The Slanted Worlds (7 page)

The stark horror of that statement seemed to hang in the air like a wisp of smoke.

Piers sighed. “She doesn't realize its power. Didn't know.”

“And she never must.” Venn stood too, facing Wharton. “Sarah's mission is to destroy the mirror. I can never let her do that. If she should find out about the power of the coin, she might . . .”

“But if the other half is lost . . .”

“That won't stop her looking for it. I must have the mirror safe. Or I'll never see Leah again.” Venn swung away. For a moment Wharton glimpsed the tension in the man, wound so tight a hasty word, a forbidden thought might snap it.

The cat on the windowsill stopped washing and gazed over.

Venn took a breath, dropped his voice. “
Sarah must never know.
And neither must Summer.”

Wharton sat down again slowly, trying to consider this calmly. “What if Summer knows already? She demanded the coin as her reward, after all.”

“Then we're in worse trouble than even I feared.” Venn walked to the window. “Let's assume, for the moment, the Queen of the Wood has no idea of the power she wears round her pretty white neck. In that case, my plan is—the only plan possible is—to get it from her. But with Summer nothing is simple. Nothing is easy. If she had any notion how much I want it, she'd take great delight in keeping it from me.” His face was set and hard. When he spoke again it was in a bitter whisper Wharton had to strain to hear.
“Is this my punishment, Leah? . . . As soon as I command the mirror I will come for you. I swear.”

He turned, abrupt. “I need a plan, Piers.”

Piers looked worried. “Tricky.”

“And you”—Venn turned to Wharton—“must never breathe a word of this. I'm only telling you because I may need you. You might be useful. That's the only reason.”

The man's arrogance made Wharton ball a fist with annoyance. “Don't talk to me like that. He may be your slave, but I'm not.”

Venn shrugged. “Fine. Then go. Get out of here.”

“I go nowhere until Jake is safe. As for Sarah, I don't like deceit. I'll decide what I say to her.”

“About what?” Sarah's sharp question alarmed them all; turning quickly Wharton saw her standing there in the scruffy jeans she had worn in London, her hair washed and clean, her eyes curious.

There was a silence so pointed it hurt. Venn's arctic glare was fixed on Wharton. They were all looking at him. What could he do? His bold words still echoed, but at once and to his own dismay, he knew his first priority had to be Jake's safety. The mirror must be preserved. He pulled a face. “Well . . .”

Venn watched him sidelong with the attention of a hawk on a scurrying rat.

Piers seemed to be holding his breath.

Sarah said, “Well what?”

Wharton squirmed. Then he licked his lips and murmured grimly, “Only that there's been no word. From Gideon. Or from Jake.”

The police station was deserted. Jake ran down the dusty corridor “We need to find his office. Allenby. The name's on the door.”

Gideon shrugged. “Then you'll have to read it.”

Jake glanced back, astonished. “You can't read?”

“Learning wasn't for the son of a hovel, great magician.”

The sarcasm was bitter. As Jake found the door and burst through it, he spared one thought on what Gideon's life might have been in that long-lost far-off century; then he was ransacking the drawers and flinging open the filing cabinets. One was locked. He grabbed a metal ruler, slid it in, and forced the drawer hastily. It swung wide.

“Got it!”

The suitcase had been propped inside. He had it out and open at once. At the door Gideon watched the grimy corridor. “Listen!”

The whine was distant and alien, the metallic howl of a strange beast. Gideon had his flint knife out, alert, but Jake said, “It's just the all-clear. It means the air raid is over.”

Gideon listened a moment. “I don't understand what's happening in this time. This war—is it fought with machines? Do the machines make war against each other, or against the men?”

“You don't want to know.” Grim, Jake was rummaging through the contents of the case. He found the birth certificate and stuffed it into his pocket.

Gideon frowned. “I can hear voices. People coming back.”

Jake couldn't hear a thing, but he knew the changeling's senses were Shee-sharp.

He tossed aside the photo albums and the letters—fascinating, but no time—and just as a door slammed far down in the buildings his fingers touched the softness of the black velvet bag. He pulled it out.

“Ready?” Gideon turned.

Jake had the bag open. He tipped out the metal film-case. What was on this? Was this what she had wanted him to see?

“Jake. Jake, we have to go! Now!” Gideon locked the door and crossed to the window. Even Jake could hear the shouts now, the banging on cells, the sergeant's furious yell.

The window was barred; Gideon shivered at the touch of the metal, but climbed up and had slithered lithely through before Jake realized what was happening. “Wait! I'll never fit.”

“You have to.”

Voices in the corridor. The door handle turned, was rattled angrily. Allenby yelled.

“Wilde! Open this door.”

“Take this. Get them back to Venn.”

Jake thrust out the velvet bag and the papers into Gideon's pale hands. Then he climbed up and gripped the bars and slid his arm, then his left shoulder through. Turning his head sideways he breathed in, sweating, willing himself between the rods of steel.

The door shuddered.

Gideon grabbed him.

“Don't! Don't pull me! I'm stuck!”

