less than Hero. Paladin's touch closed the weeping wound. Hero rose. No apology or explanation needed to be spoken; Hero understood. Paladin drew and offered his dagger. It was accepted with the ghost of a smile. Side by side, they went on through the silvered maze.
Another young warrior appeared in a mirror, the youthful semblance of Paladin himself.
'I am Jacob. I will battle beside you.'
The words bore such earnest weight that Hero motioned Jacob to step from the glass and walk shoulder to shoulder with them.
The fighter emerged. Reflected flesh became momentarily scaly, tentacular, before swimming into solid human flesh! A lie garbed in borrowed shape. Paladin's blade sundered the emerging shapeshifter, dropping him in a thousand shards of ringing glass.
Paladin and Hero nodded warily to each other and pressed on toward the sobbing lady's song. They found themselves in a wide chamber ringed with her-or varying reflections of her. One mirror showed a warrior maiden, clear-eyed and noble. The next held a pirate lass, all black leather and lascivious eyes; a third displayed a meek lady pleading from a tower window; its neighbor showed a medusa with writhing hair. Hundreds of images implored for release from the glass. Hero stood frozen, drawn to each pleading woman.
Paladin shook his head. False images, partial truths. Heart was no idealized image, but a true creature. Paladin would not be seduced by lies told about women. He would be inspired by truths told by them.
Hero nodded, understanding. Young, open, and so vulnerable, he led with his broad, brave heart.
The song rose, mournful, beyond the chamber. Paladin listened and pointed. A curving way opened, nearly hidden between alike imploring images. The two men ventured on.
Fiends lunged without invitation from the glass, a roaring menagerie of rending claws, venom-dripping stingers, scourgelike tails, twisted horns, and smoking spittle. They flooded forth as if the mirrors were portals gaping from the Abyss.
Paladin and Hero stood back to back, blades flashing among tentacles and barbed whiskers. Shrieks arose amid the battle cries. Paladin severed the head of a mantis towering over him, leaping across its carapace to slash the snarling faces of two jackal-men, and shattered the mirror behind them. Cracks segmented shadowy figures who rushed to leap the silver margin, and all collapsed in a rain of shards.
The pommel of Hero's dagger crashed into another mirror, and a dozen fiends tumbled into oblivion. He swung for the next, but flesh interposed itselfscabrous and oozing, cracked and sword-worn. Living meat barred the way to other mirrors, lifting claws and grinning with yellowed teeth.
Crying out the names of their mothers and their gods-names not so dissimilar-Paladin and Hero hacked at fiend flesh, winning through to panel after panel. Dead fiends lay heaped across the silvered floor, strange blood darkening the glass, as gate after gate fell.
Ten living fiends stood atop a hundred dead to guard the last looking glass, aflicker with emerging horrors. Hero and Paladin carved a grim path through them.
The last fiend fell, its left head laid open by Paladin's sword and its right skewered through the eye by Hero's dagger. Black blood steamed, and silence fell.
Standing exhausted, Paladin and Hero looked into the last mirror and saw themselves: two blood-soaked warriors burned by gouting acids, stabbed, slashed and bone-broken. Paladin's sword arm changed direction in two places. A severed beast claw jutted from his temple. Hero's ribs showed through a row of gaping wounds, wherein his organs pulsed through a rain of blood. The comrades were walking dead men, too busy slaying to notice that they should die. Now they had time to look.
Hero wheeled and collapsed, lifeless.
Paladin staggered. His world went black. Falling, he smashed his sword against the glass.
The riven mirror collapsed, and the false wounds it had projected onto Hero and Paladin fell away with it.
At last Paladin understood this house of mirrors. He'd thought it a mind of madness, filled with images twisted to obscure the truth, or a sorcerous cage constructed to hold Heart ever captive behind falsities. But it was neither.
The diamond was a mind but was not mad. It was the mind of a world; in any one facet of the diamond, truth was only partially reflected. Truth dwelt not in one angled view of something too large and complex to be fully seen in a thousand images. Truth dwelt beyond and beneath. It could be apprehended not by staring into one reflection but by staring into them all. Paladin would find Heart not by smashing and slaying but only by combining all reflections into the one true creature they mirrored.
He sheathed his sword, helped Hero rise, and stepped into the space beyond the last mirror they'd shattered: a mirrored passage that snaked away through deceptive turns. Its silvered panes held faces: a moon-faced sharper, a much-scarred old pirate, a pale man-giant, a black-bearded mage, a bronze-skinned man in robes of state, a pair of idiot brothers, a crooked lumber merchant…
Paladin ignored these images, grasping the corners of mirrors and pivoting them slowly, one after another. He was opening up the passage, creating a large, circular space. Hero did likewise, pushing back the mirrors on the opposite side of the passage into an inward-curving silver wall.
They worked speedily, repositioning and checking over their shoulders to match alignments. When they completed the first circle, the diffuse starlight that shone through the interior of the diamond intensified. They made a second circle beneath the first, pushing back the mirrors of the floor. When it was done, the room sparkled in warm brilliance.
When they formed the third, the light grew so intense it pushed at the silver and glass it struck, realigning the other facets of the great diamond. Not merely hundreds but thousands of mirrors were brought into focus, blazing like festival sconces, each witness to all that had happened since Heart's disappearance.
At last light surged out to every corner of the diamond-and the vision Hero and Paladin sought erupted into sizzling incandescence before them. Lightning-white the place blazed, around Heart.
She floated in beauty at the center of it all: a creature of pure light, her raiment a rainbow, her scepter a staff of lightning, her eyes twin blue flames.
Paladin and Hero fell to their faces before her.
Her song now was one of triumph as her power blazed brighter. The black tentacles clutching the diamond ignited, their flames adding to the brilliance. The globe of mirrors melted away, and a blast of pure force roared out amid the circling stars and wandering moons. With an answering roar the fire spread down the evil tree.
Freed at last, Heart would burn her former captor to oblivion. Her soul would sear the tree away. But what of the world it was rooted in? The worlds upon worlds into which it had sunk its wicked roots? Would they be destroyed, evil and good alike consumed in flames?
Paladin glanced at his comrade. Hero could do it. Hero could whelm the folk of the world below and bring their axes to bear on the base of this horrific tree.
Thousands of axes. Tens of thousands. If they chopped it through, the massive crown, a world unto itself, would pull away among the stars to erupt safely above and beyond all. Hero could do it.
But Paladin could not. This was she whom he sought, the Heart of all his world. If she was destroyed in flame, he would perish with her.
Empowered by the lightning blasts of Heart, Paladin hoisted Hero, bore him to the spinning edge, and flung him down toward the world. He shouted through the firestorm the only words they shared: 'Save it!'
Hero understood. Therein lay his greatness. Despite his youth, his fumbling naivete, the heart so untried and vulnerable in his breast, in the end Hero always understood. And in worlds of truth, understanding bridged any distance.
Immediately, Hero was at the base of the tree, and at once in every farmstead and village and city clustered about it, exhorting folk to bring their axes, and save their world. He was believed and obeyed. That was the power of understanding in a world of truth.
Paladin felt the first thunderous thousand blows shiver the tree. He staggered, striding against the gale of light and power toward the blazing woman. She recognized him. Something in her knew the garment of scars that cloaked his soul. With a single finger of fire, gentle as a caress, she flung him from the inferno, down to the verdant world below.
All the while he fell, Paladin wept; he'd been so close to his love and now he was hurled farther with each breath.