Mirrorworld

by Daniel Jordan

  “I fear I may owe you an apology, Marcus,” Musk said after a moment. Surprised, Marcus glanced back at him, but the man was resolutely not meeting his eyes. “I’ve not exactly been.. civil towards you since we left Portruss. Did you know, that the Master appointed you second in command of our group? That, if anything happens to me, you’d be in charge?”

  “Yeah, Lucin told me.”

  “What a surprise.”

  “Mm.. I don’t get why Eira didn’t tell me, though.”

  “The Master works in mysterious ways, Marcus.”

  “That’s certainly true.”

  “Well..” Musk sighed. “I couldn’t help but see her appointing you as a snub to me. You are by no means a Viaggiatori, after all. I couldn’t help but think that she was intent on making this expedition as ridiculous as possible, given the rather ragtag bunch that make up our number. And sometimes.. it’s difficult for me, in ways I’m not sure I can really explain. As a Viaggiatori, I’ve been blessed with this incredible power, this strength, the limits of which only extend further the more I walk the Mirrorline. But, when you have the power to smash everything you can see into dust.. it can sometimes be difficult to see anything as any more than that. The world according to the Viaggiatori is so fragile, a world of malleable dimensions, silk sheets and tea parties, and I sometimes have trouble feeling like I can belong in something so.. insoluble. And someone like you, a foreign object, defined by possibility and not even of this world.. I find that even more difficult to have any faith in.” He ran a hand through his hair distractedly. “This apology isn’t going very well, is it?”

  Marcus, who had been sat quietly taking all this in, shook his head, unsure what to say.

  “Did I ever apologise for knocking you out, on that first day?”

  “It was more of a verbal shrug, if memory serves.”

  “Then I am sorry for that, as well. I’m aware you’ve not had the best of times since then.”

  “That,” Marcus said with feeling, “I can agree with. But at the same time, it’s better than what I was doing before.”

  “Really?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Hmm.” Still staring out at the horizon, Musk smiled slightly. A signpost rolled past, informing them as it did that they wouldn’t be seeing another town for about thirty miles, a day’s ride. “Kendra at least appears to have some faith in you. She’s been quite interested in you, hasn’t she?”

  “Oh yes,” Marcus nodded. “She could almost have me believe that I might save the world.”

  “Ha. I can’t pretend I agree – and I don’t mean that personally. I just don’t really believe in destiny-approved saviour figures dropping into our lap just as we need them. It’s both too easy, and too unlikely. But.. if it comes to it, and something happens to me, I hope that you will at least try to do the right thing. Even if you don’t want to. In a situation like this, doing our duty has to hold higher priority than our personal feelings. That’s what I was trying to say to Kendra, I suppose.

  “Sorry,” Musk added after a moment. “Again. I had to tell someone what I was thinking. I actually feel much better now. Did you catch the name of the town on that signpost?”

  “No,” Marcus said. “I was too busy consolidating my inner turmoil.”

  “To each their own,” Musk said.

  Eira was annoyed to be constantly disturbed by an insistent banging sound.

  She’d been awake since the early hours, clearing her desk of paperwork, and making contact with the team that had gone south a few days ago; they’d successfully closed the chasm that had appeared without any major event, as it had thankfully opened in the centre of a field and disturbed only a few cows, who were now orange but otherwise unharmed. With that dealt with, she’d victoriously poured another coffee and attacked the pile of reports from Viaggiatori outposts across the Mirrorworld that she’d left to stack up until she had at least one from each location. There were no major problems to report. The world was ticking over nicely. That only left the expedition to the north, and she wasn’t expecting to hear from Musk for a day or so yet. All in all, things had cleared up quite neatly, and she had just curled up on her chair to snooze for a few hours when the noise had started.

