The Universal Mirror (3 page)

“Daydreaming’s dangerous in this part of town, I heard.”

The unexpected voice startled Asahel into snapping his head around.  The first thing he saw was the knees of a pair of finely-woven linen trousers, barely worn.  Craning his neck back to see who it was, he blinked.  Quentin was the one who stood before him, running a hand through his rust-colored hair with trembling fingers.  There was a faint hint of aged grapes in his scent and Asahel frowned, tensing harder at the realization.

“Well?  Can I sit down?”

“If you like?”  Asahel found himself adding a second question to the first.  “Quent?”

“That’s the name my mother gave me.  So I was told.”  The man brushed dirt off the wood before carelessly dropping down to sit across from him.  Asahel noticed he was nowhere near the pier’s edge.

“What are you doing here?”

“The same as you,” he said.  “Nothing.”

Asahel hesitated, wondering how many eyes were upon them.  He pulled one leg up slowly, then the other.

“Do you think I’m going to push you off?”  Quentin asked with a lopsided grin.  “It’s not likely.  I can’t swim so I’d rather not take the chance of going down with you.”  The tone was airy, words slurring together and blending into one another despite the pitch.

“I was thinking more,” Asahel said slowly.  “More that any time I’ve seen you, there’s trouble.  Aye, and it’s hard to take off running when you’ve your legs hanging off the pier.”

A few of the deckhands nearby were watching them.  Asahel could tell that they were listening by the sudden pause of their work.  His nose pinked as he tried to glare them back to duty.  The look was greeted with scattered laughter before the men scattered in turn.  Asahel noticed one of them leaning thoughtfully on his broom, rubbing at a nose that appeared to have been broken once.  He turned back to Quentin, knowing that anything he said was likely to be brought back to other ears though he knew not whose.

To his surprise, the other man was laughing.  “That’s a look of command?”

Asahel sighed.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“Why not?”  Quentin asked.  He leaned in closer, so close that the smell of wine was overwhelming.  Asahel barely held himself still, grimacing at the cloying scent.  “Because I’m a magician?  I don’t intend to leave the island.  I like my hands where they are, thank you.”

Asahel felt his stomach drop.  Quent hadn’t come out of friendship or to talk, he thought, not really.  He’d come because he was drunk.  Asahel’s eyes took in the scenery behind Quentin—the scrounging rats, the dirty moorings, and rancid piles of shell and carcass piled at the far end of the docks.  He found himself with another thought, this one worse.  He came because he was slumming.

“Go home, Quentin.”  He stood up, his shoulders hunched inwards.

“Why should I?”  The redhead was swaying a little but not enough to keep him from edging further away from the water.  “I think we ought to talk about what—”

“No.  Not here.”

“Why not?” 

“Because you don’t belong here.”  Asahel said.

Quentin recoiled.  His face pinched as his eyebrows furrowed, caving his delicate features in.  Asahel’s fingers clenched as he looked at the other man, biting his lip as he watched Quentin wilt.  His mouth was too dry to say anything more.

He shook his head and gestured towards the small wooden building in the distance.  It wasn’t much of an explanation but he could still feel the glance of the watching deckhand upon them both.  What Asahel had said was true—this was no place for Quentin to be.  It had hit home, however—perhaps because it was the one truth that either of them could acknowledge.

Asahel didn’t wonder what Quentin thought as he opened the door to the building, leading them into the small space where he kept his ledgers

“You’d ought to sit down, I should think,” he said to Quentin, though not unkindly. 

“I’d ought?”  Quentin slumped into the chair.  “You still talk like a dock rat.”  The other man bit his lip, his face hot from the insult.  “You’re right.  I don’t belong here.  But I didn’t know where else to find you.”

“Letters worked before.”  The small room was cramped with the two men in it.  The blue light outside gave little illumination through the office’s small window.  Tall stacks of paper helped with the obfuscation, casting deep shadows across the hollows of the room.  Quentin reached out to the desk, fingers picking up a quill and picking at its feather tip. 

