again near the pile of rubbish where Marcus had first spotted him, and start the cycle all over again.

  Marcus decided to go and talk to him.

  “Hello,” he said, when he was nearby. The ghost was now sitting glumly on a split refuse sack, or at least seemed to think it was, when in reality it was hovering an inch or so above the bag’s surface. It glanced up at Marcus’s greeting, and upon realising that it was being addressed, sprang to its feet.

  “You can see me?”

  “Yes,” Marcus said, “I can. Who are you?”

  “Oh thank goodness! I was starting to think there was something wrong with me.. I’ve been here for hours, bloody hours, ever since that guy..” the ghost trailed off, looking straight into Marcus’s eyes.

  Marcus felt the bottom drop out of his world, recognising the ghost in the same instant that it recognised him. It was the would-be mugger from the previous day - Peter John Lambert.

  “It’s you!” they both said at the same time.

  “But, what are you doing here?” Marcus asked. “This is unreal.”

  “Tell me about it,” Lambert agreed. “One minute I’m innocently attempting to rob you, the next I’ve been knocked out. Then they drag me over to the side of the road and dump me with the other rubbish, and then everyone starts ignoring me. Hours and hours I’ve been here, and the only person to pay any attention to me.. is you!”

  Marcus had no idea what to say, although he was sure that there was something about the situation that Lambert hadn’t quite taken in yet. He pointed wordlessly at the unfortunate shape he had just spotted, lying among the rubbish.

  Lambert followed his gaze. “Oh, yes, there I am, looking quite wretched. What of me?”

  “Well,” Marcus said quietly, after wondering what the best way to word this was and deciding there was no best way, “if you’re lying down there... with half of your face smashed in.. who’s looking down at you right now?”

  Lambert blinked. He looked down again, then at his hands, seemingly realising for the first time that they weren’t opaque. He looked again at Marcus, and then a terrifyingly oblique hopelessness illuminated his washed-out face. “I’m dead?” he asked.

  Marcus stepped back from the sheer force of his enlightenment, then gave the only answer that made sense. “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t seem strictly fair,” Lambert mused. “And you! You’re the Grim Reaper?!”

  “Well-“

  “That is unfair. How was I to know? You could have just told me, I’d have left you alone!”

  “I kind of did, actually-“

  “You killed me!”

  Marcus reeled. This was not the sort of thing he was used to. He’d never killed anyone before, but even if he had he wouldn’t have expected them to come back and tell him off about it.

  “Everyone has their time-“ he began weakly, remembering Death’s book and how he’d changed it and not believing what he was saying in the slightest.

  “I have a family, man! My wife! My daughter..” Shimmering tears of faded colour began to stream from the man’s eyes, as Marcus stood there with no idea what to do. Looking down though, he noticed that the shade of the man was still, in some way, connected to his prior self. A thin grey cord snaked out from under the ghost of his right foot, and attached itself to the same point on his body.

  Marcus looked at the cord, and then at his staff. And then at the cord again.

  People always get that wrong. Death doesn’t kill people. Life kills people. My job is to pick people up after they’ve died, and point them in the right direction. It’s important work.

  Boing went the staff as the blade popped out. Swoosh went the blade as it cut through the air.

  The ghost of Lambert stopped sobbing incoherently, and looked down at his old body. The two flailing ends of the cord that Marcus had just severed slowly faded away into nothingness as he watched. A moment passed. The sun went behind a cloud.

  “So what happens now?” Lambert asked, sounding more peaceable.

  “I don’t know,” Marcus admitted. “This is all just an accident.”

  “There’s no afterlife? No sun-filled gardens?”

  Marcus looked around desperately for assistance. There was, of course, none.

  “Is none of it real?” Lambert asked him, worriedly.

  What was real? Marcus thought to himself. He knew all about his own world, his own life, dull and drab and wasteful as it had been. Against all that was this new world, which seemed so bright and full of life even with all the ignorance he had of it. Not fifteen minutes ago he’d found himself smiling in spite of himself. But now, here, this man was off to another world he knew nothing about, one that might not even exist. Reality was, at this point, a foreign concept.

  “I don’t know,” he said again.

  “You know what,” Lambert grumbled, “you’re fucking useless.”

  And then he vanished.

  Tick, went the Book of Deaths.

  11

  It was now approaching midday. There was still no sign of Marcus. Tec had dropped in to find out if he was going to be needed today, and Eira had chased him out. As the hours wore on, she found herself becoming increasingly edgy. In the end, she arranged to meet with the council on the basis that it would pass some time she would otherwise spend fretting, and was almost guaranteed to give her something else to rage about.

