Page 37 of Hemlock & Silver

When I rose to my feet, it turned out that I was still a trifle unsteady from the stairs, and rocked sideways as I tried to rise. I flung out a hand for balance and felt a quick stab of pain. My breath huffed out into the stillness.

Another agave, one of the ones framed in needles, had caught the side of my hand and torn a shallow gouge in the skin. It smarted. I clamped it into my armpit, grumbling. The tiny spot of blood on the needle’s tip practically glowed.

Oh well, if that’s the worst that happens… Where to next? Surface, or dive deeper?

There was only one answer to that, of course.

The possibility that I might meet something dangerous, I put off my mind as much as possible.

It might happen. I might die. And I might have died the first time I dosed myself with arsenic to document the results or the first time I tested my chime-adder drug on myself. Discovery is rarely without risks.

Now on the ground floor, I took the short passage to my workroom.

In the real world, these walls were textured plaster, which gave the mirror-walls here a look like concrete or oddly worked stone.

It was less unsettling than the courtyard because it might conceivably have existed like this in the real world.

I trailed my fingertips along the wall. Not ice-cold, but chill, like a wine cellar or a cave.

My workroom had no mirrors in it, only the faded blue sky visible through cracks in the shutters.

It should have been nearly lightless, and yet I could still see everything clearly.

Scand would have been beside himself with how light shouldn’t behave that way.

Saints, but I wished he were here. Not even because I expected him to have any insights, but because I wanted to share this discovery with someone.

There’s no point in discovering something amazing if you can’t grab another person by the forearms and shake each other and yell, Do you see that! ?

(Grayling didn’t count. It’s no fun if they just yawn and look bored.)

The rooster’s cage was empty, except for a tail feather left on the floor.

There was no chime-adder to shake its bells as it moved.

Of course, there was no mirror for them to be caught in.

The room seemed colder without them, even though I knew that neither one of them particularly cared if I existed.

My glassware had become a graphite sculpture, leaving soft but complicated shadows behind it.

I drew my fingertip down the curve of the big retort flask, wondering if it was properly hollow or solid all the way through.

I wasn’t going to break it to find out. Properly blown glassware is expensive. Not expensive like mirrors, but…

Glassware.

Wait.

I should have been looking at my reflection in the glass. Dis torted, yes, a fish-eye view of my face that mostly meant looking up my own right nostril, but a reflection nonetheless.

Except that there wasn’t one.

“It’s not any reflection,” I muttered to myself. “But why? What’s the difference?”

The mirrors in my room were glass with a silver backing. If it wasn’t the glass, was it the silver?

Where could I find something silver?

In an estate like Witherleaf, silver cutlery was usually kept in the serving pantry. I wasn’t sure where that was, so I headed for the kitchen.

As soon as I opened the door, the creeping dread I’d been pushing down rose up and caught me by the throat.

The kitchen was empty, except that it wasn’t.

There were no people in it, thankfully. But the tables were covered in knives and cutting boards heaped with gray lemons, the big stewpot hung over the gray logs, and a round splodge of gray dough rose like a mushroom on the side table.

Far more than anywhere else I’d been, this room looked as if the inhabitants had just put down everything they were holding and vanished into thin air.

“Well,” I said hoarsely. “I’m probably lucky that the knives aren’t levitating in midair.” It seemed that gravity still worked, even if on the other side of the mirror, the utensils would all be in use, blades flashing as they chopped.

I went around the central table. My shoulder blades itched as if expecting a blow. Even though there weren’t any human reflections standing here, I could almost feel the people around me, as I passed through them like a ghost.

I gave in to nerves and looked over my shoulder. Nothing moved. See, nothing there.

… Hang on.

There were two balls of dough now. And there were no more whole lemons, only neat halves arranged along the board.

The room was changing to match the real world, but apparently it took a while to catch up.

“Ha!” Another puzzle piece falling into place, and my enthusiasm eclipsed my dread again.

As above, so below, apparently. (Not that above and below seemed like the right description, but as real, so mirror doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.) Things here matched the real world as well as they could, unless you deliberately manipulated something on this side.

