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CHAPTER FOUR

The Tower of the Mirror did not seem so narrow when they approached. It was at least seventy feet in girth with smooth basalt sides that seemed to run straight up into the clouds: an illusion caused by what master builders called the vanishing point effect, enhanced by the lack of any other tower close enough to provide perspective.

Its single, recessed door was built to accommodate a small portcullis which was currently raised. There was one guard standing within its shadows.

About ten paces away, Corum halted, nodded at Druadaen, then turned to the others. “This is as far as the rest of you may go.”

Umkhira stepped forward. “I shall not allow him to proceed alone.”

Druadaen smiled, but held up a hand to stop her further progress. “My friend, you must. Those were the terms upon which we journeyed here.”

She frowned. “Not so. We were invited—”

“Actually,” Elweyr corrected softly, “he was invited, not us.”

Ahearn sounded cross. “See here, when the dragon’s human puppet conveyed the Lady’s message, it included a direct request that we accompany him here!”

“Yes,” Elweyr persisted, “but as his protectors: to make sure he arrived safely.”

S’ythreni shrugged in the direction of the thaumantic. “He’s right. I remember because it annoyed me. To travel all that way, just as bodyguards? Hmph.”

Ahearn was frowning. “Well, damned if I don’t remember feeling the same thing, now that you mention it.” He glanced at Corum. “I wonder if the lot of us could have a few moments alone, Warder Torshaenyx?”

Corum nodded, waved Cerven into the shadows of the tower’s entry and followed a step behind.

Ahearn turned to Druadaen. “So we agreed to this. Doesn’t mean I like it, though.”

Umkhira nodded. “We survive by staying together.”

Druadaen put a hand on each of their shoulders. “I agree, and I could not ask for faster, or finer, friends. But as you say, this is what we agreed to. Most importantly, I have met the Lady before and I do not fear her.” What she might have to tell or show me—well, that’s a different matter.

“You were but a boy,” Umkhira muttered. “And a trusting one. Are you so very sure what you perceived then was, in fact, correct?”

Druadaen just smiled. If he started refuting every rejection, or enumerating the many reasons why he felt the tower was more likely to be a safe haven than a danger, they might still be in the street talking when the sun started to set. So he held up both hands, halting the entire conversation. “Reflect back on the powers that counseled us to journey to this place. Even before the Lady sent her own message, the dragon suggested this as our destination. It evinced such respect for her that it almost seemed awestruck. And remember how I first met the Lady: through the intercession of Shaananca, my mentor.”

“Ah, we always come back to your magic auntie,” Ahearn added.

Druadaen pushed on. “So there are two logical reasons why I have nothing to fear. Firstly, the Lady has been commended to me by persons—and beings—who have amply shown they have my best interests at heart. But no less compelling is the simple fact that, given what they have intimated and we have witnessed of her power, she could have already killed me any time she wanted. For the past fifteen years.”

His logic quieted their misgivings except S’ythreni’s, who—of all people!—cocked her head dubiously. “And what if you, and all of them, are wrong?”

He couldn’t tell if her question was out of concern for his well-being, the group’s, or her own, but that didn’t alter the only answer he could give her: “In that event, you must save yourselves.” He glanced toward Corum. “And given the capabilities of our escort, if you truly fear such an outcome, then I suggest waiting at an even greater distance than this.” Not as though that would do much good, but it was the only advice he could think of and he had to say something in order to bring the discussion to a close. “Now, I must go. I doubt I shall be very long.”

Elweyr stared at him. “Those are famous last words, you know.”

Druadaen just smiled and began unbuckling his sword as he turned toward Ahearn.

The swordsman saw his intent, shook his head. “No. You keep that right where it is. It’s been too helpful for you to leave it behind, and it’s too eerie for me to even think of taking up.”

Druadaen shrugged, reattached the scabbard, and shook his head when Umkhira stood ready to follow him back to the tower. “No, you—all of you—remain here. If it gets late, find a comfortable place and leave word with Warder Torshaenyx so I know where to find you.” Without waiting for a reply, he turned and walked briskly toward the entrance. Cerven was nowhere to be seen, but the Tualaran was still waiting in the shadows.

