Mirrorworld (7 page)

I think I have,
Marcus thought sadly, in tandem with his past self. Then anew:
Why did I have to relive that one?
No answer was forthcoming, and he could only watch as the memory began to dissolve back into its rightful place in his mind, and the world of the present rebuilt itself in her place.

Coming back this time was painful, and Marcus wasn’t sure he even wanted to. He could feel the different parts of himself, scattered across whatever now passed for reality, and seriously considered leaving them out there.. but the vision had passed, and he could feel the tug of normality trying to reassert itself, so he let it happen. Slowly, at first, and then with increasing speed, reality began to leak back in around him, and rebuild itself into the form of a small square room, where he stood with two other people. Details carefully layered themselves back in, revealing the room as empty but for a large, broken mirror, and the other people as Eira and Eustace, the former staring into space and the latter carefully attempting to recover his serenity.

“Still not dead, then?” Marcus ventured, checking his limbs and hoping he didn’t sound too glum. “What just happened?”

“I do believe,” Eustace replied, wobbling slightly, “that we just broke the training room.”

“We broke the – the Mirrorline?”

“Oh, no, where we were wasn’t actually the Mirrorline, thankfully. It was an artificial construct, exactly the same as the real place, but with a safety net. We were perfectly safe at all times. As I said, training room.”

“Oh, good.” Marcus relaxed. “Wait, hang on, you were
terrified
.”

“I just had the
strangest
dream,” Eira interjected. “You were both there, you know?”

“Yes,” Marcus and Eustace said together, “we know.”

“I had a coffee as well,” she added with a sigh. “So,” she continued, appearing to come out of her reverie, “what happened? Did I fall asleep?” Eustace nodded. “And you
let me?
”

“Eira, you know the whole concept of dream space is incredibly interesting. Even if you don’t like it, it can tell us a lot about not just the Mirrorline, but-“

“But also about the extremely private factor of
my dreams
. And look,” she said, pointing to the broken mirror, “your ‘experiment’ has cocked up one of our training rooms. Nice work, genius.”

“Eira..”
      
“I believe the proper form of address is ‘Master’ in this circumstance, Eustace. What does it say on my desk?”

“Well, actually it says Master Eira..”

“Ah, then we’re on first name terms, that’s good. Now, do you have any other critically short-sighted explanations for why you decided to try and get us all blown up?”

“Look,” Eustace said, tugging on his beard. “I think, as you do, that we should be looking to expand past the vision of the soulless automatons that have set the standards of this organisation, and that to do that we need to look into these new ways of doing things. Right, Marcus?”

Marcus, whose mind had wandered back again to the more painful aspects of the memory he’d just forcibly relived, blinked at this sudden inclusion. Glad of the distraction, he attempted a gesture implying that he’d love to contribute, but his experience with the subject matter extended only to ten minutes in a rocking chair and everything Eustace had just said. It came out as an anarchic sequence of arm flailing and odd expressions that neither of the others actually saw, as they were already engaged in a stare-down for the ages.

“Eustace,” Eira said pleasantly. “Bugger off.”

“Pfft,” the old scholar said, “You’ll hear from me again about this.” Mustering his dignity in the face of being told off by someone roughly fifty years his junior, he strolled off in an obvious huff.

“No doubt,” Eira mused quietly, “and then again and again and again. Anyway,” she said, clapping her hands and narrowly avoiding becoming entangled in her own sleeves again, “shall we return to my study, Marcus? There’s coffee there, and I can tell you the rest of the story.”

“There’s more?”

“There’s
always
more.”

This time, Eira sat at the other desk, the one surrounded by bookcases. As Marcus flopped into a comfortable armchair he’d dragged over from by the window, he noted that one of the strange contraptions he’d seen on the other desk actually appeared to be some sort of kettle. It was now on this desk, teetering on a pile of books, whilst Eira scouted around for where she’d left the sugar.

“Go on then,” she said, when they were settled and she was stirring her drink. “Ask me.”

“Ask you what?” Marcus asked, yawning.

“About my dreams. If I saw them, and you in them, then you saw them too.”

“Do we have to do this riddling all the time? Can’t you just tell me?”

