The Slanted Worlds (11 page)

“Yes. And Piers—no one will solve Dee's ciphers but you.”

He seemed to swell with pride. One of the black cats stopped licking itself to watch, its green eyes slants of scorn.

Venn straightened. Without another word, he clicked the switch.

They saw a dim, greenish interior, its walls rippling.

“What is that?” For a moment Sarah had no idea.

“A tent,” Wharton breathed, “and look!”

The door was opened and fastened back. Beyond it they saw the bombed street, a glimpse of devastated wartime London.

Jake was shoved in. He was dirty and unkempt and there was a desperate look in his eyes that scared Sarah at once. His hands were cuffed together.

“Right.” Venn turned at once. “This is what we do.”

To see the mirror again sent a thrill of relief and purpose through him.

Its tilted black surface looked exactly the same—there was no scratch, no crack in its perfection, its dark depths showed nothing. Even the silver frame was here, dented and battered, but recognizable.

Jake looked his weary reflection in the face. How to do this?

Allenby, behind him, said, “Is this it?”

“Yes.” He turned. “I want the handcuffs off. And no one in here but you and me.”

The inspector considered him. Then he turned. “Evans, outside.”

“Guv . . .”

“I can handle this. Stay in the street. No one comes past the roadblock.”

With one last glare at Jake, the sergeant marched out. They heard him clambering awkwardly over the rubble.

Allenby brought out the leather fob with the key to the handcuffs. But he held it tight.

“First, explain to me what you're going to do.”

Jake took a deep breath. “You're in over your head, Inspector. Alicia wasn't a spy, she was a double agent. Both she and I work for British Intelligence.”

Allenby's gaze didn't flicker. Did he believe it? Jake let his imagination race. “The mirror is a highly secret communication device and must not be allowed to fall into enemy hands. I can use it now . . . this minute . . . to contact . . . my superiors. Unlock me.”

Allenby didn't move. But he lit up a cigarette and his yellow fingers were shaky. “How do I know . . .”

“You don't know. I've had enough of this. Unlock me. Or your career is over.”

In the silence Jake was aware of the vast and wounded city outside, the hundreds of thousands of people all around him, working and injured and scared, not knowing that here, in its heart, was the black hole that could eat them all.

A car door slammed.

Voices argued, somewhere close.

“All right.” Allenby seemed to decide all at once. He stepped close to Jake. But before he could unlock the cuffs, the door was flung open. Two men in uniform barged in. They wore red caps and each carried a revolver.

The military.

Jake swore. Allenby turned.

“What's going on? This is police business. You have no right . . .”

“I have every right.” The tall officer stared at them both with icy authority. “You sir, will leave now. Wait at the roadblock with your men.”

“You can't order me. I'm not under your command.”

“This is war, sir.” The revolver was raised, just a fraction. “Step outside.”

Allenby glanced at Jake. He drew himself up. Very formally he said, “I'm sorry Mr. Wilde. There's nothing I can do. Good luck.” He reached out and dropped the key into the officer's outstretched hand.

Then he ducked through the tent flap.

At once they moved. Venn grabbed Jake tight. “George! Stand close!
Close!
”

Jake took one last look around. Wharton was staring out at the street, his eyes wide. “This is amazing!” he was muttering. “Bloody bloody bloody amazing.”

Venn grabbed him and yelled at the mirror.
“We're coming now, Piers!”

The sound rang out like a gunshot across the bomb site. Allenby swore, threw down the cigarette, and ran, all his men stumbling after him.

He flung open the tent door and stared in astonishment.

The mirror stood in its tilted splendor. Apart from that, the tent was empty.

Gasping behind him, the sergeant's breath was hot on his neck. “Bloody hell! Where did they go!”

Allenby had no answer. “More to the point,” he said, grim, “where did they come from?”

“Are you all right?” Sarah hurriedly unlocked the handcuffs as Jake stood on the floor of the lab as if in a daze.

“Fine. I gather Gideon got back, then.”

“Eventually. You must have been terrified.”

He wasn't listening. Instead, so slowly and deliberately that it scared her, he reached out and took the greasy key-fob that had been Allenby's out of her fingers and stared at it. It was old, well-worn red leather. On it was the metal image of a fox, with a mouse dangling from its grinning mouth.
Johnson's Car Repairs,
it said,
Black Fox Lane, High Holborn.

“What?” she said, anxious.

He looked at her, disbelieving. As if he couldn't trust what he saw.

“The Black Fox will release you,
”
he whispered.

Of course my marriage was a failure from the start. Moll saw to that. Moll with her cheeky urchin ways, with the run of the house, with her increasingly bold plans to find us a bracelet, to travel to the future, to find Jake Wilde.

