by Kai Meyer
“Even back to Burbridge?” Merle whispered. “Back to Lord Light?”
Junipa’s smile seemed even more downcast, but somewhere in the gleam and glitter of her eyes was also something else: a faint, shy triumph.
“Everywhere,” she said.
“But why—”
“Why didn’t we do that long ago? Because it isn’t so simple. I need something for it, the same thing with which Arcimboldo opened the door in the mirror that time in the workshop.”
Merle saw the scene flash before her: Arcimboldo, as he bent before the mirror and moved his lips. How he soundlessly formed a word.
“The glass word,” said Junipa, as she let the sound of the syllables melt on her tongue. “I didn’t know they called it that.”
“And you don’t know how it sounds?”
“No,” Junipa said. “Arcimboldo was murdered before he could tell me.”
Good God, Serafin thought, when Lalapeya pulled her right hand out of the water. It was gray up to the wrist, almost blue, and looked as if it were made of wax. It hung at the end of her arm as if it no longer belonged to her body. Lifeless, as if it were dead.
The sphinx’s features were twisted with pain, but still the fire of her willpower burned in her fawn-colored eyes.
“Eft,” she said, paying no attention to Serafin.
Eft quickly bent toward her and was about to help Lalapeya to stand, but she’d misunderstood the sphinx: Lalapeya was not asking for help.
“Merle needs … the word,” she said doggedly.
Eft shook her head. “We must look after your hand. If we could somehow manage a fire—”
“No.” Lalapeya looked pleadingly at Eft. “First the word.”
“What does she mean?” asked Serafin.
“Please!” The sphinx sounded tearful.
Serafin’s eyes fastened on Eft. “What word?”
“The glass word.” Eft looked at the ground, past Lalapeya, as if she saw something in front of her in the snow. But there was only a shadow there, and she stared at it as if she were asking for advice.
“Merle and Junipa must go to Burbridge,” said Lalapeya. “Junipa has the sight, she is a guide. But to open the door, the door of mirror glass, she needs the glass word.” The sphinx held her deadened hand pressed firmly to her chest with her healthy left one. Serafin had never had frostbite himself, but he’d heard that it was just as painful as being burned. It was astonishing that Lalapeya didn’t collapse.
“I don’t know the word,” said Eft hesitantly.
“You, no. But he.”
Serafin stared at the two women, his eyes wide. “He?” And then he understood. “Arcimboldo?”
Lalapeya didn’t answer, but Eft nodded slowly.
“Merle has a right to the truth. I don’t have enough strength … to tell her everything. Not here.” Lalapeya looked down at her inert, waxy right hand. “But the word … that I can tell her.” Her gaze became entreating. “Right now, Eft!”
Eft hesitated a moment longer, and Serafin, who felt terribly helpless in his ignorance, would have liked to have taken her by the shoulders and shaken her: Do it now! Do something! Help her!
Eft sighed deeply, then nodded. Swiftly she loosened her knapsack and pulled out the mirror mask: a perfect replica of Arcimboldo’s features in silvery mirror glass. Eft had made it after the mirror maker’s death, and Serafin had the dark suspicion that this was Arcimboldo’s real face, taken from the corpse and changed by mysterious magic into glass.
Eft handed the mask to Lalapeya.
“Will he speak with me?” the sphinx asked doubtfully.
“With anyone who puts it on.”
Serafin looked from one to the other. He didn’t dare disturb them with questions.
Lalapeya regarded the wrinkled features of the mirror master for a few seconds, then turned the mask and inspected the inside. Uncertainty flashed in her eyes for a moment, then she pressed the glass to her face with her left hand. The mask remained stuck, even though she took her hand away. The interior seemed in some miraculous way to fit Lalapeya’s narrow features; the glass fitted over her face without overhanging the sides.
Serafin watched breathlessly, almost expecting to hear Arcimboldo’s voice speak. He felt distaste for the idea; it seemed to him undignified, like the tired old tricks of a ventriloquist.