When Druadaen reached the doorway, Corum smiled tightly, pushed back the iron-bound timbers before them, and stood aside so Druadaen could enter the blackness beyond.


It took Druadaen’s eyes several seconds to adapt to the dim light piping in from two overhead ducts. Two humans were flanking a further door, slightly offset from the one that had just closed behind him. There was some medium-sized animal beside the larger one: a dog, perhaps? He did hear a faint sniffing from its general vicinity. From the other side of that door was a clacking sound, as if someone was opening and closing a small box.

“I believe I am expec—”

“You are,” said the slightly smaller one. The accent was distinctly Corrovani. “Wait a moment.” The clacking continued, then stopped. “You might want to shield your eyes.”

Druadaen had barely brought up a hand before he heard overhead shutters snap open; even through his fingers, he could tell there was a great deal more illumination in the room. Squinting preemptively, he uncovered his eyes.

The larger human was thickly muscled and wearing the livery of Teurodn, a realm Druadaen had visited several times in the course of his duties as an Outrider. The other was wearing Corrovani colors, but the uniform was unfamiliar: certainly not that of its army. A second, narrower squint settled the uncertainty; the urn-and-sword symbol on his tabard indicated that he was a Grayblade, a member of his country’s most elite martial order.

Hearing the dog sniffing and snorting again, Druadaen glanced down—and discovered a creature that resembled a lean, long-legged sloth with a body about the size of a small dog. Its vaguely canine head ended in a snout which was turned in his direction, the end of which was a widening and contracting array of writhing leathery folds. Druadaen blinked in stunned recognition: “A snufflecur!”

The man in the Teurodn livery was startled. “You are familiar with them?”

“Familiar enough to know that most are kept by the borderers of Eld Shire.” He didn’t add that they were typically used by the realm’s bounty hunters, who genocidally targeted all the Bent races even when they were not a-hordeing.

The Teurond was smiling. “My family was originally from Eld Shire. Three generations back, now. You know it?”

Druadaen smiled apologetically. “Only through the stories of others.” He nodded at the livery. “But I’m passably well acquainted with Teurodn.”

“How so?”

The Corrovani looked sideways at him. “He is Dunarran.” When that didn’t kindle understanding in the others’ eyes, he added, “He’s an Outrider.” The Grayblade paused, casually inspected Druadaen’s gear. “Or he was. Still has some of that kit, though.”

“’S that so?” The younger, larger guard looked for but did not appear to detect what the other had, then glanced at his thoroughly disinterested snufflecur. He shrugged amiably. “Well, in you go, then.”

Cerven was waiting on the other side of the door, the steady light of oil lamps illuminating a round chamber at the base of a broad, upward-spiraling stairway. “We have a walk,” he said, glancing at the steps, which radiated out from a single column of dark, glassy basalt that was almost three yards across and rose up through the tower like a spine.

Druadaen nodded. “No reason to keep the Lady waiting. Lead on.”

No longer distracted by the enigmatic Tualaran and winding streets that had been his two points of focus during the walk to the tower, Druadaen considered the young man leading him up the stairs. Probably not out of his teens, he wore a shortsword at his hip and light leather armor, but was not otherwise outfitted as a warrior. Careful to listen for an accent, he asked, “How many times a day do you make this trip?”

Cerven slowed until he was just half a step ahead, turned, and smiled. “Too often, however much the actual number may vary.” Druadaen smiled back.

As they approached the first story landing, two more guards—one a Taruildorean in a kilt, the other a Saqqari in the oddly angled armor of their warrior caste—made a casual challenge to confirm that Cerven was indeed escorting a visitor to the Lady. Their questions were laughably quotidian—except to anyone who might have enough skill or mancery to mimic the young Ux Reeve. During the exchange, Druadaen’s initial impressions of him were confirmed: extremely well spoken, calm, and amiable without any hint of servility.

As they ascended, every rise of twenty feet showed them the underside of another story overhead, the stonework held up by a combination of buttresses and groined vaulting. At the third there was a landing that extended outward into a corridor that surrounded the staircase. Doors and dark archways on the far wall indicated that there was at least one more concentric ring of rooms between them and the outside world.

