Mirrorworld

by Daniel Jordan

  Eira worried about it, when she had the time. She worried about the philosophical inclinations. She worried whether Talents made the man, or whether man made the Talent. In accordance to the random nature of the Mirrorline, the awarding of Talents seemed to lack any rhyme or reason, but there were undoubtedly some that seemed to make sense. If she had not found herself in possession of the remarkable ability to go on and on when she should have died of fatigue months ago, would she have been appointed Master of the Viaggiatori? Would she have been appointed on her own merits, or had her Talent been the main selling point? And if so, what did that mean? Had the Mirrorline itself deemed her worthy and so awarded a Talent that would help her on her way? That was but one scary question in a mighty multitude that had no answers, a hopeless quest of thought to understand the impossible or at least highly implausible that was frankly a waste of time, so she tried to avoid worrying about it. Luckily, her life was one of distractions, and it was with one such that she was concerned now.

  The Assassin.. Never sanctioned by the Viaggiatori, he was a Linewalker nonetheless. His basic past was known; a man of Earth, he had discovered a Viaggiatori outpost during a mission long ago, wandered through a Rashalamn Portal that the idiots had foolishly left open and unguarded, and liked what he’d found on the other side. He’d forced the Viaggiatori whom he’d taken by surprise to show him the basics of how it was done, and disappeared into the Mirrorworld before backup could arrive. Pleasantly amoral and unconcerned for the subtleties of Mirrorline management, he’d then spent his time smuggling taboo back and forth between the worlds for interested buyers, somehow always staying a step ahead of the many Viaggiatori who had over the years been assigned the task of tracking him down and telling him to bloody stop it. And for every trip, he had refined his Talent of magical resilience until he became the go-to guy for stopping rogue wizards. The Wizarding Tower of Portruss was an old institution that didn’t take kindly to other wizards setting up towers in Eurora, but such was the uncooperative nature of people who could do literally anything with magic that the Assassin was always in work to the point that, well, no-one called him the Smuggler, did they?

  Eira had to admit that snapping the man up had been a good idea; he was practically a custom-made tool, designed by the Mirrorline for a scenario such as this. The council were eager probably more for the glory of success than the saving of Portruss, but that didn’t instantly invalidate their plan. Stuffy and ignorant though they were, they did represent a different way of looking at things. Eira was painfully aware that, in her focus on looking to the Mirrorline for answers, she’d never have thought of hiring the Assassin, so she had to tip her hat to them.

  At least the man hadn’t accepted the invitation to become part of the organisation. She wasn’t sure she could have handled that. A pardon was bad enough, in its way.. It didn’t matter. Though it had cost many years of now-pointless effort on the part of the Viaggiatori to apprehend the man, the deal was done, and the Assassin was pointed directly at Keithus and primed to fire. The results would certainly be interesting, and that was why Eira was so concerned with her list. Years of bad blood between the Assassin and the Viaggiatori might mix far too well with the similar disdain that Keithus held for them, and the thought of those two joining forces was not a fun one. So Eira pored over her list, looking for people with Talents that could both help the Assassin succeed and stop him doing anything rash should the need arise. Luckily, previous Viaggiatori encounters with the Assassin had proven that while the man could shrug off a fireball the size of a house coming from a wizard, he had no such resistance against Talents born from the same source as his own. Eira loved irony when it was on her side.

  She looked down at her list again. It did not inspire much hope. Many useful Talents were held by mostly useless people, or at least by those who hadn’t yet come to terms with the significant changes to their lives that their Talents had wrought – another area of complication that seemed to eat up her time. But despite the odds, she had circled four names. Four names for four useful Talents, and four Viaggiatori presently in the city whom she knew she could trust.

  Maybe things weren’t going so badly after all. Marcus was back – what had he been doing in the library of the Wizarding Tower? It didn’t matter. They’d found him, and she could breathe easily again, for a while at least. She’d sent him straight off to Tec for more experiments, not trusting herself to not murder him personally if they’d been in the same room together. Marcus was back, and the Viaggiatori had a new plan. A plan and a backup plan, even if the council didn’t know it yet.

