Alecto didn’t even have the grace to look ill-tempered. She gave him a slow, content blink and relaxed into a sprawl in the spot of sunshine.
“Hurry up,” Iambe called before passing through a curtain of diaphanous fabrics that diffused the light of the gardens beyond. Hero gave one last reproachful glance at the cat, wondering what would shy off a literal living avatar of anger. Alecto gave away nothing else. Rami followed him out, and Hero just caught the edge of the swaying curtain before stepping into the light.
“Oh, I’m going to be ill,” Hero moaned under his breath. He stopped short enough to cause Rami to collide with him. It must have carried in his voice, because Rami grunted and rubbed sympathetic circles on Hero’s back.
When Iambe had described a well, Hero had assumed a tidy cistern, or at worst a looking pond, as Echo had used. But the marble steps led down into a terrace transformed. There was no well, or cultured pond—the terrace was the pond. Water surrounded them on all sides, as if they’d stepped into a bathysphere of mirrors. At least, Hero had to presume it was water. The substance was perfectly clear, like liquid light, and appeared simultaneously thin as a soap bubble and deep as the ocean. It went on to forever and to naught. And when Hero tried to focus his eyes to make sense of it, he found himself staring at countless reflections. He took a step across the marble, and a thousand similar Heroes took a step at a half-second delay. Rami’s arm moved at his back, and a repeating visual echo of Ramiels followed suit. Each movement sent his brain into riot trying to make sense of it.
Hero squeezed his eyes closed as vertigo threatened to upend his stomach. “No one . . . move.” He focused on swallowing—very carefully. “If you please.”
Iambe’s sandals clicked on the marble, and though he had his eyes closed it was as if Hero could feel the reflections. “I did warn you.”
“And your guidance is appreciated, spirit.” Ramiel managed to sound mild and unaffected. His voice was a low, stabilizing presence, as sturdy as the hand at Hero’s back. “But we came to speak to the muses.”
“And here you are, master angel.” Iambe swept one arm—dear gods, how did Hero know that; his eyes were closed but he could feel the motion against his skin; this place was horror—and laughed mirthlessly. “The well of the muses. It’s where our realm brushes against their realm and we can hold congress. It’ll be up to you to catch their attention.”
With that, Iambe appeared done with them. Hero opened his eyes just in time to see her walk briskly to the surface of the water surrounding them and disappear in the slender space between two reflections.
“I can’t say she was eminently helpful, but at least we’re here.”
“You’ve been here before?” Hero asked. It was a reasonable question. Rami might have been a newcomer to the Library’s fractious staff, but he was also a fallen angel, ageless in ways that Hero didn’t care to think about. He talked about the Fall of Lucifer as if it had happened last Tuesday.
So it surprised him when Rami shook his head regretfully. “I was long fallen by the time the muses rose to prominence. And while we were not exactly forbidden from it by the Creator or Morningstar, visiting other realms was . . . discouraged.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d give much care to what Lucifer condoned,” Hero said, though every curious nerve in his body wanted to ask about the other one, the Creator. The maker of angels had seemed a contentious point between Ramiel and Uriel, his Heavenly colleague that had tried to invade the Library, leading Rami to stand against her. Hero didn’t believe for a minute that there was a singular creator—too many seemingly contradictory realms rose, coexisted, and fell based on the fancies of humans—but anything that had won the devotion of such a rare creature as Rami had a certain amount of fascination for Hero.
But Ramiel was strangely silent on the topic, at least with him. Hero had become adept at, by turns, charming or antagonizing information from people, but whenever the subject of Heaven’s god came up, the only thing he could draw from Rami was a distant look of loss. For some damned reason that look on Rami’s face always made Hero’s stomach hurt, so he had stopped prodding.
Lucifer, however, was different. Rami was always happy to mutter about Hell’s erstwhile leader. Rami puckered his lips as if he’d tasted something foul. “I don’t care a whit for the Deceiver. But if I had any hope of receiving forgiveness from Heaven, I judged it best not to exhibit an interest in realms other than Heaven and Earth.” He looked around him. “So this is new, all these reflections of us and—oh.”
Rami’s voice did a missed-stair kind of lurch. Hero followed his gaze, but at first all he could see was what he’d seen before—hundreds of mirror images. Upon focusing, however, he realized that an identical “mirror” wasn’t quite accurate. To his right, he and Rami appeared in the glass surface of the water much the same, but Hero had his arm in a sling. In the image just below that, Hero appeared to have a dagger held to Rami’s ribs, as if he’d brought him here by force. In a distant, tiny reflection behind that, Hero wasn’t there at all and it was Brevity staring back at him. Each mirror iteration bore a difference. Some were slight—Hero’s scar was gone; his coat was a different color—and others were great. He caught a glimpse of a tiny reflection, almost translucent with its not-thereness, where neither Hero nor Rami appeared but the well was polluted with smoke.
“What trickery is this?” Rami wondered uneasily, but Hero grasped it in an instant.
“Possibilities. It’s a well of possibilities, every alternate possible way this moment could have gone.” Hero caught a glimpse
