Mirrorworld (8 page)

“Very much Keithus’s army,” she said, adding water. “That whispers on the wind part was just me being poetic. He sent us an envoy. It essentially said ‘reconsider, or I’ll kill you all’. Now the whole city is at risk, which hasn’t made us very popular with everyone else who lives here, but what can we do? We are long past talking him down; he absolutely despises us for some reason. So we have to resist forcibly. In the end, one city is less important than the fate of two worlds. I’d much rather it not come to that,” she added, glancing meaningfully at Marcus, “but if it did, I’d throw every brick and stone that makes up Portruss into Keithus’s path if they could keep him away from the Mirrorline.”

“It’s certainly not an ideal situation,” Marcus said. “You’re being threatened by a wizard and an army that are more than prepared to mow their way through an entire populace just to get to you. I can definitely see how I’m going to be able to help with that situation.”

“You
will
help us,” Eira said, shaking her hair forward and peering at him studiously from beneath it. “I know you will. I saw it in the Mirrorline. Your connection with Keithus, it’s real. It’s big. It means something. Something about you is vitally important. I don’t suppose you know what it is?”

Marcus had no idea, nor even any desire to consider it. He’d come into this conversation with intent to see it through to the end, and now they were here he was wishing that he hadn’t.
I was quite happy drinking my life away in perpetual misery,
he wanted to say again.
I didn’t ask for this. Somewhere along the line my life picked up meaning and purpose without even bothering to consult me first, and I don’t want it. I gave up on that long ago. All this happening now feels the world’s latest punchline to the world’s lamest joke.
All of these thoughts bounced through his rapidly failing mind, and when he tried to turn them into words the only thing that came out of his mouth was another huge yawn.

Eira grinned again, in the midst of pouring herself another coffee. “Look,” she said, “it’s late, and your brain is probably overflowing from all the nonsense I just told you. Go get some sleep, leave thinking for the morning. After all, we’re not
really
in a rush. Keithus is a long way away, and if he starts moving we’ll hear about it long before he’s close enough to threaten us. So go rest, don’t get blown up, and we’ll pick this up again tomorrow. Sound good?”

Marcus thought that sounded excellent. “Where?” he asked, blinking tiredness away.

“Where you woke up last. It’s your room now, while you’re here with us. Think you can find it again?”

“I doubt it.”

“Alright, well, go bug that useless receptionist of mine. She’ll get you there.”

“Okay. Where’s my staff?”

“You left it over there. Sleep well, Marcus.”

Marcus grabbed the staff, and made to go bug the receptionist, noting as he left that Eira appeared to have no intentions of going to sleep herself anytime soon. The receptionist was about to leave as well, and grudgingly agreed to show Marcus the way back on the way to her own quarters. She complained endlessly, but he didn’t care. He zombie-walked his way through the corridors, fell face first into his bed, and slept evenly with barely remembered dreams of being watched from afar.

Marcus woke up the next morning feeling better than he had for a long time. His brain, it seemed, had moved past being able to only offer a slightly panicked bemusement in response to new experiences; his thoughts arrived now freely and in peace. No more long buried memories had slunk from their resting places to torment him in the night, and even the dark days from before the exploding jukebox had faded, their memory prompting nothing more than the shivered recollection of a bad dream.

Bolstered with rare cheer, Marcus thus extracted himself from the myriad folds of his bed, and made to explore the rest of his new suite. Opening a door that he hadn’t before led him to a bathroom, the centrepiece of which was an ancient, free-standing, claw-footed tub. Marcus tentatively turned a tap, and hot water instantly cascaded from it.
Magic,
he thought with a smile, and had a bath.

A little later on, a dressed and refreshed Marcus Chiallion wandered into his suite’s lounge, and found one of the men from yesterday had again gotten there ahead of him. In the absence of his muscular companion, the short, wiry man was fulfilling their collective quota for brooding over the board game. He sat studying the board with an intensity that would have unsettled a more sentient and socially aware block of varnished wood, even as Marcus moved over to sit opposite him.

“Morning,” the man said, not looking up. “Sleep well?”

