Authors: Christopher Rowley
“Will you wait for me, sweet Thrembode? I should be back here within the hour.”
“Possibly,” he said with an ill-natured shrug. “I dislike being jilted in this fashion.”
“But Thrembode, someone crosses the deeps. I must go!”
“I won’t let you! Come back to bed, let someone else worry about the Black Mirror.”
“No, darling Thrembode, I can’t do that. I must go.”
“Besita, you are most vexing.”
“Thrembode, darling, please be kind. Forgive me. Stay, I will be as quick as I can.”
Besita rushed forth, the door closing behind her ample posterior with a soft thud. Thrembode cursed vilely and pulled sheets around his body and strode from the bed. Damn the woman, how could she leave him like this?
He stared out the window, looking over the North Gate to the elf quarter and the walls of the city. Beyond the walls the green field was grey with night and far away the lights of villages twinkled on the hills.
Who crossed the deeps? Thrembode’s curiosity was awoken. Someone dared the dangers of the darkness on an urgent, unscheduled crossing. He wondered whether to wait until Besita returned or whether it would be better to leave and allow her to entreat him to return later that night. Either way he would have it out of her, that much he was determined upon.
He congratulated himself—the little horror show at the East Gate of Afo had done its work. The imperial interest had been drawn to investigate. Good, it would keep them busy while the real work went on.
After a moment’s indecision, staring at the distant lights of villages in the Marneri hills, Thrembode turned and started to dress. Besita would be more enjoyable next time if she had to beg a little.
He pulled on his scarlet magician’s leggings and fastened his green velvet doublet before throwing on a heavy cloak in black fusgeen and heading out of Besita’s apartments.
Outside the tower he pulled the cloak close around himself and headed down into the city; the wind was chill, a reminder of the winter that was approaching. Thrembode had lived most of his life in warmer climes, and he dreaded the onset of the cold.
The thought of cold, as an abstraction, always sent a shiver through him that had nothing to do with the temperature, or the wind, but with the memory of his abduction to the freezing vault beneath the marrow of the Black Mountains. A terrifying place where the Masters had examined him and made him their own.
Uncomfortable with these dreadful memories, he drove thoughts of the cold out of his mind by sheer will and then turned and sped quickly down the hill on Tower Street. At the corner of Foluran Hill he paused to purchase a penny cup of hot cider from a vendor before continuing on, down the hill, past Broad Street to the Dockside where he entered a courtyard that was a maze of drink shops and hostels for sailors and travelers.
In the chamber of the Black Mirror, Besita finally joined Abbess Plesenta and another priestess who Besita did not know. Plesenta was unhappy, the other sister, introduced to her as Viuris of the Benevolent Mission, was plainly anxious. Her voice almost broke as she urged the maximum celerity in the declensions as they began to weave the heavy, complex spell that would ignite the mirror once more from the nothingness in which it was normally hidden.
Besita absorbed some of this anxiety. Her own heart began to thud in her chest. Whatever was going on it was probably terribly important. Besita felt vaguely frightened at the thought. She also felt alarmed at the prospect of being by the side of the mirror. One read such horrifying stories.
Set into a circular piece of black stone four feet across, the mirror was now cool and opaque. It seemed like clouded glass, giving back nothing but reflections.
“Come, we must make haste. Our traveler risks everything for us, we must be on time!” Viuris trembled.
Besita hated to be rushed in declension and almost ruined the primary spell twice. She was sweating profusely, and hating herself and Viuris by the time the spell was completed. Finally a spray of rosemary was burnt over the mirror while the three priestesses joined hands around it.
The power built quickly in the room after that and finally with a sizzling sound, as if a dozen hen’s eggs had suddenly dropped in a frying pan, the Black Mirror opened. The reflections were gone; instead there was a view was if through a window onto a world of whirling grey chaos. Dark shapes fled past, twisting and tumbling like clouds or waves.
The mirror itself suddenly crackled with red energies, sparking and hissing. Besita saw one spark leap out and burn a spot in her robe. She shivered; this was the most dangerous service of all. The stories they told about deaths around the mirror were spine chilling. More sparks flew in. A smell of ozone and sulphur filled the air.
