This new, wrong woman, she wasn’t new or wrong at all. She was his mother.
But what did that make the woman whom he had always called ‘Mama’?
Something is about to go spectacularly wrong..
“The Viaggiatori drag you back over to your own world, but what about me?”
Magic was reliable technology. In this instance, it was too reliable. It was showing the truth, and attempting to explain why the truth was the truth at the same time.
No.. said the voice in his head, which was evidently still following along.
The bridge was almost complete. Rashalamn’s eyes were narrowed in concentration.
“Don’t let go,” Marcus said in vain, aware that tears were leaking from his eyes unobstructed.
Rashalamn let go. For a moment after he released his concentration, there was perfect silence. Above them, the bridge he had formed throbbed with colour, straining against the bindings the Viaggiatori had placed on it. His assembled helpers stood in awe, watching it, tracing its path from the ends, where the essential spirits of the two towns bled into its colours, twisting and turning through the impossible interlocked shapes that spanned the gap between them. It was the most malevolent-looking piece of architecture that Marcus had ever seen, and he wasn’t at all surprised when it suddenly flickered, and began to writhe around.
Alarms were going off, and Viaggiatori were running around dodging explosions. But Marcus didn’t care; his eyes were to the sky. The images of the towns began to flicker and contort as their essences passed from where they should be into the framework of the bridge, heading towards a fateful meeting at the structure’s centre. The ground was shaking; the two sets of parents looked about wildly as pictures fell from the walls and windows shattered. In both scenarios, the father ordered the mother to stay put with the child, and ran from the child’s bedroom in an attempt to find out what was happening. Buildings began to warp out of existence as they fell into the bridge, even as Rashalamn grappled with it for control and attempted to pull it apart. For all his efforts, he was too late: before the bridge was even halfway dissolved, there was a terrible clang as two different worlds met in the middle, and an immense shockwave blew away most of the Viaggiatori and what was left of the bridge’s non-ethereal structure.
With a final effort, Rashalamn reached up, and shattered his bridge. The worlds snapped back with impossible speed, jerking back into their assumed positions as if nothing had happened. Destroyed buildings rebuilt themselves, pictures jumped back up onto the walls and two fathers moonwalked into their son’s bedrooms at speed. No-one had died, but the damage had been done. Kendra followed Marcus’s gaze as he looked between the two worlds that floated above. In one, he saw his brown-haired infant form, now in the hands of the woman he had always called ‘Mama’, who looked at the child she now held with a sense of confused detachment that seemed far more historically appropriate than her so recent emanation of affection. And in another world, a mirrored world, there yet sang a lullaby, a heartbroken lament for all the half-dreams and could-have-beens that curled like smoke from the lips of the woman who inspired so terrible a sense of loss, and who now held in her arms a blonde haired baby that would grow up to become a wizard.
Viaggiatori, said the quiet voice of their guide, sounding now broken and saddened, you will pay for this.
The images wound down and faded, clouds moving back in to obscure the Viaggiatori as they dusted themselves off, discussing where they’d gone wrong and how they’d get it right next time. From the clouds, words formed, floating in the sky. They were ‘Replay Video’, ‘Exit to Menu’, and ‘Exit Full Screen Mode’.
“Marcus?” Kendra asked, barely audibly. “Are you okay?”
Part 3
The Dreamer
‘The man who is not dead still has a chance’
29
The old man wandered through the city, stooped under the weight of his many years and wounds. For as long as he could remember – and he often found that ability diminished, of late – he’d worked hard, dedicating his life to his people, the Viaggiatori, and had found himself busy, always so busy. Not so much of late, of course, but the escapades of his youth had left their mark as surely as the more painful experiences of his more recent years. He had been a bright spark, head full of ideas, hand-picked by Rashalamn to assist in the legendary-bridge building sessions. From there he had gone on to be a part of many other great things, mastery over the Mirrorline growing alongside his ego until the Mirrorline had struck back with a whiplash lesson in humility that had stolen years off him. On that day he’d realised how bloody silly it was to think that he could go on forever, and so had quietly retired himself from active service, hoping to perhaps age a little more gracefully. He’d never slipped from optimism, though; he knew he’d done pretty decently, overall, and when he could no longer be a hero, he could still be a perfectly functional receptionist.
But then the wizard had come. Those few months ago, when Keithus had ruthlessly struck out at the Viaggiatori, he’d gotten himself caught up in events, and taken quite a battering. While far from the worst of the wounded that day, he’d found himself trapped between maladies nonetheless; old bones could not recover as a young man’s once had, and, according to his doctors, who seemed to speak more sense the older he got, they might never. There had been magic at work that day, a force that was far more detrimental to the soundness of body and mind than age when you were on its receiving end. As a result, he now found himself not even a receptionist, but merely tired, and retired.
