Mirrorworld (17 page)

“Eira,” Malydwyn began – they never gave her the honorific, but that could have been because in this situation she was only first among equals – “the last time we met you told us about a plan you had to find a particular man from Earth, bring him here and somehow use him against Keithus in a manner you were incredibly vague about. We decided that you were explicitly forbidden to do this in no uncertain terms, since it was dangerous and completely unfounded.”

There was a pause.

“So how’s that working out for you?”

“Very well,” Eira lied. “We’ve had Tec working on him since he got in, and he has a few lines of inquiry he’s pursuing. When we’ve established the exact nature of Marcus’s connection to Keithus, we’ll be halfway to solving the whole problem.” This much, she actually believed, or perhaps more accurately, desperately hoped for.
Once we’ve found the son of a bitch
, she added mentally.

“So you haven’t lost him, then, as rumour reports?” Oroitz asked, with the vicious sneer of the player who is currently hundreds of points ahead of the game and believes that the hand they’re about to lay down will skyrocket them even further into the lead.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Eira replied, poker face born out of months of meetings like these. “If I’d wanted to court disaster like that, I’d have let you in on what’s been happening ages ago.”

Vicious daggers danced in Oroitz’s eyes. Of them all, he was the one Eira despised the most. The only thing he seemed to have any vested interest in was making himself look good; his reputation had taken a large blow on the day Keithus had strolled up to meet the Viaggiatori, and he was keenly interested in recovering it, usually at Eira’s expense. Not for the first time, she suppressed a regretful sigh for ‘age-first’ decree through which the council elected their new members. Oroitz might have been a keen, smart Viaggiatori once, but age and indulgence had turned his traits to the sly.

Malydwyn
tsk
ed, bringing Eira back to the moment. “Conversing about the immigrant isn’t going to get us anywhere,” the tall man said. “We went over that plan last time, and since Eira clearly has no progress to report yet, it’s time we start thinking about our other options.”

“What other options?” Eira growled. “We don’t
have
any.”

“That’s not true, my dear.” Whereas Oroitz was infuriating because he was plain mean, and Malydwyn irritating because he was so flatly logical, Eira’s dislike for Delor stemmed from how effortlessly patronising he could be. “Whilst you’ve spent the last couple of days running around in a tiz about your best friend Marcus, we’ve been looking into other options.”

“The ones that don’t exist?” Eira asked. She was regretting this meeting already.

“Eira, please. Your petulance belies your station. Listen: yesterday, a very important man arrived in Portruss, a man who could help us with our Keithus situation. He was intending to sell himself to the highest bidder, but we scooped him up before he could hit the market.”

Eira groaned, thinking of the losses to the Viaggiatori’s finances and how she would no doubt find herself being the one who had to deal with that. “Who is this magical man?”

Oroitz laughed darkly. “He’s not magical, Eira. Far from it. He’s the Assassin.”

“An assassin?”

“No,” Oroitz said, enunciating clearly, “
the
Assassin.”

Eira looked around the table at the council like they were all idiots, which is to say, she looked around. “Who is ‘
the
Assassin’?! How is a random murderer meant to help us with a rogue wiz-“

There were a lot of stories about the Assassin; over his many years of activity he had gained a reputation as a living legend. The real difficulty lay in working out which of the stories were true. To the average person in Ron’s bar, this would be tricky, as they’d trade opposing stories with whomever they were talking to about whatever impossible deeds each of them believed this mysterious character had done. About the only thing each story would have in common would be that, sooner or later, someone would end up dead.

The Viaggiatori, however, were privileged to know all about the Assassin, because he’d been gently winding them up for almost twenty years. Due to his infamy, he was even listed in the Storie. This was his entry, a footnoted aside in this history of an honourable organisation:

The Assassin.

That old rat bastard supplies us with half of the work we do as we scurry to catch up with him, and he gets stronger every damn time he jumps across. Why won’t more wizards go rogue so he can go and do something useful instead of making life difficult for us?

