The Finisher

QUADRAGINTA: Looking Glass, Looking Glass on the Wall

I KNEW I HAD not many slivers to get this done. The Mendens might come at any time to take Duf and lop off his legs. And I doubted whether Delph would have the wherewithal to stand up to the medical Wugs. I sprinted back to my digs on the Low Road, retrieved Destin and the Elemental and ran back out, leaving Harry Two behind. I was not going to risk another Wug’s or beast’s life through my actions. As soon as I was clear of the village, I ran flat out and soared into the sky. I knew it was a risk, but saving Duf’s legs and maybe his life was more important than my being seen flying.

Stacks was closed this light because of the Duelum. I alighted within twenty yards of the rear of the place, hurried to the same side door and used my tools to open it. It was light outside, but that was no comfort. It had been light outside last time, and the cobble had still come to try and smash us to nothing.

I retraced my steps on the main floor but found nothing. I took a sliver to check out Domitar’s office in case he had found the Stone. I hurried up the stairs, ran to the end of the hall and saw, not surprisingly, that the wall I had pierced with my Elemental was now all repaired.

I put on my glove, pulled the Elemental from my pocket, thought it to full size, took aim and the wall once more blasted open. I willed the Elemental to shrink and put it back in my pocket, but I kept my glove on. I took my time going up the steps, thinking that I might have dropped the Adder Stone heading up or coming down them. Only there was nothing there. And the white rock would have stood out starkly against the dark marble.

At the top of the stairs, I stopped and took a long look at the words carved into the wall above the entrance to the room: HALL OF TRUTH. I didn’t care about the truth right now. All I wanted was the Adder Stone.

I hurried into the room, stood in the middle, and looked goggle-eyed around the vast space. There wasn’t a single book because there wasn’t a single bookcase on which to put them. In their place was a series of floor-to-ceiling looking glasses hung on the walls. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I looked at the frames on the looking glasses, all ornately carved with twisty, slithering creatures. They seemed familiar to me.

With a start I refocused. I scoured every crevice of the room for the Stone. I rose from the last corner, mired in defeat. It was then that I glanced at the first looking glass. Nothing could have prepared me for the image I saw there.

“Quentin!” I screamed.

Quentin Herms was in the looking glass seemingly running for his life. As I observed his surroundings, I knew at once that he must be deep in the Quag. There were no trees, vegetation or terrain like that in Wormwood. I glanced to the left and saw what was after him. My heart skipped a beat.

It was not one but a pack of freks, huge wolflike beasts with long snouts and longer fangs. They were fierce creatures. I had seen one slain by a morta after it had attacked a male Wug near the boundary of the Quag. Not only were the fangs sharp, apparently their bite drove one mad. The bitten Wug had thrown himself out a window at hospital four nights later and died.

I yelled at Quentin to run faster, faster, but no Wug could outrun a frek. Then he turned and looked toward me.

He had both his eyes!

If this image was real then what Thansius had told us at Steeples had been a lie. Although I already knew that to be the case, it was nice to have confirmation. Even Thansius had seemingly admitted it when he had told me on the pitch earlier that while we in Wormwood had many things to fear, Outliers were not among their number. But was the image I was seeing now real?

An instant later the glass went back to being just a looking glass. I saw my reflection in it and gasped as I whirled around, thinking I was now trapped inside there and a frek might be just behind me. But I was alone in the room.

Poor Quentin. I saw no way for him to survive. This made my heart sink. And then I stiffened.

There it was, in the glass, barely inches from my hand. The Adder Stone!

The dazzling white rock was simply resting on the marble floor. I whirled around again because I thought what I was seeing was a real reflection of it in this room and the Stone was just behind me on the floor. But there was nothing there. I turned back. I suspected some sort of trap because Stacks had been none too kind to me in that regard.

Still, I thought of Delph hovering over his terribly injured dad, waiting for the legs to come off. I could not go back and face Delph unless I had tried everything Wugly possible to save Duf’s limbs.

I reached out tentatively, my fingers lightly touching the glass. I jerked them back, although nothing had happened. I decided I was just being a git. I touched the glass again. It was hard, like glass should be, and impenetrable, unless I smashed it. I wondered if I should use my Elemental to do so. But what if the Elemental also smashed the Stone? I couldn’t take that chance.