Viuris was watching her, Besita fought down her fears. Viuris sought to reassure her.
“It will not last. She places a sensing spell, she has our location now.”
“My new robe is ruined!” Besita wanted to scream back, but didn’t dare in front of Plesenta. The abbess had such a wagging tongue, one had to be so careful around her.
With hot red sparks spattering occasionally around them, the three women continued to hold their position and keep the door open into the chaos of the dark.
Quite soon the sparking died away completely, although lightning continued to fork within the mirror, seeming to draw further and further into the reflection world.
A figure appeared, tiny in the distance, buffeted by the winds of the dark. Speeding through the tunnels of chaos, burrowing between the worlds, it flew towards them.
Travel through this nightmare region was done at great risk. Here grew the mightiest terrors of the enemy, including the dread Thingweights of Void. This was their home.
The tiny figure grew in size, but slowly. Chaos raged around it.
“There’s a force tracking on her, I can feel it,” cried •Viuris, who possessed great sensing strength.
“Yes!” exclaimed Plesenta, “I can feel it too. It’s closing quickly, it has a sourcing on her.”
The figure continued to grow, getting closer to the exit point from the realm of chaos. But something enormous was coalescing behind it now, something with the breadth of a mountain, the mass of an ocean.
“It’s coming in quickly, it knows she’s there!” Viuris muttered in a desperate voice. “I don’t know if she knows how close to her it is.”
To the mirror she cried, “Hurry, Lessis, hear me and hurry! There is little time—a Thingweight tracks you through the ether of the dark.”
“Lessis?” cried the Abbess Plesenta. “It is Lessis herself who crosses the dark?”
“Yes,” said Viuris. “It is Lessis herself. She has crossed more often than anyone still alive.”
Their companion had meanwhile grown very pale.
“Did you say a Thingweight was tracking her?” said Besita in a faint voice. Besita was already terrified about the dreadful things that could reach out from within the dark chaotic region. But of those things none compared with a Thingweight, the ruling predator in that darkness. No witch that had been taken by a Thingweight had ever returned, except in an evil form as a servant of the darkness.
Besita’s plump lower lip began to shake. “Shouldn’t we break the contact? We must not allow one of that dread breed to draw a trace on this Black Mirror, sourced here in the city of Marneri.”
“Hold on,” said Viuris, “Lessis comes!”
And Lessis could be seen clearly now, approaching fast, floating in a vertical posture, as if she were standing on solid ground somehow, her garments flapping in the hurricane breeze of the subworld. Behind, onrushing like some gigantic locomotive of shapeless cloud, came the vastness of the Thingweight.
“We must pull out, we must not let it discover the mirror in active use!” screamed Besita, white-faced in terror. There was a swelling roar, a shuddering vibration building in the subworld, the gross textures of the surface of the Thingweight were growing clearer. The mirror sparkled with renewed energy, small white-hot bolts of it stabbed out at the walls.
And then Besita lost her nerve and tried to pull away, to break the triune of their clasped hands, but Viuris would not let go of her wrist. Besita tried the other hand, but Plesenta held on and snapped an order for her to desist.
Besita shuddered and tried to scream, but found her tongue held by a spell from Viuris.
“Damn you, witch!” Besita wanted to shriek at her, but could not and the triune was held.
Viuris returned the hate in Besita’s eyes with a blank neutrality that was unnerving after a second or two. Finally she hissed, “Besita, desist, all will be well. Do not fear, Lessis is the greatest of all the dark riders. She will win, you will see.”
Viuris, however, was at that moment far less certain of this than she would have liked. The Thingweight was terribly close, much closer than was safe. A forerunner limb might twitch against the mirror at any moment. A moment after that they might all be seized and drawn into the monster’s pouch.
The mirror was alive with alien energies, sparks of white and blue were exploding from its surface. Besita yelped as one ignited against her foot like a firecracker. The roar was swelling, as if a storm had ignited in the room. The air was shaking and a sulfurous smell was getting fierce.
Abruptly there came a great flash of reddish light, and a human figure in grey-green robes burst through the mirror and tumbled off the dais to the floor with a gasp of breath as if she’d surfaced from a deep ocean dive.