  The council insisted on meeting her in the Main Chamber. They always did, even for private, trivial meetings. The Main Chamber was a wide hall with tiered seating on both sides, and a set ornamental table in the centre where the most powerful players in the current debate would sit, backed up by a large mirror set into the wall. The walls had once held many more mirrors and sculptures of all sizes, a decorative chronicle of Viaggiatori history, but those were gone, now, replaced with scorch marks that no amount of scrubbing or repainting seemed able to remove. Nonetheless, it was all still very official.

  All four of them were already there by the time Eira arrived, sat in their custom-designed chairs that rivalled the table in terms of ornamental overkill, alternating their exchanges of cold stares between each other. When Eira walked up and dropped into the plain chair at the head of the table that was hers by default, all four glares descended on her. There was Delor, thin and haughty, more ske
leton than flesh and blood human. Sat next to him but by no means ‘with’ him was Malydwyn, equally tall, but with more muscle to him and a ridiculous floppy moustache. On the other side of the table, balancing the glare, was Oroitz, medium of height and huge of width, drooping sideways out of his chair. Behind him, almost obscured by the rolling waves of fat, was the short and stooped Burley. His glare was less pronounced than the others, mostly because it had the furthest to go, and had to break out of Oroitz’s orbit in order to land safely. Overall, Eira thought they were the most repulsive group of imbeciles she had the misfortune of knowing.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  They flinched, slightly. Whilst most meetings sooner or later descended into open hostility, usually protocol had everyone dancing around each other for the opening few minutes. Today, however, Eira simply could not be bothered, and made a tired motion for them to get on with it.

  “Eira,” Malydwyn began – they never gave her the honorific, but that could have been because in this situation she was only first among equals – “the last time we met you told us about a plan you had to find a particular man from Earth, bring him here and somehow use him against Keithus in a manner you were incredibly vague about. We decided that you were explicitly forbidden to do this in no uncertain terms, since it was dangerous and completely unfounded.”

  There was a pause.

  “So how’s that working out for you?”

  “Very well,” Eira lied. “We’ve had Tec working on him since he got in, and he has a few lines of inquiry he’s pursuing. When we’ve established the exact nature of Marcus’s connection to Keithus, we’ll be halfway to solving the whole problem.” This much, she actually believed, or perhaps more accurately, desperately hoped for. Once we’ve found the son of a bitch, she added mentally.

  “So you haven’t lost him, then, as rumour reports?” Oroitz asked, with the vicious sneer of the player who is currently hundreds of points ahead of the game and believes that the hand they’re about to lay down will skyrocket them even further into the lead.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Eira replied, poker face born out of months of meetings like these. “If I’d wanted to court disaster like that, I’d have let you in on what’s been happening ages ago.”

  Vicious daggers danced in Oroitz’s eyes. Of them all, he was the one Eira despised the most. The only thing he seemed to have any vested interest in was making himself look good; his reputation had taken a large blow on the day Keithus had strolled up to meet the Viaggiatori, and he was keenly interested in recovering it, usually at Eira’s expense. Not for the first time, she suppressed a regretful sigh for ‘age-first’ decree through which the council elected their new members. Oroitz might have been a keen, smart Viaggiatori once, but age and indulgence had turned his traits to the sly.

  Malydwyn tsked, bringing Eira back to the moment. “Conversing about the immigrant isn’t going to get us anywhere,” the tall man said. “We went over that plan last time, and since Eira clearly has no progress to report yet, it’s time we start thinking about our other options.”

  “What other options?” Eira growled. “We don’t have any.”

  “That’s not true, my dear.” Whereas Oroitz was infuriating because he was plain mean, and Malydwyn irritating because he was so flatly logical, Eira’s dislike for Delor stemmed from how effortlessly patronising he could be. “Whilst you’ve spent the last couple of days running around in a tiz about your best friend Marcus, we’ve been looking into other options.”

  “The ones that don’t exist?” Eira asked. She was regretting this meeting already.

  “Eira, please. Your petulance belies your station. Listen: yesterday, a very important man arrived in Portruss, a man who could help us with our Keithus situation. He was intending to sell himself to the highest bidder, but we scooped him up before he could hit the market.”

  Eira groaned, thinking of the losses to the Viaggiatori’s finances and how she would no doubt find herself being the one who had to deal with that. “Who is this magical man?”

  Oroitz laughed darkly. “He’s not magical, Eira. Far from it. He’s the Assassin.”

  “An assassin?”

  “No,” Oroitz said, enunciating clearly, “the Assassin.”