Eira smiled crookedly, a slow grin that Marcus found disconcertingly familiar. “I’m sorry, Marcus. I’m pretty sure that I mentioned not being very good at explanations. I thought I might do better with source material, you asking questions and me answering them. It’s either that or we call for Eustace again. Please don’t make me do that.”

Marcus sighed. Outside, the sun was setting, casting long dark shadows across the room, and he was very much feeling that it was time to go to bed. But it seemed he had some miles yet to go before sleep, so he may as well hang in there and try to take it all in. “Alright. Horses.”

“That’s an easy one. I like horses.”

“Stampedes of horses?”

“Technically, it’s a herd. I like wild horses, they’re beautiful animals.”

“What,” Marcus asked, unable to fully believe he was pursuing this line of inquiry, “is wrong with domesticated horses?”

“Nothing, really. But everything looks better in the wild.” With this, Eira shook her hair down over her head and stared into her coffee cup. “What else?”

“Look, why are we doing this? Is this going somewhere?”

Eira nodded.

“Alright, fine. Purple-robed screeching zombies. Eustace said they were a council.”

“Ah,” Eira said, draining her cup and slamming it down onto a pile of books. The whole stack promptly collapsed and avalanched off the desk, eliciting a ‘tch’ of annoyance before the Master turned back to Marcus. “Yes.
The
council. The four most senior Viaggiatori are elected as a sort of elite council to work with and guide the Master. By which I mean ‘attempt to prevent them from doing anything vaguely outside the boundaries of what
they’ve
spent their entire lives doing’.”

“That’s a bad thing?”

“I’d say so. You see, most of the progress we’ve made here has been the result of someone daring to go and do something crazy. Nearly thirty years ago now, one of our people sought leave to take a small group into the Mirrorline to try out some theories he had. The council told him no, but he went anyway, and the result of that is most of what we now know about fast-travel between the two worlds. We discovered that the solidity of our reality was strong enough to bolster a frame of Lams and create a portal that wouldn’t be undone by the Mirrorline’s kinetic chaos, allowing us to move between our worlds instantaneously if we needed to. It was a massive step forward, and if they’d listened to the council then it might never have happened.”

“You lost me a bit there,” Marcus admitted. “What happened to this guy, this rebel?”

“They tried to make him the Master,” Eira said with a dark laugh. “But he ran away. So they wrote him into the
Storie,
then tried to pretend that he’d never existed. The old guard – or what’s left of the old guard from his day, since I guess he’d be the old guard himself now – they still refuse to say his name. They remember. Such is the legacy of Rashalamn. Now I have to deal with the old bastards every day, and I’m fairly sure they see me as another Rash waiting to happen. It’s fun stuff.”

“It sounds it,” Marcus tried to say, but his voice was hijacked by another yawn halfway through. He could feel the fog thickening over his mind again. Just one proper sleep, and then maybe he could feel normal again.. “What’s the
Storie?”
he asked, soldiering on determinedly.

“Big book,” Eira said vaguely. “Our history. Greatest achievements, influential Viaggiatori, that sort of thing. Everybody wants to get a mention in there. Kind of pompous, really.”

“Do
you
want to get in there?”
      
“Of course. But it’s still pompous.”

There was quiet for a moment while Marcus digested this information. The Master closed her eyes and rested her head on bunched-up fists, swaying slightly to the faint tick-tock of the study’s clock. Fearing that she might fall asleep on him, Marcus picked up the conversation again. “The next one was of a place, Port-somewhere, melting. So Eustace said. I didn’t see it.”

“That’s simple,” Eira murmured. “Metaphor for the city’s current state of turmoil. This city is called Portruss, didn’t anybody mention that?”

“Maybe,” Marcus said. “There’s been a lot of other stuff going on. Like the next part, where the crazy dark thing descended from the sky amidst peals of manic laughter and blew us all to hell.”

“Ah,” Eira said, her head suddenly falling from its perch on her fists. “Yeah, that’s the big one.”

“
The big one?”

“Yes.” She sat back in her chair, and looked straight at Marcus. “That crazy dark thing, Marcus, is the reason that you are here.”

