He grunt-sighed. We kept walking.
The tunnel opened abruptly into a much larger passage, wide enough for a team of draft horses. The mirror-geld backed into it, waving us forward. I looked to my right—and saw a scrap of blue.
“Oh Saints,” I whispered. “It’s the sky. It’s brought us out.”
Javier looked as baffled as I felt. “Butwhy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t like the Queen?” The Queen’s guardshadkilled the small mirror-geld. Was that the reason?
Did they really kill it, though? It wasn’t dead, just squirming around on the end of a sword.Looking at the big mirror-geld, it did not look like a thing that would die so easily, or at all. Maybe if you had a few dozen barrels of flaming pitch or a lake full of aqua regia?
The mirror-geld waved us forward again. Swallowing hard, we walked toward the tunnel mouth, past the creature’s side. Its very… very… long side. Looking back along it, I guessed the mirror-geld was at least forty feet long.
Forty feet isn’t so bad,I told myself, to stave off the bubble of panic that was starting to rise up again.There are ordinary animals that big. Whales. Kraken. A couple of sharks. That one fish. With the fins and the weird things coming off its head.
Trying to remember the name of the fish got me to the tunnel mouth. The faded blue of the sky, even with the dark notches taken out of it, was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. I took a shuddering breath, found that I was, for some reason, near tears, and told myself firmly to stop that nonsense right now.
Unfortunately, the sky was a lot farther away than normal, because the tunnel mouth opened directly onto the side of the giant pit.
“Fifty or sixty feet to the top,” said Javier glumly. “Can you climb that far?”
It was sweet of him to ask, when we both knew the answer. “Can you?”
He eyed the smooth gray stone. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“It’s a long fall down for a maybe.”
The mirror-geld shuffled up beside us on its hand-feet, and we pressed against the far wall to give it room. The atavistic horror of its appearance hadn’t gone away. I forced myself to study it, the way I’d once forced myself to study spiders. Eventually the spiders had resolved into beautiful alien jewels, inlaid with rose and tan and dusty gold. Something I could admire, even if I had no desire to touch one.
The mirror-geld resisted such treatment. No matter how I looked, it remained a gigantic wall of fragmented flesh, studded with blinking eyes and patchwork faces. I wondered how it assembled itself.Assuming that the bits all stuck together, did it just build outward, layering new bits on top of old ones? Were there hundreds of faces walled away inside it, still moving?
When the maid Eloise had stood between two mirrors and the parts had fallen off, it seemed as if they had sought each other out, the hands crawling toward the broken faces. Assuming theywantedto be together, did that mean that small mirror-gelds wanted to merge into bigger ones, like this? Or was it some kind of cannibalism of the weak by the strong?
More importantly, how many mirror-gelds like thiswerethere? There had been multiple tunnel mouths in the pit. Had they all been dug out by this one, or was it one of many?
The mirror-geld swung its overhanging head in our direction and extended two arms. When we did nothing but stare at it, it made grabbing gestures with the hands.
“Does it want something?” asked Javier softly.
“It did save us. Maybe it thinks it deserves payment?” I rummaged through my pockets. What could I possibly offer a creature like this? What did it want?
My fingers closed over the wrapped mirror.
Oh Saints. This is either a brilliant idea or a breathtakingly stupid one.Still, if there was a time for sane and normal ideas, we were long past it. I pulled the mirror out, unwrapped it, and held it out.
The mirror-geld pulled back a little, as if in surprise, then stretched out both hands. I set the mirror on its palms, careful not to touch that chill gray flesh, then held my breath.Mirrors have power in this place. Mirrors are why it exists.
I guess now we find out if it’s happy with its existence.
The mirror-geld lifted the hand mirror to the wall of faces and gazed into it, tilting it back and forth. “Are you sure that was a good idea?” Javier asked in an undertone.
“I’m not sure about anything right now.” I watched the thing’s faces, hoping for some clue as to whether we should be celebrating or running.
And then the dozens of mouths began to smile. Awkwardly, one side often unmatched to the other, but smile nonetheless. Eyes crinkled at the corners. The mirror-geld lowered the mirror, and then it went down on its many elbows andbowedto us, or as close as it could manage.
“Oh, blessed Saint Adder,” I said, exhaling.
The mirror was passed from one hand to another, down the mirror-geld’s length, until I lost sight of it. I wondered if it had some pouch to store it in or if it had a hoard at the other end of the tunnel, like a dragon. Then, still smiling, it stretched two hands out to me again.
