Mirrorworld (12 page)

“Where now?” Helm asked suddenly, derailing Marcus’s train of thought.

“
I
don’t know,” he replied, inwardly marvelling at the man’s ability to annoy him so thoroughly with a mere two words. “My tour guide isn’t being very co-operative.”

“Alright, alright,” Helm said grumpily. “What do you want to know?”

“Ideally,” Marcus said, “you could start by telling me where we are, and what this square is, and what all of these buildings are. And I mean start
big
, because I don’t even remember what this city’s called.”

“It’s Portruss,” Helm told him, and, with a sigh, resigned himself to his fate. “Named for the river Russ, which is in turn named for the blood that it ran red with when the tribes that settled the city fought over the land. But if a tourist asks, it’s named for the coppery glint that the river takes during the sunset, best viewed from the heights of Central Plaza. Which is here.”

“With you so far,” Marcus said. “The buildings?”

“Well, Central Plaza isn’t named for being central, that’s for sure. In fact, considering the placing of the city walls, the true centre of the city is probably somewhere just north of the river. But it’s the highest point, and, because power loves a view, it’s where all of the city’s important political forces and figures have made their home. Hence the fancy buildings.”

“They
are
fancy. So who are these political forces?”

“Well, obviously there’s us,” Helm said importantly. “The Viaggiatori are a major presence in the city, and we contribute a lot to its upkeep. That’s why even in troubled times no-one’s been throwing bricks through our windows. That and the windows are really high up.”

“Yet you still won’t go out in a purple coat,” Marcus put in.

“Well,” Helm began, pausing to tap again into his well-hidden pool of wisdom, “a single person creates a whole different image to a discreetly mysterious organisation. A mysterious organisation can go around being spooky all they want, but what can one person do? We’re not like wizards; bunch of hacks and cheats though they are, they
could
blow a man’s head off at ten paces given cause.
We
are, at heart, scientists, and there’s not much a scientist can do against a gang looking to mug him in a dark alley. So we don’t downplay the rumours, but we don’t confirm them, either.. hell, it’s just so I don’t get bothered in the street, really. And look, have we been bothered yet?

Marcus had to admit, they hadn’t. But then, the people streaming past lacked the worried intensity of the people he’d seen listening to the preachers the day before. Presumably they had other things to think about.. After all, Eira had suggested that the threat of Keithus was quite a distant one. “Who else is around, then?”

“The wizards,” Helm said, pointing at the tall tower. Though it was set back somewhat from the square proper, growing out of its well-groomed grounds like the world’s most tenacious weed, it still dominated the skyline. Unnerving as it was, this revelation about the tower’s occupants oddly made it much easier for Marcus to accept in his life; architectural impossibilities were much easier to swallow when they could be hand-waved away on account of ‘magic’.

“The wizards have also taken a fair bit of damage to their reputation over the Keithus incident,” Helm was continuing, in a voice that silently added
and I couldn’t be happier about that
to the end of this utterance, “but to be honest, there’s not a lot they could have done. They keep quiet on how exactly they manage their levels of power, but it was obvious Keithus was the strongest of them by far. It took four of them to restrain him, the day he came to us, and they knew he’d escape, given time. I guess that’s why they threw him out of the city, rather than dealing with him..” he trailed off, and shrugged. “Well too late for that. In any case, I don’t like them. They sit in their tower with all their arcane knowledge, sharing but a trickle of it with the rest of us. Gets my back right up.”

“As opposed to the Viaggiatori who freely tell everyone what they do?” Marcus asked, surprised at the hypocrisy.

“Well,
we’re
doing the world a service,” Helm said, wearing his associative self-importance like a shroud. “We’re working with dangerous materials, trying to make sure tomorrow follows today with no hiccoughs. But magic..
that
can be used in different ways. Exploited. Look at Keithus. By all accounts he raised an army in the north in only a couple of months. That’s not natural. Plus he’s killed people. That day he came over to us, demanding to be let through, it did not end well.”