“I did actually,” Marcus said, relaxing into his seat.

“Well that’s peachy,” the other man said, and that appeared to be the total sum of his thoughts on the matter. Marcus refused to let the sheer enthusiasm of this response dent his mood, and so consented to sit and wait for something else to happen. His companion maintained his focus on the game for a few moments longer, before sitting back with a sigh and an air of one coerced. He studied Marcus briefly, silent but for the drumming of his fingers along the arm of his chair, before glancing back down at the board. “Do you play chess at all, Marcus?” the man asked.

Marcus checked the board to ensure that this was the same chess he was familiar with. Either way, it didn’t affect his answer, which was “no”.

“Hrm,” the man said. “Well, that’s probably for the best. See, there are some who suggest that you can learn a lot about a person from the way they play a game like this, but I’m not sure I believe it. Imagine if we could just have at it for a couple of rounds and come away knowing everything there is to know about each other! Ha. Might as well ask you to lie back on the couch and talk about your father.” The man sighed again. “Anyway, that probably didn’t mean much to you, so I should go back and start from the top. We haven’t been formally introduced. I’m Helm.”

“Marcus,” Marcus said, warily shaking the man’s limply-offered hand.

“Aye,” Helm said. “Well, I understand you’ve been bought up to speed somewhat on the nature of what this place is and how it’s connected to the world you came from, etcetera, which is good, because though I have been instructed to answer any questions you may have, that’s not really why I’m here and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t waste my time like that.”

“Why
are
you here?” Marcus asked, perhaps slightly more pointedly than was required.

“I’m here,” the man said, very deliberately sitting back and steepling his fingers, “because the Master called me into her office yesterday and informed me that she needed a full psychological profile for the person” – pointed fingers tilted towards Marcus – “that she was in the process of bringing in. It was news to me, I can tell you, and not the kind I was hoping for when I got her runner. But,” he added grudgingly, “she’s the boss, needs must, and so here we are.”

“The Master wants a
psych profile
of me?” Marcus asked. “What for?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Helm said wearily. “It’s standard procedure. Every would-be immigrant gets one, and if we don’t think they’d be able to function adequately in a different world, then they don’t get to cross the Mirrorline. Obviously we usually do this in advance, and obviously standard procedure is out of the window at this point because here you sit. But, since you’re apparently
so
important, the Master still wants it, and consequently, despite the fact that I could turn that mirror in the corner to a portal and be in the Mirrorline accumulating impossibilities in the time it’d take for
you
to remember how a knight moves… Instead, I am here, telling you this, an apt microcosm of the human resources fun-pit that my particular Talent dooms me to, wherein I shall chaperone newbies until I
die
.”

“Well alright then.” Marcus, who considered himself a curmudgeon of some repute, was so awed by the sheer amount of bitter sarcasm Helm had successfully compressed into a fairly short speech that he almost felt moved to applaud. “Thanks for clearing that up.”

“
No problem
,” Helm said darkly. “Here to help. You have been informed of this great and mystical importance that you’re apparently in possession of, yes?”

“Oh yeah, I’ve heard all about how awesome I am,” Marcus said cheerfully. Inwardly he was more than agreeable towards Helm’s scepticism, but the man was being so blatantly antagonistic about it that Marcus felt moved to take the opposing stance, if only for the sake of being able to annoy him more efficiently. The man narrowed his eyes at this response, and Marcus fancied that he could almost hear gears grinding behind the man’s ill-concealed frown as he tried to calculate the extent to which he was being mocked. Silence stretched into awkwardness.

“Well, this was a fun talk,” Helm said eventually. “But it’s time to get moving.” He rose from his seat with the slow lethargy of one who was hoping that his legs would fall off and leave him able to lie down and quietly expire, instead of stubbornly remaining attached and so forcing him to go about his business. “We have an appointment down in the labs,” he revealed, “where with a bit of luck we’ll be able to find out all about exactly how
awesome
I sincerely hope that you are. Come on.”

