Mirror Sight (9 page)

She stepped boldly into the library, but he was nowhere to be seen. She had observed him entering the library, hadn’t she? Here was his taper as proof. Vanishing was usually
her
trick and the absurdity made her want to chuckle, but she swallowed it back.

She hid herself behind a big leather armchair in a dark corner to see if Professor Josston reappeared, but she’d barely gotten herself situated when she heard what must be the house’s front door opening and closing. She’d made a serious miscalculation about the amount of night time activity in the house.

She dared not leave her hiding spot, and was glad she hadn’t when someone entered the library. She peered around the chair, and in the dim light took in the wide shoulders and serious expression of Mr. Cade Harlowe, his face etched in shadows. He glanced over his shoulder as if to ensure he had not been followed, then did something very curious. He stepped over to one of the bookcases and reached up to a dragon sculpture on one of the shelves. He twisted its tail. This was followed by a distinct
snick.
He
then pushed the bookcase, and it swung open silently on well-greased hinges and tracks. He stepped through the opening and the bookcase moved smoothly back into place leaving no evidence of his passing except for a stray wisp of air current. Now she knew how the professor had vanished. A hidden room or corridor behind the bookcase.

Just what were he and his student up to?

She smiled. There was only one way to find out.

K
arigan allowed several minutes to pass before she left her concealment. She made right for the dragon sculpture, its bronze surface aged to a dark patina. It crouched with wings partially unfurled and sinuous neck curving so that it seemed to gaze directly at her with shadowed eyes, almost daring her to touch it.

She took a deep breath, reached for the tail, and turned it as she’d seen Cade Harlowe do. The
snick
made her jump. It sounded so much louder when she did it that she feared it would awaken the entire household and bring Mirriam running. It did not, but she understood Cade Harlowe’s impulse to check over his shoulder.

A gentle push of the bookcase was all it took to swing it open. The space beyond was dimly lit with a wall lamp, but she took her taper with her just in case and passed through the opening into a cupboard of a space just large enough for the bookcase to move and for her to stand in. When the bookcase swept closed behind her, her heart pounded—it was difficult to breathe—too like the sarcophagus in which she’d so recently been sealed.

She steadied herself with deep inhalations. There was no lack of air, just nerves too tautly strung in this tiny, closed space. How would she get back out? She saw no mechanism for unlocking the bookcase. She shrugged, telling herself she was going forward, anyway, not retreating, and the way forward was clear, a door outlined by the lamplight.

She lifted the latch and opened it, cool air exhaling into the little room. The lamp sketched out stone steps descending into blackness. Three unlit tapers sat on the top step, but she bypassed them and ignited hers. Closing the door behind her, she began a spiraling journey downward.

She plunged down and down on rough cut stone steps, the air growing increasingly damp. She felt she must surpass even the house’s foundation before she reached the bottom, her bad leg quivering from the strain of bearing her own weight with each step down.

In a small chamber at the bottom she found another door, this one much older-looking and ironbound, yet when she tried it, it opened as easily as the others with no groan of ancient hinges. Hoping she’d finally found where the professor and Cade Harlowe had snuck away to, she stepped boldly across the threshold into a dark space dense with silence of which she could make no sense.

She brightened her taper, and even then the scene mystified her. The path before her was like a cobblestone street, and along its sides were dusty shop fronts, hitching posts, troughs. Rubble filled the spaces between and behind the buildings. Hefty beams and brick and masonry arches supported the earthen ceiling above.

“Gods,” she murmured, her voice clamorous in the silent world.

Mill City must have been built right over the remains of this old city, she thought, or at least part of it. These stone and timber structures were more like what she was accustomed to in her own time than the brick of Mill City. She limped over to one shop front, her slippers raising puffs of dust, and used the tail end of her shawl to rub grime from the rippled glass. Her light revealed little of the interior but the rough plank floor riddled with debris and a table with a chair pulled slightly away as if its occupant might return at any moment. A plate and tankard draped in cobwebs also waited.

Karigan shivered and backed away. A sign hung askew from one hook over the door, drawing her eye. The sign of the Cock and Hen.

