Mirrorworld (40 page)

“You don’t know.. the wizard came, showed me an image with his magic.. Mud in a cage, whipped by demons.. I had to agree, I’m so sorry, so sorry..” The man climbed into a sitting position, holding his hand where Marcus had hit it and quite possibly done some serious damage, crying freely.

“Ohhh,” Marcus said, sagging. “A wizard can show you anything with magic, Fango. He doesn’t have Mud, he never did. I met your brother myself, not a week ago, in Tiski.”

“You did?” Fango asked pitifully, staring up at him.

“
Yes
,” Marcus said, “I did. He – he was.. well. He told me about you.”

Fango continued to stare, all thoughts of attack abandoned. “Me?”

“Yes, about how you’d decided to stay here despite the situation. He – er – he asked me if I would give you his apologies, but said to say.. that he wasn’t coming back.”

“Oh my,” Fango said, seeming to come out of a trance for the first time, “I – I am so sorry, Mr. Marcus, I, I can’t expect to ask for your forgiveness for this, but I was so sure..”

“Don’t worry about it,” Marcus said absently, preoccupied with amazement about how guilty he could feel lying to someone who had just attempted to kill him. “Wait,” he added, as a horrible thought struck him, “did you attack anyone else before me?!”

The first door that Marcus knocked down in his terrified sprint was the door to Kendra’s room. Sure enough, she lay sleeping, looking ridiculously cute and peaceful and very much still alive. A quick perusal of the other nearby rooms turned up the sleeping forms of Fervesce, Lucin and Musk, all consistently living, and a quick peek into the stables revealed the Assassin still lying exactly as he had been earlier, and still smoking. Marcus relaxed for the first time in several minutes, staggering back into the common room where the fire still blazed despite the hour. As he relaxed into a comfy chair he was stricken by the realisation that he’d run off and left his would-be assassin unmonitored, but even as he leapt from his chair again the wide man sheepishly entered the room, and sat down self-consciously opposite him.

“No-one’s dead, then,” Marcus said flatly.

“No,” Fango replied. “I came for you first, because I thought I might wake you otherwise. I’d have done the girl next, then worked my way up to that fellow in the stables.”

“That’s very interesting,” Marcus said, tightening his grip on the scythe that he hadn’t let go of yet. “Everyone seems to be sleeping very deeply. Did you put something in their food?”

“Of course I did,” Fango said, almost irritably. “It’s not every day I get charged to assassinate people. I wanted to do it properly. Just a little sleeping weed, enough so that you wouldn’t wake up at the sounds of your comrades screaming.”

“Please stop talking like that,” Marcus growled, and Fango visibly shrunk back. He was still clasping his hand; now that they were in a better-lit room Marcus could see that it had been marked by a nasty looking burn, the kind that would leave an equally nasty scar.

“What – what
is
that weapon?” Fango asked timidly. “I couldn’t resist looking at it.. and then..”

“It’s just a scythe,” Marcus snapped. “Blade on a stick.”

“That burns anyone who touches it? Not you, though. Looking at you there, holding it now.. Even with the pyjamas, I could almost believe that the Reaper himself had come for me.” The man shivered. “Is that it? I deserve to pay for my sin if I was foolish enough to assault Death himself..”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Marcus said quickly. “I’m not going to kill you. Well, not if you’re not going to attempt to attack me again. If you come at me with a knife in the dark again I can’t be held responsible for what this weapon might do. Seriously.”

There was a quiet moment, which Marcus spent studying his opponent’s defeatist poise, trying to figure out if it was legitimate or not. Fango himself broke the silence by quietly asking “did you really see my brother?”

“
Yes
,” Marcus said. “I wouldn’t lie about that. Oh, stop crying,” he added after a moment.

“I can’t – can’t help it,” the larger man said, stifling his sobs. “It’s just – I’m a
nice
person, but the thought that Mud was in danger.. I couldn’t stand it.. I was alone here so long, and then the thought that I might lose the only person I knew.. and now I feel silly and so bad and.. oh I’m just an innkeeper! I just want to make people happy! I’m not a killer, I swear!”