A minute passed, during which none of them moved. Even those left behind in the palm grove were silent, although they couldn’t see exactly what was going on in front of them. Serafin guessed that the boys felt it anyway, just as he did himself. One could feel the magic, which radiated in all directions through the ice and cold, perhaps even into the river, where it induced the fins of the frozen fish cadavers to flutter. The hairs on the backs of Serafin’s hands were standing up, and for the same reason he felt a gentle pressure behind his eyeballs, as with a bad cold. But the feeling passed as quickly as it had come.
Lalapeya placed her sound hand over the mask with fingers spread and effortlessly pulled it off. Underneath, her face was unscathed, not even reddened. Eft sighed when the sphinx returned her glassy mirror shell to her.
“That was all?” asked Serafin.
Eft shoved the mask back into her knapsack. “You wouldn’t say that if you had had it on your face.”
Lalapeya bent over the opening in the ice again.
“No,” whispered Serafin. But he didn’t hold her back. They all knew that it was the only way.
Lalapeya plunged her sound left hand into the water. Serafin thought he could feel the cold creeping up it, the blood leaving her lower arm, and the skin turning white. Sphinxes were creatures of the desert, and the icy cold must hurt her terribly.
Again minutes passed in which nothing moved, in which the frost itself held its breath around them and the icy wind came to a standstill over the plain. Lalapeya’s face grew paler and paler while she exposed her hand to the cold and the flesh gradually went dead. But she didn’t pull it back; she waited patiently and felt under the ice in the darkness for an answer to her silent call.
Then the corner of her mouth twitched: the fleeting shadow of a smile. Her eyelids closed as in a deep, deep dream.
She whispered.
A tear flowed from the corner of her eye and turned to ice.
“What sort of a word is that supposed to be?” yelped the phantom.
“Magic words are always tongue twisters,” Merle explained. “Most of them, anyway.” She said it as convincingly as if she had actually heard more than two of them in her life.
The phantom grew more heated. “But such a word!” He had needed five attempts before he was certain that he had said it right, just as Lalapeya had said it to him on the other side.
Merle had to confess that she still couldn’t keep it in her head. Compared to that, she spoke the magic word for the mirror phantoms as easily as a nursery rhyme.
But Junipa nodded and that was the main thing. “I can say it. It’s quite simple.” She said it, and it sounded perfect.
She is a guide, thought Merle, impressed and at the same time a little disturbed. Whatever it might mean—she actually was one!
“Tell my mother—,” she began, but the phantom interrupted her.
“She’s gone again.”
“Oh.”
For the first time the phantom sounded as if he felt a little pity for Merle’s situation. “Don’t be sad,” he said gently. “She’ll be back again. Most certainly. This business was quite … difficult for her.”
“What exactly do you mean by difficult?”
“You’ll worry yourself unnecessarily.”
If the phantom had intended to soothe Merle with that, he achieved exactly the opposite. “What’s wrong with her? Is she sick? Or injured?” she asked in alarm.
So the phantom told her what Lalapeya had undergone in order to produce the contact. And that she thus might lose both her hands.
Merle pulled her fingers back and let the mirror sink. For a moment she
stared into emptiness.
Now she no longer doubted that the sphinx was her mother.
“Merle?”
She looked up.
Junipa smiled encouragingly. “Do you want to try it? I mean, right now?”
Merle took a deep breath and looked around at the others. The spies were still standing beside Vermithrax. He was telling them in his full-toned lion’s voice about their adventures in Hell. At another time Merle would perhaps have been concerned that he was telling too much—especially as Seth was listening intently from his corner—but at the moment she had other things on her mind.
“Can you do it, then?” she asked Junipa. “Here?”
Junipa nodded. Merle followed her eyes to the mirrored wall and saw her own reflection crouching depressed on the floor, her fist clenching the handle of the water mirror.
