The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  The Raven had nothing to add to this.

  She scratched the wrist of the hand that had been severed, flexing its fingers as she did so.

  “My wrist itches though. It’s been getting worse.”

  She peeled back the leather glove and revealed the paper-thin silver band that now circled her arm.

  The Raven opened an eye and clacked its beak.

  “I don’t know,” Sara said. “I haven’t tried.”

  The Raven looked at her.

  “I’m not scared,” she said. “I just hadn’t thought of it.”

  She took her errant hand in the other and twisted.

  “No,” she said.

  The Raven clacked.

  “I’m not resisting,” she said. “Look, I’m willing it to… oh.”

  The hand came off her arm, cleanly sheared away at the silver join which now revealed itself to be the meeting place of two mirrored stump surfaces. Although the wounds had looked this way when the hand was originally lopped from her arm and lost in the mirrors, to see the cut ends of the severed limb still mirrored in this fashion–and detachable no less–was disconcerting. She looked down at her disembodied fist. The fingers opened and flexed and wiggled.

  “Well,” she said. “I did not know I could do that.”

  She replaced it, mirrored stump to mirrored stump, and found herself once again two-handed.

  “That,” she said to the Raven, “is interesting. But it’s still itchy…”

  She took the hand off again and looked down into the roughly oval glassy surface on the wrist stump.

  If she had not been looking down she would not have seen them. The mirror reflected the glass ceiling beneath which she passed. As she stepped from reflection to reflection, she noted that a new but unvarying vertical passage opened up like a series of identical mirrored chimneys heading to the invisible sky above her head.

  It was the break in the pattern that warned her, the non-identical chimney, the regularity broken by the bulk of the Mirror Wight hanging overhead, waiting to drop.

  There was a blur of descending motion. Without thinking she leapt away, snapping her hand back onto her wrist and drawing the longest blade from her belt as she did so. The Raven tumbled off her shoulder and flapped untidily into the air.

  The Wight landed softly in front of her, crouched and ready with a black obsidian knife held in front of it. The stone dagger was the thing that caught her attention, not just because it was sharp and definitely pointed right at her, but because its uncompromising deep blackness was a complete counterpoint to the blanched man holding it.

  He was almost monochrome, his facial pallor matched by the clothes he wore, clothes from which the original hues had faded almost entirely, like material left out in a merciless tropical sun, although in truth the colour had been leeched away by the light-hungry mirrors. The clothes were, however, distinctive in style if not depth of tint. He was barefoot, with naked, unstockinged calves above which knee breeches were laced, disappearing under the overhang of a long waistcoat of a style that had last been modish at the time of the Restoration, more than a century and a half ago. The long tousled wig the Wight wore confirmed the cavalier look, an ancient thing whose grey curls hung down on either side of his long and strangely pouchy face.

  The deep-set eyes had pendulous bags under them, and the cheeks they sat on were saggy, the jawline dewlapped with slack flesh, as if the whole pale face itself was beginning to flow slowly downhill like a forgotten candle softened by too much time spent in an overwarm room.

  But the eyes were sharp, pointed right at her.

  “Mirror Wight,” said Sara.

  The Raven cawed in agreement and flapped back a couple of feet to hang unnaturally still in the air behind her shoulder.

  Naming her assailant was just a reflex, not the most intelligent or considered thing she might have said–as meaningless as saying “cow” when surprised by one on a walk through a farmyard–but naming a thing had some power to it. And naming something she had only read about made her feel strangely less alone, for if someone had met Mirror Wights and written about them, then it stood to reason that it was possible to walk away from such a meeting unharmed.

  “Lady,” said the Wight. The eyes glittered as it made what might have been the smallest of courtly bows, more of a reflexive tremor than an intended gesture of respect.

  Sara tentatively lowered her blade a little. She did not want to fight if talking could avoid the need for it. The Wight was a big man, a look exaggerated by the curls piled on top of the wig, but even without that artificial advantage, and slightly crouched and ready to spring though he was, he was still much taller than her. And quite apart from that, Sara was a talker and a listener and a thinker, not a born fighter.