He was thin and agile, but the bars were too close. They squeezed his head. He was caught in a vise. He would never get free.

Panic gripped him. There was no way on, no way back. “I can't do it! I can't!”

“You can!” Gideon grabbed him, fierce. “Push.”

“No! It's too late.”

Something crashed and gave. For a second he thought it was him, that he was out, then behind him the lock burst. Pinned halfway to freedom, he slipped off the bracelet and flung it at Gideon, who caught it with astonished speed.

“To Venn
. Not Summer! Promise me!
”

Hands grabbed him, hauled him out from the bars with careless, brutal force, knocked him down. He crashed into a black circle of boots.

The window was empty.

Gideon was gone, and if he answered, Jake didn't hear it.

What doth my mirror show?

It showeth not what a man looks like but what he is.

Not what he sekes for but what he hath found.

From
The Scrutiny of Secrets
by Mortimer Dee

The diary of Alicia Harcourt Symmes:

After the strange demise of my dear papa, and now that I am truly his heiress, I think it would be a suitable tribute for me to continue his diary. His name was John Harcourt Symmes, and he was a Victorian gentleman of science, in those distant days when the study of the occult could still be scholarly, and respectable. Unlike now, where I am called a foolish woman and people smirk at me behind my back.

I knew hardly anything about him until the day the letter came.

I was a young girl of 19, living a quiet life with my aunt and uncle in the rectory at Charlecote Thorpe in the county of Yorkshire. It was a remote, windy hamlet on the moors, the nearest town ten long miles away. I had lived in that dingy and depressing house since I was eight, the year when my dear mama passed over to the Other Side. She had separated from Papa very early in her marriage, and no one ever told me why. I was kept in complete ignorance. It was never even spoken of by my aunt and uncle. I could only suppose there had been some terrible scandal, some wonderfully thrilling disgrace. Mama had even reverted to her maiden name of Faversham, though in secret I practiced my true forbidden name over and over in my books in childish handwriting.

Alicia Harcourt Symmes.

It had a refined sound to me, even then. It made me feel like a different person, as if I had some hidden dark mirror image of myself.

I was an isolated child. Not ill-treated but certainly unloved. It was clear to me my aunt had only taken me in out of duty to my dead mother. I had only my dolls to play with, as the village children were thought too rough and uncouth to come to the house. Sometimes I used to peep at them from between the heavy velvet curtains, as they ran on the moor and small scruffy dogs chased after them. I envied them their wild fights, their screeching arguments, their real families. Because, though I seemed outwardly a quiet and reserved child, respectful and silent in company, the truth was that I was seething with rebellion.

I loathed my life!

Maybe that was why I was fascinated to learn more of my father. Once, coming very quietly into the room, I heard my aunt in conversation with one of her cronies, the curate's wife, and she was saying: “. . . My dear, he experimented in the occult, in fiendish, terrible things Of course, he was a most depraved and villainous creature. How my sister came to fall under his spell remains the sorrow of my life. Do you know, they say at one time he even kept a girl from the streets and she actually became . . .”

Then they saw me, and fell silent.

How I pondered those words in the curled cave of my bedclothes! How in secret I would imagine and dream of my father! Depraved and villainous! I shuddered with delight. I pictured him tall and devilishly handsome, with a curled mustache, and I prayed that one day he would come in a great carriage and whisk me away from the tedium of the dull dark house, to Paris, to Rome, to London!

But he never came.

Instead, on my twenty-first birthday, the letter arrived.

Sarah spread the photocopies of the Dee manuscript on the kitchen table. Piers had enlarged them, so that the page of scribbled drawings, the tangles of coded words, could be seen more easily.

Venn picked one up and examined it.

“Total and utter gibberish.” Wharton turned a copy, not even sure which way up it should go. “I mean look at this. A tower, a bird-mask, some sort of crane? Then an equation. Then a scratchy picture of what might be, well . . . a man on a horse?”

“A centaur,” Venn muttered.

“Well, maybe. But what does it all mean? How can this help us get Jake back?”

Venn flicked a glance at Piers. “Any idea?”

The little man looked at the page almost hungrily. “Not yet, Excellency. But I'd love to have a go. Puzzles! I love puzzles.”

Venn frowned. “Be quick. We need the information.”

He turned to Sarah and she faced him. That sharp blue gaze they both had, Wharton thought. How hadn't he seen before how similar they were?

Venn said, “So. My great-granddaughter.”

Sarah knew there was one question that had burned in him since their last meeting; he asked it at once, unflinching. “Is it true that Leah comes back?”

She looked away. “In my history, she didn't die in a car crash. But I don't know details. All our family documents were lost in the fire, or Janus took them. But that painting of her—the one you have in her room? We still had that.”

“So I'll succeed.” He seemed numb with relief, dizzy with disbelief. He glanced at Wharton, then back at her. “If only I knew how. As for what happened with Summer . . . I'm trusting you, Sarah. You have to help me. When Leah is back, I don't care about the mirror. You can blow it to smithereens if you like.”

He turned and went to the door.