The idea of ‘famous last words’, Eira reflected, was by no means only an Earth concept.

“Okay,” she said aloud, “that actually makes sense. Hire the known murderer with noted magical resilience to kill the crazy wizard who is causing all of our problems. Hire the noted smuggler who spends his time working against us, when he’s not killing people.. to work with us and kill people.” She felt dizzy from the irony.

There were smug smirks from all around. Behind Oroitz, Burley was nodding emphatically. He never spoke, merely agreed with everything the others said and nothing Eira said.

“We are sending him after Keithus the day after tomorrow,” Malydwyn kindly informed her. “He asked for some time to prepare, you see.”

“Yes,” Eira said, “I do see. He’s going alone?”

“He is.”

“No,” Eira said, “he isn’t. I’m sending some of our people with him.”

There was a notable bristle from all four men. “With
respect,
dear, this is
our
venture..” Delor began.

“Shut up,” Eira snapped. “You’re sending someone who has no love lost for us to meet with someone who has no love lost for us. What if Keithus wins him over and they both come after us?”

Blessedly, they had no response. “Since I
am
still officially in charge of this organisation,” she continued icily, “I’m taking over this venture, and I’m sending some of our people with him. Officially, they will be there to back him up, and if it comes down to it, they can prevent him from going rogue. Again. Don’t argue with me, because you can’t without sounding like idiots.

“More so than usual,” she added, with a big smile.

They argued amongst themselves for a moment, Burley nodding vehemently and shaking his head in equal measure. “Agreed,” Malydwyn eventually said, turning back to her. “On the condition that, if it succeeds, you make it known that this action came about due to the actions of this council.”

“Fine, whatever,” Eira sighed, aware that if this turned out well, they’d make use of this example to further undermine her authority. In her mind, she already had an idea how to prevent this, but to do so.. it all came back to finding Marcus. In the end, though, no matter how much she might dislike these four spoons and the idea of them having power over her, this
was
a good idea, and saving the world had to be more important to her than her own reputation. If not, she was no better than them.

“How much am I going to have to do to cover for this?” she asked. “What did you offer him to work for us?”

“Oh you don’t have to worry about our accounts,” Oroitz said with a chuckle that filled Eira with dread. “We didn’t offer him money. We offered him a full pardon, and honorary membership with us. He accepted the pardon.”

There was another pause.

“
What?!”

“I said,” Marcus repeated, “I want to see an atlas and anything you have about Death.”

The young librarian continued to stare at him. Marcus leaned heavily against his staff, well aware that after twenty-four hours of muggings, drinking, sleeping on rubbish and being harangued by the dead, he wasn’t looking too hot. Luckily, he only looked half as mad as most of the wizards he has passed on the way in, all of whom appeared decidedly raggedy. There was, he’d noted, an almost apologetic air about them. Perhaps they were compensating for being the organisation that had spawned Keithus, or perhaps this was the way anyone who was capable of turning another person into a frog carried themselves, as a sort of pre-emptive karmic measure should they be forced to actually do it.

In any case, he had successfully infiltrated their inner sanctum by dint of walking up the public pathway into their tower, where, it turned out, the library took up most of the ground floor. This was quite impressive, even more so considering that Marcus was fairly sure that the tower was bigger on the inside. Sure, it was a tall building, but it wasn’t, from outside observation, particularly wide. Once he’d walked through the entrance hall, however, the building had opened up into a huge, spacious chamber, with a large stone spiral staircase meandering its way up the centre, stretching into the infinite heights. Any ceiling there might have been was obscured by a criss-cross of walkways bridging the central staircase to the rooms around the edge of the circle. To Marcus’s eye, the whole thing seemed oddly modern, like the inside of skyscraper if it had been designed by someone with spirals for eyes.

He’d put it out of his mind, wandered through the automated doors that opened into the library with a soft hum, and made his request at the front desk. The librarian he’d made it to was still staring at him. Marcus wasn’t quite sure how to react to this. “..Perhaps just the atlas to begin with?”

