I could hand the key over, but that would feel like handing over my choices. Instead I squeezed past and held key to door until the hidden locks surrendered and the metal slab slid out of my way.
We passed half a dozen facets of the mirror, positioned as if they might be windows into the interior of the Builders’ creations, but each showing the Lady Blue’s sanctum. Twice more I saw the room shudder and on the second time larger pieces fell from the ceiling, along with several mirror frames, and innumerable glittering shards as the broken mirrors had their teeth shaken from them.
“Up?” I looked up the narrow shaft, pulsing red.
“Up.” Kara nodded.
“Will Snorri make it? He’s quite fat.”
Snorri growled, the light gleaming on muscles slick with sweat as the temperature rose around us.
I drew a deep breath, and regretted it. “Smells like the rest of the Builders came in here to die.”
The tight confines of the shaft muted the siren, but as I clambered into the small chamber at the top it returned with full force. I stumbled to the mirror facet set into the wall and slapped the key onto one of the dead screens below it. “Make it stop!”
That last “stop” burst out into a silent room. Kara looked up at me as she climbed out of the hole.
“Well done.” Rubbing her ears, she stepped back to let Hennan out.
“Thank the gods for that.” Snorri squeezed out of the shaft, flexing his shoulders.
“We’re close now. The central chamber is next but one. Through there.” Kara pointed to a peculiar opening, tall, narrow, leading into what looked to be a small cupboard.
The sound of a door crashing open spun us all around. The Blue Lady stood in the doorway of the room beyond the mirror, arms spread as if about to cast some terrifying spell, grey hair in disarray, a cloak of midnight blue swirling around her. Her age shocked me. I knew her to have more than a hundred summers under her belt, but I’d not seen her like this, like something that might be piled in the corpse cart at the back of a debtors’ prison: bones wearing old skin that wrinkled up around each joint. Worse than her age was the way she moved, possessed of unnatural vitality, avid, eyes full of fever. She sprang at the surface between us, covering the distance in a moment. Her face filled the mirror, shrieking curses at us in a language I was glad I didn’t understand.
I took a step back as two gnarled hands covered the mirror facet and the whole thing grew dark. “What’s she doing?” Mora Shival might look a shadow of herself—not a shadow, more as if she had been scraped too thinly across the day—but she still scared the hell out of me. “What’s she doing?”
“I don’t know,” Kara said. “We should keep going though.”
“Where?” I asked.
Kara pointed to the slot she had indicated before.
“But it’s just a cupboard or something . . .”
“The map says it’s through there.” She glanced down at the paper in her hand, frowning.
“Fine.” I pushed past Snorri and stuck my head through the slot. “There’s room for one person to stand in here, and no other way out.”
“Maybe it goes up,” Snorri said.
I didn’t like the sound of that.
“Get in there and try it.” At least he refrained from pushing me in this time.
“That should do it.” An unfamiliar voice behind me.
Turning, I saw the hands draw back from the mirror facet, revealing the Lady Blue’s haggard face and bright eyes once again. “That should do it,” she repeated, her voice like a rasp, no trace of the culture and humour I remembered from the Red Queen’s memories.
“Do what?” I wanted to ask but my tongue stuck as my mouth went dry. I could see some of the thinnest hairline fractures closing up.
“The mirror’s healing itself.” Kara stepped back. “Go! Hurry!”
Keen to be away now, I slid into the space past the slot, folding my arms across my chest. I stood in a vertical tube a little taller than myself. A silver panel with no markings was set into the curving wall before me. Lacking any other ideas, I pressed the key to it. “Open.” The structure shuddered. “Open!” The panel turned black. “Open, damn you!” Something began to move with the sound of tortured steel, an awful scraping noise that put my teeth on edge.
“Jal!”
I turned my head just in time to see Snorri vanish as the inner cylinder rotated, with me inside, sealing away the opening slot. I kept the key pressed to the panel and prayed hard to any god that would have me. The light stuttered and died. I’ve known weeks pass more quickly than the thirty seconds that followed. Eventually a bright vertical line appeared, broadening with agonizing sloth into a gap wide enough for me to press myself through as the slot in the inner cylinder rotated into alignment with the slot affording access into the next room.
“Decontamination cycle complete.” A lifeless voice spoke in the cylinder as I stepped out.
The first thing to hit me was the stink, as if something had crawled in here to die. Fortunately that was also the only thing to hit me. The chamber was larger than I had expected, with irregular walls giving on to narrow convoluted passages trailing off beyond the reach of the pulsing red light. A time-star floated at head-height in the centre of the chamber, burning blue above a black disc set in the silver-steel floor. I kept myself from looking at it, sensing the thing could hook a person, leaving them to spend the rest of their life staring at it.
A facet of the fractal mirror had been set in one of the few flat sections of wall. The spiderweb of fractures continued its slow healing process and for a moment the Lady Blue turned her attentions to her sanctuary’s door. On the walls around her a dozen or more unbroken mirrors now hung in spots where the original occupant of the space had been shaken down. All of them the same: a plain mirror in a cheap pine frame . . . The same mirror I had seen hanging in a score of places in Tuttugu’s cell as he lay dead.
In the section of wall directly opposite me was a valve like the one I had just come through, next to a large black rectangular panel. I pressed the key to the outer casing of the valve that had admitted me. “Keep turning.” The thing ground on with agonizing slowness, fighting every inch of the way.
In the mirror the Lady Blue’s door shuddered beneath a great blow. Then another. On the third hit it shattered as if it had been made of glass, wickedly sharp chunks flying in all directions. The Silent Sister stood revealed in the doorway, stooped in her greying rags as always, the hint of that enigmatic smile gilding the thinness of her lips, one eye dark and penetrating, the blind eye glowing as if her head were full of light. Behind her, taller, broader, armoured in crimson half-plate, the Red Queen, smoke rising from the mantle about her shoulders as if she might at any moment burst into flames.
“Alica.” The Lady Blue tilted her head to acknowledge her visitors. “And your sister. I never did quite catch her name.”
Behind me Kara slipped out of the valve which kept on turning, rotating its opening back toward Snorri and Hennan. “Don’t look at the star,” I hissed, pushing her face away from it with one hand. “Perhaps you’ll introduce us?” the Lady Blue said.
My grandmother made no reply. The Silent Sister stepped into the room, and as she did so, reflections of the Lady Blue leapt from the new mirrors on the walls, each racing toward the original, running into her, somehow becoming one with her. Each joining painted Mora Shival more firmly into the world, adding definition to her, making the blue of her robe deeper, more intense, more vibrant, making her flesh more solid over her bones.
“No.” The Silent Sister spoke only that word and every mirror exploded into fragments, glittering clouds blooming before each frame. Even the cracks across the fractal mirror spread for a moment rather than healing. I couldn’t tell you what she sounded like—I only know that the word was spoken.
“That was foolish.” The Lady Blue wiped her mouth where a flying shard had cut her. “To spend your power so.”