Advent (10 page)

 
Now, no hesitation. The decision was made. He raised the staff, feeling the phantom flames whirl about it, tethered.

 
‘I require you,’ he said, holding his voice steady, ‘to safeguard a thing for me.’

 
‘We have no power over things.’

 
‘It is no corporeal thing.’

 
The voice emitted a long, hissing sigh.

 
‘A spirit.’

 
‘Yes,’ the magus said. His throat was very dry.

 
‘Of what station?’

 
‘My own.’

 
There was an awful pause and then it sighed again. It was laughing at him.

 
‘Do you dare mock me?’

 
‘No. We welcome you. Only will it and you may dwell as we do. It is an easy matter.’

 
‘Silence!’ The insidious taunting revolted him. ‘Silence! You dream that I would give you my soul unconstrained? There is a bargain, Spirit. I have made it ready and I will bind you to it.’

 
‘A bargain.’ The voice seemed to savour the word with a chilling luxury.

 
‘It is here.’ He clenched his jaw, breathed carefully. ‘Before me.’

 
The angry sound began as a low hiss, the scrape of receding waves on a sandy beach. It gathered, rose, filling with airless breath, until it became the roar of a consuming fire. Gripping the staff firmly in both hands, the magus ignored it and began to speak. The words he spoke were in no language known to men living or dead. It was a tongue he had striven over decades to learn, each syllable and particle of it costing immense labour in the discovery, its rudiments pieced together from tiny scraps scattered in the darkest corners of the great library of the invisible world. It was never meant for human lips, and he sweated until his face appeared to be washed by a river of fire. The effort twisted his eyes closed. He felt resistance, protest, howling fury, but his will was stronger, and the authority embedded in his staff unbreakable. At his halting command the glow in the room began to gather, the impression of movement taking shape as a whirling orbit. It tightened around the tip of the staff until it was compacted into a blazing ball, as if he had thrust the wood like a spear into the lake of the heavens and lanced a comet.

 
The tip hovered over the table, above the polished silver mirror. Arms steady, he lowered the staff to the surface of the mirror.

 
He felt again for the power of the ring and commanded the spirit through the passage.

 
There was a soundless eruption of light. The magus threw up his hands to protect his eyes, dropping the staff to the floor. The moment it left his grip the air filled with fugitive whispers and strange cries, swiftly fading beyond the corners of the room. Streaks of fiery light followed them and vanished as quickly. He felt that he was caught in a shower of burning hailstones and cried out.

 
The room fell quiet.

 
Blinking to restore his sight, he saw the same five candles on the table, the same shadowed racks and shelves around the walls, the heavy door barred against thieves. Only one thing had changed.

 
The silk-smooth oval on the table, no bigger than the palm of his hand, was tinged with vaporous orange-red.

 
The magus stared at it, recovering his breath.

 
The mirror had, quite clearly, ceased to reflect the beams of the ceiling above. It had gained depths of its own. Somewhere down in them, a fire burned.

 
He fingered the ring. Triumph stirred in him. The ring had not betrayed him, then, despite her warning. The passage had opened at his will. He had been foolish to doubt himself. Was he not the greatest of the magi?

 
He averted his eyes carefully as he leaned over the table.

 
‘Are you confined?’ he demanded. ‘Speak!’

 
The dry voice came as if from a coffin buried under the house. ‘Why punish, Magister?’

 
‘Answer. Are you confined?’

 
‘We are.’

 
‘Have you power to leave the place I have bound you?’

 
‘We have not. Release us, Magister, to work your bidding.’

 
‘You may not change your place until I release you?’

 
‘We may not.’

 
His fingers closed around the mirror. To his flesh it felt like the same chill artefact of quicksilver and stannum and glass and magic it had been moments before. He lifted it into the palm of the hand that wore the ring and raised it.

 
‘Then show yourself,’ he said.

 
The mist cleared. He saw his own face, greying beard dark with sweat. The weariness of his expression shocked him. He had grown haggard.

 
His eyes burst into fire.

 
The mirror slipped out of his hand. Trembling, he fumbled after it. It eluded his unsteady hands and clinked down on the table. His fingers clutched at his face.

 
‘As you wish,’ said the voice.

 
No more than an illusion in the mirror. Of course not. He began to grow angry. Was he a child, to be terrified by a reflection? Was he a novice, to be shocked by a spirit’s tricks?

 
He took up his staff. With the instrument of his authority over the fiery spirit in his hand, he reached once again for the mirror and raised it before his eyes as steadily as he could.

 
Within it his image gazed steadily back at him, the wall of his laboratory behind, apparatus glinting by candlelight; but the picture of him in the mirror had eyes that were circles of dancing flame, and its mouth curled with a joyless smile even as his own lips parted in revulsion.

 
The reflection of his mouth spoke to him. ‘Do you see us?’