“The mirrors,” she whispered, shoving the water mirror into her pocket and buttoning it and touching the ice-cold wall with her other hand. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why everything is made of mirrors here. The sphinxes have made a doorway. They want to pull down the walls between the worlds with their fortress. First they conquer this world, and then the next, and then another and—” She broke off as she realized that this was the same plan the Stone Light was following. Where was the connection? There must be a connecting link between the sphinxes and the Light.
“Let it be,” said the Flowing Queen. Merle had almost forgotten her, she’d been so silent during the past few hours. “What if you do not like the answer?”
Merle had no time to think over the Queen’s words. Junipa had stood up and extended her hand in invitation.
“Come,” she said.
On the other side of the room, Seth raised an eyebrow.
Andrej also looked at them. Merle smiled at him.
“I can stop you,” said the Queen.
“No,” Merle said, and knew that it was the truth.
Then, hand in hand with Junipa, she stepped in front of the wall. She saw the reflections of the men, saw how they all turned around in amazement.
Junipa whispered the glass word.
They entered the mirror, plunging wonderingly into a sea of silver.
HER TRUE NAME
MIRRORS AND MIRRORS AND MIRRORS. A WHOLE WORLD of them.
A world among the mirrors. Behind them, between them, beside them. Lanes and tunnels, all of silver. Reflections of reflections of themselves.
And right in the middle of it: thousands of Merles, thousands of Junipas.
“As if we were traveling back through time,” said Merle.
Junipa didn’t let go of her hand, leading her like a child through the strange environment. “What do you mean?”
“How long has it been since Arcimboldo sent us behind the mirror to catch the phantoms?”
“I don’t know. It seems to me as—”
“As if it were years, right?”
“An eternity.”
“That’s what I mean,” Merle said. “When we go back to Venice—and someday we will do that, won’t we?—so, when we go back to Venice, a lot of things there will probably be different. Almost certainly. But here, nothing has changed at all. Only mirrors, mirrors, mirrors.”
Junipa nodded slowly. “But no phantoms.”
“No phantoms,” Merle confirmed.
“At least, not here.”
“Is the mirror world actually its own world?” Merle asked.
“It’s more a place in the midst of all the other worlds. Or better, sort of a saucer with many worlds lying around it, like the universe around the planets. You have to go through the saucer to get into the next world. Arcimboldo explained it to me, but he also said that it would take many years to grasp only a fraction of it. Longer than one life. Or many lives. And Burbridge thinks this is too big for the comprehension of a human being. ‘Too little, really,’ he said.”
“Too little, really,” the Queen repeated in Merle’s thoughts. Was she of the same opinion? Or did she see everything quite differently? As she had so often in recent days, she remained silent.
Merle thought about Vermithrax, whom she’d left behind on the other side of the mirror. The obsidian lion would certainly be terribly concerned about her. We should have let him in on it, she thought. We ought to have told him what we were going to do. But how would they have done that without letting Seth and the Czarists know about it?
Poor Vermithrax.
“He knows you,” said the Flowing Queen. “He knows that you will come through somehow. Better worry about yourself instead of him.”
Merle was about to contradict her when the Queen added, “And if you are only worrying about Vermithrax, he will reproach himself for the rest of his life if something happens to you.”
That’s mean, she thought angrily. And terribly unfair.
But the Queen had already subsided into her brooding silence again.
The girls went farther through the labyrinth of mirrors, crisscross, in a crazy zigzag, and the longer they were under way, the more Junipa blossomed. Over and over again, where Merle expected a pathway, there was only a new wall of glass and another one to the right of it and to the left of it, but nevertheless, Junipa found the narrowest crack between them, the loophole, the needle eye in this glittering, flashing, sparkling infinity.
“The sphinxes must have been here,” said Merle.
“Do you really think so?”
