Master of One

by Jaida Jones

  The beetle’s humming stuttered, then increased in volume. Bright red drops of blood welled and dribbled down Rags’s wrist. He smashed his palm into the wall, slamming the bug against the stone over and over.

  Finally, it fell in a flutter of silver. Rags didn’t pause to watch it drop between the arrows. He turned back to the gears, beetles swarming in the machinery without gumming up the works.

  Another example of dirty fae magic.

  Oh, a simple murder chamber with arrows and locks is too easy, Rags imagined them saying. What’s the point of a trap that doesn’t fight back every chance it gets?

  Unfortunately, there were no fae left to curse.

  So Rags did the sensible thing: grabbed a nearby rock, rolled his sleeve down to protect his bleeding hand, and plunged both rock and hand into the beetle-infested nightmare.

  Easy—if you don’t mind pain. A good thief could turn his impediments against themselves, spin obstruction into a way to the prize.

  Rags wasn’t much, but he was a good thief.

  With the crunch of splintering metal and a plaintive whine, the machinery ground to a slow halt.

  Rags heard the door’s bolt slide back once again. The volley of arrows died, replaced by yawning silence in the tunnel. The last of the beetles fell, twitched, stilled.

  Rags crept to the edge of the alcove and climbed down the way he’d come.

  On the floor amid the scattered black shafts of the arrows lay the first beetle, the one that had bitten him.

  “Could be worth something,” Rags told himself, and pocketed it.

  But the door was open, and that was more important. Heavy stone he didn’t trust not to fall as he darted underneath, feeling foolish but relieved when the slab didn’t hurtle down to crush him.

  On the other side, Rags popped the mirror from his pocket and notified Morien that he was taking a break. Much needed. Completely justified. He’d opened two doors already.

  “It’s three, actually.”

  Rags hadn’t realized his eyes were closed until Morien’s voice alerted Rags to his presence.

  The sorcerer was holding out an apple. Rags took it and bit into it, didn’t ask where it’d come from.

  “What d’you mean, three?”

  “Had you not located the switch, you would have continued your descent into a bottomless pit, indefinitely,” Morien said coolly. “That too was one of the doors. Now finish that apple. You’ll need your strength.”

  Like Morien needed to tell a Cheapsider not to waste food.

  But there was something off about the fruit. Sweet at first, it had a bitter aftertaste that lingered, and it was too rejuvenating to be a normal, nonmagic apple. Rags hated to think of the trouble he’d gone to to avoid being poisoned by fae arrows if he was only going to ingest Morien’s willingly.

  But Morien had more efficient ways of killing Rags, if he wanted Rags dead.

  “You’d better go back for the Queensguard,” Rags said around a mouthful of apple. “Unless your boys in black have some immunity to hawkshade us commoners don’t know about?”

  Morien’s reaction to that statement was a blank expression, not even a rippling of the cloth around his nose and mouth. It told Rags all he needed to know about the sort of person he was dealing with. It didn’t matter to Morien who stepped on a poisoned arrow as long as he got to where he was going.

  Still, when Morien disappeared and Rags was alone again, he felt a strange sense of loss.

  It wasn’t loneliness. Easier to account for only one set of hands, one mind with a purpose. Getting other people involved was, without fail, where Rags’s plans always went sideways.

  He whistled roughly, pressing back against the weight of the walls closing in on him. Straightened his shoulders in a display of fake defiance. He didn’t have a fear of tight spaces, but he did have the sense that this place really didn’t want him around.

  Rather than swallowing him up, the walls wanted to spit him out.

  It was the rejection that ruffled his feathers.

  11

  Rags

  It wasn’t long into his search for the fourth door, along underground paths illuminated only by the dimly glowing fae carvings in the walls, that he found the next corpse.

  Impossible to guess the age on this one, because its face and chest had been chewed open and hollowed out like a Lastday turkey.

  Decidedly not a fae this time. The air around the body stank of dead meat. Rags had smelled worse, but not much. He swallowed back a gulp and marched forward, determined not to meet the same fate, showing the dead thief the same respect they would have showed him.