The Cock and . . . ? No!
She almost dropped her taper. This could not be possible. The Cock and Hen was in the lower quarter of Sacor City. But there could be no mistake—this was
the
Cock and Hen, a disreputable inn in a rough neighborhood that nevertheless brewed the finest darkest ale in the city. She knew the sign—and the ale—well, and now she began to recognize the rest of the exterior, even as out of place as it looked underground.

Mill City had been built on top of Sacor City, or at least part of it. That was the only conclusion she could come to. The street she now stood on was the Winding Way. The revelation that her city lay buried beneath the foundations of another sent her reeling. She sat on the edge of a trough, oblivious to the dirt smudging her nightgown. “I can’t be seeing this.” Passing her hand over her eyes did nothing to change the scene before her.

Was all of Sacor City buried? How had this come to pass? And when? She had to keep reminding herself she was in the future, but she could not draw herself away from the enormity of it, the sense of loss. Her time, her world, was hidden, literally buried. She shook her head and released a rattling breath.

The only one who could explain it to her was down here somewhere in this strange, but familiar, muted world, and now she was more eager than ever to find him. The way was not difficult, for footprints over the dirty, dusty cobblestones had made a clear path she could follow.

She passed buildings she recognized, though sometimes she had to think about which one was which, because of their new setting and the damage to otherwise familiar facades. There was the harness shop that made the special lightweight saddles of the Green Riders. It was next to a blacksmith’s shop. She peered through the cracked window and spotted an anvil and forge still intact. If ghosts wished to visit her, she thought, this was the appropriate time and place, but not one so much as whispered past her ear or fluttered among the ruins.

More buildings were crushed beneath rubble, actually cutting off the Winding Way. The footprints veered off to a gaping doorway. There was not much inside the building to suggest what it had once been, but some broken shards of pottery littered the floor. Karigan racked her brain but could not remember.

Plain wooden stairs ascended to an upper level. They were not old, these stairs, but of a more recent construction and covered with dirty footprints. She followed them, climbing into an upper story and landing in a room that could have once been a bed chamber. She discovered another set of stairs that led into the attic. Up she went again and, once in the attic, discovered steep, narrow stairs that rose through a square cut in the roof, through which faint light trickled.

She gathered herself and climbed again, clutching a rope that served as a handrail, and rose through the roof, the roof of the old city, as she thought of it, and for several lengths through a vertical shaft of stone and rubble braced with cross beams. Eventually she emerged into a long chamber of bricks with barrel-arched ceilings. The room smelled dank, of wet stone. Her light fell across hulking metal contraptions that shone with a dull green gleam, rust eating painted surfaces. They’d valves and levers and gears, and she had no idea what they were supposed to be used for.

The faint light she’d seen had not originated here but spilled down the shaft of a stairwell behind her.
Got to keep going.
She entered the stairwell, took a deep breath, and climbed again, her feet ringing dully on wrought iron steps, the handrail clammy to her touch. When she spiraled up to the top of the first flight, she found a lamp at low glow and a door hanging open. She stepped out onto a wooden floor splotched with dark stains, the air thick with dust and a metallic, oily tang.

Even at full brightness, her taper could not begin to illuminate the vast space. She couldn’t tell how far the long room extended, but support beams marched down its length like lines of soldiers before vanishing into the dark. Shafts were attached to the ceiling, and wide belts of looping leather dangling down from pulleys swayed in subtle air currents like beckoning nooses. She shuddered.

Deeper in the room, her light glinted on square-framed skeletons of steel heaped in a jumble of parts: rollers embedded with fine metal tines, toothy beveled gears the size of cart wheels, rods and pipes and chains, and many other unidentifiable pieces. She could not fathom their purpose or how they might all fit together—an impossible puzzle. The building groaned and complained with settling noises, and its listless air currents stirred loose tendrils of her hair.

To Karigan it was as if the building echoed the energy, activity that it must have once known; that something of it remained captured here, restless, contained by boarded up windows and disuse.

She shuddered again and backed into the stairwell. No one was in that darkened room of derelict mechanicals. More light shone from above, so she climbed up the spiraling stairs yet one more level, and when she stepped through the door into the dazzling light, she stood blinking some time before her eyes adjusted. When they did, she could see the actual proportions of the room. It was longer than even the king’s throne room, and wider, too.