  Bang. Bang. Bang. Thud. Occasionally, muffled curses drifted through the walls. The curiously repetitive sound had been reverberating around the study for about ten minutes now, and showed no signs of abating. With a resigned sigh, Eira staggered to her feet, spent a few minutes fiddling with her coffee machine, which was on the verge of breaking down, and came away with a steaming cup in hand and the determined intent to locate the source of the noise and beat the hell out of it. Her receptionist didn’t look up as Eira more or less fell through the door, which was a shame, as Eira felt like blowing a raspberry at the damn unflappable woman who showed no signs of being affected by the noise, which was now louder, and seemed to be coming from this direction..

  A few corridors of stalking later, Eira discovered the source of the noise. She found herself outside the row of doorways that led into the Mirrorline simulation rooms, where new recruits got their first taste of the Mirrorline, and where she’d taken Marcus on his first day. That particular room had not come out of that event too well, and Eira vaguely remembered signing a paper leasing someone to get it repaired. The door to that room was open, although the only thing Eira could see through it was infinite space, a clear indication that either she really needed to get some more sleep, or that the simulation had been rebuilt. In any case, the constant banging seemed to be coming from inside, so she stepped through the boundary and into the not-quite-Mirrorline.

  Immediately to her left, there was a tall ladder. At the impossible peak of its far end, someone was busily hammering a comically oversized nail into the wall’s infinite length, an act that could only possibly be doing whatever good the worker believed it was doing. As Eira watched, the perpetrator paused to inspect his work, nodded in satisfaction, and tugged himself to the side slightly. At this touch, the ladder glided a few metres further away from the door, before juddering to a sudden halt that produced a loud profanity from its occupant as he waved his arms desperately to preserve his balance, before pulling another nail from the air and setting about hammering away again.

  Wincing, Eira hastened over to the foot of the ladder and gave it a little shake. This shake echoed up the ladder’s length, increasing in violence until it reached the top, where it summoned another curse from the occupant that it now forcefully dislodged. Wailing, they fell down to ground level, bounced back up from the soft floor and landed in front of Eira with a flourishing bow.

  “Eustace?” she asked in disbelief.

  “Hello Master,” the old scholar said, moving his beard back into place, “how may I help you?”

  “What are you doing here?” Eira asked, half-heartedly wishing that she’d made herself a coffee strong enough to provide the mental agility needed to deal with this guy.

  “Fixing up this simulation room, as per your orders. Strong fixing aids make the room itself stronger.”

  “Yes, I know that. I meant, what are you doing here? I’m sure this organisation employs a few hundred people. Including people who specialise in this sort of thing. So how come whenever I seem to go anywhere to find out what’s happening, I keep running into you?”

  “Well,” Eustace said, with the twinkly-eyed expression of pure innocence that always made Eira wary, “as much as I appreciate your keeping me incredibly busy with managing the affairs of our libraries and literature, as well as managing my network of contacts and whatever else you might throw my way, I do still sometimes find myself with spare time, and I like to help out wherever I can.”

  “Wherever you can just so happening to be close enough to annoy me into coming here?” Eira asked, countering Eustace’s expression with her own narrow-eyed suspicious face.

  “I assure you, that was not my intent,” the old man lied. “But he
y, since you’re here, how about looking into that dream-walking phenomenon? It’s too good an opportunity to pass up!”

  Eira sighed, wondering, not for the first time, how to split the difference between the blessing of a hyper-competent sidekick and the curse of a delinquent subordinate, when these disparate characterisations were in fact oppositional elements of the same single fusty old person. “Fine,” she said. “I don’t have the energy to argue. Just don’t start banging that hammer again. I assume you already had this all worked out, so what’s the plan?”

  “Of course I didn’t,” Eustace said, cheekily endeavouring to seem hurt by the idea, “but okay here it is. I’ll transfer control over the simulation room to you, then you go lie in that bed over there that has mysteriously just appeared, get some sleep, and see if you can’t somehow control things around you when you start dreaming. It’s easy, really.”

