Mirrorworld (33 page)

Fervesce studied him stoically for a few moments. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t intend to add that to your list of worries. For what it’s worth I doubt it is the case; our current Master is a young woman of remarkably integrity, the likes of which we have not had leading our organisation for as long as I have been a part of it. She would not throw away life to no significant end. I was simply saying that this is how the more cynical amongst us might react to the idea of a saviour provided by a higher power.”

“Musk thinks like that,” Marcus said wearily. “He told me as much earlier; he thinks the idea is too easy a way out. And I don’t really detect a great presence of faith in my supposed greater cause from Lucin or the Assassin either. Kendra is the only one who seems to believe in it.”

“Ah well, the young will hold harder to their hope,” Fervesce said wistfully. “I recall being very much the same, impulsive and adventurous, although I was far more irrational than I believe Kendra to be. What?” he asked, as Marcus’s eyebrows rose of their own accord. “Careful, lad,” he said, “don’t be assuming people are of less sound mind just because they see things differently to you. Kendra’s a damn sight smarter than I’ll
ever
be, even now, and if she sees something in you, I’m inclined to also.”

“Is there any way I can convince you both not to?” Marcus asked desperately.

“You would probably only harden
her
resolve,” Fervesce said with a laugh. “I reckon you’d have an easier time overall trying to live up to the ideal than trying to disabuse her of it.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Marcus muttered.

“Maybe not to you,” Fervesce countered.

“Well,” Marcus said, but he had no rejoinder, and so simply sighed. “Something to think about, I suppose. “ He stared out at the rolling scenery for a while, and did exactly that.

“Do you mind if I sleep up here tonight?” he asked Fervesce eventually. “I don’t think I can bring myself to lie back down on your psychic grass floor thing.”

Fervesce shrugged. “I don’t mind.”

“Thanks. Are you going to be doing this every night?”

“Most likely. Unless we stay in a town. I can’t manipulate people out of rooms and so on, so either we don’t go anywhere that night, or we take the inn with us. Musk’s directive is to move as fast as possible, and so we do.”

Marcus smiled as he bedded himself down. “I’d like to talk to you again, Fervesce. You seem a lot more normal than a lot of people around here.”

“Yes,” the old man said, looking around again at the bubble of psychic energy that he was using to propel them through the night. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

Time began to pass by with surprising speed over the next few days. The coach would rumble along the north road all day, stopping only at intervals for a quick half-hour round of food and rest for the horses. Marcus sat on the roof as they trundled gently through the world, watching the greenness of the fields fade to a weary brown, and the terrain become sharper and more rugged as they made their way north. Elsewhere, he passed the time playing cards with Lucin, or talking to Kendra and Musk, either in attempt to fill his mind up with knowledge about the Mirrorworld that might come in handy or just for its own sake, and though the latter companion was never again as forthcoming as he had been on that first day atop the coach, Marcus found himself appreciating the company nonetheless.

In the evening, after they’d parked up for the day and left control of their movement to Fervesce, Marcus passed the time, when not sleeping, with the old Viaggiatori, who too seemed glad of the company. In contrast to the topics of his daytime conversations, they spoke of Earth, and all the old things of home that the Mirrorworld could not give them. They spoke of airplanes and television, of music and computers, and though in sharing his own recollections Marcus was forced to again engage with memories that he no longer cared to hold, the enthusiasm of Fervesce’s nostalgia was a soothing balm. For his part, the old man seemed aware of how Marcus felt, and they tended to steer away from bigger, trickier subjects in favour of the missed minutiae of an Earthman’s life.

Kendra, once she discovered that Marcus and Fervesce were burning the midnight oil, occasionally joined them for a while. Marcus initially felt a little awkward about this, given Fervesce’s previous rebuke of his attitude towards her, which, while not unkind, had left Marcus somewhat wary. Yet the conversation came naturally, with careful avoidance of the subject of what might lay ahead of them, and Marcus soon settled back into the odd comfort of Kendra’s presence.