Viuris and Besita rose and broke the triune and closed the mirror. A second or so later the searching tentacles of the monster in the dark groped past the mirror’s location in the overworld and blundered on, losing the trace for good.
Besita then sank down to the floor herself, shaking all over, positively wet through with perspiration. Unable to speak, she stared up at Viuris and then across to the slight form of the grey-haired woman kneeling on the floor.
This was Lessis of Valmes?
She saw an exhausted, haggard woman in middle age, still struggling for breath. Catching Besita’s stare, the woman gave her a quick little smile and pressed her hands together as she took a deep breath before speaking. She had a wide face, high cheekbones and large, luminous eyes.
“My goodness, that was a near thing, I thank you all for holding on.” Her voice was quiet, melodious.
Lessis struggled to her feet and Besita noticed that Lessis’s right foot was bandaged and stuffed into an oversize slipper. Lessis hobbled over and helped Besita rise from the floor.
“I think we certainly shaved a whisker from the face of father fate that time! Sisters, I thank you, you showed the courage one expects of Marneri witches.”
Besita saw that Lessis’s cloak was stained and muddy, and the boot on her left foot was worn and cracked. She looked anything but a high agent of the rulers of Cunfshon.
“Lessis! Oh, my dear,” Viuris could not restrain herself. With tears in her eyes she clasped the frail figure.
Lessis withstood this embrace stoically, then disengaged gently from Viuris’s arms and trapped a lank lock of grey hair and tucked it away beneath her hood. She drew a deep breath and set her shoulders. She had yet to complete this business, and there were many things to do.
“Thank you, Viuris, you and your colleagues here. I had to hurry my spell. It leaked rather badly, I’m afraid. I must have been detected at the beginning of the crossing. If you had not hung on, I would probably be entertaining one of the terrors of the deeps right now.”
She paused for another breath, then continued wryly. “Of course, you shouldn’t have done that. You put the city at risk.”
Besita could not restrain a venomous look at Plesenta. Then she caught Lessis’s eyes upon her and felt instantly low and unworthy. Besita blushed with embarrassment.
“But,” said Lessis, raising a finger, “this time it was for the best perhaps.”
They moved towards the door, and when they were close Lessis coughed harshly for a moment. She leaned on Besita who embraced her tenderly. She was so slight, so little, Besita felt a pang of tenderness.
“Thank you, brave Besita. Your courage has served us well.”
Lessis knew her name? Besita was stunned and proud. Unconsciously she stiffened, felt her chest inflate, as if suddenly a spotlight was upon her.
Lessis of Valmes had that effect on people. Besita did not know it, but she had absorbed two small spells in the space of three seconds. Her sense of duty and patriotism had never been so inflamed.
Lessis limped to the door, continuing to lean on Besita.
Outside the door Lessis finally left Besita’s side and proceeded down the hallway with Viuris, apparently quite fit enough to limp along unaided. They turned down the stairs, lost in hushed conversation.
Besita and Plesenta followed at a distance. Plesenta spoke in a conspiratorial whisper: “I never know what to make of them, these Grey Sisters. They go hither and thither, even into the places of the enemy. And then they use the Black Mirror. It’s true what she said, we did risk the whole city. We risked our lives—another moment and we would have been snatched into hell.” Plesenta was still shaking from the memory.
Besita stared at her, seeing only a grumpy vindictive-ness in the abbess’s tone and words.
“Abbess, theirs are the secrets, theirs are also the deeds done in obtaining them. Viuris was right, Lessis did outrace the Thingweight.”
Abbess Plesenta stared at Besita in an odd manner.
“Are you all right, Besita?” she said.
“Perfectly all right, Abbess, perfectly.” Besita gave her an even smile and headed for the stairs.
Two hours past dusk, when Relkin scuttled along the battlements of the wall of the Chapterhouse that stood behind the Tower of Guard, a great golden moon was suspended in the eastern sky just above the horizon.
But the brightness of the moon gave no warmth, and the north wind easily penetrated Relkin’s broadcloth jacket and shirt. He was shivering when he reached the juncture of the battlement with the outer wall of the tower itself. Here he had found a few handholds in the chinks where the mortar had fallen out, and on his first night in Marneri he had climbed the tower to look down on the city, and get a sense of it from above.