There were two more doors a little farther down the hall.

One was a regular pantry. Bins of potatoes and shelves of jars filled most of the available space.

There was no way to tell what was in the jars, and I didn’t feel like sampling to find out.

I took a potato, though. If it turned strange and silvery, I could be absolutely certain that the apple really had come from here, and that it wasn’t just a very peculiar variety.

There were no apples in the first pantry. Which said something, though I didn’t know what.

The next door opened to the serving pantry. I picked up a pie server and turned it back and forth, but there was no reflection. So either the silverware wasn’t real silver, or silver by itself wasn’t enough to make an opening from the real world.

Maybe it was the specific combination of silver and glass. Or, depending on how many of Witherleaf’s mirrors came from the queen’s dowry, it might even be something unique to the mirrors from Silversand.

What bizarre alchemical concoction are they making over there?

I wanted to go outside and see how the wider world fared, so I retraced my steps and cut across the courtyard to the terrace. When I opened the door to the short entryway, I was greeted by unexpected spots of light on the wall.

What on earth…?

They looked almost like the sort of dapples you see when sunlight filters through leaves. I reached out my hand, and the light crossed my fingers, bringing unexpected warmth with it.

I had to squint at the opposite wall for a moment. The lack of colors made the shape hard to read. A fish? Maybe? I remembered that there had been something on the wall when I’d come here before, a large piece of artwork. I’d barely glanced at it, scurrying after the king as I was.

It was a fish, I decided, a mosaic fish made of dozens of small tiles.

I had no idea what the species was, if it was even meant to be a real animal and not, say, a stylized representation of Saint Trout.

Most importantly, scattered among the ceramic tiles were chips of mirror the size of my thumbnail.

I stepped into the line of the tiny reflections, suddenly eager for the warmth.

Then a thought occurred to me. I closed my eyes and touched a fingertip to one of the tiles.

It tingled as it passed through the silver.

I pulled it back, just in case someone was at the far end of the hallway.

A disembodied finger was bound to cause comment.

So it’s not just the one in my room.

I opened the door and stepped through onto the terrace. The sky overhead, however faded, was a welcome expanse of blue.

There was a mirror somewhere on the second floor of the villa that caught part of the gardens and woke them in a riot of color. The terrace itself was gray, with a gray table at the far end, gray chairs, gray tablecloth, gray cup, gray plate. Lady Sorrel’s tea, missing only Lady Sorrel herself.

It was the sight of the tablecloth, oddly enough, that made me realize another thing that was missing.

There was no wind here in the mirror-world.

When I’d had tea with Sorrel and the king, a week and several lifetimes ago, there had been a breeze from the desert that stirred the cloth against my legs.

It had smelled faintly of creosote and incipient heat.

No wind here. No smells either. The cloth hung in straight folds. Looking over the gardens to where they meshed with the desert, I saw the dark structural shapes of cactus and brush against the equally dark ground. Beyond that, blackness stretched to the horizon.

The sight was chilling. I rubbed my arms and decided that maybe I’d done enough exploring for the moment. Next time I’d bring warmer clothes.

Besides, I had so many thoughts, and I wanted to write them down before I forgot something important.

I threaded my way back through the villa. My hand was on the cold nonmetal of the doorknob when I heard something behind me.

It was such a familiar sound that if the mirror-world around me had not been so silent, I probably wouldn’t have even registered it. A door had closed somewhere in the upper gallery; that was all.

I thought it through, while my pulse spiked inconsiderately.

If there was a mirror that faced a door, and someone had opened the door in the real world, then it would open here.

If they closed it behind them, it would close here.

Granted, I couldn’t see any figures standing in the gallery, where they would have been frozen when the door cut off the reflection, but if they’d been going into a room, instead of out, I wouldn’t.

Right. Entirely logical. Nothing to be worried about.

Saints, I have to write all this down.

My mirror-bedroom looked no different when I got back to it, and the maid hadn’t been in, or if she had, her reflection was now caught in some other mirror. I closed my eyes and stepped through the giant mirror.

When I opened them, Javier was standing five feet away, looking utterly poleaxed, staring straight at me.