  “What do you want?” said Sara. “I mean no harm. I would just like to be on my way.”

  “Then on your way may you go,” smiled the Wight.

  She wished he hadn’t smiled. His teeth were black. Not black as in rotten and neglected, but black as in exactly like the shiny stone dagger that he still hadn’t lowered even slightly. The unnaturally pale gums that cushioned them only served to highlight their strangeness.

  “Thank you,” she said. She should have felt relieved, but she was already thinking ahead as to how she would pass him, and whether–assuming he was not lying and let her go ahead of him–she would be able to proceed without the crippling dread that he would then be padding along somewhere behind her all the time. Walking in the mirrors was bad enough, quite apart from the spectre of being stalked through them. What had seemed like a strange but sterile environment was now going to be haunted by fear.

  “But you must pay,” he said, just as she took a pace forward.

  “Pay what?” said Sara, stopping and tightening her grip on the knife.

  “Blood,” he said. “The Blood Toll. None may pass through our domain without paying it.”

  The Raven snapped its beak in disapproval.

  So, thought Sara, a fight it was going to be after all. She felt sadness and the lack of Mr Sharp in equal, pungent measure.

  “I give you fair warning,” she said, holding out the glove on top of which she wore her rings. “By Law and Lore, let me pass. We are The Oversight.”

  The Wight looked unimpressed.

  “Oversight you may be, but whatever else you are, you are not a ‘we’, my lady, for I can see only one of you, and behind your pet bird, down the long chain of mirrors, an infinity of nobody else… Pay the toll.”

  “It is a form of words,” she said, “customarily used by those who bear this ring. It means harm one of us, harm all, and that if you do so, all will avenge.”

  “Pretty words too,” he said. “Very lovely in troth, but ‘customarily’, in my usage, those who pass must pay the toll by providing a gentleman of the mirrors with a small and refreshing beverage.”

  And he reached inside the hanging pockets on the skirt of his waistcoat and produced a well-worn pewter mug from the depths within.

  “Or in simpler terms, for I apprehend that a mere untutored woman may require plainer elucidation: bleed yourself or let me bleed you, for what I want is your red, my pretty.”

  He placed the battered mug on the glass floor between them and nudged it towards her with his toe with an encouraging wave of his knife.

  “You wish to milk me of my blood?” she said.

  “Life in the mirrors thins the vital fluid,” he said. “Takes the vigour quite from it, so it does, much as it takes pigment from us. But it is life. And if you would pass through the realm we have made our home, then you must pay the toll.”

  And he nudged the tankard another inch towards her.

  “That’s a half-pint mug,” said Sara. “That’s a lot of blood.”

  Sara had once been bled by her grandfather, when a child, to cure a fever. He had taken no more than an eggcup full and that had left her feeling pained and weak for days. A half-pint of blood, especially in her reduced sta
te, was not an option she relished at all. She was not sure that she could spare even half that.

  “Fill it twice and you may pass.” He shrugged, flashing black teeth in a nasty smile.

  “Twice?” she said. “You said beverage, not beverages.”

  “Ah yes, but whereas you are demonstrably not presently part of a ‘we’, I am,” he said, nodding at something behind her.

  The Raven cawed an urgent warning. Sara turned in time to see a second Wight flicker through the mirrored wall two mirrors back and to the left of her.

  This new Wight carried a longbow, the arrow nocked and held ready. He had evidently been in the mirrors even longer than the cavalier. He wore tight leggings, a codpiece and a leather jerkin, all so etiolated by his chosen habitat that he seemed to be a uniform dirty white colour–except for the whites of his eyes which were disconcertingly as black as his bared teeth and the obsidian chip that tipped the arrow pointed straight at Sara’s heart.