  “I’m sure it is. Give it to me, then.” Eira strove to relax her mind, which didn’t prove particularly difficult given that it was currently functioning at only the minimum capacity required to walk, talk and occasionally think, and felt, with a slight bump, control of the Mirrorline slide into her head. It was, as ever, a remarkable feeling. Infinite amounts of doors and windows had suddenly opened to her; away from a world of tangible realities, anything at all was now possible. Floating in that world of opportunity, she felt the brief temptation to abuse it, to take the raw potential of the Mirrorline and use it to build a life more perfect than her most comfortable dreams, but it was counterbalanced by the summoned ghost of the knowledge that none of it would be real, never more than a twisted shadow of true reality, and that the sheer effort of willpower required to hold such a huge implausibility together would ultimately destroy her mind. It had been attempted, of course; cautionary tales of the first Viaggiatori, whose attempts to use the Mirrorline to build better worlds than the one they were cursed to live in invariably ended badly, hung like talismans on hooks in her head. To die, or to give up the dream and return to reality as a wasted shadow of her former self, or to try so hard to establish false order that the Mirrorline itself rebelled, pining for its preferred state of chaos.. those were the fates recorded in the earliest pages of the Storie. It was unknown what had truly become of the latter, of those who had been caught up in the forceful unravelling of their fictional worlds, but considering the fates of those who suffered even the least hostile of Mirrorline takeovers, that was probably for the best. Nonetheless, it was in the wake of these unfinished tales that the Viaggiatori as they were now had been established, and tied forever to the task of understanding and safeguarding the sheer intoxicating power of a world that was not a world.

  All that in mind, Eira resisted the urge to build her own utopia, and walked over to the bed. To her, it appeared to be extremely comfortable, and because of that, it was. She dropped into it, nodded to Eustace, and closed her eyes. Despite the coffee still swirling within her, she felt herself drifting off within minutes, wondering all the while exactly how she was meant to control her dreams.

  “Don’t stop,” Musk called down to the Assassin, as they pulled up on the main street of the small town whose existence had long since been promised by a fleeting glimpse of a passing signpost, “we aren’t staying here. Carry on for another mile or so, find a secluded spot, then take us off the road.” The Assassin cheekily tipped a non-existent hat to the man, and urged the horses onwards. Slowly, laboriously, the coach creaked into motion once more.

  “We’re not staying?” Marcus asked, rising from his half-sleep in disappointment. The town around them had an endearing quaintness, like an image from a West Country postcard. Small, thatch-roofed houses spewed thin columns of smoke from their chimneys, as children danced on the village green and locals wassailed each other as they passed in the street, dimly lit by lamps in the rapidly approaching twilight. Marcus had been looking forward to ducking through the low door of the rustic inn, sitting by the fireplace and exploring their collection of locally-brewed ales.

  “No,” Musk said, shattering the beautiful dream. “We don’t want to be spending the night in towns. You’ll see why later. I need to go and check on Fervesce. Don’t go anywhere!”

  “Pfft,” Marcus said as Musk disappeared over the side of the coach. He sat and said a silent farewell to the town whose name it seemed he was destined to not know, watched it fade into a faint swarm of light and shape behind them as the Assassin moved the coach away along the road. A hefty bump shortly announced their departure from the beaten track, and sent Marcus sliding across the roof in a pile of luggage as the Assassin rattled the coach off the road and into a field, where it glided to an ungainly halt.

  As the Assassin set about wiping down the steaming, snorting horses by whose grace they had gotten this far, Marcus surveyed the man’s choice of field. It was a nice enough location, shielded from view from the road by a line of trees whose wintery sparseness could do nothing to actually obstruct the sight of the monolithic coach lurking behind them, but who could at least cut the wind somewhat. The group was sufficiently inundated with sleeping materials that a night under the Mirrorworld’s stars wasn’t an entirely undesirable prospect, but a part of Marcus was still thinking of fireplaces and ales, low ceilings and the murmur of conversation, and so couldn’t help but feel robbed.

  He dropped off the side of the coach, narrowly avoiding the door as it swung open. Kendra stepped out, followed by Musk and then Lucin, whose eyes surveyed the scene imperiously.

