Shadowmarch

“But, Master, that doesn’t make sense,” Toby said, yawning but a little more awake now. “If the gods made all the spheres, couldn’t the gods just make a new star?'

Chaven had to smile. “You are doing better. That is a proper question, but a more important question is, why haven’t they done it before now?”

For a moment, just a moment, he saw something ignite in the young man’s eyes. Then caution or weariness or simply the habit of a lifetime dulled the expression again. “It seems like a lot of thinking about a star.”

“Yes, it is. And one day that thinking may teach us exactly how the gods have made our world. And on that day, will we not be nearly gods ourselves?”

Toby made the pass-evil. “What a thing to say! Sometimes you frighten me, Master Chaven.”

He shook his head. “Just help me get the perspective glass fixed on Kos-sope again, then you can take yourself to bed.”

It was just as well he was now alone, Chaven thought as he wrote down the last of the notations. Even Toby might have noticed the way his hands had begun shaking as the hour he was waiting for came nearer. It was powerfully strange, this feeling. He had always coveted knowledge, but this was more like a hunger, and it did not seem to be a healthful one. Each time he used the Great Mirror, he felt more reluctant to cover it up again. Was it simply lust for the wisdom that he gained or some glamour of the spirit which gave that wisdom to him? Or was it something else entirely? Whatever might have caused the craving, he could barely force himself to take the time to drape his long box full of rare and costly lenses with its heavy covering, and only the sharp chill of the night air persuaded him to add even more delay so that he could crank shut the door in the observatory roof, shutting out those intrusive, maddening stars.

His need was especially sharp because it had been so long—days and days!—since the mirror had gifted him with anything but shadows and silence. How frustrating it had been all of tonight, trying to concentrate on Kossope when it was the three red stars called the Horns of Zmeos, also called the Old Serpent, that had his deepest attention: when they appeared behind the shoulder of Perin’s great planet, as they would do tonight, he could consult the mirror again.

When the observatory room and the perspective glass were both secured, he went in search of Kloe. Tonight, if the gods smiled, her work and his offering would not lie ignored again.

Chaven’s need had grown so strong that he didn’t notice how roughly he was handling Kloe until she gave him a swift but meaningful bite on the web of his thumb and forefinger as he put her out. He dropped her, cursing and sucking at the wound as she scampered away down the passage, but although his anger was swiftly replaced by shame for his carelessness toward his faithful mistress, even that shame was devoured by the need that was roaring up inside him.

He sat before the mirror in a dark room that already seemed to be growing darker still, and began to sing. It was an old song in a language so dead that no one living could be certain they were pronouncing it correctly, but Chaven sang the words as his onetime master, Kaspar Dyelos, had taught them to him. Dyelos, sometimes called the Warlock of Krace, had never owned a Great Mirror, although he had possessed broken shards of more than one and had been able to do wonderful things with those shards. But mirror-lore as a discipline was as much about remembering and passing that memory along for the generations to come as it was about the practical manipulation of the cosmos—Chaven often wondered how many wonderful, astounding things had been lost in the plague years—and so Dyelos had taught all that he had learned to his apprentice, Chaven. Thus, on that day when Chaven had found this particular mirror, this astounding artifact, he had already known how to use it, even if he had not precisely understood every single step of the process.

Now Chaven rubbed his head, troubled by an errant thought. His brow was starting to ache from staring into the mirror-shadows and wondering if something else was looking at the shadow-mouse that lay on the shadow- floor, and whether that something would finally come. Was he doomed to failure again tonight? He was distracted, that was the problem… but he could not help being puzzled by the fact that he suddenly couldn’t remember where he had acquired the mirror that was before him now, leaning against the wall of his secret storeroom. At least it seemed sudden, this emptiness in his memory. He could recall without trouble where and when he had obtained each of the other draped glasses on the shelves, and their particular provenances as well, but for some reason he could not just at this moment remember how he had obtained the jewel in his collection, this Great Mirror.

The incongruity was beginning to feel like an itch that would not be scratched and it was growing worse. Even the powerful hunger he felt began to weaken a little as the puzzle took hold of him. Where did it come from, this powerful thing? I have had it… how long?

Just then something flared in the center of the looking glass, a great out-wash of white light as though a hole had been torn through the night sky to release the radiance of the gods that lay behind everything. Chaven threw his hands up, dazzled; the light faded a little as the owl settled, folded its bright wings, and looked back at him with orange eyes, Kloe’s sacrificial mouse in its great talons.

All his other thoughts flew away, then, as though the wings had enfolded him as well, or perhaps as though he had become the tiny thing clutched in that snowy claw, in the grip of a power so much greater than his own that it could seem a kind of honor to give up his life to it.

He came up out of the long emptiness at last and into the greater light. Music beyond explaining—a kind of endless drone that was nevertheless full of complicated voices and melodies—still filled his ears but was beginning to grow less. His nostrils also seemed still to breathe that ineffable scent, as powerful and heady-sweet as attar of roses (although such roses never grew on bushes rooted in ordinary earth, in soil steeped in death and corruption), but it was no longer the only thing he could think about.

It might have only been with him a moment, that deepest bliss, or he might have been basking in those sensations for centuries, when the voice-that-was-no-voice spoke to him at last, a single thought that might have been “I am here,” or simply, “I am.” Male, female, it was neither, it was both—the distinction was of no importance. He expressed his gratefulness that his offering had been received again, at last. What came back to him was a kind of knowing, the powerful calm of something that expected nothing less than to be adored and feared.

But even in the midst of his joy at being allowed within the circle of this great light again, something tugged again at his thoughts, a small but troubling something, just as shadows in his room of mirrors sometimes seemed to take odd shapes at the corner of his eye but never at the center of his vision.

Questions, he remembered, and for an instant he was almost himself. I have questions to ask. The Rooftoppers, he announced, those small, old ones who live in hiding. They speak of someone they call the Lord of the Peaks who comes to them and gives them wisdom. Is that you?

What came back to him was something almost like amusement. There was also a sensation of dismissal, of negation. So they do not speak of you? he persisted. It is not you who visits them with dire warnings? The shining thing—it looked nothing like an owl now, and although at this moment its shape was perfectly plain to him, he knew he would not afterward be able to explain it in words, nor even quite remember it—took a long time to answer. He felt the absence in that silence almost as a death, so that when it did speak again, he was so grateful that he missed part of what it told him.

Things had been awakened that would otherwise be sleeping, was all the sense that he could make of its wordless, fragmented thought. The shining thing told him that its works were subtle, and not meant for him to understand.

He sensed he was being chided now, there was more than a hint of discord in the all-surrounding music. He was devastated and begged forgiveness, reminded the shining thing that he only wanted to serve it faithfully, but in the one piece of his secret self which remained to him, the small sour note had allowed him to think a little more clearly Was that truly his only wish—to serve this thing, this being, this force? When he had first touched it, or it had touched him, had they not almost seemed to have been equals, exchanging information?

But what did it want to learn from me? What could I possibly have given to this power? He couldn’t remember now, any more than he could remember how the mirror, the portal to this painful bliss, had first come into his hands.

The radiant presence made it clear that it would forgive him for his unseemly questioning, but in return he must perform a task. It was an important task, it seemed to say, perhaps even a sacred one.

For a moment, but only a moment, he hesitated. A little of himself still hung back, as though the mirror were