The Slanted Worlds

23

Once—before he met his wife—I asked Venn what he loved best in the world.

“Freedom,” he said.

After Katra Simba, after he was married, I asked him again.

He looked away into the distance. “Leave me alone, Jean,” he said. “You know the answer now.”

Jean Lamartine, The Strange Life of Oberon Venn

“DON’T HURT HIM. He’s my son.”

Jake felt il signore’s surprise jerk the knife tighter. He tried not to breathe.

“Your son, dottore?”

“Yes. Come from England, as he says.”

“I do not believe the lies of devils. I saw the girl vanish. Through that black portal of hell.” The warlord backed, dragging Jake away from the mirror. It leaned like a slant of darkness in the hot room. Flies buzzed in the window.

“Listen to me.” David took a step forward. “You know me. I’ve served you now for four years. I delivered your children. I bound your wound after the battle with the Sienese and nursed you through the fever it brought. I saved your life.”

No answer. The grip just as tight. Jake made himself hold still. Sweat soaked his forehead. He tried not even to swallow.

“If that’s not enough, I have something to give in exchange,” David said. “Something of great power. Only you should know of it.”

In the silence a cry rose from far off in the city. A woman’s scream of grief. It rang in the sweltering, shuttered streets. In the pitiless blue sky.

“Do you hear that?” David said softly. “Signore, that is the city crying out to you. That is the cry of death itself.”

For a second, nothing. Then the warlord turned his hawk profile on the guards. “You men. Outside! Allow no one in unless I call.”

They obeyed him without question, though one glanced back, catching Jake’s eye with a murderous glare. The door latch clattered behind them.

“Speak.” Il signore turned the knife against Jake’s neck. “And be quick.”

David said, “Give me my son and let us both go in safety. We’re no threat to you. In return I will give you this.” He took the vial from the folds of his robe and held it up. The amber substance it held gleamed in the slant of sunlight.

“Some sorcery.”

“Not sorcery. This is medicine. It may cure the plague. There is enough in this flask for you and your family, should you need it. No more exists, not in the whole of this world.”

In the obsidian mirror Jake watched the warlord’s face. Perhaps the dark glass magnified emotion, revealed its intensity, because he was sure he saw the man’s eyes narrow with greed.

Jake tried to pull away. The knife blade, sharp as a razor, jabbed into his skin.

“How can I believe this?” Il signore’s voice was a rasp of doubt.

“You have no choice.”

“No? I could have your son thrown into a pest-pit. Infected with the plague. To see if you can cure him.”

“Take him and I smash the vial to pieces. Shall I do that now?” David held it high. “Because hear this, signore. I am no demon, but a man who has scryed into the future of the world, and I know about this pestilence. You think it’s bad now. It hasn’t even begun. It will sweep Europe like a black rain. Men will die in the fields, at the table, men will drop dead in the counting-house and the church. Their bodies will lie unburied, heaped in the streets, and even the rats won’t touch them. Two out of every three will die, kings and princes and dukes as well as peasants. Your citizens will be decimated, your army reduced to a clatter of empty armor. Trust me, signore. This is horror. This is the truth.”

His urgency hung in the air like the murmured echo of his words in the high ceiling.

Sweat ran in Jake’s eyes.

Il signore did not move. Jake felt the heat of the man’s body in the strangling arm as he said, “Go where?”

“Into the mirror. Back to the place we came from.”

“To England? Or to hell?”

“This is hell. Seeing our children die is hell. Unless we help each other. I’m not offering you damnation, Piero. I’m offering you life.”

The vial caught the sunlight. It gleamed red now, red as blood, a warm comfort in the dim room.

The warlord moved, in sudden, powerful, decision. He forced Jake forward. “Very well. Put the flask on the floor and step back from it.”

“No.” David held the man with a steady gaze. “First you must release Jake.”

They faced each other. Pinned between them Jake felt the struggle of their mutual defiance. He dared not move now, because the knife was a razor’s edge between life and a sudden, slashing death. He kept his eyes on his father. His belief was fierce and blind.

Suddenly he was shoved forward, a violent release that sent him sprawling against David. With the lithe speed of a snake, il signore snatched the vial and thrust it deep in his own robes and without even pausing lifted the knife and stabbed.

“Demon!” he snarled.

Caught in astonishment, David froze. The blade whistled; Jake hauled him aside with a great yell and grabbed the warlord’s arm.