Marcus sighed, because every reminder of Keithus was a reminder that somehow, one man and his stolen scythe were supposed to be the key to stopping him, and that one man wasn’t entirely convinced that this was an idea he could get behind. That in mind, he moved on to the next building.

“What’s that place?”

He nodded towards the cathedral, which cut a spikily Gothic figure against the stoic, Roman face of the House of Viaggiatori. Before the square, pointed bell towers stretched skyward, feebly straining to seem relevant next to the wizard’s tower. Behind and around them, various arced and domed but no less spiky structures made up the bulk of the building. The overall effect was of a building that practically begged to be ominously illuminated by flashes of lightning during a thunderstorm, and would probably look conspicuously out of place on a sunny day.

“That,” Helm said, “is Bedlam Palace, wherein you’ll find our representatives for our major religions. Usually too busy arguing with each other to make trouble for us, thankfully.”

“Are they all united?” Marcus asked, surprised.

“Not at all. Everyone believes something different. But they all believe in
something
. I understand the theory is that one day they’ll be able to decide on what it is. They might even get it right.”

“You’re not a religious man, then, Helm?”

“Pah,” the Viaggiatori spat. “In a world with magic of many kinds, who has any idea when something is the work of a god or not? Even if one materialised before me right now, I’d be looking for the strings and clockwork. But, this notion people get, this
need
to believe in something.. I don’t know if it’s just inherent to anyone who strides the universe, or if it’s leaked over from the people on your side. See, we
have
higher powers. Wizarding magic, and the entirety of the Mirrorline. There’s no need to
believe
in it, it just is. It doesn’t incarnate, it doesn’t think. It just is. And yet.. people believe.”

Marcus didn’t say anything. He was impressed, though; when Helm wasn’t too busy spitting venom, or at least spitting it in a direction other than Marcus, the man said things that were quite interesting, especially to someone who had long since given up on any concept of belief. Then again, Marcus’s sojourn into memory had reminded him that he’d pretty much given up on every concept full stop at this point, so if there was a universal standard for knowing what to lose and what to keep hold of, he could hardly claim to adhere to it.
It must be nice,
he thought,
to know what you believe.

Helm was still talking, muttering something about a gigantic mirror that was part of the centrepiece in the temple and how it was a tragedy that they wouldn’t let the Viaggiatori make use of it, but at that moment, someone in the surrounding throng wandered by eating something out of a small container that smelt distractingly ravishing. “Where do we get food?” Marcus asked.

“..for the last two hundred years. What?”

“Food,” Marcus said, imparting some urgency into his words. ”Where’s food?”

Rice Street was one of the most well-known streets in the city of Portruss. Politically, it couldn’t compare to Central Plaza, nor any of the banks, statues or offices of state that dotted the north side of the city’s great hill. What Rice Street had was something far more important; food. The street ran the full length of the city from Central Plaza to the Docklands, and along its length a weary traveller could fill their belly with any type of cuisine from across the Mirrorworld that they might have a hankering for. Entrepreneurial would-be chefs flocked to the area, carving out a small section of the street from which they could introduce the unsuspecting city to their next big idea, and shoot for the prize of culinary immortality. Such had been the fate enjoyed by the overworked young chef who spent his every waking hour flitting between two major bakeries, and was one afternoon so utterly exhausted that he thoroughly mucked up the in-house recipe for a jam tart and accidentally served to a particularly open-minded foreign ambassador the pastry that would soon become known as the Portruss Pie. This young man’s named now decorated the walls of both bakeries, each of which claimed to be the home of the Portruss Pie, and whose intense rivalry over the legitimacy of this claim still occasionally exploded into unlicensed street bake-offs fifty years after the fact.

Not all of the stories were successes, of course. Some Rice Street locals would find a niche in history for completely different reasons. Despite years of campaigning, Mr. Ramsbottom had continually failed to convince anyone that his congealed blood ‘puddings’ were a thing that they wanted to eat. His signature foodstuff had, however, found a second life as a handy projectile; people now annually flocked to his stall from all over Eurora to see how many batter puddings they could dislodge from their service stands across the street with a well-aimed blood pudding, and Ramsbottom was these days quite vehement in stating that this had been the plan the whole time. Culinary history might not have been made, but a legend had been written nonetheless.