Asahel couldn’t read his expression in the dim light.  Even if he’d been able to see Quentin clearly, he wasn’t sure if it would have done him any good.

“I didn’t mean—” He started.

“It’s all right,” Quentin said.  “I just…. I’m tired of the lying.  You’re a magician and so am I.  Why all this nonsense because of money—”

“It’s more than that.”  Asahel’s interruption was like the sound of a pebble dropped into a river, easily washed over.

“They put all of these ridiculous restrictions on us because we can do magic and then, to put up with what society thinks on—”

“Quentin—”

“Top of all that?  I can’t—”

“Quent.”  Asahel’s firm hands reached out and steadied Quentin, his palms resting on shoulders covered in silk.  The taller man’s mouth closed and for once, Asahel thought that there was some advantage to his stocky build.  “Don’t.  You’re drunk and you haven’t got a clue of what you’re on about or well… you do but you’ll not care in the morning.  Or remember.” 

Biting his lip once more, he continued, “Tell me why you’ve really come.”  He could taste the tang of blood in his mouth from the number of times he’d bitten his lips already that afternoon.

“It’s what happened.”  Asahel swallowed as he heard Quentin say the words but he didn’t interrupt him.  “I can’t stop thinking about trying to dig that body out of the ground.”

Quent looked at Asahel then, his gray eyes so dark that they blended with the shadows in the room.  “Do you know what I mean?”

“Aye.  I keep thinking of it too,” he admitted, bowing his head so low that his face was no longer visible.  His hands crumpled again, balling up so tight his knuckles reddened.  He could hear Quentin’s breath hiss before going still.  There was no comfort in this quiet, not with that act still hanging between them. 

Yet, the silence didn’t stop.  Both men remained as they were in an uneasy dente.  Asahel lifted his head to see Quentin seated in the chair behind his desk, his head resting against his arms.  He wants me to speak, he realized.  How like Quentin that was.

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” he said, his voice cracking the air.  “At least, we didn’t finish it, I reason.  No Heresy was done.  We’ve not got to talk of it again.”  The look that answered him was sharp, eyes narrowing in on his face so intensely that Asahel faltered.

“That isn’t what I meant,” Quentin said and again, Asahel felt his stomach lurch.

“I’m not doing it.  I said I would before because I’d no idea what it would be… and you left me with it, the hard bits of the work.”  He shook his head.  “The first Magus created the Heresies for a reason.  We’re not meant to practice magic on the body—you know it.”  Asahel swallowed.  “We were mad to think of it.  No one ever has.”

“That doesn’t make it wrong.”

Asahel walked over towards the window, staring out of it.  Life had resumed its normal pace without him in it.  A young boy was mopping the deck of one of the smaller boats.  A pair of men hefted up a crate of cassia onto another.  Here and there, dockworkers passed, congregating and moving, their faces all shaped the same by distance.  Every person he saw seemed governed by some unknowable force—the same force that Quentin proposed they bend to his or her own will.  He’d grown up knowing, as all of them did, that God had created Cercia before men had killed him.  It placed the responsibility on man to know his own morality.  The Heresies were the prohibitions against casting certain types of magic.  This was what kept the magicians in check—otherwise, it was believed they would wrestle God from his grave and take the universe for their own keeping.

The tips of Asahel’s fingers tingled, magic awakening to his thoughts.  He balled his hands up, knowing that Quentin could sense the spark in him.  He longed to explore magic rather than cage it—long-ago curiosity had been what bound them at university.

“You weren’t like this before,” Quentin said.  “At school, you thought this was a good idea.”

“It was an idea then,” Asahel burst out, the air suddenly charged as his voice released a hint of the raw power coursing through his body.  “And we were boys.  At least I’ve grown now.  I’ve responsibilities to think of, even if you haven’t.”

Quentin clenched and now Asahel felt it in him as well, the beginnings of a spell wanting release.

“Not all our responsibilities are to family,” he snapped.  “Don’t we have a responsibility to life?  To the magic?”

“Aye, and I don’t see that digging up a stranger’s corpse’s terribly responsible,” Asahel said.  “Especially if you’ve no real plan.”