  She permitted herself a small smile, then downed the last of her coffee and went to find some people.

  Marcus, meanwhile, was stood on a small hill, beneath an inky-black sky. Neither of those things had been there a moment ago, but that was the way of things. He was, or had been, back in the Viaggiatori labs, and had from there returned to the comfortably disquieting embrace of the Mirrorline’s chaotic sky, but even that had faded away when Tec had activated his memory program. Now there was just the hill, and the darkness, and his memories. They were all still in his head; he could hear the millions voices of past Marcuses clamouring for his attention again, but they were quiet, now, the buzz of a distant hive. Their cries faded further as the memories began to move, untangling themselves from the knotted jungle of Marcus’s mind. They emanated from all around him as faint wisps of light that curled upwards like smoke, rising as stars to claim a place in that dark, infinite sky. Within minutes, Marcus was bathed in a distant cacophony of twinkling, knowing lights, and his head felt light and empty.

  This is nice, echoed Tec’s voice. The technician had declined to join Marcus on the hilltop, preferring to stay in the Mirrorline’s reflected form of his lab down the way a bit. From there, he’d said, he’d be much better equipped to deal with any new problems that might arise. He had, however, sent along an incarnation of a big, fat parrot, whose eyes he was now seeing through. Marcus glanced down at it, standing gormlessly next to him.

  “Does it not always look like this?” He addressed the bird, even though he didn’t need to.

  Not at all, Tec told him. Funny thing about this program is that the menu screen, as it were, takes a different form depending on who the subject is. Mine’s just a hall of doors. Yours is nicer. Well, when you’re ready, Marcus. The bird squawked absently.

  Marcus turned back to the stars. Tec had told him that he, Marcus, would be mostly in control of the Mirrorline for the purposes of this experiment, knowledge that Marcus had reacted to by making a run for the mirror through which they’d entered. Unfortunately Niko had been waiting for him, and had grabbed him, spun him and thrown him back in in one quick, melancholic movement. Tec had then explained that he’d be able to override Marcus at any time from his position, an emergency measure designed to ensure that nothing and/or nobody got bent out of shape in either a figurative or literal fashion.

  And so here they were. The entirety of Marcus’s remembered history lay twinkling all around, and it was his job to try and sift through it and find a clue as to how and why he was connected to Keithus. Where to start? Lacking any other ideas, the beginning seemed as good a place as any. He cast his mind out into the stars, feeling them shift at a thought, and whisked more recent, brighter memories aside, searching for his earliest known memory. He thought he knew it, that inconsequential recollection of his youthful misunderstanding over the correct application of a colander. Either that or the grand theft buggy one. But no; both of those dull lights stepped aside, lighting Marcus’s way to an even fainter heartbeat in the night sky.

  I’ve never been here, Marcus thought wonderingly. Maybe I forgot that I remember this one. He reached out to take that small, fading light in his hand, and it grew around him, sharing a secret.

  Eira found Musk at the back of the large entrance hall, guarding the elevator that led to the labs. The man was leaning at ease against the wall, watching the world go by
without apparent interest. Eira could tell he was on his guard, though, for his bunched fists were large. Therein lay his charm: Musk was an honest, straightforward hard-worker, who believed that such qualities were unfitting for the high society he had joined upon becoming a Viaggiatori, and so tried to hide them, assuming instead a cloak of distant, upper-class respectability that never quite managed to conceal his better nature. Sadly, his Talent did him no favours in this regard; the unthinking ability to manipulate the relative size and strength of his hands often spoke volumes about his true feelings, and many a social gathering had ended with his excusing himself after his hands had swelled to levels primed for destruction, incensed by the foolish idiosyncrasies of those he somehow felt obliged to socialise with, and whose rare china cups he accidentally crushed with great frequency. Certainly, much fuss was made among those in the know of his ability to break through anything, given time – much more attention than was lavished on the flipside of this ability, wherein he would shrink his hands to steady, dainty levels, and pull off some frankly beautiful needlework. It was the former aspect of his Talent, and the personality that powered it, that Eira was interested in now.