  None.

  He rounded a corner—and nearly ran into himself.

  He stopped short, breath catching, to avoid breaking his beak on the iridescent surface in front of him. Fae glass. Thicker yet more brittle than human glass. As multicolored as opal, as tricky as an oil slick.

  The Rags in the glass wavered, looking startled as he swayed from side to side. When Rags turned away from his reflection, it was to find another wall of glass sliding into place behind him.

  “No going back.” Rags watched his reflection’s mouth move. No sound echoed outward.

  Creepy. He turned his back on it to continue down the glass-walled path.

  At the end of the mirrored corridor he turned another corner. Just ahead, the path split right and left. He paused. Risked a glance at his reflection.

  “Don’t suppose you know the way?”

  The Rags in the polished glass shook his head. Slowly at first, his pupils expanded, then all at once devoured his eyes, filling them with blank, eerie black.

  “Yeah. Never mind. Never doing that again.” Rags returned his gaze to the floor, fending off a shudder. “I’ll figure it out myself.”

  He took a step to the right but sprang back immediately as the heavy stone tile beneath his boots started to sink, then fell away like a broken trapdoor. Only blackness, like his reflection’s eyes, stared up at him.

  The chasm was too wide to jump. Rags had no choice but to go left.

  “In case anyone’s listening, I hate this.” He reached into his pocket and felt the slippery surface of the mirror there. If he held it up, had Morien face the fae glass, what would the sorcerer see?

  Cheering himself by imagining something that could give Morien the same heebies he gave everybody else, Rags slid his booted foot forward along the floor, paying closer attention to the seams between the tiles. The silence was starting to make his skin crawl when a warped laugh cackled its way across glass and stone. “Hate this, hate this.”

  That was his voice. His laugh, though he hadn’t laughed like that, open and full-bellied, since— Had he ever laughed like that? Rags squeezed his eyes shut, then forced himself to open them. He needed to keep watch on that shifty floor. Literally shifty. It had already opened up right under him.

  When he came to the next fork in the path, he was presented with three choices. Straight ahead, left, or right.

  It was a maze. A fucking fae maze, made of fucking fae glass, with a fucking fae reflection giggling like a madman at him from the darkness.

  Rags was going to compose a new lullaby poem inspired by the fae. It started like:

  Fuck the fucking fae forever.

  Spelunk in their fae caves never.

  A work in progress.

  A hiss snapped across the floor behind him. Rags jumped like a brandscale snake had ankled him. Forward, straight ahead, his choice made by gut instinct more than skill. The stone beneath his feet dropped and he lunged desperately back, just in time to avoid being plunged into darkness. Off balance, Rags stumbled instead toward the left-most corridor, where a pair of hands caught him before he could hit the wall, gave him a hard shove between the shoulder blades.

  Whirling to face the culprit, he locked eyes with the Rags in the mirror.

  Mirror-Rags’s jaw dropped and lengthened. Cavernous mouth. Row after row of pointed teeth. His fingers dripped to an ob
scene length, tipped with wicked claws. He cocked his head, inquisitive, like a sparrow. But then his head continued to tilt, twisting as his neck stretched and spiraled out.

  Rags spun on his heel and ran, praying he was speeding toward the path without the trapdoor tiles. He waited for the mirror-thing to lunge, to bite him like the snake it had been transforming into.

  Now he understood the corpse he’d seen. His predecessor must’ve been murdered by his own reflection.

  Rags tripped on nothing, went down. Skinned his knee, yelped like a kicked dog instead of swearing like the full-grown thief he was. He cringed, waiting for the whoosh-snap of teeth around his neck.

  It never came.

  Rags’s heart rabbited frantically against the cold ground. Throat dry and tight with fright, Rags felt his breaths skitter warm along the clutch of his fist. He rasped in stale air, then opened his eyes.

  Gray stone beneath him. Good news. He wasn’t in the belly of a fae-dreamed horror-beast.

