I nodded. There was an ache in my chest, and I didn’t know why. It felt a little like fear.
We left the garden and continued on our circuit of the villa. Off to the left, I could just make out the barn that held the non-cream-producing cattle. It occurred to me that if I went down the road to the barn, all the stalls would be empty.
Unless there are cow reflections left standing around. But how often do cows encounter a mirror?
Javier passed with little more than a glance. “Too many people coming and going,” he said, when I looked at him askance. “You’d be gambling that no one would ever have a mirror on them when they went out to the stables and that they wouldn’t happen to notice that the reflections didn’t match up. It’s possible, and we can check it later, butIwouldn’t do it.”
“Where would you hide out?” I asked, slightly amused. “If you were a diabolical poisoner.”
“If I had a base of operations on this side, I would want it to be somewhere that no one would wander through on accident. So either concealed outside or in a private room inside.”
“I’d think inside would be more likely,” I said, as we resumed trudging around the perimeter.
“It is, but I want to rule this out before we go opening random doors.”
We kept going. There was a low embankment on the southeast side of the villa, where the ground had been leveled before building. I followed Javier up, watching my footing. Mirror-stones turned as easily underfoot as real ones.
“What the hell isthat?” Javier stopped so abruptly that I nearly ran into his back.
“What? What are you…” My voice dried up. One more step up the embankment and I saw what he saw.
A few years ago, my father had gone out to inspect a quarry that someone was trying to sell him, and I’d gone with him. Five or six miles out of town, there was a small city of tents, and then a vast crater hewn out of the earth, hundreds of yards across, with a single road spiraling down into the pit. I remember standing on the quarry’s edge and thinking how strange it was, how obviously man-made, not like canyon walls at all.
The pit at our feet was not as wide as the quarry had been, but much deeper. The desert simply fell away into steep walls that went down and down for… well, for a long way. The mirror-walls might have been stone, but they were the same featureless gray as everything else, and I didn’t trust my ability to distinguish depth. I definitely wasn’t going to jump in, anyway.
My first thought was that I couldn’t possibly have missed something this size. My second was that I hadn’t looked out any windows on this side of the villa, so why would I have seen it at all?
“I take it this isn’t here in the real world?” I asked.
“It is not.”
“Ah.”
The pit was roughly circular, and I thought it was about a hundred feet across. There was no spiral road, but nevertheless, I couldn’t shake the memory of the quarry. “Someone had to make this,” I said. “Otherwise it would have just filled back in to match the real world. I think.” I started to lean out over it, and Javier’s arm was in front of me like a bar.
“Please don’t do that.”
“I’m not going to fall in.”
He closed his eyes briefly. “Please. For my nerves.”
“Well. If it’s for your nerves…” I stepped back.
We slowly skirted the edge of the pit. It was farther around than I’d expected. The ground was solid underfoot, but I nudged a small stone toward the lip. It rattled against the wall as it fell, skittering downward, but the muffling silence of the mirror-world meant that we couldn’t hear it hit the bottom.
I saw what looked like scratch marks cut into the walls, though it was so hard to tell in that unrelieved gray. Quarry marks, maybe?
“There are holes in the sides,” Javier said, pointing. I followed his gaze and realized that he was right. What I’d written off as unevenness in the stone were actually openings. Caves? Tunnels? It was impossible to tell how far back they went. I picked up another pebble and tried to toss it into one, but the angle was completely wrong, and while I might be able to get an arrow across the pit, I certainly couldn’t throw a stone that far.
“Perhaps we don’t want to throw rocks into the mysterious hole in the unnatural mirror-world?” said Javier.
“More nerves?”
“They’re a trifle unsteady today.”
“Can’t imagine why.”
We stared into the pit some more. It did not suddenly begin to make sense. I had the feeling that we were both hoping the other one would suggest some course of action other than staring into the hole. Neither of us did.