“Just look around. The Iron Eye is a replica. Mirrors everywhere, reflecting themselves. Over and over, reflecting oneself to oneself. The Iron Eye is a copy of this, a reflection of the mirror world, as it were. Only much clearer, much … more rational. Here everything appears to be so random. If I go to the right, am I really going to the right? And is left actually left? Where’s up and down and front and back?” She was going to stop at what she thought was a dead end in front of her, but Junipa pulled her on, and they passed the place without encountering any resistance. To Junipa, the path appeared to be obvious, as if her mirror eyes had picked out a pathway. To Merle it was a miracle.
She regarded her friend from the side, letting her eyes slide over the girl’s delicate profile, the sweep of her milky-white skin. She stopped at the mirror shards in her eyes.
“What do you see?” she asked. “I mean, here … how do you know the right way?”
Junipa smiled. “I just see it. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s as if I’d already been here before. When you go through Venice, you know the way too, without having to look for particular spots, for signposts or things like that. You simply go and eventually you get there. By yourself. It’s the same thing for me here.”
“But you were never here before.”
“No, I wasn’t. But maybe my eyes were.”
She was silent for a while until Merle took up the conversation again. “Are you angry at Arcimboldo?”
“Angry?” Junipa laughed brightly, and it sounded sincere. “How could I be angry at him? I was blind and he gave me sight.”
“But he did it on Lord Light’s orders.”
“Yes and no. Lord Light, Burbridge … he ordered Arcimboldo to take us out of the orphanages. And the business with the eyes was also his idea. But that isn’t the only reason Arcimboldo did it. He wanted to help me. The two of us.”
“Without him we wouldn’t be here.”
“Without him the Flowing Queen would be a prisoner of the Egyptians or dead. Just like us and the rest of Venice. Have you ever considered it from that angle?”
Merle was of the opinion that she had regarded it from every possible angle. Naturally they were only free because Arcimboldo had taken them to be his apprentices. But what was this freedom worth? Basically they were prisoners like all the others—worse, even, they were prisoners of a fate that left them no choice except the way they had taken. It would have been so comfortable to stop, lean back, and say to themselves that someone else would settle the whole thing. But that wasn’t the way things were. The responsibility w
as theirs alone.
She wondered if Arcimboldo had possibly foreseen this. And if that was why he’d engaged in the trading with Lord Light.
“We’ll be there soon,” said Junipa.
“So fast?”
“You can’t measure the paths here with our measures. Each of them is a shortcut in its own way. That’s the point of the mirror world: to get quickly from one place to another.”
Merle nodded, and suddenly she had the feeling that everything Junipa was telling her wasn’t so weird at all. The more fantastic the things on her trip had turned out to be, the less astonishing they seemed to Merle. She couldn’t help wondering how long ago it had been. When had the old world come apart for her and turned into something new? It wasn’t at the moment when the Queen entered into her, but yet it was that same night, when she said good-bye to the old Merle for the first time and opened the door to the new one; when she’d left the festival with Serafin and let herself fall into that completely unlooked-for moment; when she’d become a little more comfortable with the idea of being grown up soon.
“There it is,” said Junipa. “In front of us.”
Merle blinked, saw only herself in the mirror at first, and thought acidly that it was the perfect reflection of her brooding: always only herself, herself, herself.
“Your self-pity is so unbearable sometimes,” the Flowing Queen said. And after a pause she asked, “Don’t you have a smart answer?”
You’re really right.
Junipa grasped her hand more firmly and pointed to a spot in the silvery infinity. “That’s the door.”
“Oh, really?”
“Does that mean you can’t see it?”
“Someone forgot to screw on the doorknob.”
Junipa smiled. “Just trust me.”
“I do that all the time.”
Junipa stopped and turned to her. “Merle?”
“Um?”
“I’m glad you’re here. That we’re going through this business together.”
Merle smiled. “Now you sound entirely different from before, in the Iron Eye. Much more … like yourself.”
