“I’ll go.”
I whipped around.
“I’ll do it.” A small voice, but firm. Hennan held out his hand to Kara. “Give me the rune.”
“You can’t.” Snorri shook his head. “You saw what it’s like in there. And it’s not what you saw that you should be worried about, it’s whatever is in you that’s going to come out. The effect is so much stronger down here than it was on the surface . . .”
Hennan ignored Snorri, holding Kara’s gaze. “You told them I should come. You said, ‘what could be more valuable than someone whose family has resisted the pull of the Wheel for generations?’”
“Yes but . . .” Kara faltered. “This is something different. You saw—”
“Anyone who comes close to the Wheel can call themselves a wrongmage.” Hennan spoke over her. “Jal made the ground open up and swallow someone.” He mimed it with his hands. “But most of them aren’t wrongmages for very long. The Wheel kills them.”
“Too right!” I said. “And it’s not a good death either. You’re mad if you want to go in there.” I found I didn’t want to watch the boy die.
“My grandfather’s grandfather was Lotar Vale. He worked his magics closer to the Wheel than almost any before or since, and he did it for ten years—then found the strength to leave! That’s why my family don’t feel the pull. Lotar’s blood runs in our veins. The horrors don’t come for us.” It would take a practised liar to spot the hesitation, but I could tell he was just guessing.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Kara said.
“Let him try,” Snorri rumbled.
“What?” Kara took the boy’s arm, as if he might throw himself across the boundary at any moment.
“He’s old enough to know his own mind. In two years he’ll be a man. Unless we fail here in which case nobody will be anything in two years’ time.” Snorri waved at the mirror. “If we don’t break it and the Blue Lady sees us, you think she’s going to take him on as her little helper? Or kill him with the rest of us?”
Kara said nothing but held out her hand, the iron tablet dark against the whiteness of her palm. Hennan took it, brushed a hand up through the red shock of his hair, glanced nervously back at Snorri and me, then put a foot over the boundary. Took another step. Wholly inside the unshielded area now, he looked back, lips twitching toward a smile.
“Hurry!” Kara waved him on.
The air began to seethe around Hennan as he turned back toward the mirror, with quick steps, hands out in front of him as if he were breaking through cobwebs. Half-seen shapes moved around him like figures made of glass, seen only as a confusion of surfaces catching and distorting the light.
As he neared the mirror one of the shapes darkened, taking on colour. Something snake-like wrapped his wrist as he reached out with the tablet.
“No!” Hennan sounded angry rather than scared. The snake, or tentacle, or tendril became glassy as he stared at it, turning insubstantial again, and Hennan pressed the tablet against the mirror’s surface.
“Brjóta.” For a moment the word hung in the air, trembling through the half-glimpsed horrors as the Wheel tried to give them form. In the next moment the mirror cracked with a splintering bang that left my ears ringing. A spiderweb of fractures ran across it, top to bottom. Immediately a klaxon rang out, strident, the light turning from a constant white to a pulsation of reds in shades from hot coals through to scarlet.
Hennan spun away, shaking off translucent hands, brushing past or through figures that loomed on all sides. He ran for us, each step slower than the next as if he were wading through a swamp. The air grew misty around him, but red as blood with the light’s warning.
“Don’t stop!” I roared.
A yard to go now. A thin crimson line opened along his cheekbone as a glassy claw sliced him. The mist took on a deeper stain.
All three of us stood at the boundary, screaming for him to push on.
He made it another foot, moving with agonizing slowness, before another cut opened up, this one deeper, running across his forehead, leaking blood.
We reached for him, though thankfully I had the sense to do it a split second later than the other two. Kara was quickest, lunging shoulder deep into the profound darkness that bloomed the moment her fingers crossed the boundary. Dark or not, she caught the boy and dragged him to us. I caught her in turn as she fell back. Her arm seemed unmarked but she lay in my lap, trembling as though dipped in the Norseheim sea, unable to catch her breath, eyes wide and staring.
“You’re all right.” Snorri lifted her from me.
I got up, pulling Hennan to his feet. With a rag from my pocket I wiped the blood from his eyes. We stood for a minute, all of us waiting for our hearts to stop trying to batter their way out of our chests. Kara shook herself free from Snorri and started to treat Hennan’s wounds with some paste from a leather pouch, the frightened girl banished once more to whatever part of her mind Kara kept her in, the v?lva back with us again, all business.
“We need to move.” I started back out through the door. Grandmother said the Silent Sister would know when the mirror broke. They would be beginning their final assault on the tower now and I wasn’t keen to find out if the Lady Blue had any more tricks up her sleeve.
Hennan brought up the rear and, glancing back, I saw the air around his shoulders mist briefly then fade, as if the shields that had once held to the painted boundary might now be failing, fractured as profoundly as the mirror.
Once I had them moving I let Kara lead the way with her map, and slipped into the middle of our little group just behind Hennan. “Good work there, lad.” I punched his shoulder in the way I’d seen Snorri dish out approval. “If I’m still marshal when I get back to Vermillion I’ll recommend you for a medal.” I rolled the word “when” silently in my mouth. I still didn’t know for sure what I would do once the key was in that final lock. I might have cut the Lady Blue off from coming to visit through the fractal mirror, but her words could still reach me. I could be a god in the new world—or burn with the peasants in the old . . .
“Look!” We reached one of the facets of the fractal mirror, finding it covered by a radial web of cracks, but Kara was pointing to the room beyond rather than the damage.
“I don’t see—” Then I did. The whole room gave the faintest of shudders and fine white clouds of plaster dust began to sift down over the polished furniture. “Come on!” Everyone’s time had been running out faster and faster. Now the Lady Blue’s time had run out, and somehow I didn’t think she would go gentle into her last goodnight.
THIRTY-TWO
Kara led us through the bulk of the sleeping leviathan, the engine that had broken free the Wheel that once steered the ship of the universe on its straight path through the unending night. The engine that even now nudged the Wheel further and further from true, threatening at any moment to steer us over some precipice into a fall that could shatter worlds.
The pulsing light throbbed throughout the structure, the siren penetrating all corners, making speech almost impossible.
“We have to hurry!” I shouted the words at Kara’s back in order to be heard. “We don’t have much time.” Since we broke the mirror I had been hearing various parts of the great engines come to life, or rather feeling it through the soles of my boots. Beneath the siren the labouring mechanisms groaned and whined, an unhealthy edge to the sound.
Kara turned away from the door in front of her and narrowed her eyes at me over Hennan’s head. “Perhaps the person with the key that opens everything should go first?”