At the next landing, Druadaen was surprised to discover that the spine of basalt was, in fact, hollow. A weathered ogee arch of markedly different workmanship opened unto a round chamber not quite five feet across. In the center of its floor was a hole so lightless that it might have led down to the core of Arrdanc. Anchored in those stygian depths was a narrow, free-standing slab of flat, pitted stone. It continued up through a matching aperture overhead. Druadaen tarried to listen; far below, he heard intermittent burblings… but with cadences that reminded him of conversation.

As they went higher, they passed two people descending the stairs. One was apparently of Solari extraction. His woven hide tunic and kirtle suggested he might well be one of that continent’s hermit-nativists. The other was a woman cased in the light steel chainmail of Uanseach’s best armorers, but the baldrics of her two shamshirs and the sheath of her wide-bladed jambiya were emblazoned with the fiery script of Lajantpur. Her eyes flashed as they played across each man’s upturned face, then refocused on the descending stairs.

But it was the eighth landing that presented the strangest surprise of all: yet another opening into the tower’s basalt spine. However, this one was simply a rough cleft and so narrow that Druadaen had to turn sideways to enter it.

He discovered a small alcove lit by a dim but steady glow that had no discernible source: almost certainly mantic illumination. A single occupant—spare, bald and seated upon a thick gabbeh rug—was gazing into the darkness as her fingers flew swiftly over something on her lap. As Druadaen stepped closer, she turned, smiled, and nodded, revealing that she was not just bald but hairless, right down to her lack of eyelashes. Her empty, off-center stare indicated that she was also quite blind. Neither her dress nor appearance suggested any particular land of origin.

Or maybe, Druadaen reconsidered, it was that she seemed oddly universal. Her face struck him as an amalgam of what he had seen in the many lands he’d visited upon every one of Arrdanc’s continents, and so, called to mind all the ports he had visited but no one of them in particular.

She turned back toward the darkness at the core of the tower, flowing into a meditative pose favored by the Baskayan mountain mystics as her fingers resumed their nimble dance upon a device that Druadaen initially mistook for an abacus. A moment of study showed that it was not structured for a base-ten number system; indeed, he began to doubt it was a counting mechanism at all.

But when Druadaen followed her gaze into the hollow core of the basalt spine, he forgot the device, her, and every other feature of this strange alcove. Before him, the same stone tablet he had seen earlier descended from the dark above and vanished into the darkness below… but this time, he realized it actually was vanishing into the lower darkness. By sinking very, very slowly.

Druadaen stared, squinted and discovered that its surface was not pitted as he’d originally thought, but engraved in impossibly fine patterns that followed a linear scheme. He was about to abandon his attempt to further scrutinize the carvings when he saw that it was extending—growing—further along the horizontal axis, as if an invisible scalpel was incising additional enigmatic markings into it as he watched.

He turned, leaned back out into the staircase, his mouth open to ask the first of many questions. But Cerven simply shook his head and motioned that they should resume their upward journey.

Druadaen glanced back at the woman and the strange chamber. “I don’t suppose you can share anything you might know about that.”

Cerven smiled slightly. “I don’t know any more than you do.” He shrugged. “As the Warder said, I’m new here.” He glanced up the stairs. “We should continue.”

Ten stories later, they reached a landing which did not open on to another landing and perimeter corridor. In place of that expected feature was a black, steel-banded door. Druadaen peered at the silken sheen of the timbers. “Is that ironwood?”

Cerven smiled. “I believe so. You have a keen eye.” He waited. When Druadaen showed no sign of continuing, he explained, “From here, you go on alone.”

“Why?”

“Because from here, everyone goes on alone.” Cerven smiled faintly, nodded, and started down the stairs.


After climbing two more stories, Druadaen found himself mounting a final riser to stand on a small landing which offered only one way forward: a door of plain construction, the wood dark with age and held together by even older iron fittings. As he reached toward it, he heard the sound of a latch falling aside; the handle retreated from his hand, revealing a sliver of the jamb.

Well, I see I’m expected. He once again reached for the crudely fashioned handle—

And halted, but not out of trepidation or awe. Rather, he abruptly realized that he’d failed to prepare himself in one important way: to be ready for how time might have changed the Lady.

To Druadaen, she was timeless in the way that persons met in childhood become firmly fixed in memory, like a butterfly in glass. He had seen her only one other time, almost a decade later and at a considerable distance as she prepared to depart Tlulanxu. Less than an hour later, his comatose father had finally passed, which had left an infinitely greater imprint upon his recollections of that day.

