Obsidian Mirror

14

He conjured snow, he summoned ice,

he frosted lakes and rivers,

he killed the birds in the elderwood,

he blackened toes and fingers.

He said If I can never rest

then all the world will suffer.

I will destroy both man and beast

until I find my lover.

Ballad of Lord Winter and Lady Summer

THE SILVER SNAKE closed around her wrist like an alien hand, but this time Sarah was ready for it.

She stared into the obsidian mirror.

In its convex darkness she saw the room, warped and unfocused, a blur of shapes in the gloom of the winter afternoon. She saw the soft, relentless snowfall outside the mullioned windows.

They were all watching her—Piers at the computer, Wharton perched on a broken armchair, Jake leaning against the stone wall, his arms folded in rigid defense, after his bitter argument with Venn that it should be him.

But Piers had told them both to shut up, and he had clasped the bracelet on her wrist.

Venn stepped back. “Anything yet?”

“No.” Sound was muffled in the soft carpet. It was there to protect the mirror if it fell. She frowned. What if it did fall? Would that be enough?

Venn turned on Piers. “Now?”

“Less response than before. The temporal axis is steady. No fluctuations.”

Her hands were sweating. She stared into the mirror, willing it to change, praying something would happen to its stubbornly solid surface. Glancing at Wharton, she sensed the rising silence of his disbelief. He was a lot shrewder than he looked. Had he told Jake about her?

The room was dim, woven with the dense web of cables between her and the Chronoptika. Its pillars rose into darkness, their capitals adorned with clusters of crumbling ivy leaves and carved acorns. Under some, the faces of green men peeped through bramble, tendrils of leaves sprouting from their mouths.

They were watching her too.

Piers sighed. “Nothing. Maybe we should take a break.”

“No!” It was her own cry, echoing Venn’s.

“No,” he said, walking around behind Piers. “We increase power.”

“I don’t think that’s wise, Excellency. It’s already at the maximum we—”

“Don’t argue with me! Just do it!”

Wharton was on his feet. “I don’t think—”

Venn turned, lean and ominous. “No one asked you.” He came and stood in front of Sarah. “Be ready. There might be a strong reaction. If you feel anything at all, just say. If you can’t speak, raise a hand, and we’ll switch it off. Understand?”

Wharton said, “I want you to know I heartily disapprove of all of this. Jake. What do you say?”

Jake was looking at Sarah. Quietly he said, “We should go on.”

He knows. The knowledge flickered through her fear, her swift sight of Wharton’s shock. He knows I’m not who I say. And he’ll sacrifice me if it means getting his father back.

Venn was already at the controls, that mishmash of Victorian wiring and dials, roped with modern cables. He adjusted a few dials, said, “Now Piers,” and turned to watch the mirror.

Nothing seemed different, but at once the air changed. It seemed sharper, tasted of metal. Jake peeled himself off the wall. A whine he had barely been aware of before was growing, inside his ears, inside his skull. It was climbing to a shrill, subsonic needlepoint of intense irritation.

Sarah was still, focused on the mirror.

She made a small movement, as if in pain.

Jake said, “What is it?”

She didn’t look at him, her gaze caught by her own curved reflection.

“It’s starting,” she said.

Gideon lay on the top of the high wall of the estate and watched the snow settle on the flat roof of the car below. All he had to do was slide his legs over and jump. He would land safely, ankle-deep in the snowy lane. He would be free.

He didn’t dare.

Between him and that safe landing lay centuries of days and nights, sunrises, moonsets. So many lifetimes that almost nothing was left the same from the place he had been born to. He dragged dirty hair from his eyes and lay with his chin on his hands.

Was it true, or one of her lies?

Would he crumble to dust, would old age fall on him as soon as his foot touched the outside? Was Venn’s estate really a protected outpost of the Summerland, with nothing but death beyond its borders?

There was only one way to find out. He stood up, balancing.

From here he could see the weathervane on the church tower at Grimsby Deep, miles away. That was the church he had been baptized in; vaguely he remembered a gaunt, echoing space. It had stayed with him, but it must be very different in there now. For him seventeen years ago. He had not changed by as much as a lost eyelash.