I had also grown far too fond of the little scrap.

When my wife said, “She goes or I do,” I'm afraid it was not a difficult decision
.

Diary of John Harcourt Symmes

S
ARAH SAT ON
the end of her bed and stared at the open pages of the notebook.

Downstairs, in the sleeping house, a clock pinged three silver chimes.

With the black pen she had scrawled:

What's happening there? Tell me!

No answer. The writing faded before her eyes.

This was the third time tonight she had begged him, increasingly despairing, and she knew he had read it. Far off in time, surrounded by his empire, powered by the ferocious energy of the mirror, Janus was tormenting her with silence.

She flung down the pen and went to the window. It was a wild, windy night. Since Summer's furious tempest, the weather had been a constant gale; now the lawns of Wintercombe were silvered by a moon half hidden in streaming cloud.

Tugging the dressing gown around her, she hugged herself, staring out stonily at the storm. Janus was the future, but for everyone else, he didn't exist yet. For Jake, Wharton, even for Venn, that world was only a possibility, something that didn't need to be thought about. For her it was real.

Her past.

Her life.

Her parents.

It was as real as standing here, or that Blitz-shattered London Jake had told them about around the fire last night, his hands, still red from the manacles, tight around the battered mug of coffee.

She thought about this house in that century to come, its ruined state, the collapsing wings, the charred timbers of the fire-blackened roof. That was Wintercombe too.

And in that time the mirror was consuming the world.

She turned, alert.

From the corridor outside had come the very faintest of creaks. Holding her breath, still as a shadow, she listened.

Someone was padding, very quietly, past her room.

She crossed barefoot to the door, opened it, and put her eye to the slit.

It was Jake. He was wearing his gray striped dressing gown and had the monkey on his shoulder. As she watched he stopped at Wharton's door, tapped on it softly, and slid in.

She didn't hesitate. Deep inside her mind was the switch that would make her invisible. Janus's gift, that she hated to use. But now she let it operate, felt its warm
itch
flare in her skin.

She slipped out quietly.

Wharton's bedroom was the last in the corridor, near the servants' stairs down to the kitchen. Crossing the landing, under the owl-faced grandfather clock, she felt a cool draft from the dark spaces below move against her bare legs.

The bedroom door was not quite closed. Voices murmured inside, but even with her ear pressed against the gap she couldn't hear what they were saying, so she edged it wider, turned sideways, and slipped in.

Wharton was sitting up in bed looking bleary. “For God's sake Jake, can't it wait . . .”

“I can't sleep! I have to talk to someone.”

“Tomorrow . . .”

“No,
now
!” He dumped the monkey irritably; it jumped into an open drawer of the tallboy and began to rummage through Wharton's carefully matched socks.

“Oh stop that,” the big man growled.

Jake was a shadow on the window seat, crumpled and morose. Wharton clicked on the reading lamp and looked around sleepily. As his glance swept across her, Sarah flinched, but it was clear he saw nothing.

So she slid down and squatted by the door.

Wharton said, into the silence, “Must have been tough for you in that place. Locked up. Handcuffed!”

“It's not that. I could handle that.”

Yeah right.
Wharton allowed the thought to yawn through him. “Don't be so ridiculously heroic, Jake. You went through a terrible experience and it would have been hell, not knowing if you'd ever get back. There's no shame in that. I tell you, even the brief half hour I spent in . . . the mirror . . . shook me to the core.”

He could hardly believe it even now, the alien, oddly wrong smell of the wartime past, the disconcerting loss of certainty there, the utter disbelief that had almost frozen him.

Jake snorted. “Where did Venn get the uniforms?”

“Piers produced them. I don't know where he keeps all that stuff.”

“Piers has a lot of abilities we don't know about.” Jake's whisper was low and grim. “It's clear he's some sort of Shee himself.” He stood up and came toward Sarah so abruptly she knelt up, alarmed, but he just closed the door firmly and turned the key in the lock. Then he went back and sat on the bed.

“There's something I didn't tell the others. About the children.”

“What children?”

“Three kids. Three identical boys. They looked about ten. They were in the Underground station where I slept. There was something really weird about them. They knew my name.”

Wharton sat up wearily, starting to pay attention. “Go on.”

“They said . . . each of them said . . . a sort of prophecy. As if they could see the future. And then just before you lot turned up, I saw them again on the bomb site. This time I asked them who they were.”

“What does it . . .”

“They said
We are Janus.
”

Wharton's eyes widened. Then his gaze flickered to the door, as if somehow he had sensed the jolt of shock that had made Sarah clamp spread fingers over her mouth.

