forever!”
“Look, Harold’s already here,” Arnkh announced, getting up off the grass. “Are you here to stay or just dropping by?”
“Just dropping by,” I mumbled stupidly.
“Like some fish soup, Harold?” asked Uncle, trying the broth with his spoon and grunting in delight as he took the pot off the fire.
“But you’re all dead,” I said stupidly.
“Really?” Marmot and Tomcat glanced at each other in surprise.
“I’m more alive than all the living, and I’m very hungry,” Tomcat eventually replied. “Are you joining us?”
I shook my head and backed away from the fire.
“Well then, if you’re not hungry, we’ll get started, and you go down to the water to get the others; we can’t wait for them forever!”
I nodded, but kept on backing away. This wasn’t where I belonged! This was only a dream! It was a different world! A different reality! Where my friends were still alive and had no intention of dying.
“Hey, Harold! Tell Hallas I wasn’t supposed to be cooking today!” Uncle’s shout reached me just as the picture in the mirror started to disappear.
I walked on and saw Lafresa. She was staring into the mirror about ten yards ahead of me.
Lafresa tore her gaze away from the mirror, noticed me, and narrowed her eyes. Then she took a step away from me and froze in front of the mirror wall. I followed her example and found myself …
A forest meadow, surrounded by a stockade of tall fir trees. The grass was completely covered with the bodies of elves. Only two of them were still alive, standing there without speaking, looking at the prostrate body of a h’san’kor. I couldn’t make out who these two were, I could only see that they were an elf and an elfess. Then I understood.…
I involuntarily took a step toward them. They both heard the rustling of the grass and turned round. The elf drew his bow, and the arrow pointed straight into my face. The elf’s one golden eye carefully followed every movement I made. The other eye was missing—an old injury from an orcish arrow.
Ell.
“What do you want here, man?” Miralissa asked in a hoarse voice.
“I…”
“Get out, this is our forest!” said the k’lissang, and his one eye glinted brightly.
“Why have you come here?” asked Miralissa, wiping away the blood streaming out of her ear.
“For the Rainbow Horn.”
“The Rainbow Horn?” she asked, shaking her head sadly. “Too late. The Firstborn have the Horn now, and even we can do nothing. The elves lost the battle, and Greenwood is destroyed. This is no place for you.”
“Very well,” I said, and stepped back.
The elves in front of me were not the ones I had known. They were quite different. Alien.
Ell kept his one eye firmly fixed on me and said something in orcish. His words sounded like a question.
I fell on the floor and looked at the empty mirror in horror. In orcish
The mirrors called to me with offers, requests, entreaties, demands, and threats, trying to draw me into themselves forever. Faces passed before me in a series of bright pictures—the faces of those I had known, the faces of those I would know in the future, the faces of those I would never see.
“Harold! Come here!”
“Die!”
“Why can’t you just stop?”
“Come in, you’re one of us now.”
“Hey, Harold, can you see me?”
“Please, kind gentleman, please!”
I took no notice of them, I just pushed them away and tried to break free of the mirrors’ sticky cobweb, now that I’d learned to tell reality from illusion. I didn’t always manage to do it straightaway, sometimes the pictures were so bright and powerful that it cost me a great effort to reject the hallucination.
Lafresa was walking on ahead of me, and she was having difficulty. Sometimes I started to catch up, and then I fell behind again when I froze in front of one of the mirrors. And then Lafresa would disappear, and I was left completely alone. A step, another step, another …
“Hey, Harold!” Loudmouth called to me with his monstrously gnawed face. “Come here, let’s talk!”
I just shook my head and walked past the mirror.
“In the name of the king, thief!” Baron Frago Lanten and ten guardsmen tried to block my way. “Come here, or it’s the Gray Stones for you!”
I took no notice of them at all.
“Do you want gold, Harold?” asked Markun, shaking a whole sack of gold under my nose. “All you have to do is stop!”
I just laughed, and he shouted shrill obscenities at my back.
“Who’s going to pay for my inn?” asked Gozmo, wringing his hands in despair.
I shrugged.
“Hey, Harold!” a familiar voice called to me. “Come here!”
I stopped, stared at the reflection for a long time, and took a step toward the mirror.…
I looked at him, and he looked at me. We had time to study each other. We had an entire eternity of time in our hands; there was no need to hurry.
“Well, how do you like the look of me?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“To be honest, not very much.”
“That’s not surprising, I had a bad example to follow.” He grinned, and his grin turned out ugly and repulsive. Was my grin really like that, too?
I carried on looking at my double—a perfect copy of the master thief, Shadow Harold. A pale face; black circles under tired, sunken eyes; a back stubbly beard; clothes that were dirty, crumpled, and torn. A fine sight. Some dead men, not to mention beggars, looked better.
“Who are you?”
A rather timely question, wasn’t it?
“I’m just me. Or you. It all depends what side you look at us from and what you really want to see in the end.”
“You called me, didn’t you? So tell me what you want, I’ve got plenty of my own business to deal with, without making conversation with my own reflection.”
“Which of us is the reflection, that’s the question, Harold,” he said, and his eyes narrowed maliciously.
“Are we going to have a battle of words, double?”
“Do you have something against battles of words, double?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the first difference between us; you’re not very fond of talking, Harold.”
“What do you want?” His face (my face) was beginning to infuriate me.
“Come on, take it easy!” he said, with a glint of mockery in his eyes. “Take a more cheerful view of the world,