With a start, Marcus realised that Fango seemed to be waiting for him to pass a judgement on him, “Look,” he said, “you’re not going to attempt to attack anyone else, right? Good. Then we can forget this ever happened. I doubt anyone would really appreciate being woken up at this point to tell them that we have to leave because the innkeeper is a lunatic. So how about we live in a world where the innkeeper is the jovial fellow he initially appeared to be, and we all sleep peacefully and leave tomorrow morning on good terms?”

Fango appeared disturbingly ecstatic at the thought of forgiveness. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” Marcus said. “But if you go back on this and kill me, I’m going to be really annoyed.”

“Understandable,” Fango said, appearing to regain some of his former good humour.

“Alright then,” Marcus said wearily. “Now, get me some of that sleeping weed stuff. I’ve got a big day tomorrow and it’d be nice to be well rested for it.”

The following morning, Marcus stood observing his destiny and really wishing he was somewhere else.

The small group had departed the inn early, feeling very well-rested as a result of Fango’s ill-intentioned druggings. Even Marcus had been able to acquire a good few hours of rest, and so they had parted on fair terms with the innkeeper who had attempted to kill them in their sleep. Marcus had tried to cheer the man, who had become despondent that his only human interactions in some time were leaving already, with the idea that if they did defeat Keithus, then travellers might start to come his way again. Fango had stared at him as if he were completely insane, but had borne a small smile when Musk had revealed that they’d be leaving the coach and horses in the man’s care until the return journey, speaking with such confidence that Marcus had almost believed there might even be one. Either way, they’d at least left Fango with someone other than himself to talk to, which was surely an improvement. Kendra has hugged each horse in turn, and then Fervesce had collected the group into one of his bubbles, and they’d flown off towards the mountains.

En route, Marcus learnt from Musk and Lucin some of what he should expect; Lucin had managed to slip his wandering vision behind the eyes of an orc, and had followed the creature’s patrol route along the heavy barricade that lay not far north of Fango’s inn, preventing any foolish travellers or would-be assassins from straying too far into the pass on foot. By sweeping the area with his bird, however, Lucin had discovered a system of smaller pathways that led to a high shelf across the western edge of the pass, completely unreachable by people who didn’t have psychic bubbles and home to some wonderful views of the plateau and castle that they were heading for. It was on this overlook that Marcus now found himself, staring out at Keithus’s amassed army.

It was big. It was so big that he could barely see it. The majority of the plateau below appeared to be host not to an army but to a vast, writhing,
thing,
a formless shape of chaos that was somehow far greater and more distinct than the individual movements of the countless bodies that gave it its form. It squirmed against the many tall flagpoles that rose from it like pins in a map, tribal territory markers that forced it to submit to some level of order. Irritated, it roared into the silence of the mountains, the uncountable sounds of its heavy bustle echoing off the inclines alongside the terrible shrieks of its composite parts, as they churned together in the melting pot below. It was a grand and grievous sight, a concentrated force of destruction that stood ready to be unleashed on the world. And it
was
ready: as Marcus scanned through the crowds, attempting to trace the cruel cries back to the Jabberwocks who had made them, he saw that the flow of this army was not of one at ease, but of one that was preparing to move. Everywhere he looked, campsites were in a state of undress, camp followers packing rations and dismantling tents with the same military efficiency that powered the mobilising soldiers, who were forming up and running drills nearby.

Grim though this gathering was, it was also incredible, in ways that hurt Marcus’s head. He’d slowly come around to the idea that strange and mythical creatures were a fact of the Mirrorworld, but there was a difference between allowing for the possibility of orcs and being confronted by the reality of several hundred of their hunched, hulking forms going about their business. And then there were the trolls, who hefted their large, angular selves about the construction site on the north side of the plateau with stone severity, caring not for the casual way in which they blew Marcus’s mind.

Yet even they were not the most remarkable or unexpected part of this scene. Such an honour was reserved for the great upright frame of wood and stone that the trolls had built, which ran the width of the plateau and housed the largest mirror that Marcus had ever seen. It was difficult to comprehend at first, as the vastness of the armies and mountains that it unfocusedly reflected appeared more as a warp in the air than a tangible object, as if an artist had stumbled across this scene yet found a piece missing, and been inspired to fill in the gap from the suggestion of its surroundings. Trolls swarmed about this grand, twisted structure with slow urgency, hammering out routine maintenance as Marcus’s group stood, watched, and collectively got a bad feeling about it.