  “Everything alright here?” she asked him.

  “Yes, Master,” Musk said, straightening up and brushing his hair aside. “All quiet. He’s been down there about half an hour now. I buzzed down to Niko just now, and he said all was well. Didn’t sound like he believed it, but that’s probably just Niko.”

  “Well yes,” Eira said. “Is someone guarding the other exit?”

  “Helm’s down there,” Musk said, grimacing. “And he’s not happy. He talked to me earlier. Talked at me, to be honest. Says Marcus made him look like a fool, cost him reputation. He believes his chances of getting a shot at playing in the Mirrorline anytime soon have been sunk, and is planning quite a complex vengeance should Marcus attempt to sneak out that way. It starts with a bucket of paint over the door, and snowballs from there, apparently.”

  Eira made a mental note to appease Helm in some way, which instantly disappeared somewhere into the abyss of filing cabinets that were being juggled by her mental self, who was also steering a unicycle over a tightrope. She dragged Musk off into the corner.

  “Master?”

  “Listen up, Musk,” Eira confided, “this is important. I need your help. In two days the Assassin – yes, that the Assassin, is being sent north on a mission to track down and defeat Keithus. I won’t lie in that it’s a bit of a desperate, pre-emptive measure, but it’s also our best shot. I want you to lead the man’s honour guard of Viaggiatori agents.”

  “Are you serious?” Musk scratched at his hair. “The man’s a complete ar..”

  “Salt of the earth, he is not,” Eira agreed emphatically. “But as I said, he’s our best shot, and I don’t want him going off on his own. He needs support, and I need people around him who I can trust, in case he does anything stupid. Do you understand?”

  “I do,” Musk said gravely.

  “Well, that’s why I need you,” Eira admitted, “and your Talent. Will you at least consider it?”

  Musk considered it. “What’s the pay?” he asked innocently.

  Eira could have kissed him. “Triple. For as long as the mission takes.”

  “Sold,” Musk said, offering a hand. “A chance to save us all, hey?” he mused as they shook. “I’m honoured to be considered, Master. I suppose you want me to continue guarding this dumb immigrant in the meantime?”

  Eira smiled sweetly. “You’ll see. Have you seen Kendra?”

  The memory that Marcus had found was, in reality, little more than a fragment. It grew around him mostly out of fog, the Mirrorline sky filling in the gaps and as a result consuming most of this vision. But there, in the heart of it, he watched as a brief second or two of recollection repeated itself, over and over, becoming all the more familiar for it.

  He was young; foolishly young, yet too young to be foolish. He was little more than a baby in his mother’s arms, which, indeed, was the image that lay at the core of this recollection. He watched from the third person as his infant form was slowly rocked to sleep by a half-remembered vision of his mother. She looked different, of course, more youthful, but also slightly off – but that was surely the fault of the memory. It was, he thought, amazing enough that he could remember this at all: it could be forgiven a few faults. There was the song, as well; a subtle, quiet lullaby that Marcus was sure she had never sung again, but that somehow seemed to fill him with a profound, haunting sense of sadness. In the endless replay he could only hear a brief snatch, but it was enough to grab the tune of a song he’d never known.

  He stood and watched the memory loop around twice more, and then stepped away, relinquishing his grasp on it. It was too sad, he thought, as it faded away, and left him alone in the sky.

  Kendra, it eventually transpired, was in the gardens. Eira found her by accident by glancing out of the window on the way past, on her way to another place where the woman would have turned out to not be. She backtracked round to the gate, and entered the pristinely-kept gardens of the Viaggiatori.