“What about David?” she said.

He stood stock-still, as if he had forgotten the name. “Yes, David. David too. Of course.” He went out. A moment later they heard the front door slam.

“He's not going to the Wood, is he?” Wharton said anxiously.

Piers shrugged. “The estate has many footpaths. He'll roam up on the moors for hours.”

“That Summer creature gives me the creeps.” Wharton turned to Sarah. “Come on. We need to check the mirror.”

On her way out, she looked back. Piers had seated himself at the table. He had poised a lamp over the papers and was making hasty notes with a long red pen. From nowhere he seemed to have found a green visor to shade his eyes.

“Looks like a newspaper hack,” Wharton said.

She smiled. As she closed the door, three of the cats jumped up and sprawled on the table, mewing for food.

“Get lost,” Piers said absently.

The house was silent and musty. As they walked its corridors, they passed through slants of pale light from the windows, watery with tiny running raindrops.

“It seems so empty without Jake,” Wharton said.

“Yes.”

To her it seemed as if an air of hopelessness, of damp decline, had invaded the place. She paused beneath a pale square of paneling. “There was a painting there Christmastime. Surely?”

“Venn sold it last week. Piers boxed it up and I took it to the station. It's being auctioned in Christie's.”

“So he's short of money.”

“Sarah, he's out of money.”

She shook her head. As Wharton led the way up the wide, curving staircase, she thought of how the Time-wolf had once slunk up here, its eyes sapphire fragments. On the landing, the ancient floorboards creaked.

The Long Gallery stretched before them.

They walked down it, but Wharton stopped abruptly before a bedroom door. “Reminds me. There's something you might be able to help me with, because the damned beast won't even look at me.”

He led her inside.

Jake's bedroom.

It had been his father's, and he had moved in there. His clothes lay on chairs, on a heap on the floor. His laptop sat on the mahogany dressing table.

Wharton pointed up. “Horatio. Quite lost without his master.”

She saw the marmoset. It was huddled in a heap of misery on the very top of the great curtain rail. It spared her a miserable glance, its tiny face screwed up.

“Horatio!” She reached up, her voice soft. “Come on. Come down.”

The creature turned its face away.

“Just won't eat,” Wharton said gloomily. “If Jake gets back and finds him dead, there'll be hell to pay.”

Suddenly he turned to her. “Though what if he never gets back, Sarah. What if . . .”

“Don't panic.” She kept her voice firm. “Of course he will. Pass me that chair.”

It took ten minutes to coax Horatio down, but the grapes she found proved too enticing, and finally he jumped into her arms with a screech and snatched the fruit.

“Brilliant.” Wharton was delighted. “I knew he'd like you.”

She clambered down. The marmoset's fur was soft and lustrous. It looked up into her face and chattered. Then it took another grape, held a handful of her hair, climbed onto her shoulder, and sat there, sucking. Its tail was a soft tickle around her neck.

She turned. “Right. Let's go to the mirror.”

At first she was amazed that Venn had left it unguarded. Then, as she ducked through the viridian web that was spun about it, she noticed the new bank of security devices, the alarms and laser-thin beams of light that Wharton held her back from.

“Venn is more and more afraid of theft. Getting paranoid. There's the control panel, and they've wired it up like the crown jewels. If there's any sign of Jake coming back, the whole house will probably explode with alarms. This is what the portraits are paying for. We can't go any closer than this.”

Sarah hissed in frustration. “Crazy.”

“Maybe. But that thing scares me . . . It seems to have a life of its own.”

The obsidian mirror.

It leaned, facing her, a dark sliver of glass in its jagged silver frame. In the angled shadowy surface, she saw a slanted image of herself, and her own face looked different, subtly altered. The mirror showed her herself, but for the first time a stab of doubt pierced her—did it show what was there now, or were its reflections warped and rippled through by time, so that she might be seeing herself seconds ago? Or did the mirror show not only the outward form but how a person felt? Their emotions? Their soul?

Wharton was talking. She dragged her attention back.

“. . . can do about any of it. I never thought I would miss that infuriating, arrogant wretch.”

She realized he was talking about Jake.

“Jake can look after himself.”

“So could his father. But what if we never see him again, Sarah?”

She patted his elbow, and walked as near as she dared to the network of lights. “Don't worry. Keep believing. Gideon will find him. He promised.”

Wharton snorted. “If Summer knows that, Gideon might be torn into pieces by now.”

“You really have to . . .” She stopped.
A brief glimmer, like lightning.
“What was that?”

“What . . .”

“Did you see!”

She felt him hurry beside her. “I can't see anything except . . .”

The mirror flickered
.

For a brief, terrible moment it was not even there. They were in a place of utter darkness, the air a choking dust; all around them and over their heads, a crushing, suffocating mass of rubble and brick.

Sarah gasped.

Wharton swore.

Then the mirror was clear.

“What . . .
whe
r
e
was that!”

Sarah stared at the obsidian glass, seeing her own eyes, wide and startled. She stared into the fear that the black hole had reached even here to engulf the world.