‘Or not,’ Will said. ‘That would be too simple for a man like Dee. Tricks and puzzles and games are what fire him, and in them he finds his own kind of torture.’ He peered into each of the three facing mirrors in turn, then said, ‘I would wager we are in a maze.’
Meg nodded, understanding. ‘Each mirror opens on to another space like this one. We lose hours, if not days . . . if not our wits or our lives . . . finding a way through.’
When Carpenter reached out to press one of the mirrors, Will caught his wrist. ‘We should choose carefully, John. If I know Dee’s cunning, he will have arranged it that once a choice has been made, neither of the other two ways can be opened. Otherwise, it would be a matter of simply searching all possible paths.’
‘And no going back,’ Launceston mused, studying his reflection. He smoothed one eyebrow with his index finger.
‘We have no time to dawdle. Let us make our choice and move on,’ Strangewayes snapped. ‘They are all the same. How can we know which way to go?’
The younger spy was correct, Will accepted. They could not afford to tarry. He selected the mirror to his left and swung it open. As he had expected, another square of mirrors confronted him. Once the others had squeezed in, he heard the mirror at their backs close with an echoing click.
‘This is madness,’ Carpenter exclaimed. ‘We will be lost in this hell until Judgement Day.’
For long moments, they passed through an endless procession of themselves, their faces seeming more haunted in each new space they entered. Will found his head swimming with flashes of reflected torchlight, sparkling eyes and the constant whispers from the carvings overhead. He shook his head, trying to dispel visions of other shadowy figures looking over their shoulders. He could see that the others also struggled with the assault upon their senses in the confined spaces.
‘There is more at play here than mirrors,’ he said as he stepped through another opening. The words had barely left his lips when the door jerked from his grip and slammed with surprising force, separating him from the rest. He hammered on the glass, but it seemed unbreakable. Through the barrier, he could hear Carpenter’s muffled curses, but after a moment they died away. Only silence remained. Perhaps this too was part of Dee’s trap. Divide, and conquer.
With grim determination, he turned to move forward alone.
Time seemed to stretch out in a constant parade of mirrors and doors. In every space, images of himself reached out for ever, an unending but insubstantial pageant of Will Swyftes ineffectually fighting a battle that would never end. He began to notice that the incomprehensible droning whispers were starting to make a kind of sense, urging him on towards despair. The mirrors themselves pricked his unease. The Unseelie Court communicated through them, lived within them, for all he knew. Were they now watching his every move? Laughing at his failures, luring him on to his doom?
Barely had the thought crossed his mind before he saw his reflection melt away. In its place loomed up the yellowing and hideous skull beneath the skin.
Reeling, he tore open another mirror and stepped through to the next small chamber, and the one after that. He felt hours pass; days; years. His reflection aged, the skin hanging from his face in loose folds, until it crumbled to dust, then became young and vital once more.
Wrenching open one mirror, he was greeted by an image of Dee. The old man sat in a high-backed wooden chair that resembled the Confessor’s throne in Westminster Abbey. His eyes were black pebbles in a frozen face. Brooding, he was, plotting death; not the Dee that Will knew at all. The vision vanished in the blink of an eye, but not before Will felt it sear itself upon his mind.
More mirrors glittered, endless Will Swyftes.
As he stumbled into another chamber, the glass showed no reflection, nor a hint of what might be, but a memory. It was night, and he stood by the well in Arden on the day and night that had changed the course of his life for ever. It was the day Jenny was stolen from him, but that had not been the only assault upon his life. He was there, washing his hands over and over again, desperately trying to rid them of the blood that now turned the water brown. And he heard the soft tread of small feet at his back, and knew that it was Grace. He could not let her see his crime, his failure. And so he turned to her and smiled and spoke as sweetly as he could. But that was the moment he knew he was not a good man, and could never be again. Redemption would never come for him. All that remained in life was saving Jenny. If he could do that, at least he could achieve something good in his miserable existence.
And then, in his befuddled mind, a single clear thought surfaced. It felt like a revelation, a burning truth.
With shaking hands, he ripped open the mirror and teetered on the brink of a pure black abyss. Buffeting wind lashed rain into his face. Somehow his fingers clutched on to the jamb. The door had opened in the wall of the tower and he half hung over a vertiginous drop into the night. The blast of air and the wet cleared some of the delirium from his mind, and he understood what a trap Dee had set. Only reactions honed by a lifetime of battle had prevented him from plunging to his doom; others would not have been so fortunate.
As he dragged himself back, he glimpsed movement below him. Even in his feverish state, his senses jangled. Gripping on to the jamb, he leaned out into the storm once more and peered down. Squinting, he could just make out shapes shifting on the sheer wall. Like fat grey spiders, the Enemy scaled the tower, clinging on to the gale- lashed stone with supernatural skill.
Bypassing the mirror maze, they would be upon Dee in no time at all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
THE MIRROR SWUNG open without a sound. Blinking in the glare of candlelight after so long stumbling through the dark, Carpenter looked round a small antechamber lined with leather-bound books. On a trestle in a corner stood rolls of yellowing charts, a human skull with a fragment of pate missing, an ivory-handled knife with a curved blade and a small silver casket. He could still smell the sweet aroma which had hung in the air since they had entered the mirror maze. But over the top of it now drifted the reek of human sweat.
His head swam from the visions that had floated across his mind’s eye since he had become separated from the others. His love, Alice Dalingridge, calling to him, still as beautiful as when she had been alive. His father, now so long in the grave, showing him how to chop wood behind the thatched cottage in the forest clearing. And that thing tearing at his face in the frozen Muscovy woods, when Swyfte had left him for dead and he had felt all hope desert him. Time no longer meant anything to him. He might have been in that black, glass world for years.
With a shaking hand, he wiped the sweat from his brow and steadied himself. At least that damnable whispering had left him in peace. Creeping forward, he listened at the door to the next chamber. When no sound reached his ears, he opened it a crack and peered inside. Amid shelves of books, Dee sat on a stool in front of the cold hearth, his back to Carpenter. The old man had his head in his hands, deep in thought.
The spy drew his dagger in case he had to prick the alchemist to urge him to obey. As he prepared to step into the chamber, a hand fell on his shoulder. He almost cried out and lashed out with his knife. The steel whipped a hair’s breadth from Launceston’s throat. Pulling the door shut, Carpenter pushed the Earl to the other side of the antechamber and whispered, ‘You fool. I could have killed you.’
He flinched at the other man’s penetrating gaze. ‘What was your intention?’ the Earl asked in his blank, emotionless voice.
‘To capture Dee, of course.’ Carpenter’s gaze flickered away from the other man’s probing eyes.
After a moment, the Earl spoke, his tone measured. ‘I have had little comfort in my life, despite the land my family has owned, and the wealth we have amassed – or perhaps because of it. My father was not a man given to sentiment. Ledgers and balance sheets prescribed the limits of his life; the cold stone of our castle, rarely heated even in winter, was the womb of his existence. He sought to teach me harsh lessons, feeling, mayhap, that it would best prepare me for the kind of life he lived. Cellars and drains and holes were my billet. Days spent in dark and damp, with only rats and beetles for friends. Blood and bruises and broken bones. No traitor in the Tower fared worse. I wonder sometimes if God made me the monster I am, or if it was my father.’ He wrinkled his nose and shrugged. ‘It matters little. We are what we are.’