He was flung away like a rag. Something red and scorching ripped down his shoulder, his side, then David had hold of him and they were falling backward, back and back, into the exploding, enfolding embrace of the mirror, and the last thing he saw before darkness was the warlord on his hands and knees, staring dumbfounded at the opening in the wall of his world.

Rebecca burst out of the dark tunnel of the mirror with a scream of terror, straight into a mass of malachite-green webbing.

Crushed against her ribs, the baby screamed too.

The webbing caught her like a fly in a trap. Its mass of sticky threads bounced with the shock.

She picked herself out of it, breathless and confused. She felt as if she had been torn apart and reassembled and that all the pieces were in the wrong places.

“Maskelyne? Piers?”

The laboratory was empty. Strangely dark. Small lights winked on the monitors. Her breath smoked in the damp air. “Where are you?”

The chill silence unnerved her. She stood, turned, gasped in a deep breath. The mirror reflected her bedraggled anxiety. And where was Jake? Why hadn’t he followed?

The baby cried again. She unwrapped the small heavy bundle and uncovered a white face that contorted itself in misery.

“Sshh,” she breathed.

The Abbey seemed more silent than she had ever known it, and the lab darker. There was something else wrong, a new stench of damp and decay.

Something slithered and fell.

She turned in terror, her heart thudding.

The far wall, a dark patched surface of medieval brick, was bowing, swelling outward into the room. As she watched, a brick cracked, a patch of plaster fell off, as if some great unstoppable force was building up behind there, the whole weight of the hillside forcing its way in.

She stepped back.

Then deep in the house she heard an enormous crash.

As if a chimney had fallen.

Or a bomb.

Venn prowled the mirrored hall with tormented anxiety. “Something’s happening. Can you feel it? Something’s changing.”

Gideon, his face and hands pressed to one of the identical glass surfaces, gazed into his own green eyes. He too could sense it. A subtle distortion of space, a contraction. A breathing in.

He said, “The room’s getting smaller.”

“Smaller?”

“It’s closing in on us. Collapsing.” He could hear it now, the soft, creaking shrinkage of the chamber.

Venn turned with sudden purpose to the mirrors. “Then we smash our way out.” He tore at the carved frames, but the gilded wood fell away as if it was rotten, desiccating in his fingers.

“Try this!”

Gideon found a chair, picked it up and crashed it down. Frail wood splintered. They each snatched a chair-leg, and attacked the walls. Already the room was half the size it had been, the floor and ceiling slanting at impossible angles.

Venn smashed the nearest mirror; it starred into jagged fractures. For a moment Gideon was reminded of the crevasses out in the ice field; he leaped back as the pieces fell in great slabs at his feet.

But there was no opening. Behind the first, another identical mirror showed them their own despair.

Furious, Venn smashed that too, and found only another.

Gideon dragged him back. “That’s no use. Think! You must have some power here. The Venns are half Shee, everyone says. Summon it! Use it!”

Venn’s cold stare chilled him.

“No.”

“But—”

“If I do . . . if I start that, where will it end?” He stared at the collapsing room. “That’s what she wants, for me to give in to her, to enter the unhuman world. And it would be easy. So easy.” He took a deep breath. “You above all know that. You’ve heard their music. You went with them.”

Gideon nodded, but panic was growing in him. “I know. But if you don’t, we die here.”

“Summer would never . . .”

Gideon faced him. “Summer would kill us like flies,” he breathed.

Venn was silent. As if he made himself face the truth of that.

Gideon watched the man’s struggle with a cold compassion. “You have to,” he hissed. “The Shee all whisper about it. Ever since Oisin Venn your family have had the choice. The power is there, if you want it. Do it, Venn. Destroy her with her own gift.” His voice was fierce, he knew. His desire for vengeance on her shocked even himself.

Venn threw down the piece of wood and stood still.

Gideon waited, breathless. The room was so small now that he could reach out and touch both sides of it, as if the very cube of the world was dwindling to a point as minute as infinity.

Venn looked up.

The ceiling was a glass plane, still out of reach. He seemed to focus on it with a bitter, controlled fury. Gideon waited, fighting down panic. Glass walls nudged his arm. His own reflection pushed against him. He was replicated, hand to hand, face to face, an eternity of Gideons crowded together with his stifling terror. He would be suffocated, crushed against his own face, his hands clawing hopelessly against their glassy copies.