But he was okay with it. He remained proud of what he had done, and he still had a lot of friends both within and outside of the organisation. Although he was no longer an official part of the Viaggiatori, they took care of their own, providing a pension and allowing him to retain his quarters. He’d taken the time to recover, and then built a new life for himself, wandering through Portruss as best he could before his energy gave out, seeing the sights, visiting friends and reminding himself about all the excellent things in life. Though not prone to regrets, he had found one small one: he had been looking forward to the upcoming pearl anniversary of the great bridge-building sessions, and so was mildly peeved that the fuss over Keithus had shifted the attention of the city, and bred a mood so dark that no-one seemed much inclined to celebrate anything.
That was what truly saddened him. Portruss had always been, in his eyes, a city of life. Now faced with the threat of extinction, he was disappointed to see that its residents didn’t seem to share his philosophy of grasping hold of what life there definitely was, in defiance of the dark things that lay on the horizon, threatening ends and changes in an uncertain future. Rather than dance when there was still a chance, the people were listening to the doomsayers, and living in anticipation of the worst when the old man just wished that they’d remember their best. Yet even he had difficulty, sometimes; when he remembered his first-hand experience of the wizard’s wrath, his spirits too were prone to sinking, and when he caught them doing so, as he did now, he didn’t know quite what to think.
He tried to shake it off. Today, he had come to the Bedlam Palace, the premier home of organised religion in Portruss. Here, in the grand central courtyard that was framed by a gigantic curved mirror that the palace’s owners absolutely refused to let the Viaggiatori touch, different perspectives went about their standard practice of having at each other in an endless cycle of linguistic and theological one-upmanship. It was a slice of old city life that had remained unchanged – in fact, if anything, the debates had only intensified since the threat of Keithus had become so real, with the various parties attempting to interpret it as a harbinger of their specific judgement days. It didn’t make for particularly pleasant or life-affirming debates, but the old man hadn’t come for that, anyway. He was here for the atmosphere, to enjoy sitting in the enclosed courtyard, buffeted from the chill winds of this unseasonable, lingering winter, and to watch the day’s proceedings be re
flected in the mirror. It reminded him of so many things.
Right now, the Lethian archbishop was filibustering like there was no tomorrow, which was funnily enough also the content of his speech. The old man could see the faces of his detractors, pent up with frustration about being unable to get a word in edgeways. The inevitable crowd that these debates always attracted filled up every pause for breath with thunderous applause, which allowed the archbishop to just keep going. He had already begun to repeat himself and was starting to look a little blue in the face, but seemed ready to continue on for some time yet.
The old man chuckled quietly to himself, and went back to staring into the mirror. It really was quite massive. Of course, the size of the mirror didn’t matter to a Viaggiatori, as long as it was big enough to walk through – and some more inventive Linewalkers had some contrary thoughts on that, even if so far their experiments had not produced the most comely of results. Yet for all that part of the old man saw this mirror as just another technical item, another part of him was quite able to appreciate it as just a really fancy mirror, and find a solace in its distant reflection.
Suddenly, the mirror began to shimmer. The old man blinked in surprise as his inverted doppelganger disappeared in a haze of light: an unnatural shimmer such as this was a sure sign that the mirror had become an entry/exit point for an active portal between the worlds, and that surely meant that someone would very shortly be coming through this forbidden mirror! That strange light practically screamed of intriguing developments to come, so the old man pulled out his pipe and started stuffing it with tobacco, getting settled into his front-row seat.
Without any fanfare, orcs began to exit from the mirror. At least, that was what the old man assumed that these bulky, vaguely humanoid creatures were. He’d never seen them, but he’d heard plenty of stories, and these fellows screamed ‘orc’ to him. He kept watching, curious, as they continued to come through. Screams began, as other people finally started to notice that things were happening. The orcs responded with guttural roars of their own, and sprang forward.
The old man lit his pipe.
Eira sat at her desk, puzzling over her reports. Eustace had attracted her attention to two specific reports that the Viaggiatori Public Relations Office, which operated out of the top drawer of the old man’s filing cabinet, had pulled up over the last week or so, and she now had them laid out side-by-side before her, as she sipped coffee and tried to get her head around them.
The first report was titled ‘Trouble Sleeping’, and presented the results of a survey that Eustace had gone around handing out, pertaining to other people’s night-time habits. Eira could only suppose that the man had gone totally overboard in his obsession with things that went bump in the night, as she could think of no logical reason to ask people about this kind of stuff. Nonetheless, he had turned up a result. By cross-referencing his answers against the last time he’d taken this survey (and apparently he did it quite often), he had discovered that, since then, the people of Portruss had gotten much better at retaining the memory of their dreams and nightmares. Vividly remembered dreams were apparently at an all-time high, and presumably this meant something.
The connection, of course, was inferred to on the part of all the Dreamwalking that the Viaggiatori had been doing. The idea had come a long way in a short amount of time; Eustace had been putting Eira through a series of increasingly insane experiments to see exactly how powerful her subconscious Mirrorline control was, and she’d matched up every time. In their last experiment, she’d even managed to wrestle control away from Eustace after she’d fallen asleep before he could pass it to her. This was remarkable, as it wasn’t something that people were supposed to be able to do. Eustace had been initially shocked, but quickly reverted to his now-standard ‘told-you-so’ grin.