Chandeliers, half a dozen of them, hung down the center of the room between whatever shafts were still attached to the ceiling. The floor, unlike the rough one below, shone to a high polish, and it was almost like standing in a ballroom, though the battered support beams and brick walls were clues to the room’s more utilitarian past. The windows were not simply boarded up, but were hung with heavy velvet draperies. Lamp sconces provided additional light.

She was not alone.

About halfway down the room and to the left, Cade Harlowe, stripped down to his trousers and quite unaware of her, punched at a heavy oblong bag hanging from the ceiling, the sweat gleaming on his muscles. The wall near him held racks of swords, pikes, staffs, and other weapons. Weights were lined up along the wall, as well.

Standing near him was the professor, watching his student as critically as any arms master, still dressed in his fancy attire. He noticed Karigan first, his gaze alighting on her. Then Cade Harlowe paused what he was doing and followed the professor’s gaze. The three of them stood frozen like that for a long time, just staring at one another, then the professor broke the spell by striding toward her with his arms outstretched.

“How very good to see you up and about, my dear,” he said, his voice ringing out across the large space. “I see your curiosity finally got the better of you.”

K
arigan waited as the professor crossed the long space between them, followed by Cade Harlowe, who grabbed a towel along the way to mop his face. Would she get any answers from them, including one to explain what this building was all about? Or would her “uncle” continue to play the mysterious professor and try to put her off. When they reached her, he was all smiles beneath his mustache, but Cade Harlowe’s expression was one of suspicion, which must, she thought, match her own.

“I told you she would come looking sooner or later, didn’t I, Cade?”

“Yes, Professor.” Cade’s tone was bland.

“And I would bet all my sweet, old auntie’s finest gems—she had seven husbands, you know—that our young lady is the one who caused the disarray in my office tonight.”

Karigan chose not to respond one way or the other.

“Well, I suppose it was not unexpected,” the professor said as if to himself.

She wondered if he meant the shambles of his office or her causing it.

The professor came back to himself, his gaze turning to one of concern. “I’d hazard you’ve had a tiring journey to find us, my dear. Shall we retire to someplace more comfortable?” He extended his arm.

Her leg
was
sore after all the stairs. Cade relieved her of her taper, and she took the professor’s arm. The professor walked slowly to accommodate her limp, and she was grateful to be able to lean on him.

“How do you like my little sanctuary?” he asked, waving his arm at their surroundings.

“It’s . . . it’s not little—it’s huge! What is this place?”

“It is what remains of the original Josston Mills complex, number four,” he replied. His smile faltered slightly. “Five floors of industry in this one building alone. This floor was once the spinning room.”

Karigan tried to imagine how many spinners and spinning wheels it would take to fill the place but found she couldn’t quite. The professor continued to smile down at her as if he guessed just what she was thinking. She shook her head.

“Nowadays, it is believed this building is but a shell I occasionally use for storage.”

“Is it?”

“I do use it for storage,” he replied, “though it is not precisely a shell.”

As they crossed the great length of the room, her wonder grew. The far end appeared to be an opulent sitting area and library with stout furniture upholstered in rich leather. The wood of furnishings and shelves was dark, burnished with brass fittings. An old Durnesian carpet covered the floor. It was not old in that it looked worn or faded, but that its dyed weavings were of a texture and deepened tint that suggested age. Only the most masterfully made Durnesian carpets aged so well. It also featured the “homestead pattern” that had belonged to a clan of the most revered of makers.

A chipped and hairlined marble sculpture of the god Aeryc cradling the crescent moon stood beside a handsome desk. At first she took the sculpture for granted because she was used to seeing such iconography in her own Sacoridia, but then it occurred to her she’d heard no reference to Aeryc or Aeryon or any other gods since her arrival in this time. She remembered Mornhavon the Black and his Arcosians had worshipped only one god and thought the Sacoridians heathens for supporting an entire pantheon.

As if one god could take care of an entire world’s needs,
she thought with derision.

