Realizing that I could get very sidetracked very quickly, I set them both on the table for later consideration and went to see if there was enough light to explore.
The hallway looked exactly as it had before. I paused on the threshold, feeling like a swimmer. My bedroom had been shallow water. Notsafe,exactly. You could still drown in the shallows, but at least the way out was never far away.
Now I was about to plunge into the depths.
I set my foot on the gray tiles and stepped into the hall.
Nothing terrible happened. I realized I was holding my breath and let it out, laughing at myself. What had I expected? That there were… I don’t know, pits of spikes lying around, as soon as you got away from the mirror?
I glanced over my shoulder. My room was ablaze with light and color, but as soon as I stepped to the side, it was gone. There was no glow of reflected sunlight on the walls, no hints of color anywhere that I could see.
It was strangely unsettling. You know on some gut level how light works, and when it stops working like it should, your body registers that something is wrong.
Looking over the gallery railing, I could see down to the courtyard, the entire villa as dark as if it had been dipped in coal dust. The long galleries, the archways, the many doorways, all dark and lifeless. No people. Of course, there were no mirrors in the halls—why would there be? They were fragile and expensive things here, if not in faraway Silversand. So no reflections would be caught standing in the halls, waiting like lost children for their owners.
That was probably for the best. The dark halls would not be any less unsettling if there were silent figures standing in them.
Theymustdissolve after a while,I told myself firmly. The alternative did not bear thinking about.
I made my way along the hall to the stairs. The doors were all closed. The archways, with their elaborate patterned tiles, were now dull monochrome. Unless the pattern had been carved or etched into the surface, the far side of the mirror brushed it all away.
From the stairs, I could look up at the sky. It, at least, was still blue, though it seemed dull and faded. I would have expected it to look brighter in contrast to the charcoal villa, but instead it seemed as if the color had been leached away.
There was an angular black scar across the sky, a triangle pointing roughly south. Realistically I knew that it wasn’t a presence but an absence, the place where two reflected beams from distant mirrors diverged. But the blackness seemed much more real and solid than the sky itself, and it was hard not to see it as some kind of object. A massive piece of architecture, perhaps, or a freakishly straight-sided mesa looming over the desert.
I looked down to see if it cast a shadow, then realized that I wouldn’t be able to tell. There were no truly deep shadows, nor any light sources except the sky. Everything existed in that strange, sculptural light. My hands on the railing had only faint shadows underneath them, and the railing itself had only a slightly darker curve along the bottom.
The staircase itself was surprisingly disorienting. The monotonous color and lack of crisp shadows made it hard to judge the distance between steps. And it was soquiet. The scuff of my heels on the steps was the only sound I could hear. This space should have been full of people laughing and talking and working, a bustle of humanity going about its business in the villa. I could not remember the last time I had heard such silence.
I cleared my throat a few times, expecting it to be disproportionately loud, but the noise was thin and small against the vast edifice of silence.
My excitement was rapidly mixing with fear, which did nothing to stop the trembling in my hands. It felt a little like the first time I’d fallen in love. I’d been queasy and trembling and excited then, too.
Hopefully this would work out better.
At the bottom of the stairs, Lady Sorrel’s potted agaves stood clustered in one corner. I bent down and touched one of the less spikey ones. The thick leaves felt no different than anything else here. They might as well have been all one with the soil and the pot itself, more like sculptures than anything living.
I took out my penknife and cut a thick leaf free. The inside was gray all the way through. I touched the edge, expecting it to be wet, but it was as cool and dry as the railing or the walls. If I could touch the sky, I imagined it would feel much the same. The blade of the knife, as I put it away, seemed like a world of silvery color.
So the surface isn’t just a gray patina, then. It’s actually completely made of this mirror-stuff. Huh.
I tucked the leaf into my pocket, wondering how long it would take to fall apart once I brought it back to the real world. Perhaps, like the apple, it would last for hours. Perhaps plants lasted longer than books. Could it be because they were more alive? Maybe. Or maybe, as Grayling had said,mirrors are strange.
When I rose to my feet, it turned out that I was still a trifle unsteady from the stairs, and rocked sideways as I tried to rise. I flung out a hand for balance and felt a quick stab of pain. My breath huffed out into the stillness.
Another agave, one of the ones framed in needles, had caught the side of my hand and torn a shallow gouge in the skin. It smarted. I clamped it into my armpit, grumbling. The tiny spot of blood on the needle’s tip practically glowed.
Oh well, if that’s the worst that happens… Where to next? Surface, or dive deeper?
There was only one answer to that, of course.
The possibility that I might meet something dangerous, I put off my mind as much as possible. It might happen. I might die.And I might have died the first time I dosed myself with arsenic to document the results or the first time I tested my chime-adder drug on myself. Discovery is rarely without risks.
Now on the ground floor, I took the short passage to my workroom. In the real world, these walls were textured plaster, which gave the mirror-walls here a look like concrete or oddly worked stone. It was less unsettling than the courtyard because it might conceivably have existed like this in the real world. I trailed my fingertips along the wall. Not ice-cold, but chill, like a wine cellar or a cave.
My workroom had no mirrors in it, only the faded blue sky visible through cracks in the shutters. It should have been nearly lightless, and yet I could still see everything clearly. Scand would have been beside himself with how light shouldn’t behave that way. Saints, but I wished he were here. Not even because I expected him to have any insights, but because I wanted to share this discovery with someone. There’s no point in discovering something amazing if you can’t grab another person by the forearms and shake each other and yell,Do you see that!?
(Grayling didn’t count. It’s no fun if they just yawn and look bored.)