“This is insane,” Lucin said bleakly.

“Why would Keithus be building a giant mirror?” Fervesce asked.

“I don’t know,” Musk said, “but I don’t like it.”

“This is insane,” Lucin said again. “How are we meant to get from here to there?”

The ‘there’ to which he referred was the large castle that loomed on the far side of the pass’s slopes, beyond the notable army of nightmare creatures. The crumbling building dominated the bleak landscape, angrily frowning down at the plateau from its position on high. It appeared almost completely unconnected to the world around it, with the only visible path to the entrance zigzagging up precariously from the far side of the plateau, and heavily guarded by a coalition of intimidating ant-sized shapes.

“We need to move,” Musk said, “by the looks of it, we don’t have much time.”

“Move
how?”
Lucin asked. “How do you expect us to get all the way over there? We climb around, everyone will be gone by the time we arrive. We go through the middle, we die.”

“We’ll get over there the same way that we got up here,” Musk said. “Fervesce?”

The old man was staring at the giant mirror; Marcus was sure that he hadn’t even spared a glance for the huge army, his attention instead being entirely diverted by the construction to the north. He gave no indication that he had even heard Musk until the latter repeated his name, at the sound of which he shook his head and relaxed as if coming out of a trance.

“There’s something about that,” he said, “something unnerving. It.. speaks to me somehow, as if we’re kindred in a way. I don’t like the feeling. Sorry, what did you need?”

“Could your Talent get us,” Musk asked, “from here,” he pointed down at the ground, then up and over in an arc, coming to rest with his finger squarely aimed at the distant castle, “to there?”

Fervesce didn’t answer immediately, instead retracing Musk’s arc with his eyes and pawing at his beard thoughtfully. “I believe so. It would take a
lot
of effort to distract gravity enough to allow for full-on flight instead of gentle hovering, and you’d have to move fast.. but it could be done, I think. I do confess I’m a little bit disturbed as to why you just asked me that.”

“Kendra,” Musk said quickly. “Do you recall my asking you if your Talent had any effect on inanimate objects?” She nodded. “Did you test it?” Another nod. “And?”

“Ehh, it might have worked,” she said. “I don’t know, walls are hard to talk to. Tough to break them down and get them to reveal their feelings, y’know? But it may have been a bit wobblier, yes.”

“Okay,” Musk said, clapping his hands together, “that was only a possible bonus anyway. Now listen up everyone, here’s the plan. We don’t have much time and we need to get to Keithus quickly, preferably maintaining the element of surprise if indeed we still have it. That rules out walking and taking the front door, so it’s going to go like this; Fervesce will put us in a bubble and fly us over towards the castle. I will stand at the edge of the bubble with my fists ready, and smash us a way in. Kendra, I want you to try to work your Talent on the walls, maybe make my job a bit easier. Everyone else.. you just make sure to stay behind me for now. The bubble should shield us from the impact, but still, this probably won’t be very pretty. Are we agreed?”

There was silence. The assembled group stared blankly at Musk, except for Fervesce, who had been distracted by the mirror again. Eventually, Lucin stirred to say “
this
is the big plan you’ve been working on all this time? The clever scheme that gets us in?”

“Yes,” Musk said. “I had to see the layout here for myself before I knew it would work for sure, but I’ve spent some time on this. It’s the best way to get there, and even if Keithus is expecting us, I doubt he’ll be expecting us to arrive quite like this. Also, we’re using Mirrorline-given power, so any magical defences he may have set up won’t have any effect. Different magic, see?”

“You’ve gone completely mad,” Lucin said flatly. Stood next to him, the Assassin nodded slightly, as if some inner theory of his had just been confirmed. Even Kendra was looking slightly bemused at the suggestion that they throw themselves across open air and into a solid stone wall.

“This
will
work,” Musk said almost desperately, but he had lost the attention of the group. A collective light bulb appeared to have gone off in their heads and they were all now looking at Marcus with very meaningful expressions. “What?” he asked. “Oh, you want me to veto him again. I don’t know, I thought that sounded like a pretty good plan. Well thought out and presented.”