  Eira looked around the table at the council like they were all idiots, which is to say, she looked around. “Who is ‘the Assassin’?! How is a random murderer meant to help us with a rogue wiz-“

  There were a lot of stories about the Assassin; over his many years of activity he had gained a reputation as a living legend. The real difficulty lay in working out which of the stories were true. To the average person in Ron’s bar, this would be tricky, as they’d trade opposing stories with whomever they were talking to about whatever impossible deeds each of them believed this mysterious character had done. About the only thing each story would have in common would be that, sooner or later, someone would end up dead.

  The Viaggiatori, however, were privileged to know all about the Assassin, because he’d been gently winding them up for almost twenty years. Due to his infamy, he was even listed in the Storie. This was his entry, a footnoted aside in this history of an honourable organisation:

  The Assassin.

  That old rat bastard supplies us with half of the work we do as we scurry to catch up with him, and he gets stronger every damn time he jumps across. Why won’t more wizards go rogue so he can go and do something useful instead of making life difficult for us?

  The idea of ‘famous last words’, Eira reflected, was by no means only an Earth concept.

  “Okay,” she said aloud, “that actually makes sense. Hire the known murderer with noted magical resilience to kill the crazy wizard who is causing all of our problems. Hire the noted smuggler who spends his time working against us, when he’s not killing people.. to work with us and kill people.” She felt dizzy from the irony.

  There were smug smirks from all around. Behind Oroitz, Burley was nodding emphatically. He never spoke, merely agreed with everything the others said and nothing Eira said.

  “We are sending him after Keithus the day after tomorrow,” Malydwyn kindly informed her. “He asked for some time to prepare, you see.”

  “Yes,” Eira said, “I do see. He’s going alone?”

  “He is.”

  “No,” Eira said, “he isn’t. I’m sending some of our people with him.”

  There was a notable bristle from all four men. “With respect, dear, this is our venture..” Delor began.

  “Shut up,” Eira snapped. “You’re sending someone who has no love lost for us to meet with someone who has no love lost for us. What if Keithus wins him over and they both come after us?”

  Blessedly, they had no response. “Since I am still officially in charge of this organisation,” she continued icily, “I’m taking over this venture, and I’m sending some of our people with him. Officially, they will be there to back him up, and if it comes down to it, they can prevent him from going rogue. Again. Don’t argue with me, because you can’t without sounding like idiots.

  “More so than usual,” she added, with a big smile.

  They argued amongst themselves for a moment, Burley nodding vehemently and shaking his head in equal measure. “Agreed,” Malydwyn eventually said, turning back to her. “On the condition that, if it succeeds, you make it known that this action came about due to the actions of this council.”

  “Fine, whatever,” Eira sighed, aware that if this turned out well, they’d make use of this example to further undermine her authority. In her mind, she already had an idea how to prevent this, but to do so.. it all came back to finding Marcus. In the end, though, no matter how much she might dislike these four spoons and the idea of them having power over her, this was a good idea, and saving the world had to be more important to her than her own reputation. If not, she was no better than them.

  “How much am I going to have to do to cover for this?” she asked. “What
did you offer him to work for us?”

  “Oh you don’t have to worry about our accounts,” Oroitz said with a chuckle that filled Eira with dread. “We didn’t offer him money. We offered him a full pardon, and honorary membership with us. He accepted the pardon.”

  There was another pause.

  “What?!”

  “I said,” Marcus repeated, “I want to see an atlas and anything you have about Death.”

  The young librarian continued to stare at him. Marcus leaned heavily against his staff, well aware that after twenty-four hours of muggings, drinking, sleeping on rubbish and being harangued by the dead, he wasn’t looking too hot. Luckily, he only looked half as mad as most of the wizards he has passed on the way in, all of whom appeared decidedly raggedy. There was, he’d noted, an almost apologetic air about them. Perhaps they were compensating for being the organisation that had spawned Keithus, or perhaps this was the way anyone who was capable of turning another person into a frog carried themselves, as a sort of pre-emptive karmic measure should they be forced to actually do it.

  In any case, he had successfully infiltrated their inner sanctum by dint of walking up the public pathway into their tower, where, it turned out, the library took up most of the ground floor. This was quite impressive, even more so considering that Marcus was fairly sure that the tower was bigger on the inside. Sure, it was a tall building, but it wasn’t, from outside observation, particularly wide. Once he’d walked through the entrance hall, however, the building had opened up into a huge, spacious chamber, with a large stone spiral staircase meandering its way up the centre, stretching into the infinite heights. Any ceiling there might have been was obscured by a criss-cross of walkways bridging the central staircase to the rooms around the edge of the circle. To Marcus’s eye, the whole thing seemed oddly modern, like the inside of skyscraper if it had been designed by someone with spirals for eyes.