So Druadaen’s strongest memories of her were those of a bedazzled nine-year-old on his first visit to a city with his parents. Which, he realized, might have left him with a reflexively positive impression of her, might incline him to be disposed to trust her uncritically, particularly since her features and her long black hair had recalled his own mother’s.

But that was where the similarity ended. Whereas his mother had possessed effortless social graces and unfailing tact, the Lady of the Mirror had been… well, not exactly awkward, but decidedly unusual. She had been determined to acknowledge each of the hundreds of well-wishers who came to see her that day, pausing to make some response, no matter how fleeting, to every bow or word of welcome. And when she encountered a gesture of greeting she did not recognize—persons from many distant lands came to her Conferral—she tarried longer still, her brows knitted in concentration even as she smiled.

It was as though on the one hand, the Lady’s speech, manners, and wit indicated that she was a learned woman who moved among persons of importance with the ease and surety of a peer. But, on the other hand, she seemed wholly unschooled in the practicalities and practice of how to behave at an affair of state. Indeed, her insistence upon treating every person, regardless of station, in precisely the same fashion had attracted private comment—not all of it positive.

Druadaen wondered how much the Lady had changed since then, schooled himself to as much preemptive aplomb he could muster, pushed the door inward, and strode into whatever chamber or fate lay beyond. Even so, he was not fully prepared for what he encountered.

The Lady of the Mirror stood before him, hands folded, a small, serene smile on her face. “Welcome, Druadaen u’Tarthenex.”

And in that instant, he discovered he’d failed to anticipate the way that time had, in fact, changed her:

Not at all.

She was still the same woman of early middle age that moved energetically through his childhood memories, like a vibrant dancer always trying to outrun her own skirts. The crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes were merely creases left upon a face that was always animated and poised to change expression. And as Druadaen had both hoped and feared, her tresses were as shiny and long as he recalled—just like his mother’s.

He remembered to bow before the delay became noticeable. “Lady of the Mirror, I thank you for your invitation.”

“I am glad that you accepted it. Please, enter.” The Lady stepped away from the door, half turning as she did.

Whatever Druadaen meant to say next evaporated like mist in a desert. Behind her, an immense free-standing mirror stood revealed. Speechless, he didn’t realize its full size until he had moved to face it directly.

It was a perfect circle, approximately ten feet in diameter. Its reflection of the chamber was extraordinarily crisp, but seemed to curve inward, as if, although unmoving, the image was perpetually falling into the center of the glass.

If it is glass, that is, Druadaen revised a moment later. The mirror had no frame, and if it was suspended in midair by wires, they were too thin for his eyes to see. Instead, its utter stillness reminded him of a mantic effect: motionless in the exact spot of its creation until it faded.

He nodded at it and, throat dry, croaked, “The Mirror.”

“So it is called,” the Lady said after a pause that suggested her agreement was reluctant.

“What do you call it?” Druadaen asked, curiosity expelling the words before tact could hold them back.

She smiled. “It has many names in many languages. I prefer ‘the Shimmer.’”

Druadaen frowned and, emboldened by her willingness to talk about the object, observed, “Shimmer often implies radiance, rather than mere reflection.”

The Lady nodded. “And so it does here.” In response to his dubious glance at their unaltered images in the Mirror, she added. “This chamber is also a Refractorium. It allows the Shimmer to influence how and where radiance is expressed.”

Druadaen had spent a decade and a half working in Tlulanxu’s Archive Recondite, reading widely among texts enigmatic and arcane, but not once had he encountered the puzzling term she had used. “What is a Refractorium?”

The Lady smiled again. “You shall find out soon enough, I suspect. But why don’t we start with something simpler?”

“Such as?”

Her eyes held his. “The questions you came to ask.”

“But… I am here at your invitation.”

“So that you might ask the questions that are the next waypoint on your journey.”

“You mean, the answer to the truth of the world?”

She shook her head. “No. We only discover that answer by living the question as a perpetual quest, moment to moment.”

Druadaen felt lost. “Then, what questions do you mean?”

She shrugged. “The ones about yourself. Of course.”


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