  “Is this it?” the short man asked.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Marcus said with feeling.

  “Ssh,” Musk said wearily. “This is the best thing. You know why.”

  Lucin’s response was to turn around and go back in the coach. Marcus simply shrugged, because he didn’t know why, but was too tired to be particularly fazed about being again uninformed. A day of absolute inertia and half-sleep in the company of his own thoughts had made for a poor fellow to the long walk and late night adventure of the day before, and since it was clear that this was the best bed he was going to be getting, he decided to just get in it. Wandering over to the coach to pull free a bedroll and a pillow from the great pile of soft things on which Fervesce’s sleeping form yet reclined, Marcus heard Musk gently requesting that they not stray too far from the coach. That in mind, he rolled into the great space beneath it, fluffed up his pillow, and lay staring at the complex mechanisms of the coach’s underside that now loomed before him, searching for a sleep in which he might yet see the warm inn that still hung, flickering and homely, in the eye of his mind.

  With a start, Eira woke from a lovely dream, in order to find that the room was on fire.

  “Aahhhh,” said Eustace, running past with his beard in flames. Eira quickly conjured up a monsoon, and shortly the inferno had been washed away. The old scholar staggered up to the bed, gave her a dirty look, and fell backwards into a chair that she barely had time to form for him.

  “What happened?” she asked, sitting up.

  “Well,” Eustace said, wringing out his robes, “you were dreaming about some people sat around a campfire. I’d guess some sort of anticipatory dream about Musk and his group, unless you have some fond memories of other campfires. I couldn’t tell, because the fire was dim.”

  “You saw it?”

  “I was there, Eira. Whatever you were dreaming of became a fully realised scenario around me. First you were wandering the streets of Portruss, apparently looking for something, and then it all dissolved into some oblique shapes and colours that drained away into an abyss. I’d love to know what Helm would have made of that one. And then later there were a group of people sat around a campfire. I mean yeah there were lots of less distinct scenes that came and went before I could figure out what they even were, but d’you see? If these scenarios became real without you even having to make them so, without being aware that you were doing it, then that’s proof that unconscious thought has a far greater power
over the Mirrorline than conscious Linewalking! I knew it. And if that’s on no practise at all – imagine what we could do with further study!”

  “Right, right,” Eira said. “But what about the whole bit where everything was on fire? I feel like we should probably talk about that before we talk about further study.”

  “I don’t really know what happened there,” Eustace admitted grudgingly. “I was walking about the campsite trying to see through the darkness and then suddenly the fire just exploded everywhere.”

  “Hmm,” Eira said. “That might have been me. I seem to recall being annoyed that I couldn’t see, and willing the fire to burn bigger so I could make out what was happening.”

  “You did that?” Eustace leant forward, forgetting the sorry remnant of his beard that he’d been forlornly stroking. “You actually consciously manipulated the dream?”

  “I guess so. It didn’t feel like a dream, doing it, though. It was more like.. well, being here.”

  “Fascinating,” Eustace said, leaning back again. “Well, whatever you did, it definitely worked. The fire flared up, and then all of the things were burning, and, yes, I must say I’m quite glad you woke up when you did, as that might have otherwise become a less than pleasant experience. Certainly my facial hair may never be the same again.”

  Eira had to giggle, pulling a fresh coffee out of thin air as she did. “I think perhaps I may have overdone it slightly. Still, are you satisfied now? Can I go?”

  “Satisfied? Eira – Master – this is a revelation. There’s so much more we can learn from this! We have to try it again!”

  Eira groaned. “I thought the plan was that I let you check this out, then you stop bugging me.”

  “Well, I don’t know what your plan was, but mine was to find out as much about this as possible. If you could learn to control this – it could be a whole new way to work the Mirrorline. And what you did when you tried to change something – the intensity of it! Manipulating the Mirrorline could be so much easier if we could do it unconsciously.. This could be something very, very huge.”