Hang on… if the maid was walking across the room and stepped out of the mirror’s range, shouldn’t this reflection be in midstride?
She wasn’t. She stood with her feet together, which meant that she had moved independently, at least a little, when she reached the shadows.
I took another step back and swallowed hard.
I don’t know how long I stood there watching her. It felt like years. I kept waiting for her to disappear, off to reflect in some other glass, but she didn’t. Wherever the maid had gone, it had no mirrors.
Saints, maybe she’s gone to bed early. That reflection could be here for hours.
I didn’t think I could handle hours.
The implications slowly began to sink in. If your reflection stayed beside the last mirror you passed, what happened if youdied? Was the mirror-world full of shades left behind the dying?
There had been a mirror in my mother’s bedroom. If I went through it, would I find her body, wracked with the pains of childbirth, crouched just beyond the frame?
A shudder went through me at the thought. Then I remembered the little hand mirror that I use to see if a patient is still breathing. If that sliver of glass was enough to trap a reflection, then Saint Adder’s infirmary must be waist-deep in the dead.
Unless it’s just a reflection of their nostrils,I thought, and bit the side of my hand to control what threatened to be hysterical laughter.
“Right,” I said, my voice high and flat in my own ears. “I’ve got to get out of here.”
Well. Take stock.How much room was there? Could I inch past the motionless reflection and reach the exit?
She was half blocking the narrow entryway, and there wasn’t a great deal of room to get by. I was quite certain that I didn’t want to touch her. I kept waiting for her to reach out and grab me. There was no reason to think that she would, but there was no reason to think that shewouldn’teither.
I pressed myself flat against the wall and wormed my way past, hardly daring to breathe. At one point I had to pass within an inch of her shoulder. I could actually feel the gray chill radiating off her. (Would it have been better or worse if she were warm? I don’t know.)
When I was finally out of range, I backed toward the mirror, not taking my eyes off the gray woman until my shoulder hit the cold glass. I closed my eyes and stepped through.
Safely back on this side, I moved to one side and leaned against the wall. It seemed important for some reason that the mirror not be able to see me. Not that the gray woman would necessarily be able to see me, but… well, anyway, I was happier against the wall.
It wasn’t until my heart had stopped racing that I realized that I was still holding the reflection of the book in my right hand.
CHAPTER 14
“Saints have mercy!” I said aloud, staring at the mirror-book. I’d managed to bring an object back through the mirror. I hadn’t expected that. It hadn’t even occurred to me to try.
I looked over at the real book. It was still there. In the mirror, the nightstand was empty.
Strange as it may sound, this felt more like magic than entering the mirror had. The world in the mirror was different, foreign, almost dreamlike. This was real and solid and out here in the real world as I knew it.
The mirror-book was no longer partly gray, but it was not quite identical to the real one. There was a silvery sheen to it, not quite reflective, like a thin coat of oil. It also opened on the wrong side. I flipped to a random page, and the letters were indeed backward, which delighted me. The pages themselves had the same sheen, like onionskin. It reminded me of something.
My eyes kept flicking to the mirror, drawn to the gap on the nightstand like a missing tooth. What did it mean, if you could bring things out of the mirror? Books, clearly, would be difficult, given that they were backward, but what about other things? There were always medicines that were in short supply. Suppose you could double them at a stroke?
I leaned against the wall for what must have been a quarter of an hour, my mind racing.Put a mirror in a granary and you could double food production… Reproduce objects like rugs that take so much time and labor to create…
Hell, if I wanted to be crass, bars of gold don’t care what direction they face.
The book twitched in my hand.
I would like to say that I set it down calmly, as befitted a priceless object of scientific study. Actually I jumped, squawked, and flung it aside as if it were an insect. A moment later, I realized that it hadn’t been a twitch, it had been the book crumbling away.
I watched in dismay as it fell apart. Have you ever seen a log in a fire that has burned completely to ash but retains its shape until you touch it? Then it simply falls apart—and that’s what the book did. Bits of silvery grit dripped onto the carpet as the rectangle became an irregular lump, and then the lump itself dissolved. The ash twinkled in the lamplight, then it, too, faded away into nothing.
So much for bars of gold.
Now, why had that happened? Perhaps things from the mirror couldn’t exist in our world for very long? It made a kind of sense—not a scholarly, scientific sense, but a wonder-tale sense. There’s always a creature who pays you in gold that dissolves when dawn comes.