Did Mornhavon require his empire’s citizens to worship the one god, or did he allow them to choose? She couldn’t imagine he would allow choice in religion or in any other matter of importance.

She released the professor’s arm and limped to the shelves which rose from floor to ceiling, with a rolling ladder to reach the uppermost heights. Unlike the library in the house, she found some titles she recognized, such as
Lint’s Wordage
and
The Journeys of Gilan Wylloland,
the latter an old favorite of hers. She pulled down another book,
The Sealender Legacy,
and found the book largely charred. In fact most of the books she checked were damaged and had the look of age upon them. Unlike the carpet she stood on, they had not done well through time, though it looked like someone had taken care to clean and mend them as much as was feasible.

These were all Sacoridian titles, at least as far as she could see, including its history and fictional works. She even spotted several volumes of census reports. She turned around trying to take it all in—the extensive library of damaged books, the huge mill building, the Durnesian carpet, and a professor in formal evening attire.

“Ah,” Professor Josston said. “Here is Cade with some tea.”

The professor had allowed her time to try and absorb it all, but now Cade strode toward them bearing a silver tray service from the opposite corner where a small kitchen was set up with a stove, cupboards, and table. He’d since put on a white shirt and waistcoat, but he still wasn’t quite up to gentlemanly standards with his sleeves rolled up and his collarless shirt unbuttoned at his throat. He set the tray down on a low table and stepped back.

“Shall we sit?” the professor asked. He gestured at a chair and Karigan sat, glad to get off her leg.

“You, too, Cade.”

The younger man’s arms were folded across his chest, and he opened his mouth as if to protest, but the professor cut him off.

“Sit.”

Cade sat. He did not look very happy. He continued to look unhappy while the professor served tea and poppy seed muffins. Karigan thought it an odd time for tea, as she reckoned it must be past the midnight hour, but she welcomed it nonetheless. Tea made everything better.

The professor seemed to agree. “Nothing like tea,” he said, “when in unfamiliar or confusing circumstances, eh?”

He did not sit behind the big desk, which, Karigan noted, was immaculate. There were no piles or stacks or mess here. Everything was neatly arranged. Instead, he sat with them around the small table and its tea service.

“Ah, yes,” he said, “tea warms the spirit, does it not?”

She and Cade nodded.

“I would guess, my dear, you have many questions. But first, I need you to tell Cade your name—the name you gave me. Not the one
I
gave you.”

Karigan narrowed her eyebrows. “Why? You believe I’m mad.”

“It was the only rational explanation I could accept at the time.”

“But now you believe that I am who I said I am?”

“I believe that I do believe so,” the professor replied. “I do not know how it is possible, or why you’ve come to be here, but the evidence supports your . . . assertion. I told Cade who I believe you to be, but I’d like him to hear it from you.”

Karigan glanced at the glowering Cade, now unsure if she wanted them to believe her, to know her true identity. Still the professor had gone to some lengths to protect her.

“I am Karigan G’ladheon,” she said, challenging Cade with her gaze.

“
Rider Sir
Karigan G’ladheon,” the professor added.

Cade lowered his cup, slowly and with control, until it settled gently onto its saucer with a soft
clink,
as though he was suppressing an outburst of denial.

“It cannot be true.” He swept his hand through his hair. “It is not possible. You can’t make me believe that a historical person is sitting in this room
now.”
It did not sound like the first time they’d had this particular discussion.

“Like I said,” the professor replied, “I don’t know how it’s possible that someone from so long ago could be here now, living and breathing among us, but the evidence . . . from her clothing to the brooch she wore. The textiles were of a time when cloth was hand-woven.”

Early on in this world, Karigan had noticed the extremely fine, almost perfect weave of her nightgown and bed clothes. Not even the best textiles her father traded in were so intricately woven. She had wondered how it was accomplished, and now the professor implied it was not by hand.

“The details were right,” the professor said, his gaze settling on Karigan. “The dye of the green, the embroidered gold winged horse on coat and shirtsleeve. But Cade asks a legitimate question.
How
did you get here to this time? In our first conversation, you mentioned something about a mask bringing you forward. Can you explain this?” Both men sat there staring hard at her, waiting.