  He knew what he’d seen, though. That thing with his face, moving faster than light.

  Footsteps sounded behind his prone body. No, not behind. Beside. Was his reflection still in the glass? Or was this merely a trick of echoes, of reflected sound? Rags scrambled to his feet, scurrying forward with his eyes fixed on the stone floor.

  He couldn’t look in the glass, see the thing that wore his face and wanted to kill him. But he couldn’t run away properly if he couldn’t look up, see where he was going.

  He’d been privy to tricks with mirrors before he saw the sorcerer’s mirrorcraft up close. From street performers to paranoid Ever-Nobles, who had all kinds of safety precautions set up to guard their vaults. Men and women who didn’t trust a simple lock because people like Rags could pop them open.

  Was the monster nothing more than a fae illusion?

  Worse: a fae illusion that might kill you, despite not, technically, being real?

  Rags slammed hard into a glass wall with his shoulder, bounced off, hit the floor. Startled by the pain, he made a mistake. He looked at the mirror he’d run into, and the thing in the mirror met his eyes.

  A long-fingered hand reached out of the glass and grabbed his ankle.

  Not an illusion.

  Rags wrenched free and darted left. This time, when the floor bottomed out, he was almost expecting it. He had enough momentum to pivot and throw himself back the way he’d come.

  There was a way through this maze. Had to be.

  Other saps had been savaged and left for dead. Didn’t mean Rags had to suffer the same fate.

  His reflection monster wasn’t on top of him yet. How had Rags avoided being torn to shreds immediately?

  He glanced over his shoulder. Mirror-Rags shimmered free from the glass and sprinted toward him. By instinct, Rags flinched and turned away.

  The sound of bootfalls skittered around him, but no hand touched him. Mirror-Rags made no contact.

  Now you see it, now you don’t.

  Maybe Rags had to be looking at the mirror in order for it to come out and attack him. For the thing inside it to exist outside it.

  “Shit.” Rags exhaled, dug for the mirror in his pocket. Didn’t look at it while hissing, “Morien, I need one of your witchy blindfolds. Don’t ask. And if you’re going to do the thing where you poof into existence, uh, be careful.”

  Bad news if the sorcerer saw his own reflection and it devoured him. Rags didn’t think Lord Faolan would take too kindly to that, to say nothing of what would happen to the shard in Rags’s heart.

  He was covering his eyes with his own sweaty fingers when he heard Morien grunt. A light swatch of fabric fell out of the hand mirror and landed across Rags’s bare wrist. Morien didn’t follow.

  “Not so tough when it’s not your mirrorcraft, huh?” Rags asked.

  Only silence met his joke. A sensitive subject.

  Had the sorcerers suffered at the hands of the fae and their magic before learning to best them? Rags didn’t know. But because he was a thief, he couldn’t help wondering if the sorcerers had stolen the magic for themselves.

  No, he wasn’t here to wonder. Rags tied the scrap of red around his eyes, felt his heartbeat slow as the world around him faded.

  Wherever Mirror-Rags was, it couldn’t get him now. Rags couldn’t hear it or see it. By his theory, that meant it didn’t exist.

  Rags bent to take off his boots. Mirror-Rags couldn’t get him, but the floor could. He was going to have to find his way to the end of the labyrinth by toe-touch alone.

  He made slow, torturous progress through the maze, bumping into glass, quickly shifting his weight backward the instant he felt the first crumble of stone giving way beneath his bare toes.

  He only knew he was finished when he pushed through a panel of something cool, harder than glass, and heard the thunk of a door falling shut behind him.

  Rags fumbled with the knot at the back of his head and pulled off the blindfold. Took a deep breath, blinking back his eyesight.

  He stood in a room the size of a massive dining hall, only instead of housing feasting tables and chairs, there were rows upon rows of crumbling suits of armor.

  Armor made from black bone and fae glass.

  Rags would have scoffed at that, but he’d seen what fae glass could do. An entire enemy army could be felled by glancing into a polished breastplate, captured by their own deadly reflections.