Then I recalled what I had done in fixing the window in my house. I wasn’t sure how I’d done it exactly, but I looked at the glass and imagined that it was simply a wall of water. I focused all my thoughts on transforming glass to water.

I reached out again and my hand passed through the glass. A satisfied smile filled my face. I had done it! Maybe I was becoming like that sorceress thing Eon had mentioned being in the Adder Stone.

As my fingers closed around the rock, hard and cool in my palm, my smile was immense. Until something seized upon my wrist and pulled me off my feet and headfirst through the looking glass. I landed on something rough and warm to the touch. Momentarily stunned, I quickly picked myself up and stood ready to defend myself. The darkness was all around me, quite a change from the well-lighted room I’d just vacated.

I thrust the Stone in my pocket and stiffened when I heard something coming toward me from out of the black. I took out the Elemental and willed it to full size. Yet, for the first time ever, nothing happened. When I glanced down at my gloved hand, the Elemental remained as small as a long splinter of wood. I thrust it back into my pocket and tried to take to the air. But Destin seemed as powerless as the Elemental inside the glass and I fell back to the floor. I pushed down the lump in my throat and faced what was coming with none of my special tools.

A vague silhouette a shade lighter than the darkness around it emerged into my line of sight. As it drew closer and I could see it better, I gapsed in shock.

It was a very young, only it wasn’t a Wug, or at least none I had seen before. It was dressed only in a cloth diaper. It had a few hairs on its head, and its skin was as pearl white as the Adder Stone in my pocket. Its features were as angelic as any I’d ever seen. But I was still on my guard, for sweetness could quickly transform to wickedness. The image of Morrigone appeared in my mind.

It closed to within a yard of me and then stopped. It looked up at me and I looked down at it. I felt my heart go out to the tiny creature because its mouth drooped and its eyes narrowed and tears dribbled out from them. Then it gave a little bit of a cry and then something truly remarkable took place.

Its features softened and turned Wug-like. When it was done, I could only stare transfixed. It was my brother, John, at age three sessions. He started to cry once more. When I instinctively put out my hand, he immediately drew back.

“It’s okay, John,” I said in a hushed voice. “I’m going to get you out of here.” I knew none of this made any sense. John could not be here, and he certainly couldn’t be three sessions old. But my mind wasn’t working very well in here. I put out my hand once more, and once more he shrank back. His distrust eased my suspicions and I lunged forward and gripped his hand tightly.

John looked up at me, his tears now stopped. “Vega?”

I nodded. “It’ll be okay. I’ll get you out of here.”

I could only think that Morrigone had somehow imprisoned John here to get back at me. As I turned to look around for a way out, I let go of his hand. Or at least I tried to. I looked down at my hand and what I saw made me more than slightly sick. His fingers were now part of my fingers. They had somehow grown together. I jerked my arm back, but all that did was lift John off the floor. His other arm reached out and gripped my shoulder.

Instantly, I felt a weird, invasive sensation. I looked down and his hand and arm were now growing into my shoulder, right through my cloak. And when next I looked at his face, John was no longer there. What was there was the most odious, foul creature I had ever seen. It was like a moldering skeleton with bits of skin dangling in odd spots. And there were no eyes in the sockets, only ripples of black flame. With each dark flicker I felt pain course through my body. Its teeth were black and grinned at me like some savage demon that had just triumphed over its prey.

I screamed, turned and ran. All this did was allow the thing to wrap its small legs around my waist. I felt the invasive feeling again but I kept running. I just wanted to go back through the looking glass, yet I had no idea how. I could feel the thing melding onto my back. And then the most extraordinary thing happened. I suddenly felt like I weighed a thousand pounds. I couldn’t remain standing. My legs buckled. I fell to my knees, and then forward onto my face. I felt my nose shatter and my already injured eye swell even more. A dislodged tooth fell out of my mouth. I spit up blood.