“I—I don’t know exactly how or why it happened,” she replied. “We were in Blackveil and—”

The professor blanched. Cade raised an eyebrow, his large hands gripping the armrests of his chair until Karigan thought he’d puncture the leather.

“What did I say?” Karigan asked.

“Blackveil,” the professor murmured. “It is not spoken of. We are unaccustomed to hearing it named.”

Karigan sighed. Here they go again, she thought, with the secret histories versus “true history.”

“We did not mean to interrupt, my dear,” the professor said. “Please continue.”

She did and found herself explaining how she and a party of Sacoridians and Eletians crossed the D’Yer Wall into Blackveil to observe the status of the forest after a thousand years of being closed off from the rest of the world and subject to the influence of Mornhavon the Black. Eventually they found themselves at the forest’s heart, in the deserted Castle Argenthyne, legendary bastion of the Eletians who were conquered by Mornhavon long ago. She did not speak in great detail of the trials she and her companions endured, for it would require more than one night in the telling, but she told enough that Cade’s and the professor’s expressions were rapt and suffused with amazement.

When she reached the part about finding the looking mask in the nexus of Castle Argenthyne, she said, “It was a true object of magic. Beyond magic even.” A thing of the gods, she thought with a shudder, remembering how she’d raised the mask to her face and looked through it and saw the strands of time and the heavens intersecting, diverging; weaving and unraveling. She’d held a million, million possibilities in her hands, the power to manipulate the fabric of the universe. She’d rejected that power and smashed the mask on the floor to prevent Mornhavon the Black from seizing it, and the next thing she knew, she found herself trapped in a sarcophagus at a circus, from which she escaped into Mill City and Cade Harlowe’s hands.

“So that’s why you asked me if I was one of those clowns,” Cade said.

“And it enlightens me as to how Rudman Hadley ended up with a live body in his sarcophagus,” the professor mused, “which he accused me of planting to discredit him, by the way.”

The two men quieted, seemed lost in their own reveries, perhaps trying to digest Karigan’s story. She plucked nervously at the hem of her nightgown awaiting a more definitive response.

Cade was the first to react. He turned to the professor and said, “You can’t possibly believe all this.”

“Part of me finds it extremely difficult,” the professor admitted. “But the past was filled with wonders that defy rational explanation.”

Cade snorted. “And you believe this thing about the mask?”

“Looking masks are part of our heritage, Cade, perhaps trivialized in the latter part of Sacoridia’s history but derived from ancient rituals when magic was as rife in the land as water in the ocean. Who is to say that true looking masks did not hold power? And as you may recall, we found all those broken pieces of a mirror embedded in our young lady’s flesh when she arrived.”

“Which could have been just an ordinary broken mirror,” Cade said. “It’s not proof.”

Karigan’s heart pounded, hearing of the shards. Had they saved any? If so, would any power remain in them? Then she dismissed the idea, remembering that magic did not seem to work in this time.

“Perhaps not,” the professor said, “but like the uniform, the brooch, it all supports what she says. I’m pretty good at detecting liars, and I don’t think she has fabricated this story. There are too many precise details, and she did not bungle them, trip herself up, as a liar would have.”

Karigan was not sure it mattered if they believed her—she would find some means of reaching home one way or the other. But if they did believe her, it would ease the way for her to find out the information she wished to take back to King Zachary about the defeat of Sacoridia and the rise of the empire. On inspiration, she said, “Test me.”

“What?” Cade asked.

“Test me. Ask me questions that only someone who lived during my time, or scholars like yourselves, would know.”

Cade wasted no time and jumped in with the first question. “What is the Order of Black Shields?”

“Easy. They guard the royal family, living and dead. Usually we just call them Weapons.”

Cade sat back, rubbing his chin. “Perhaps easy for someone who studies history, but not generally known. What was the succession of Clan Hillander on the throne?”

Karigan started with the Clan Wars and Smidhe Hillander, down the line of succession to King Zachary. Thus began an exhaustive period of eager questioning by both Cade and the professor about Sacoridian history, as well as facets of everyday life. Early on, they tried to slip her up with false or very specific questions. She could not answer all they asked.