My heart sank. “I don’t have anything else,” I told it. “I’m sorry.”
The mirror-geld swayed. It took me a moment to realize that it was trying to shake its enormous head. It pointed dozens of fingers at me—at us—and then at the palms of the two outstretched hands.
“Uh,” I said.
“Does it want to shake hands?” Javier asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
He squared his shoulders. “Right.” Before I could move to stop him, he’d put out his own hand and walked toward the mirror-geld.
It took both of his hands in his own and gripped his wrists. More hands shot out and seized his ankles.Oh Saints, it’s got him!I thought, then scoffed at myself. The mirror-geld had had us all along.
But it did not eat him or rend him limb from limb or any of the horrors I was imagining. It lifted his feet up and slid more hands underneath, then moved one up and stretched out another hand a little higher. He stepped up onto it, and the mirror-geld lifted his other foot up, and offered another hand, higher up its body.
It’s making itself into a staircase. Is it trying to help us get out of the pit?
The hands beckoned to me, and I went forward. Cool gray fingers gripped mine, and I felt it seize my feet and lift them. Istepped up onto the next hand. It gave a little under my weight, and my stomach clenched with dread, but the hand gripped my foot, and then the mirror-geld began to move.
It came out of the tunnel mouth, length after length, lifting itself up like the chime-adder pulling back to strike. It swayed as it crawled, and I closed my eyes, clutching at the hands that held me.
It can’t possibly reach the top. It’s big, but not that big. Is it going to crawl up? Can it do that?
But it did not. The mirror-geld stood, half reared, and then sounds began to come out of it, both familiar and unfamiliar at once.
They were the sounds of hands clapping and fingers snapping. Percussive sounds. Certainly it had no shortage of hands to make them. But then the sounds began to smear together and to modulate into something uncomfortably like speech. It was no language that a human could ever speak, but it had the right cadence, the rise and fall and pause of words strung together.
“What’s it doing?” Javier called down to me.
“How should I know?” I yelled back, and then, contradicting myself immediately, “I think it’s talking to someone?”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
I craned my neck over my shoulder, looking for movement. And there it was, off to my right, another bulky body coming out of another nearby hole. It had the same caterpillar-millipede shape as our mirror-geld, but it seemed smaller.
More clapping and snapping noises rang out, some of them from the newcomer.Newcomers.I could hear another one behind and above me, and another lower down. I closed my eyes, but that didn’t make it any better, so I opened them again and stared fixedly at the gray hands in front of me.
A wall of mirror-flesh slid by in my periphery. A moment later, the hands began handing me up again. I looked up and saw a second mirror-geld hanging out of a tunnel. It reached its hands out to me, and the first mirror-geld heaved me up into its arms, pattingmy feet as it released me. Then it was up and up again, and then a third mirror-geld, or maybe the first one, had moved into position. Each one could only get us about ten feet, since they had to keep the bulk of their bodies in the holes to balance the rest, but there were a lot of them. At least five, I think. Five isn’t a lot when it’s grains of rice, but a great deal when it’s bites of hemlock or forty-foot monsters. I was past panic again. The mirror-gelds were helping us. Friendly nightmares. I had no idea what to do with that. It didn’t make my skin crawl any less. Did that make me ungrateful? I was grateful to the spider that spun her web in the corner of the chicken pen, catching the flies that liked to concentrate there, but even now, I didn’t much want to touch her. Unlike the spider, the mirror-gelds were clearly intelligent in some fashion. Father had said many times that you never judge people by how they look, but he meant things like cleft lips and goiters, not hundreds of arms pasted together in a composite abomination. Still, the same principle applied. I told myself I was a bad person.
So what else is new?
Maybe I could get used to the mirror-gelds if I had enough time. It was starting to seem like I might have enough time on the climb out of the pit. Surely we had been doing this for hours. My arms were very tired, but it didn’t seem to matter. The hands pulled and tugged me upward, even when I was no longer moving on my own.
And then, quite suddenly, the hand that grabbed me was warm and tanned and encased in a dark blue sleeve. Javier pulled me up onto actual solid ground, even if it was the wrong color. My legs immediately tried to give out, and he grabbed me around the waist to hold me up. Another hug that didn’t count. I blinked up at him and thought,Shit, I’m in love with you,but what I said was “Oarfish.”
Whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t that. “Say again?”
“It’s an oarfish. The long fish with the things on its head. I was trying to remember… You know what? Never mind.”
“Are you hysterical?” asked Javier with interest.
“What? No!”
“It wasn’t an insult. After that little jaunt, most people would be.”
“Well, I’m not. Anyway, who talks about oarfish when they’re hysterical?”
“Oh, I can think of at least one person…”