“What do you think of the Mirrorworld, so far?” Fervesce asked one night, abruptly changing the subject from their reminiscing about the cinema. Kendra lay curled up in blankets by his side, seemingly asleep as they flew through the night, illuminated only by the old man’s small lantern.

“It goes both ways,” Marcus answered. “I do like it here, as much as I’ve seen. This is a crazy, incredible place, full of things that impress and confuse me in how.. unearthly.. they are. But at the same time the differences are surrounded by things that I know and that still make sense, and people, who are always people wherever I go but who just seem better here, somehow.” He smiled sadly. “But on the other hand, against that backdrop is the reality of my connection to Keithus, which has driven me ever since I’ve arrived here and taken me down paths that I’d rather not have took, and that can’t help but hurt. Sometimes I hope that maybe we could all come out of this in one piece, and I could gain back a measure of freedom.. Ask me again, if that ever happens.” He sighed, glancing at Kendra, whose small smile suggested that she wasn’t quite as asleep as she was pretending to be. “In the end, though, despite all the strings, this
is
better than anything that came before. Earth never did anything for me, and I have nothing left to say to it. So I’ll take the new lease of life, even if it sucks a bit.”

He was surprised to discover that the more he had this thought, the more he believed it. Maybe it was because of where they were, on the road, a sufficient distance in both time and space from his past, but not yet so far along that the future was breathing down his neck. Here, travelling along the lines that linked the larger points of his life, he could almost feel cheerful.

Fervesce seemed to agree. At the very least, the old man held a great respect for the concept of traveling. He was always eager to hear stories of the places on Earth that Marcus had visited, during his time in search of the great ‘answer’. To Marcus, the whole thing seemed more trivial and pointless than ever, now, but Fervesce seemed to enjoy the tales, and so he told them nonetheless.

“In Nepal, I heard rumour of an ancient temple hidden in the mountains. Supposedly it was once a palace, and it was certainly big enough to be. It was hidden on a summit overlooking a forest; you had to climb up a sort of natural staircase that ran around the side of the mountain to get there, but it was worth it. They had lots of mirrors and carvings set into the cliff side on the way up, and the view from the top was pretty impressive. Everyone there was super weird, though.”

“Weird how?”

“I don’t know,” Marcus said, running a hand through his hair. “It’s just a thing about travelling
, I
think. When I was out in the world, looking for my answers, I ran into a lot of people who were doing the same thing. A lot of them told me that they were looking for a ‘place to belong’, and I always thought that was kind of dumb, because I thought that they were just looking for a place to project all their insecurities and stuff into, and that honestly, you build your own sense of belonging. Travelling can be fun, but it’s not a source of instant answers to all of life’s questions. Ultimately it’s just a whole lot of interesting sights and sounds, and the meaning you give it comes from within.”

“Wait, hang on,” Kendra interjected. “Couldn’t you say the same about your whole ‘searching for meaning’ thing?”

“Yeah, you could,” Marcus agreed. “It was when I realised that that I stopped doing it. What was I saying?”

“Temple in Nepal,” Fervesce prompted, stretching out. “Whose occupants were weird.”

“Right. Well, yeah, they were. Most of them were all Zen and peaceful and such, but the bloke who ran the place just seemed to find the whole thing terribly amusing. I talked to him quite a bit; he told me that he’d accomplished a lot in his life, until the weight of his achievements had gotten too heavy to bear and he’d fled from them in order to live a quiet life. He challenged me to decide if he’d made the right choice or not, but told me not to tell him what I concluded because he already knew that he had. I’ve thought sometimes that maybe he was trying to tell me something, but ultimately I think it’s far more likely that he was just rambling for the sake of someone to talk to.”

“It could be both,” Kendra said cheerfully. “Maybe he
was
rambling, but his nonsense prompted some sort of realisation in your own mind vis-à-vis your previously vouchsafed belief in greater meaning coming from within?”

“Hell if I know,” Marcus said. “I didn’t last long enough there to find out. All those quiet courtyards, empty corridors and endlessly blooming flowers, way up on that mountain.. it seemed unnatural, and it started to freak me out of after a couple of days, so I took my leave, left them to it.”