“So that’s what Rice Street is
famous
for,” Helm continued, as he walked alongside Marcus down the street in question, “but it’s not the only thing you’ll find here. The whole area is good for shopping, and there are plenty of inns and hostels here too. Not as many as on Main Street, since that’s, you know, the main street, but you’d be surprised how many people arrive in the city more concerned about where their next meal's coming from than where their next bed will be, and Rice Street takes care of those priorities in that order. All told, you could probably spend a week in the city without leaving this street, sleeping in a different bed each night and eating different meals every day. Ah, a Betyoullian stall. Chinese food, Marcus?”

“What?” Marcus asked, as Helm veered off to the side. A valiant effort to absorb what Helm had been telling him had been increasingly sidelined, as they’d walked down Rice Street, by a preoccupation with where all of these delicious smells were coming from. “You have Chinese food here?”

“Not really,” Helm said, as they joined the queue. “We have something not entirely unlike Chinese food. Or, more precisely, your Chinese food is not entirely unlike the food from Betyoullia. It’s all the same food really though, point of view just depends on which world you’re in.”

“Stop saying food,” Marcus said absently, shuffling up to within grabbing distance of the stall’s offerings. Starting with a base of what looked a lot like rice noodles, he carefully layered on top of this a generous helping of what seemed suspiciously akin to crispy beef, before burying
that
under a pile of what was almost definitely chow mein, and topped the whole thing off with what could only be spring rolls for good measure. Not wishing to underpay, he carefully handed the diminutive lady running the stall one of the fatter gold coins from his satchel, which sent her eyebrows on a one-way trip into her hairline but was accepted without argument. The lady continued to eye him as he went over to the rickety table that Helm had slipped off to procure for them on a nearby wooden decking, an all-purpose eatery area that expanded well into the street. The people of Portruss, it seemed, had a remarkably free-spirited philosophy when it came to the appropriate use for their thoroughfares.

“Where’s Betyoullia?” Marcus asked, after a few minutes of busy silence.

“East,” Helm said, and that was all for the moment, as he wandered back down to the stall and attempted to make the argument that, since Marcus had in fact paid with a sum that totalled a greater value than the stall’s net worth, he was entitled to a second portion. Returning unsuccessfully, he carried on. “Very far east. See, the Mirrorworld’s round just like your Earth – if not as big – and I’m sure you’ll get to hear all of Tec’s theories about that soon enough – and Betyoullia’s about as far away as you can get from here before you start coming back. Funny story behind the name, too. I’d tell it now, but I think we’re about to be robbed.”

“What?” Marcus asked, startled out of wrestling with his chopsticks.

Helm nodded over to the stall, where two burly-looking and noticeably well-armed men were now deep in conversation with its owner. They did not appear to be haggling over the shrimp-to-noodle ratio in the chow mein, which was in itself a surprise as it was
shocking
. As Marcus looked, the stall’s owner pointed in his direction, and the two men’s ghastly serious expressions turned to regard him with a baleful curiosity.

“Do we run?”

“To where?” Helm sighed. “We might get lost in the crowd, or we – and I mean you, because
I
am a streetwise city dweller – might fall over, get caught, get robbed anyway and get beaten senseless for good measure. Just sitting here and taking it will probably be the more painless option.”

“Are you actually serious? We’re going to sit here and let them rob us?”

“That’s what I’m going to do, and I recommend you do it too.”

It was at that moment that the two burly men arrived at their table, rendering further argument pointless. The intruders casually pulled up a chair each from a nearby table and joined Marcus and Helm as if they were old friends. The bigger of the two leant close towards Marcus, who after a whiff of the man’s breath found himself suddenly and mysteriously devoid of appetite.

“We hear there’s been a lot of money being flashed around these parts,” the man said companionably.

Marcus glanced at Helm, but the Viaggiatori was busily entrenched in a staring contest with the other intruder. “Where’d you hear that?” he asked.