Everything else had rippled through fat, inexplicable changes. Houses appeared, almost overnight. Carts had crawled, then cars had sped up the lanes. Small planes had fought each other in the sky. Pylons grew. Strange wires that the swallows gathered on every autumn hummed in the frosty wind. What were they all? When had they come? He couldn’t remember. And he had never been beyond, to the places where cars and people arrived from, where the planes sailed from, the small fascinating silver birds that flew so high.

He had asked her once, what they were. She had kissed his forehead and said, “They are the enemy, sweet boy.”

A voice said, “You would be a fool to jump.”

He wobbled, then crouched and turned, furious. “Don’t creep up on me!”

The Shee, waiting in the dark branches of a pine, smiled its charming smile. It was a male, gracefully dressed in blue and silver, its long hair tied back. “What are you looking at? May I see?”

They all had this childish curiosity. He said, “A car. Someone’s parked it here. And I think they’ve come inside.”

He could see from the snow that the car had been here a while. It was a dark, sleek machine, and its skin gave out no heat.

The Shee wandered over to the gates and Gideon jumped down beside it. The creature indicated with a long finger. “Look.”

The gates were open; as far apart as a man could slither. They swung, slightly, in the icy wind. The camera was already clotted with snow. Gideon said, “What is that thing?”

“Venn’s scrying device.” The Shee gave a languid grin. “It will see nothing today. Not even these.”

They both gazed at the footprints that led through the gap between the snowy gates, and up the dark, clogged drive.

A man’s. And the splayed spoor of the wolf.

The whine rose in Jake’s teeth and nerves. It shivered down his spine. He wanted to yell for it to stop, but he forced himself to keep still, his eyes fixed on Sarah. She was gazing into the mirror. He moved so he was behind her, but saw only blackness.

“Nothing.”

“Exactly.” Venn’s voice was breathless with triumph. “Nothing. No reflections. Nothing.”

Sarah said, “A room. A man, thickset, with a mustache. He’s seen me. He’s talking to me.”

The whine rose to screaming pitch. The web vibrated. Piers said quickly, “Shutting down.”

“No!” Venn’s eyes were on the mirror, searching. “Not yet. Not till I see it. Where is it, Sarah? Where?”

But she spoke, not to him but to the mirror. “Where is this? Who are you?”

The answer came from no one in the room. It was a thin, pompous voice, oddly quailing. It said, “My name…my name is Symmes.”

The Shee knelt and touched the footprints, sniffed them. Then it raised its hands to its ears. “What is that terrible whining cry?”

Gideon was wondering that too. “Is it the world freezing up?”

He had been with them so long, they had taught him to hear as they did. He could hear the cold night coming down, puddles on the graveled track hardening infinitely slowly, the icy crystals lengthening and creaking to a pitted surface. He could hear the birds edging on their frozen roosts, the blown barbs of their feathers, the blinks of their beady black eyes. He could hear the frost crisp over the windowpanes of Wintercombe.

But this whine was worse than all of that.

“Sounds like a human machine.” The Shee rose, disgusted.

Gideon nodded. The creatures’ aversion to metal still pleased him, even after all this time. It was their one weakness. The Shee listened, snow dusting its thin shoulders, its moon-pale hair glimmering.

“Summer will want us to investigate.” Gideon turned.

The Shee’s eyes went sly. “Enter the Dwelling? Many have tried. Venn is too careful.”

“For you, he is. But I might be able to….”

“Summer forbids it.”

It was a risk. They were treacherous beings—this one would betray him in an instant. So he said heavily, “You’re right. And after all, tonight, there’s the Feast.”

The creature grinned, as he had known it would. “The Midwinter Feast! I’d forgotten! We must get back.”

Its quicksilver mind would be full instantly of the promise of the music, the terrible, fascinating music of the Shee. The music that devoured lives and time and his own humanity, the music that enslaved him and haunted him and that he hungered for like a drug.

“You go,” he said. “I’ll come later.”

“I have to bring you. She’ll be furious.” Its bird-eyes flickered. He saw the small pointed teeth behind its smile.

“I’ll follow you. I just want to see where these prints go.”

It hesitated, tormented. Then nodded. “Very well. But be quick!” It turned, and its patchwork of clothes ebbed color, a magical camouflage, so that now it wore a suit of ermine and white velvet, the buttons on its coat silver crystals of ice. It stepped sideways, and was gone.