  “A mug for me, a mug for him, bind yourself up and be on your way,” said the cavalier.

  “I cannot spare it,” she said.

  “You cannot not spare it, my dear, for if you do not give it freely, we shall take it anyway,” he said. “I am trying to be a gentleman about this but we do not have all day, and if another of my companions appears, then that will be three half-pints and things get messy.”

  “Messy?” she said, playing for time. She would have to try and step out of the mirrors, but she didn’t know if she could do it fast enough to avoid the arrow. And even if she did step out of the mirrors, she had no idea what she would be walking into, other than some unfamiliar room into which the Mirror Wights could in fact follow her.

  Wights lived in the mirrors but could emerge momentarily. As long as they didn’t spend too much time out of the protection of the mirrored realm, they remained untouched by time. At least that is what Sara had read. Looking at them, with their leeched skin and black teeth, it was however clear something was touching them, even if time did not have them fully in its grasp.

  She felt a jab in her back. The bowman had barefooted up behind her and was prodding her with the tip of the arrow.

  “Messy means blood on the mirrors. Us don’t like blood on the mirrors. A blooded mirror’s a fell thing, my flower,” he said in a deep ruined voice that sounded like each word was being dragged through sharp gravel. “A blooded mirror, blooded on this side–why, that’s a world of pain…”

  “And not necessarily this world,” laughed the cavalier, voice dry as tinder. “A blooded mirror becomes a blackened mirror, and what lies beyond a Black Mirror…”

  He shook his head. The grey curls swung pendulously back and forth as he did so.

  “What lies beyond the Black Mirrors is horrors we as best not talk of in case they has ears as well as eyes,” said the bowman, echoing the unpleasant laugh with a dispiriting snigger of his own.

  She turned to look at him again. He was about her height, and as she moved he stepped carefully back and raised the arrow so that it was aimed right at her eye.

  “The Black Mirrors watch us,” he spat. “It ain’t good. Us don’t want to make more of them.” He squinted at her down the length of the shaft. “Now you stay very still, for if I put this arrow clean and gentle in your little peeper here, you won’t bleed much. So why don’t you do as I say, my coney?”

  Sara Falk stared back at him, unblinking, trying to clear her mind. What was going to happen next was not going to be about thinking. It was going to be about moving very, very fast.

  “Very well,” she said, taking a deep calming breath. “I will do exactly as you say—”

  And she did. She didn’t move an inch out of place. She maintained eye contact, staring at him down the length of the arrow shaft; his aiming eye at the other end of it locked on hers, a hard man determined not to lose even something as little as a staring contest with a mere woman. Which suited her entirely, since while he focused on her eye and not blinking his own, he wasn’t watching the rest of her, so he didn’t register her hand blurring upwards until it was too late.

  She grabbed the shaft of the arrow before he could let fly. As the command to loose it was still racing from his brain to his fingers, she jerked it off the taut bowstring.

  As his fingers opened to release, she punched the arrow straight backwards with all her strength.

  The bowstring snapped forward, shredding the fletches on an arrow now going at speed in the opposite direction. The string smacked painfully into the side of her fist just as the back of the arrow punched through the bowman’s eye and on into the brain beyond with a sickening popping sensation.

  She heard a roar of anger from behind and felt rather than saw the cavalier leap at her. She kept hold of the arrow shaft and spun out of the way, stabbing into the space she had just vacated, hoping to meet her assailant and impale him by his own momentum. The arrow instead met the stone dagger and skittered sideways into the cavalier’s shoulder. He yelped and stumbled into the falling corpse of the bowman. The two of them went down in a snarled tangle of limbs.

  Sara knew this was her moment of choice–stay and try and finish him off, or run and put distance between them. It wasn’t really a choice. She shifted the knife to her right hand.

  He saw her coming and rolled sideways and then just flickered and disappeared.

  “Damn,” gasped Sara.

  He had gone into a mirror.