  What was this place, that it had once held an armory that would have outfitted every Queensguard on the Hill? And why was Rags so determined to think up questions that, if asked, would only get him into trouble?

  Clear across the end of the hall waited another door. This one had only one handprint on it.

  “Gloves again?” Rags did his best not to look over his shoulder. A cold wind lingered behind him where the door had shut, and he couldn’t shake the image of Mirror-Rags prowling on the other side, trapped behind glass.

  Waiting.

  Just like Morien the Last was waiting for news of Rags’s progress.

  Rather than face the horror of Morien after dodging the great ax swoop of terror that had come with outrunning his murderous mirror twin, Rags decided to turn his mind toward getting the next door open.

  It didn’t matter what happened between those doors. All that mattered was surviving to the end.

  Eventually Rags discovered he needed to find the one crumbling suit of black-and-silver armor equipped with a glove bearing a special pattern, which worked like a key to open the fifth door—all while a polished juggernaut made of black bone rolled after him, hungry to squish him flat.

  And so on.

  “How come you can’t just pop to the end of this place?” Rags asked Morien when the sorcerer appeared with a pittance: another bitter, metallic, stomach-numbing apple.

  Morien looked at Rags like he wasn’t going to answer. But, to Rags’s surprise, an answer did come.

  “The rooms beyond do not fully exist before the trial to enter them has been solved. I can do many things, but I can’t send myself somewhere that doesn’t exist. Yet.”

  The bastard vanished after that, and Rags was alone again. More doors awaited, his sole choice to learn how to open them, or die.

  Down was the vague trajectory Rags sensed, when he had any sense of direction.

  The sky became the earth, and the earth became the sky. He was swallowed in darkness, its mouth, throat, belly. Weak light pulsed from the strange symbols on the walls. They were neither mathematical nor naughty pictures, the only two picture languages Rags recognized. These were fae and fancy and infuriatingly vague, lines that merely suggested shape and movement. As his eyes adjusted to the markings, he’d catch a glimpse of something familiar: a reptile tail carved to slither up the rockside, or a wary feline eye glowering from above.

  Living door to door, disarming traps, subsisting on Morien’s magic apples. Resting, occasionally, in the safe spaces between. Brief naps to restore energy, somehow, no nightmares. He began to wonder if he’d
ever feel sunlight on his skin again, or breathe the smoky, sultry, stinking-but-alive air of Cheapside.

  Soon, he had to stop wondering.

  When Rags stepped through the seventeenth door into a round room, he found that the eighteenth door was actually seven doors, lining the room’s walls in a half-moon.

  At first glance, the doors were identical. All seven were carved from dusty white rock and narrowed to arches at the top. But different etchings covered each. They were separate parts of a series of small images ordered for the eye to follow their story.

  Rags couldn’t read, but this story he followed over the seven archways of the doors. Each offered another fragment of the tale. Figures knelt before a regal form, taller than the rest, wearing a high crown. It gestured with the length of its spindly arm, and the figures set off. Soon, the figures split into separate directions. One, its geometric tail switching behind it, ventured underground, while one with a wing traveled to a smoky city and one with a fang traveled to a great lake. And so on. Six figures departing to six different locations.

  Six: one shy of the number of doors Rags currently faced.

  That had to mean something. Seven minus six left one correct door. He needed to use what was in front of him to decide which door he wanted.

  He ran his fingers over the delicate figures on the center door, tracing the shapes under his callused skin. Nothing gave. No hidden mechanism, no secret dial camouflaged amid the carvings.

  Nothing on this door. Six more to examine.

  “Not gonna think about what might be behind the wrong ones.” Rags’s mouth quirked as he glanced over his shoulder.

  Of course there was no one there.

  Silence in the round chamber as he moved from one door to the next, focused and ready to catch any little difference, his touch hesitant against the stone.

  Just then, a voice whispered, “You left him.”

  It wasn’t Rags’s voice.