  Kendra was feeding ducks by the pond, scattering breadcrumbs about and incurring the silent wrath of the gardener, who was lurking under the trees on the far side, shooting her loaded glances that she completely failed to notice as she made a mess of his immaculate paving slabs. Eira caught his eye as she walked up, gave him her patented furtive eyebrow look, and he slipped off to brood in his shed.

  Kendra looked up as Eira sat down next to her on the bench, their gazes meeting halfway through the motion, and gave her one of her disarming slow smiles. Short, dark-haired and faintly Betyoullian in appearance, Kendra had actually been born in Portruss, and so caught people off-guard when she opened her mouth and laid out a solid city accent on their unsuspecting ears. She had come to the Viaggiatori young, and had demonstrated a skill with the Mirrorline that few could rival, but tended to shy away from active service. She was currently working as a librarian in the extensive archives that formed the Viaggiatori collection of knowledge, both of Earth and the Mirrorworld, and her only trips across the Mirrorline were to see their contact on Earth, who would always hook her up with one of the two copies of every book ever published that his institution inherited. It was an important, if somewhat dull job, and Eira found it fundamentally strange that a person of so sunny and sociable a disposition would choose to spend so much time amongst the cold, deep walls of books that lay buried in the archives beneath the House of Viaggiatori. Then again, the woman seemed to be rarely actually in the library, which was why Eira had spent the last half hour wandering around in a fruitless search that had now been concluded only by happy accident.

  “Hello, Master,” Kendra said. “How are you?”

  “I’m not sure,” Eira replied. “There’s a lot going on.”

  “Isn’t there always?” Kendra asked, tearing a piece of bread and throwing it to the ducks. “Anyway,” she admonished, “I think I asked how you were, not how goings-on were.”

  “Right,” Eira said, smiling. “I’m okay, I guess.”

  “I guess will do, I guess,” Kendra said, and offered Eira a slice of bread.

  She took it silently, tore some up and threw it in the general direction of the ducks, who dived on it in a hail of exciting quacking and flailing wings. Eira wasn’t sure she got ducks; she’d always found them weird, graceless, ugly little creatures. Where had they even come from? She made a mental note to try and find out what they were doing in what she was sure was supposed to be a purely ornamental garden, and watched in dismay as it instantly vanished into the same abyss that the note on Helm had. Kendra was, unfortunately, right; there was always a lot going on. She tried to think wistfully of the last time when she’d not had anything to do, but was sabotaged by her treacherous mind conjuring instead a vision of all the paperwork that would be accumulating on her desk while she was out recruiting. There would probably be some initial re
ports back from the team she’d sent out last night by now, and they might need help, depending on what they’d found at the other end of Tec’s alarm bells.. and the council would be plotting, no doubt, since doing so was second only to breathing for them.. and a spot more sleep wouldn’t go amiss, either..

  “You should come here more often,” Kendra told her as she failed to hold in a massive yawn. “I usually come down here when I’m really busy and don’t do anything much for an hour or so.”

  “That doesn’t seem to make much sense,” Eira said.

  “Pfft.” Kendra widened her eyes at Eira reproachfully. “Does that matter, if it works?”

  Eira didn’t respond. She knew that tales of her coffee consumption rate and unsociable work hours were already becoming legendary amongst the Viaggiatori, and couldn’t decide whether Kendra’s suggestion was a legitimate product of the woman’s natural eccentricity, or whether she was just banking on Eira believing that this was the case when she was in fact deliberately winding her up. It was impossible to tell, so she decided to plough on regardless.

  “Well,” she said, “if you’re looking for something else to do, there is a thing I could use your help with. I’m sending a small group north to try and stop Keithus, and –“

  “I’m in,” Kendra said, searing through Eira’s sales pitch.

  “You.. are?” Eira asked, now safely settled in the usual state of nonplussed bewilderment that characterised her discussions with Kendra. “Just like that?”