The young librarian descended from whatever cloud his mind had wandered off to. “Yes, yes, of course, I’ll show you the way. Regarding your, er, other request, however..”

Marcus groaned. There was an obstacle coming.

“..We don’t usually allow access of the magical books to non-wizards, you see..”

Marcus suppressed an urge to ask the young man if he really thought he didn’t look like a wizard. This was this fellow’s kingdom, the shelves his homes and the books his subjects. Annoying him wouldn’t prove as entertaining as it had with, for example, Helm, since this guy could just kick him out, and Marcus was of the opinion that he’d been kicked around long enough already in the past few days. That in mind, he decided to try a different tact.

“
Is
Death a creature of magic then?”

“Erm,” the young man said, suddenly bought up short.

“Does that mean you wizards have found a way to
cheat Death?”

“What?!”

“Death, after all, comes to us all. If that doesn’t make him public domain, what does?”

“I’m going to have to fetch the Senior Librarian,” the man said gravely. “The cartography section is that way” – he pointed – “please don’t go anywhere else in the meantime.”

A small success. Marcus wandered off into the depths of the library as the young man ran off in the other direction. He soon found what he took to be the cartography section; few other areas of the library were likely to be dominated by a large map of what Marcus vaguely recognised as the Mirrorworld, which hung from a central canvas in an open space amongst the claustrophobic shelves.

As Marcus had previously observed during his brief glimpse in the Mirrorline, the Mirrorworld appeared not entirely dissimilar in geography to Earth, albeit with a smidgen of surrealist interpretation. He found Portruss first, located along the coastline of what would have been France, the largest marker among many that dotted the continent named as Eurora, which bled straight into Ifriqiya without any such inconvenience as the Mediterranean. That body of water appeared to have been shoved off to the East, into the great circular basin that drowned central Asia. Further East, the far side of Russia appeared to have been chopped off, swapped with Australia – which had ballooned in size – and glued to Ifriqiya’s east coast. To the west, across an ocean, there lay a large landmass that could have been an amalgam of the Americas. Beyond that the water wrapped around again through a series of islands and smaller landmasses, where it met the eastern edge of the map coming around the other way and completed the picture. It was hard to not look at the map and see Earth, despite the more obvious differences.

Nonetheless, there were lots of interesting looking places. Trade routes passed from Portruss over the ocean to the west, to the aptly named Westerlands, docking at a place called Azuromicron in the north and a place called Carpa in the south. Roads also went out to the north – to the Northlands – Marcus was beginning to note a pattern – which was shaded in grey rather than green. The green itself carried on far to the south, where civilisations were scattered all across the landmass, connected by a complex map of roads and routes that formed a painted cross-hatch across Eurora.

In short, there was a lot to see. A whole world’s worth of places to visit.. and a Grim Reaper to chase him through all of them. Well, that was the real reason why he was here. He wasn’t going to run for the hills without being as well-informed as he could be. There would be a way out. If the wizards wouldn’t help, well then maybe it would be worth going back to the Viaggiatori, despite their designs on him. After all, they’d started this. Would it be worth it to hope that they might be able to fix it?

Marcus suddenly felt terribly tired.

“Are you the scarecrow who’s put the wind in the sails of my junior librarian?”

Marcus suddenly felt terribly terrified. Leaping clear into the air, he came around a half turn before landing, tried and failed to untangle himself from his staff so that he might
boing
out the blade and defend himself, and stumbled inelegantly the rest of the way around to face whoever had snuck up on him.

It was a wizard. Very much so; he had a pointed hat, and his long, thin beard almost touched the floor. He looked ancient, but very alert in a manner which reminded Marcus of Eustace. He was also carrying a veritable doorstopper of a book under his arm.

“Scarecrow?” Marcus asked weakly.

The wizard chuckled. “His words, not mine. Don’t worry about it, he’s a stickler for the rules anyway. He’s yet to learn that rules are optional and often plain wrong in a magical library. I’m Burgundy,” he added, sticking out his hand, “and I heard you’re interested in Death.”