The Slanted Worlds

11

Of course my marriage was a failure from the start. Moll saw to that. Moll with her cheeky urchin ways, with the run of the house, with her increasingly bold plans to find us a bracelet, to travel to the future, to find Jake Wilde.

I had also grown far too fond of the little scrap.

When my wife said, “She goes or I do,” I’m afraid it was not a difficult decision.

Diary of John Harcourt Symmes

SARAH SAT ON the end of her bed and stared at the open pages of the notebook.

Downstairs, in the sleeping house, a clock pinged three silver chimes.

With the black pen she had scrawled:

What’s happening there? Tell me!

No answer. The writing faded before her eyes.

This was the third time tonight she had begged him, increasingly despairing, and she knew he had read it. Far off in time, surrounded by his empire, powered by the ferocious energy of the mirror, Janus was tormenting her with silence.

She flung down the pen and went to the window. It was a wild, windy night. Since Summer’s furious tempest, the weather had been a constant gale; now the lawns of Wintercombe were silvered by a moon half hidden in streaming cloud.

Tugging the dressing gown around her, she hugged herself, staring out stonily at the storm. Janus was the future, but for everyone else, he didn’t exist yet. For Jake, Wharton, even for Venn, that world was only a possibility, something that didn’t need to be thought about. For her it was real.

Her past.

Her life.

Her parents.

It was as real as standing here, or that Blitz-shattered London Jake had told them about around the fire last night, his hands, still red from the manacles, tight around the battered mug of coffee.

She thought about this house in that century to come, its ruined state, the collapsing wings, the charred timbers of the fire-blackened roof. That was Wintercombe too.

And in that time the mirror was consuming the world.

She turned, alert.

From the corridor outside had come the very faintest of creaks. Holding her breath, still as a shadow, she listened.

Someone was padding, very quietly, past her room.

She crossed barefoot to the door, opened it, and put her eye to the slit.

It was Jake. He was wearing his gray striped dressing gown and had the monkey on his shoulder. As she watched he stopped at Wharton’s door, tapped on it softly, and slid in.

She didn’t hesitate. Deep inside her mind was the switch that would make her invisible. Janus’s gift, that she hated to use. But now she let it operate, felt its warm itch flare in her skin.

She slipped out quietly.

Wharton’s bedroom was the last in the corridor, near the servants’ stairs down to the kitchen. Crossing the landing, under the owl-faced grandfather clock, she felt a cool draft from the dark spaces below move against her bare legs.

The bedroom door was not quite closed. Voices murmured inside, but even with her ear pressed against the gap she couldn’t hear what they were saying, so she edged it wider, turned sideways, and slipped in.

Wharton was sitting up in bed looking bleary. “For God’s sake Jake, can’t it wait . . .”

“I can’t sleep! I have to talk to someone.”

“Tomorrow . . .”

“No, now!” He dumped the monkey irritably; it jumped into an open drawer of the tallboy and began to rummage through Wharton’s carefully matched socks.

“Oh stop that,” the big man growled.

Jake was a shadow on the window seat, crumpled and morose. Wharton clicked on the reading lamp and looked around sleepily. As his glance swept across her, Sarah flinched, but it was clear he saw nothing.

So she slid down and squatted by the door.

Wharton said, into the silence, “Must have been tough for you in that place. Locked up. Handcuffed!”

“It’s not that. I could handle that.”

Yeah right. Wharton allowed the thought to yawn through him. “Don’t be so ridiculously heroic, Jake. You went through a terrible experience and it would have been hell, not knowing if you’d ever get back. There’s no shame in that. I tell you, even the brief half hour I spent in . . . the mirror . . . shook me to the core.”

He could hardly believe it even now, the alien, oddly wrong smell of the wartime past, the disconcerting loss of certainty there, the utter disbelief that had almost frozen him.

Jake snorted. “Where did Venn get the uniforms?”

“Piers produced them. I don’t know where he keeps all that stuff.”

“Piers has a lot of abilities we don’t know about.” Jake’s whisper was low and grim. “It’s clear he’s some sort of Shee himself.” He stood up and came toward Sarah so abruptly she knelt up, alarmed, but he just closed the door firmly and turned the key in the lock. Then he went back and sat on the bed.

“There’s something I didn’t tell the others. About the children.”

“What children?”

“Three kids. Three identical boys. They looked about ten. They were in the Underground station where I slept. There was something really weird about them. They knew my name.”

Wharton sat up wearily, starting to pay attention. “Go on.”

“They said . . . each of them said . . . a sort of prophecy. As if they could see the future. And then just before you lot turned up, I saw them again on the bomb site. This time I asked them who they were.”

“What does it . . .”

“They said We are Janus.”