  She hurdled the dead bowman, unable to stop fast enough, and then spun around, looking front and back. If the cavalier had flickered out of one mirror, he could as easily appear out of another at any moment.

  She caught the movement with the tail of her eye and threw the knife without knowing she’d done it, running on instinct. She turned and saw the whirling blade heading right for the cavalier who just flickered through another mirror and disappeared, leaving the knife to clatter to the ground a hundred feet down the empty glass corridor.

  Sensing he’d try and come through a mirror behind her, she ran to retrieve it, pulling another knife from her boot as she did so. She got halfway there before she was proved wrong. He stepped out of a mirror beside her, crouched low and ready to fight. Thankfully he was looking past where she was to where she had been, and their eyes met as she sprinted past.

  He cut at her, too wide and too late, and then he glimmered through a mirror and, before she could stop her pell-mell dash for the thrown knife, appeared between her and it.

  He slashed another wicked blow across her path, which she would have run into had she not thrown herself backwards and slid beneath it. The obsidian blade razored air particles in half just above her face, so close she could feel the wind of its passage. She reached her thrown knife and grabbed it as she rolled back to her feet.

  The cavalier blinked away through a mirror again. Clearly he had no problem getting in and out of them, and knowing exactly where he would emerge.

  Sara stood still and listened. The Raven flapped over and landed on her shoulder, then shuffled around so it could keep watch on her back.

  “Good idea,” she said, breathing hard, trying to control her adrenalin and slow her speeding pulse. “Thank you.”

  For a long beat they were alone in the glass corridor, with no company other than the dead bowman bleeding quietly out in a heap about a hundred feet away.

  The cavalier suddenly stepped back into the corridor between them. She hadn’t even had time to raise the knife to throw it before he flickered away again.

  She realised she felt a tingle through her bare feet, like the faintest of tremors, each time he went in or out of the mirrors. It came again and there he was on the other side of her. Again he disappeared before she could throw a knife at him. The next time he appeared he was actually smiling, showing his unnerving obsidian teeth as he played a very lethal game of cat and mouse with her.

  He disappeared, she moved, he reappeared, this time dropping out of a mirror, smile getting larger.

  “Only a matter
of time,” he said, and then was gone.

  The game was making her disorientated as he flicked back in and out, but then she noticed he never now came quite close enough to strike her, and that’s what saved her–not her speed or her tenacity, but her thinking.

  Why was he doing that? The answer stopped her in her tracks. He was trying to achieve the disorientation, to make her dizzy and tired. He was just wearing her out. But in doing so, in flickering in and out of the mirrors, he had made her aware that she could sense his transition by the vibrations resonating through the soles of her feet.

  She knew what to do.

  She closed her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest, a knife poised between the fingers of each hand. The moment she felt the vibration she threw her arms violently sideways, opening out into a crucifix as the blades flew left and right down the corridor. Her eyes opened and she saw one blade spinning futilely down the mirrored channel to her left. She heard a chunking impact as she turned fast to her right.

  The Raven cawed in approval and lofted into the air.

  “Damn you,” swore the cavalier, looking down at the blade buried in his thigh. From the gush of blood it was clear the femoral artery was severed. He reached for the mirrored wall beside him but fell suddenly backwards, landing in a stunned sitting position before he could escape again.

  Sara drew her last knife. His eyes found hers and he shook his head.

  “Nay, lady. I am done. Save your blade.”

  He stared down at the blood pooling around him. It was dark red, so dark as to almost match his teeth, and it seemed thicker than normal blood.

  He reached a hand into it and pulled it out, looking with a kind of dumbfounded fascination at the viscous strands that remained attached, like half-set glue. He shook his head again.

  “The fault was mine. I had not thought so fair a flower would conceal such ruthlessly sharp thorns. But come closer, for my strength is failing and there is something I must tell you…”

  Sara kept her distance, conscious that he had not let go of the obsidian dagger.

  “Well,” he sighed disappointedly. “I should have killed you straight away.”