He tried to turn, but there was no space.

Venn shivered. He seemed thinner, paler. His fingers a little longer. His eyes bird-blue.

He had lost something of himself.

He crouched. “On my shoulders. Quickly!”

Gideon climbed, light and fleet; Venn stood, heaving him up. “Push. Push hard!”

He strained. His palms forced against the glass roof, but it was solid, hard as ice, impenetrable. For a second he understood the whole horror of being sealed in, the fear of the baby in the womb, the chick in the egg.

“Push!” Venn yelled.

The walls crushed against them.

Then, with a crack that sent Gideon’s heart leaping, the world shattered.

Water roared down. Into his yell of terror. Into his mouth and eyes.

Sarah said quietly, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Wharton was a little startled. For a moment he was not quite sure where he was. He looked around curiously at the sumptuous room, then at Summer, who smiled sweetly.

Sarah held his eye. “Good. Be careful. Please.”

She dared not say more. But if he guessed she was here for the half coin, surely he would know not to risk mentioning it. She felt the tiny half-moon of gold move against her skin, under her clothes. Now all she had to do was get it—and them—out of here.

“But where’s Venn?” Wharton turned, astonished. “And Gideon?”

“Oh, I think it only fair they have a little difficulty, don’t you?” Summer stretched her small feet languorously. She fixed Sarah with a sudden sly glance. “Because Gideon was supposed to be bringing me one of those lovely magic bracelets, and he has failed me. Again. How very disappointing.”

She sat up. “And you see, Sarah, something else is all wrong.” She stood and crossed lightly to the red box and picked it up. Wharton stared at it.

“I don’t believe you came for this. I think you came for something else.” Summer pouted. “Now, I wonder what that could be? Something so powerful you would even dare to come to my house for it?”

Sarah dared not move. She sensed Wharton edge closer.

Summer opened the box. “You, in there!”

The bird popped up and chirruped brightly.

“Stop that.” Summer extended a finger. “Listen, I know she’s taken something. What is it? Tell me at once or I’ll turn you into a cockroach and you can crawl in dung for a thousand years.”

The bird was silent. Then it looked at Sarah, a bold flicker of its beady eyes, and before it spoke, she knew that this time it would betray her.

“What do I get if I tell you?”

“Freedom. You get to fly in the greenwood.”

“And change my shape back?”

Summer shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe I could let you be a real bird.”

“A starling? And fly with the Host again?”

“Why not.”

The wooden bird considered. Then said, “A half coin of gold. On a chain around her neck.”

Sarah grabbed at the chain and leaped back. Wharton stepped between her and Summer.

Summer laughed. “That trinket! So the emperor’s face does have power. I rather thought so when I asked you for it. But it must be far, far more powerful than I thought.”

She came toward them and Wharton braced himself to stop her. But to his astonishment his body refused to move. His arms remained at his sides. Furious and terrified, he tried to yell. Nothing came out but the faintest of gasps.

Summer came up to him and stood on tiptoes to stare into his eyes. “Sorry, George,” she whispered. “It won’t last, I promise.”

He tried to squirm as she passed behind him.

Summer came to Sarah and said quietly, “When a gift is given, it should never be taken back.” She reached out lightly and took the chain from around Sarah’s neck, her touch light and cold as a spider’s.

Furious, unable to move or even access her invisibility, Sarah saw the glittering broken coin held before her eyes, the key to the mirror’s destruction dangled like a taunting toy before a child.

A terrible, wrenching anger surged in her; she cried out in her mind, a great cry of despair that seemed to well up and burst into abrupt sound as if her ears had popped. Summer stepped back, astonished, and in that single instant the tiny bird flew; it snatched the half coin from Summer’s fingers and fled with it, up and up, into the high white ceiling of the room, into the curtains, through the opened window out into the mothy night.

Sarah collapsed. Wharton gasped.

Summer screamed a shrill screech of fury and with a flurry of feathers became instantly a black hawk with yellow eyes; she flew and the room flew with her, the sofa transforming into a fallen log, the deep carpet a pile of leaves, the ceiling the crowded trees of the Wood.

And above, in the starry darkness of the sky, the tiny bird flew up and up and up, until it was lost to sight in the frosty galaxies, the endless black eternity of space.