“It’ll be different this time.”

“This time?”  Asahel stumbled forward, his hand blindly seeking a chair.  When he found it, he sat, his gaze still not leaving Quentin’s face.  He didn’t trust it.  There was a fire in the other man’s eyes rarely seen in his casual demeanor, the green of his irises flaring up.

“We have to try again.  We didn’t finish the job.”

“You’re drunk,” Asahel was still staring, unable to look away.  “Go home and sleep a bit.”  The words were tremulous, not comforting.  The sudden flow of magic was beginning to ebb and he flattened his palms against his knees, trying to think of some way to dispel Quentin’s words before they could turn from half-mad talk to reality.

“Would you listen to me if I was sober?”  The glint in Quentin’s eyes was so sharp that it could cut. 

“No.”  It was a short answer but an honest one. 

“Then it doesn’t matter.”  Quentin stood, weaving his way towards the door.  “I’m doing it whether you’re there or not.”  But he hesitated, his toe stuttering at the threshold as he looked at the other man.  “Tomorrow night.  Just after sunset, like before.  At the Thana.”

“I won’t be there.”  Asahel kept his voice firm.  The energy in the room was going wild and he wondered if that wasn’t, in itself, a form of working magic on other people.  There was something about the power flowing through him that tempted, more surely than even the look on Quentin’s face could have done.  He clamped it down, ignoring the tingling at the base of his spine and the tiny hairs rising at the back of his neck.

Yet his fingers still drifted, making a slight small gesture.  A few papers slid across the desk behind him and he felt the pressure slacken.  He watched as Quentin stood up, his spine straightening in sudden, rim-rod anger.

“Goodbye.”  The door slammed as a gust of wind punched the wood.

Asahel wasn’t sure which of them had done it.

Sunset in the Thana was not like nightfall in any other part of the capital.  Pallo never slept.  Life was a swirl of glittering parties, the clink of coin on wine glass and laughter so shrill it pierced the ear.  Quentin had been raised in silence but it was the silence between people who used noise to block out one another.  Places that were genuinely quiet filled him with unease, not reverence.

The Thana was one of these places.

The graveyard overlooked the capital.  It was surrounded by tall, pale walls that shone in the fading light, giving little trace of the decay that was so apparent in the city’s waking hours.  Cercia’s highest rested here—it was not the pauper’s yard that he and Asahel had made their first attempt at, but rather a more dangerous expedition altogether.

Asahel would have said I wanted to get caught. Quentin thought as he walked towards the small path that led around the walls towards the gate.  He’s probably saying it now. 

That didn’t make him feel any better.

A thick cloud of fog was rolling in from the waters, covering the path around the Thana and shrouding the graveyard itself in a heavy mist.  His feet slipped in the muddy earth as he walked, heels sticking every couple of moments.  The dirt itself was sucking at his shoes, it felt, clinging to the worn leather.  Kicking at it, Quentin halted as he turned the corner and saw the gates rising up out of the mist, the pointed spires rusted and blunted at the tips.  Two torches burned at the entrance, the flames shrouded from where he stood.  He frowned as he saw the light, his lantern lowering.  No one let a fire burn unguarded for hours.

Someone lived here.

His step was cautious as he approached the gates more closely.  The gates themselves were the opening to a long iron barricade that stretched around the old necropolis.  Families had been buried within for centuries before the fashion had turned and men had laid the dead to rest in the ground.  The crypts still stood, a city in stone as real as the capital itself.

Quentin looked at the iron barring the Thana from outside.  A heavy lock held the bars together, steel weaving between intricate metal patterns.  His thumb pressed against the keyhole for a moment, feeling the cold sear his skin.  With his free hand, he gestured, calling the magic through the earth and through his skin, twisting his fingers with a jerking motion to represent the turning of a key.  He could feel the tumblers inside the lock resisting the magic, twisting and wrenching as he fought back.  He tensed as he concentrated on the motion, the conduit of energy heating his skin until it escaped in a sweat.