Marcus blinked. “
Was
it Death, then?”

“What? No, no, far worse. That... was Keithus.”

Silence in the study again. Tick, tock.

“There’s something worse than Death, and its name is
Keithus
?”

“
His
name is Keithus.”

“And he’s what? Some kind of monster.. demon.. thing?”

“No no..” Eira ran a hand through her hair, where it promptly got stuck. “Remember, it was just a dream. It was mostly an exaggeration, but, well, in truth it was a fairly accurate representation of what he’s capable of, which is the complete and utter destruction of all things. But he is just a man.”

Marcus drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “How can one man have the capability to destroy
everything
?”

“He’s a wizard,” Eira said simply. “Yeah, we have wizards. Wizards and magic. And I’m not talking about the kind of stuff
we
do, which is science. No, for wizards magic is dribbly candles and incantations and elemental spells and so on. Our craft can be learnt, but theirs.. you’re either born with it or you aren’t. The Wizarding Tower here in Portruss takes on those who are, and teaches them how to control it. Keithus was an apprentice there once, and now he’s an incredibly powerful wizard. Some say he’s the strongest there ever was, stronger even than the ancient mages whose magical duels reshaped half the world. The wizards worried about him, about all that power, but despite all that he was still their golden child.”

“Past tense?”

“Yes, because this is where the trouble starts. Up until a few months ago, Keithus was a renowned eccentric who more or less kept to himself. Then, one day, he came to us, and asked us to let him through the Mirrorline, to Earth.”

“Did you let him?” Marcus prompted, as Eira had closed her eyes again.

“No. How could we?
Remember
,” she added, imitating the orientation video’s marvellous baritone, “
balance is key.
We like to play with the Mirrorline, but our main thing as an organisation is preservation, not experimentation. That means making sure that things that are exclusive to one world or the other stay that way, which is bloody hard given that the Mirrorline is super volatile, all the time. Without us to manage it when it freaks out and swallows people or places and spits them out on the other side – or just straight up eats them – who knows what would happen? There is a balance, and though we barely understand it, our best reference tool being how happy the Mirrorline is on any given day, we try to maintain it. That’s why we couldn’t let an impossibly powerful wizard simply hop over to Earth for a day trip, or whatever. Where there’s a wizard, there’s magic.”

“I guess that would cause a bit of a mess,” Marcus said thoughtfully. “We don’t really have anything that could counter magic. Bombs and stuff, maybe. I wonder who would win in that fight.”

“Yaha,” Eira said, “that’s how it works. Your bombs and stuff are another example. And this.” She waved at her strange kettle, which was shaped like a large, crumpled hourglass. A bright flame danced endlessly in the lower bulb, gifting light unto the darkening study and casting flickering shadows across the walls around them as it heated the water that was poured into the upper bulb. “On Earth, you use electricity to boil your water, to power your appliances. Here, we bottle magic to the same purpose. Different paths to the same result. Balance.”

“Okay, no magic for us, then,” Marcus said, massaging his temples with his fingertips. “And no crossing for Keithus. But what about me?” he asked. “What do I have to do with all this?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Eira said. “You’re the key.”

“They key to what?”

“To Keithus. To stopping him, fixing him, balancing him, or something else.”

“Who told you that?” Marcus asked, amazed.

“The Mirrorline told me,” Eira said. “I went to ask it for advice, and it showed me you.”

Marcus stared. “Well,” he said after a moment, “that’s surprising.”

“Fortuitous is what it is,” Eira said, ignoring his tone, “because this is far from done. Keithus wasn’t happy when we told him no. He got angry and started breaking things, and people. Other wizards restrained him, robbed him of all his magical artefacts and kicked him out of the city.. It wasn’t the best of days. By all accounts Keithus left for the north, and now there’s an army gathering somewhere up in that cold wasteland, and the whispers on the wind carry the intent to raid Portruss.”

“Keithus’s army?” Marcus suddenly felt very on edge, as if the man might dive in through the window and blow them all to pieces at any moment. Eira leaned over to blow into a glass tube that extended from her kettle, and the flame brightened, bringing more light to the room and making him feel a little better.