Gideon kicked the gates shut.

He ran, fast and hard, toward the house.

The screech ratcheted up the scale, a nightmare howl that made Piers snatch his hands back and swear.

Sparks cracked in the dark.

“Turn it off!” Wharton yelled.

Sarah was sucked flat against the web. Behind her, grabbing her arms, Venn said, “I can’t see him. Is he there? What does he look like?”

She screamed. “I’m falling. I’m falling!!”

The mirror was gone. It was a wild, gaping rent in the world. A scatter of objects lifted from the desk, flew, and were sucked straight in. With a vicious crack, part of the web came free, one green cable whipping past Jake’s head and vanishing with a bright blink like lightning.

“Stop it!” Jake yelled.

“Not yet.” Venn shoved him off. “I’ve got you, Sarah.”

But she was fighting him, struggling back. Jake yelled, “Let her go!”

He grabbed her. A fusillade of rivets cracked past him; he dragged her down. For a terrible unbalanced moment he and she and Venn were one tangled person, dragged and flung forward. The green web held them against it, but the force of the hole was too strong, it pulled hair, hands, breath like an immense invisible magnet, and then just as Jake could feel the agonizing suffocation rise to his throat, the whine cracked, and with an explosion that flung him backward off his feet the mirror came back.

He staggered. The room roared with smoke. Wharton was yelling, “Fire!” In the corners of his eyes brilliant crackles of red were spurting up.

Sarah pulled him up. She screamed something, but his ears were ringing.

Flames whoomed into the roof. He saw Piers and Wharton appear and vanish through clouds of steam, a ferocious hissing, and then something seemed to pop in his head and his hearing came back, and the fire extinguishers were pumping fierce cascades of foam over the sparking cables, the flaring embers of books and circuits.

And then, in a terrible sudden silence, there was only his breathing.

When I came to I was lying in my room with my Indian servant applying stimulants to my brow. The room was oddly dark and stank of burning, with some of the furniture overturned, but strangely nothing seemed severely damaged. A few objects were strewn on the floor, smoldering.

I sent Hassan out, righted my chair, and sat on it gaping vacantly at the mirror. I had seen a girl from another time and had spoken to her.

We had conversed, across ages.

It was then that I realized that not only my life had changed, but that the world had changed utterly. Out there gas lamps were being lit, men were hurrying out to taverns to buy their evening meal, theaters were opening their doors, the vast populace of London was teeming in the rainy streets.

Yet here, in this solitary room in a house among a million others, I, John Harcourt Symmes, had broken open the boundaries of time and space.

So when the brick crashed through my window I almost screamed with the sudden shock of it.

It landed on my mahogany desk, scattering papers and books, and I leaped up and ran to the smashed star of the window and stared out.

In the dim shrubbery to the side of my gate a dark figure flickered and was gone.

Hassan came racing in, with the men I had hired. “Get out there,” I snapped at them. “And do your duty!”

Quickly I closed the shutters and picked up the missile. It was a half brick, and I shuddered as I thought how it might have smashed the mirror itself to pieces. Tied to it with a length of dirty string was a note, which I unfolded. It read: “You have stolen from us and we will have our payment. And until we do, you will never sleep soundly again.”

I crushed it in my fist and smiled. The poor wretch from the shop, perhaps. The first thing I would do was have him sought by the officers.

And then, believe me, I would amaze the world.

Soft steam hung in the dimness. Jake looked at Wharton, who stood breathless with his empty extinguisher, surveying the wreckage.

Burnt-out wires glowed like cigarette tips.

Ash drifted in an icy draft.

Sarah hugged herself, the snake bracelet tight in her fist.

Venn picked himself up and pushed past Jake. Ignoring everyone, he ducked through the safety web to the mirror, and when he reached it he put his hands against it, meeting his own contorted reflection.

Piers came from the controls, a zigzag of soot on his forehead.

“The mirror itself is undamaged,” he said. It was almost a plea. “It’s not the end.”

Venn was staring at himself. His hands, maimed by frost, gripped the black glass. For a second Jake was sure he would grasp it tight and pick it up and throw it to floor, shattering it in a million pieces.

But all he did was stare into his own blue eyes, his hands flat on the solid, unforgiving surface.

He seemed to Sarah to be staring at the torment of his failure.

And of hers.