Helm strode out without looking back, leaving Marcus to marvel at how much brighter the world seemed in the man’s absence. Chuckling at the thought of how refreshing it was to meet someone whose life seemed gloomier than his own, Marcus grabbed Death’s staff and set out after his new friend, to discover what the Mirrorworld had in store for him today.

It took almost ten minutes of walking to arrive at the entrance to the labs, ten minutes of strolling in pained, deliberate silence through corridors that seemed to be gently spiralling in on themselves. Marcus was fairly certain that Helm had taken every right turn they’d come across, and yet their path had somehow not led them around in a big circle yet. Instead, the corridors became darker and less elaborately decorated, until they culminated in a stone staircase that led down into a deep, foreboding gloom, lit only by the ceaselessly dancing light of various lamps and their captured flames. The air felt stale, and dust swirled in their wake where their footsteps disturbed its slumber. By the time they reached the bottom, where their way stood blocked by a large stone door with LAB carved into it, Marcus was starting to feel decidedly twitchy.

Helm made use of the door’s knocker to sound out three hefty booms into the still silence. Almost immediately, there came the answering sound of an explosion from the far side. Marcus glanced back at the stairs, wondering if he could make it up all of them at a run, but before he could make a decision either way the door began to grind open ominously, and he instead tightened his grip on Death’s staff, bracing himself for whatever horrors he might find on the far side.

Smoke billowed out from within, obscuring the shape of the figure that stood to greet them. Visions of the monster from Eira’s dream shot through Marcus’s head and were promptly skewered as this figure stepped forward and revealed itself to be a perfectly ordinary, if somewhat melancholy-looking, human being, waving smoke out of its face.

“Oh, it’s you,” the apparition said glumly, addressing Helm. “What do you want?”

“I bought you your new toy,” Helm said, indicating Marcus, who waved cautiously.

“Oh right, our saviour,” the spectre said, with a notable absence of enthusiasm, “We forgot you two were coming, late as you are. Bought him down the back way to freak him out, eh?”

“I’ve no idea what you mean,” Helm said. “Let us in, Niko.”

The man stood aside, and Helm strode past. Marcus followed them apprehensively through the fading smoke and into the strangest room he had ever seen. Perfectly round, it was dominated by its centrepiece, which Marcus could only comprehend as a giant, complicated
thingy
. It began at ground level with a large mirror, held in a frame that was itself part of the tall towers of technology that surrounded it. These cold, metal machines were sporadically decorated with all manner of knobs, buttons, big red levers and small screens that displayed either incomprehensible stacks of fluctuating numbers or sporadically pumping heart-rate monitors. Thick cabling held the ensemble together, and wound upwards to the space above the mirror, where they supported a wide glass sphere that appeared to contain that same swirling mass of colour and shape that Marcus had seen in the sky of the Mirrorline the previous day. More cables let out of the top of the sphere, running into another stack of towers that hung down from the domed ceiling and helped create an overall impression of a stalagmite and stalactite reaching out to each other and making magic. Rubber piping snaked out from the central structure to the edge of the room, where they connected to additional frames of all shapes and sizes, above which hung appropriately sized mirrors, ready to be loaded for whatever purposes they served. More frames and mirrors hung from the ceiling all around, reflecting warped approximations of the central structure off into infinity and compounding the room’s weirdness quotient. The scattered desks, abandoned coffee cups and minor mountains of paperwork that filled the rest of the lab’s floor space served as oases of quiet normality that helped Marcus’s mind adjust to the fact that this room really did exist, and that he was standing in it.

“Welcome to the labs, Marcus,” Helm said, in the tone of one who’d seen it all before and had no time for gawping tourists. “Niko, can we-“

Whatever Helm had been about to say was lost in the sudden crash from the far side of the room, where a man had been teetering dangerously on a stepladder while changing a mirror, and was now on the floor amidst shards of said mirror. Cursing, Niko ran off to try and extract the other person from the remnants of his reflection. Marcus glanced at Helm, who shrugged with sharp emphasis.

“The labs people are a bit weird, and generally don’t get along well with others,” the other man said, without a trace of self-awareness. “Several council decrees keep them in this basement.”