Wharton’s eyes widened. Then his gaze flickered to the door, as if somehow he had sensed the jolt of shock that had made Sarah clamp spread fingers over her mouth.

“Janus? But Venn killed Janus . . .”

“Venn killed a replicant of him. But in that weird future Sarah never talks about, Janus controls the mirror. So who knows what he can do with it? Or how many copies of himself he can make? Anyway, that’s what the kid said. And then he . . . it . . . laughed.”

Wharton shook his head. He opened the bedside drawer and took out a jumbo bar of fruit and nut chocolate, and snapped some off. Cramming it into his mouth, he muttered, “Great. As if we didn’t have enough problems.”

At the rustle of the silver paper Horatio dropped like a stone from the chandelier in a shower of dust; he sat on Wharton’s stomach, huge eyes wide.

“Get that thing off me.”

Jake took the chocolate, pulled out a nut, and gave it to the marmoset.

“Hey! My secret stash!”

“It makes you fat, George.” Jake snapped off a generous chunk for himself. “It’s for your own good.”

They ate in silence. Sarah decided to try and get closer. She reached out a hand.

Horatio’s eyes went straight to her.

She froze.

The monkey chattered and shrieked.

“That’s all, greedy.” Wharton threw it a raisin. “Okay, so these Janus-children told you things. What things?”

Jake pulled the bedside chair over and sat in it, feet on the patterned quilt. “The first one said: The Black Fox will release you.”

“And what sort of nonsense—”

“Not nonsense.” He took the greasy key fob out of his pocket and threw it on the pillow. “That was Allenby’s. The key unlocks the handcuffs. The prophecy came true.”

Wharton, after a moment, picked up the keys. He ran a thick thumb over the worn emblem. “Coincidence.”

“No.” Jake stared straight through Sarah, unseeing. “And if the first one came true, the others might as well.”

Wharton drew his knees up under the bedclothes. “And they were?”

“The second kid said: Find the Man with the Eyes of a Crow. And the third: The Broken Emperor lies in the Box of Red Brocade.”

Wharton sucked a nut. “Sounds like . . . Hang on. The Broken Emperor. Do you think that might be something to do with the Zeus coin? The broken half of it Sarah gave Summer? That can . . . you know . . .”

Jake stared. “You know about that?”

“Venn told me.”

Sarah put her hand carefully down on the worn carpet and inched forward. A board creaked under her weight.

“Turns out leaving it with the Shee was such a bloody stupid thing to do!” Wharton stared gloomily. “If Summer finds out the mended coin has the power to destroy the mirror, then BOOM. End of all of us.”

Sarah’s heart gave a great jolt in her chest She wanted to cry out with the shock.

“Keep quiet. It’s not safe to talk about.” Jake got up and paced to the window, staring out at the fleeting moon over the Wood. He had intended to tell Wharton all of it—the children’s stupid rhyme that kept going around and around in his head.

But something made him keep that treacherous offer locked tight inside him. He folded his arms, annoyed, staring at his own reflection, the rain running down his glassy face. “So what does it all mean?”

“Search me. Maybe we should tell Venn . . .”

“Not yet.” Jake turned. “Horry. Come back here.”

The marmoset had skittered to the door. It was scrabbling at something nearby, on the floor, and then with a small spiteful grin it screeched, loud in the still house.

Jake dived over and snatched it up. “Shut up! You’ll wake the place.”

Then he noticed the door was unlocked.

“Hell!” Very quietly, he opened it and peered out. The corridor was a long silhouette of silent shadow.

He stepped back. “I was sure I locked that.”

Wharton lay down and rolled over. “Place is the draftiest hole in the world,” he muttered. “Go to bed now. Talk tomorrow.”

For a moment Jake was still. Then he went out, and padded silently down the corridor. Above him the recesses of the ceiling showed faint watery reflections of the rain, pattering loudly down the drainpipes outside.

At Sarah’s room he paused. It was unlikely, but . . . Very carefully he tried the handle.

It wasn’t locked.

He opened it and peered in.

She was lying in a curled huddle, her blond hair on the pillow. Moonlight caught her closed eyes, her easy breathing.

For a while he stood still there, holding Horatio, watching her. He was tempted to say something, to stand there and say, Was it you? Were you listening? But then tiredness came over him, and a sort of sadness, as if he didn’t even want to know, and he backed out and closed the door with the softest of clicks.

Sarah did not open her eyes.

She lay in her curl of bedclothes and listened to the thud of her heart, the drag of her breath. Her hands and feet were numb with cold, and so was her mind. All she could think of was one phrase.

The coin has the power to destroy the mirror.

What a fool Janus must think her.

What a fool she was!

Her hand clenched tight under the sheets.

At least now she knew exactly what she had to do.

And who her only ally would be.