The thing was on my head now. I could feel fingers like tentacles encircling my skull. And if I thought this was the worst it could possibly get, I was about to be proved wrong. In my mind grew darkness so profound, so overwhelming, that I felt paralyzed. I thought I had been struck blind and moaned in anguish. And then something vanquished the darkness. What I saw next made me wish the darkness would return.

It was every nightmare I had ever had times a factor of a thousand. From my earliest memories to seemingly the last sliver of my life, every painful fragment of memory I had ever experienced exploded onto my consciousness with the force of a million colossals crashing on top of me.

And then, even surpassing those horrible visions, were images I had never seen before, but which now flooded my brain.

Everyone I had ever loved — my parents, Virgil, Calliope, John — was running away from me. When I tried to go after them, a serpent came out of a dark hole in the dirt, wrapped itself around my ankle and started pulling me down. I cried out for help, but my family simply ran away from me faster. In another nightmare, Krone was lifting the ax high above his head and when it came down, two heads rolled off the block — mine and Delph’s. Our heads lay there staring lifelessly at each other.

And then I was reaching out to my parents on their cots in the Care. But in my hand was an open flame. When I touched them with it, they burst afire. They screamed at me, tried to escape, but couldn’t. Their flesh turned black and then fell away until there was only bone left and then that too vanished. Their screams, however, continued to ring in my ears, each burst like a knife between my ribs.

The last image was somehow the worst. I was on a flying steed, dressed all in chain mail, like the female I had seen. I was fighting. I had a sword in one hand and the Elemental in the other. Bodies were falling all around me as I cleaved and thrust my way through a horde of attackers. And then it hit me directly in the chest. The light entered me in the front and left me in the back. The pain was unimaginable.

I watched myself look down at the wound. The mortal wound. The next instant I was falling through the sky, down … down … down….

I tried to scream but nothing came out. I felt the creature on my back tightening its grip around me. I swung my arms back and tried to hit it. But in hitting it, I was only striking myself. I had thought fighting in the Duelum was hard. I would take a thousand Nons trying to crush my skull over this. This was so awful, all I wanted was to die.

The thing was gripping me so tightly I could barely breathe. My chest was rising and falling in increasingly constricted space. I knew at some point soon it would have no more latitude to operate. But I didn’t care. Right now I had no desire to live. The nightmarish images became darker, smaller, but their potency somehow grew immeasurably with each passing moment. I was being dissolved from the inside out.

I’m not sure how it came to me because I don’t really remember doing it. My hand reached down to my waist. My breathing was so labored now that any upcoming breath could very well be my last. I managed, despite the crushing weight I felt, to slip Destin free.

I gripped it in both my hands, which of course were now part of the creature’s hands. I flipped it upward over my head and felt it settle around the creature’s neck. I crossed my arms as fiercely as I could. This, in turn, made Destin replicate that movement. It encircled the creature’s neck and then tightened. If this didn’t work, I was truly lost. I pulled with all the strength I had left.

I heard a gurgle, the first sound the creature had made since it stopped crying.

The next thing I saw struck me first with horror and then with relief as the chain grew lax. The thing’s head hit the floor in front of me, bounced once and then lay still. Slowly, an inch and a sliver at a time, I felt the grip of the thing begin to ease and then fall away. In three excruciatingly long slivers, it was gone. My mind cleared. I rose on wobbly legs.

I didn’t want to because I thought it might have turned back into John, but I finally had to stare down at the evil thing that had very nearly killed me. It was turning black and was shriveling up before my eyes.

I turned and ran as fast as I could. Only this time I knew where I was going because the darkness inside wherever I was had started to lift. It was as though the evil dead thing was absorbing all the blackness in here into itself, allowing the light to shine once more.

When I saw my reflection just up ahead, I sped up and leapt, my hands outstretched. I flew through the looking glass, tumbled to the hard marble floor, and was up in an instant. I turned to stare back at the looking glasses. All of them were starting to fade. In less than a sliver, they disappeared. But I had glimpsed once more the intricate designs on the wooden frames. And this time, I remembered where I had seen them before.

The Adder Stone safely in my pocket, I raced down the steps and out through the side door of Stacks. Freed from the place, I soared into the air, Destin in fine working order after being freed from the glass. I had to get back to hospital as fast as possible.