 
‘Silence!’

 
His image raised a finger – his finger – to its lips and smiled again. The hand it lifted was the right. The magus saw that in the mirror it was not wearing the ring. Gripped by doubt, he glanced down and saw his treasure there on the small finger of his own right hand. It was his; it was not lost. She had spoken wrongly: it belonged to him. The mere sight of it restored some of his self-possession. It also reminded him not to lose time. It was unwise for him to wear the ring long.

 
He faced the infernal copy of himself as bravely as he could, reminding himself that he had seen worse.

 
‘Hear the conditions I make,’ he said, forcing authority into his voice. ‘If you keep safe what I will give you, you will be freed. You will keep it until such time as another looks deep in this mirror. Then you will surrender it to them, and in that moment you also will be unconfined.’

 
The hideous parody of his face sneered. ‘It is insufficient.’

 
It was fortunate for the magus – so he believed, at least – that he had expected this. He knew how the lower beings loved to kick against the pricks whenever they could, and he was prepared accordingly to bargain in return for the task he was imposing on it. If he had not already considered the means, he doubted he could have maintained the presence of mind to converse with the awful image facing him.

 
‘Very well. Then I offer you flesh.’

 
The myriad voice sighed once more, a drawn-out, wordless, hungry groan.

 
‘When you are free I will allow you substantial form. You will be my familiar. You will be more than spirit. Is this sufficient?’

 
There was a long pause. Then the reflected lips tightened in a deadly smile and whispered, ‘It is.’

 
The smile made the yellow bile rise to his throat. He felt a powerful urge to be rid of the sight in the mirror. He laid it down quickly and fetched a small knife.

 
‘Very well.’ He had rehearsed these words, which, along with the act of putting aside the mirror, made it easier to speak calmly again. ‘As I am man, made in God’s image, my living soul belonging to myself alone and incorporate in this mortal body, so I will put into your keeping a part of myself, making that part spirit only as you are spirit.’ He held the blade of the knife in one of the candles. The flame forked around it. ‘When another looks deep into this mirror, you will surrender up that spirit to flesh again, and at that time you will also be free and may seek corporeal form.’

 
In the silence that followed he withdrew the blade, letting it cool.

 
‘You may speak,’ he said.

 
‘By what power?’ The voice was nowhere. The shadows in the corners of the room seemed to utter it.

 
He raised his right hand in front of his face. ‘I hold the key that opens the passage between your world and mine.’

 
‘It is not yours to hold.’

 
‘Be silent!’ the magus shouted. ‘May your utterance be cursed! Go from—’ He choked back his rage, horrified at how close he had come to finishing the sentence and so releasing the spirit from its service. He closed his eyes and let his heart subside. He could no more afford fury than fear. His decision was made, he reminded himself. There could be no contradiction.

 
Reining his passion tight, pushing the whispered words out of his thoughts, he put down the staff and held his hands above the mirror. He pressed the point of the knife against the skin of one finger, just below the nail, and pricked. A single drop of blood beaded out and fell on the surface of the glass. It spread like oil over water.

 
The voice made a long, wordless, whispering sound.

 
He picked up the mirror again. The glass was dry and smooth, and showed nothing but a cloudy red expanse, as if he were cradling a fragment of the dawn. He brought it close to his mouth.

 
Once again he felt for the power of the ring.

 
The

world around him sang with life. A dawn sky was scarlet, portending a terrible day. He was hurtling towards disaster. Its mists cleared suddenly and in the mirror a face that was nothing like his own returned his stare, eyelids peeled back with measureless, insane terror. It was an unknown face, a woman’s face. It saw him as surely as he saw it. They saw each other’s fates, the same fate, more dreadful than death

The magus had meant to breathe gently over the mirror, joining the air and water of his living spirit to the blood that was its earth and fire. But the vision dragged the air out of him. Instead of exhaling, he cried out. The glass fogged over and then blazed. An invisible wind howled through the ring, tossing him like a dead leaf, thundering in his ears. He heard the woman scream, with his own voice.

 
Then he crumpled to the floor.

 
The small mirror fell beside him, face up, blank with the dimness of the room.

 
Outside, dusk had come early. Fat storm clouds erased the day. Their load of sleet had begun to scour people out of the streets. While the greatest magus in the world lay in a dead faint, the storm grew fiercer. An angry demon was riding it, people muttered to themselves.

 
It was some hours before he at last emerged from his laboratory, the box with its immeasurably precious talismans tucked inside his travelling cloak. His servants knew better than to ask questions, even when they saw him as deathly pale as now. When, though, he called them before him, paid them all nine times what they had from him in a year and dismissed them, they went away telling each other – and, later, everyone else – that this night, surely, his final reckoning had fallen due.

Part II

Tuesday Morning

Six