“It sounds like quite a remarkable place,” Fervesce said, scratching at his short beard. “I’d quite like to see it.”

“Well maybe you’ll get a chance to,” Marcus said. “It’s not too late, is it?”

“I don’t believe I will ever see Earth again,” Fervesce replied sadly. “I haven’t walked the Mirrorline in a long time.. In some ways I’m afraid of what might happen if I did it even one more time, given the extent to which my powers have already grown. I don’t know if I could handle more.”

Fervesce, in Marcus’s opinion, was very conflicted. He longed for the world he had come from, and all the things in it that he hadn’t seen, but at the same time the path of his life had so changed him that he could no longer live there, and the risk that he thought he was exposing himself to in crossing over made popping back for a holiday very much out of the question. Marcus pointed out that there was no reason to believe that the man’s powers would grow to an extent where they would hinder him, but Fervesce was quick to point out that, in many ways, they already had. Physicality, he said, seemed alien when you could do pretty much anything with your mind. Basic, simple pleasures no longer gave him any joy: only through the exercising of his abilities could Fervesce feel like he was fulfilling himself. There was no real comeback to that, so Marcus had let him be.

When not waxing lyrical, the man also seemed to have taken it upon himself to move Marcus’s opinion of the Mirrorworld in general away from ‘conflicted’ and towards ‘positive’. After hearing out Marcus’s response to his asking what he thought, he offered the whole world to Marcus on a plate as a means of starting anew, as he himself had done after first crossing the Mirrorline.

“That Assassin lad is a fair example of that as well,” he said, striking a match to his pipe, “although admittedly not the most moral one. He was nothing but a hired hand back on Earth, at least as far as I’m aware. He keeps his past very close to his chest – well, he keeps everything very close, but given how interesting we, as the Viaggiatori, find him, we’ve managed to pick up a few bits and pieces. Anyway, nowadays he’s a premier smuggler, the go-to-guy if you want something moving across worlds. And as a result of
that
, he is also hireable as a wizard killer. I mean, not that that is quite as lucrative a market; we don’t
usually
find our very existence under threat from crazy wizards, you know. But there
are
some who do go rogue, if a little more quietly. They chafe under the rules of the establishment, and decide to strike out on their own.. and they always turn up dead. Now,” Fervesce said seriously, “I’m not saying that our old established Wizarding Tower has been hiring the Assassin to kill off would-be rivals, because that would be slanderous talk about a fellow Portruss institution. But yes, either way, it can’t really be denied that our Assassin’s made the best of his situation, can it?”

From there the conversation turned back towards Talents and their strange machinations, which left Marcus pondering once again his own absent Talent. Fervesce’s conflicted relationship with his abilities had left him slightly more apprehensive about it, but without any way or means of figuring out what it might be, there didn’t seem to be much point dwelling on it. What was far more interesting to Marcus was finding out what Kendra’s particular Talent was, but she continually refused to tell him, repeatedly stating that it would be far more interesting for him to find out in a practical situation. Once again, there was no real comeback for that.

On the fifth day since their departure from Plumm, Marcus spied ahead of them a large, high-walled complex, nestled snugly amongst the crumbling hills through which they’d been rolling all morning. Rooftops and pointed facades rose from beyond the embrace of this cold, monolithic outer layer, suggesting the presence of civilisation within.

“What’s that place?” he asked Musk, who was sitting nearby.

“That is the town of Tiski.”

“Aaand..”

Musk rolled his eyes. “Tiski is the northernmost major settlement in the Northlands, the furthest north any of the merchant caravans care to travel. I’ve no idea why anyone would choose to settle here, on the edge of some of the most hostile territory in the known world, but hey, what do I know. That’s what the walls are for; beyond Tiski, we’re out of the area where humans rule. There are other towns further north, mainly mining towns looking to make a profit out of the rich minerals in the area, but they live under constant threat. Tiski is the last secure settlement, and we’ll be stopping off there to resupply before we carry on.”

“Ah..” Marcus paused. “So, all that hostile territory you just mentioned.. We’re going there?”