“Janus? But Venn killed Janus . . .”

“Venn killed a replicant of him. But in that weird future Sarah never talks about, Janus controls the mirror. So who knows what he can do with it? Or how many copies of himself he can make? Anyway, that's what the kid said. And then he . . . it . . . laughed.”

Wharton shook his head. He opened the bedside drawer and took out a jumbo bar of fruit and nut chocolate, and snapped some off. Cramming it into his mouth, he muttered, “Great. As if we didn't have enough problems.”

At the rustle of the silver paper Horatio dropped like a stone from the chandelier in a shower of dust; he sat on Wharton's stomach, huge eyes wide.

“Get that thing off me.”

Jake took the chocolate, pulled out a nut, and gave it to the marmoset.

“Hey! My secret stash!”

“It makes you fat, George.” Jake snapped off a generous chunk for himself. “It's for your own good.”

They ate in silence. Sarah decided to try and get closer. She reached out a hand.

Horatio's eyes went straight to her.

She froze.

The monkey chattered and shrieked.

“That's all, greedy.” Wharton threw it a raisin. “Okay, so these Janus-children told you things. What things?”

Jake pulled the bedside chair over and sat in it, feet on the patterned quilt. “The first one said:
The Black Fox will release you.
”

“And what sort of nonsense—”

“Not nonsense.” He took the greasy key fob out of his pocket and threw it on the pillow. “That was Allenby's. The key unlocks the handcuffs. The prophecy came true.”

Wharton, after a moment, picked up the keys. He ran a thick thumb over the worn emblem. “Coincidence.”

“No.” Jake stared straight through Sarah, unseeing. “And if the first one came true, the others might as well.”

Wharton drew his knees up under the bedclothes. “And they were?”

“The second kid said:
Find the Man with the Eyes of a Crow.
And the third:
The Broken Emperor lies in the Box of Red Brocade.
”

Wharton sucked a nut. “Sounds like . . . Hang on. The Broken Emperor. Do you think that might be something to do with the Zeus coin? The broken half of it Sarah gave Summer? That can . . . you know . . .”

Jake stared. “You know about that?”

“Venn told me.”

Sarah put her hand carefully down on the worn carpet and inched forward. A board creaked under her weight.

“Turns out leaving it with the Shee was such a bloody stupid thing to do!” Wharton stared gloomily. “If Summer finds out the mended coin has the power to destroy the mirror, then BOOM. End of all of us.”

Sarah's heart gave a great jolt in her chest She wanted to cry out with the shock.

“Keep quiet. It's not safe to talk about.” Jake got up and paced to the window, staring out at the fleeting moon over the Wood. He had intended to tell Wharton all of it—the children's stupid rhyme that kept going around and around in his head.

But something made him keep that treacherous offer locked tight inside him. He folded his arms, annoyed, staring at his own reflection, the rain running down his glassy face. “So what does it all mean?”

“Search me. Maybe we should tell Venn . . .”

“Not yet.” Jake turned. “Horry. Come back here.”

The marmoset had skittered to the door. It was scrabbling at something nearby, on the floor, and then with a small spiteful grin it screeched, loud in the still house.

Jake dived over and snatched it up. “Shut up! You'll wake the place.”

Then he noticed the door was unlocked.

“Hell!” Very quietly, he opened it and peered out. The corridor was a long silhouette of silent shadow.

He stepped back. “I was sure I locked that.”

Wharton lay down and rolled over. “Place is the draftiest hole in the world,” he muttered. “Go to bed now. Talk tomorrow.”

For a moment Jake was still. Then he went out, and padded silently down the corridor. Above him the recesses of the ceiling showed faint watery reflections of the rain, pattering loudly down the drainpipes outside.

At Sarah's room he paused. It was unlikely, but . . . Very carefully he tried the handle.

It wasn't locked.

He opened it and peered in.

She was lying in a curled huddle, her blond hair on the pillow. Moonlight caught her closed eyes, her easy breathing.

For a while he stood still there, holding Horatio, watching her. He was tempted to say something, to stand there and say,
Was it you? Were you listening?
But then tiredness came over him, and a sort of sadness, as if he didn't even want to know, and he backed out and closed the door with the softest of clicks.

Sarah did not open her eyes.

She lay in her curl of bedclothes and listened to the thud of her heart, the drag of her breath. Her hands and feet were numb with cold, and so was her mind. All she could think of was one phrase.

The coin has the power to destroy the mirror.

What a fool Janus must think her.

What a fool she was!

Her hand clenched tight under the sheets.

At least now she knew exactly what she had to do.

And who her only ally would be.