Eira had officially sanctioned further research into the matter, enlisting the aid of Tec and his buddies down in the labs, who loved a good project. Other Viaggiatori had begun to learn the art of Dreamwalking, as Eira had unimaginatively christened it, but she was still the poster girl for it, since no-one had developed anything near her talent as of yet. For her part, she’d never really intended it to get this far, but an excuse to get some free sleep and still be productive had been hard to resist, even if it had meant prolonged exposure to Eustace. The old scholar was in the process of solidifying a theory of Dreamwalking, which stated that it made control of the Mirrorline much easier because dreams were a natural source of creative energy, our minds building something out of nothing as we slept. Harness that unconscious energy, he’d said, bring it to the fore, and you could make anything you wanted. Revolutions were happening.
And yet, somewhere in the midst of all that, he found time to go out and ask people some really odd questions. Eira turned to his second report, which was entitled ‘Aspirations’, and simply stated that not only were the people of Portruss having more dreams, their dreams were coming true. A huge variety of people were getting exactly what they’d wanted, from food to feed their family to finding a huge bag of money in their time of financial need. From Eira’s perspective, the most unlikely thing was the possibility of actually gathering information like this by means of a survey and suggesting that it was anything other than pure coincidence, but Eustace had claimed that all he’d had to do had been to triangulate the waveforms of his questioning and reverse his polarity a few times. She had a strong suspicion that none of those words meant anything.
Nonetheless, dreams were happening, and dreams were coming true. Eustace had had to admit that there hadn’t been any flying pink elephants yet, and that the ‘dreams coming true’ thing was on a far more realistic and logical level than it sounded, but he insisted that somehow, all of this was connected. As the instigator of it, he’d argued, it was naturally Eira’s job to figure it all out; he’d do it himself, of course, but he was just so busy. She’d raised an eyebrow at that, but the old scholar had proven to be remarkably immune to its arching powers. So, with a sigh, she’d shooed him away and decided to have a look at the reports, which were dense to the point of incomprehensibility and probably didn’t offer any information that Eustace hadn’t already summarised for her anyway.
The Master of the Viaggiatori poured herself another coffee. With all of these developments, as well as having to spend some time each day doing her actual job, she had almost forgotten about Musk’s party, and the overhanging threat of Keithus. Every time they did spring back to mind, she was almost overcome with speculations about what was happening. She’d last received word from Musk some days back now, a message stating that they were in Tiski and moving on promptly. With any luck, they would be there by now. The climactic battle might even be taking place this very instant.
“Eira!” came a muffled cry from the other side of her study’s doors.
“You can’t go in,” she heard her receptionist say. “The Master explicitly told me not to let you in again until at least five hours have passed.”
“This is important, wench! Just listen to what’s going on outside!”
Eira blinked, and glanced over to her window. She’d picked a room with a view out over the city because it offered more privacy than being able to see out over Central Plaza, so she couldn’t see what, if anything, was happening out on the front. The city itself looked the same as it ever had, but there did appear to be more screaming around the very edge of her hearing than usual. She tried to listen for more, but then the doors to her study slammed open and Eustace practically ran in, looking uncharacteristically terrified.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“Keithus,” Eustace said. “He’s here.”
“Oh,” Eira said, reaching for her coffee. “This can’t be good.”
The army of monsters had secured Bedlam Palace and begun to expand out into the streets by the time the mirror rippled once more, and Keithus stepped out of it. After seeing the many, many orcs, which had been followed by the tall, gangling, but f
ew-in-number vampires, who had been followed by the trolls, those living walls of rock, which had in turn been escorting those horrific, long-clawed creatures.. after all that, a single wizard was something of an anti-climax, in the old man’s eyes. He puffed idly on his pipe as the new chap got his bearings.
“Excellent,” Keithus said. “Bedlam Palace, right on target. And it seems the conquering thing is going off pretty well without any input from me. Oh, an old man. Hello, what are you doing here?”
“Taking my time,” the old man said. He was still sat exactly where he had been before, except that now he was flanked by two orcs. More honour guards throughout the large room had been assigned to watch over the other people in the palace, but no-one had yet come up with the bright idea of moving all of the groups together, so the general impression was one of organised chaos.
“Good for you,” Keithus said. “I just finished doing that. Do you like my army?”
“They are very well disciplined,” the old man said. “I thought they’d just start eating people, yet whilst they haven’t been particularly nice to anybody, our treatment has been rather humane.”
“Ah, well,” Keithus said with a frown, “that is interesting. I’m sure I specified to my general that they should be ready to burn, pillage and destroy, not just occupy. That’s not dynamic at all.”
Mirrorworld Page 37
