Page 58 of Hemlock & Silver

Whenever we slowed, the hands would beckon again. At one point, we reached a cross tunnel, and the mirror-geld held up its arms crossed at the wrists and shook its gigantic head back and forth in exaggerated warning. I could feel Javier thinking about bolting, and gripped his hand more tightly.

“I’m not sure it’s going to eat us,” I said. “It could have picked us both up and dragged us out if that’s what it wanted.”

“I don’t trust it.”

“I’m not suggesting we do. But it’s bigger and faster and a lot stronger, so I suggest we do what it says for now.”

He grunt-sighed. We kept walking.

The tunnel opened abruptly into a much larger passage, wide enough for a team of draft horses. The mirror-geld backed into it, waving us forward. I looked to my right—and saw a scrap of blue.

“Oh Saints,” I whispered. “It’s the sky. It’s brought us out.”

Javier looked as baffled as I felt. “But why ?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t like the Queen?” The Queen’s guards had killed the small mirror-geld. Was that the reason?

Did they really kill it, though? It wasn’t dead, just squirming around on the end of a sword. Looking at the big mirror-geld, it did not look like a thing that would die so easily, or at all. Maybe if you had a few dozen barrels of flaming pitch or a lake full of aqua regia?

The mirror-geld waved us forward again. Swallowing hard, we walked toward the tunnel mouth, past the creature’s side. Its very… very… long side. Looking back along it, I guessed the mirror-geld was at least forty feet long.

Forty feet isn’t so bad, I told myself, to stave off the bubble of panic that was starting to rise up again. There are ordinary animals that big. Whales. Kraken. A couple of sharks. That one fish. With the fins and the weird things coming off its head.

Trying to remember the name of the fish got me to the tunnel mouth.

The faded blue of the sky, even with the dark notches taken out of it, was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.

I took a shuddering breath, found that I was, for some reason, near tears, and told myself firmly to stop that nonsense right now.

Unfortunately, the sky was a lot farther away than normal, because the tunnel mouth opened directly onto the side of the giant pit.

“Fifty or sixty feet to the top,” said Javier glumly. “Can you climb that far?”

It was sweet of him to ask, when we both knew the answer. “Can you?”

He eyed the smooth gray stone. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“It’s a long fall down for a maybe.”

The mirror-geld shuffled up beside us on its hand-feet, and we pressed against the far wall to give it room.

The atavistic horror of its appearance hadn’t gone away.

I forced myself to study it, the way I’d once forced myself to study spiders.

Eventually the spiders had resolved into beautiful alien jewels, inlaid with rose and tan and dusty gold.

Something I could admire, even if I had no desire to touch one.

The mirror-geld resisted such treatment.

No matter how I looked, it remained a gigantic wall of fragmented flesh, studded with blinking eyes and patchwork faces.

I wondered how it assembled itself. Assuming that the bits all stuck together, did it just build outward, layering new bits on top of old ones?

Were there hundreds of faces walled away inside it, still moving?

When the maid Eloise had stood between two mirrors and the parts had fallen off, it seemed as if they had sought each other out, the hands crawling toward the broken faces.

Assuming they wanted to be together, did that mean that small mirror-gelds wanted to merge into bigger ones, like this?

Or was it some kind of cannibalism of the weak by the strong?

More importantly, how many mirror-gelds like this were there? There had been multiple tunnel mouths in the pit. Had they all been dug out by this one, or was it one of many?

The mirror-geld swung its overhanging head in our direction and extended two arms. When we did nothing but stare at it, it made grabbing gestures with the hands.

“Does it want something?” asked Javier softly.

“It did save us. Maybe it thinks it deserves payment?” I rummaged through my pockets. What could I possibly offer a creature like this? What did it want?

My fingers closed over the wrapped mirror.

Oh Saints. This is either a brilliant idea or a breathtakingly stupid one. Still, if there was a time for sane and normal ideas, we were long past it. I pulled the mirror out, unwrapped it, and held it out.

The mirror-geld pulled back a little, as if in surprise, then stretched out both hands. I set the mirror on its palms, careful not to touch that chill gray flesh, then held my breath. Mirrors have power in this place. Mirrors are why it exists.

I guess now we find out if it’s happy with its existence.

The mirror-geld lifted the hand mirror to the wall of faces and gazed into it, tilting it back and forth. “Are you sure that was a good idea?” Javier asked in an undertone.

“I’m not sure about anything right now.” I watched the thing’s faces, hoping for some clue as to whether we should be celebrating or running.

And then the dozens of mouths began to smile. Awkwardly, one side often unmatched to the other, but smile nonetheless. Eyes crinkled at the corners. The mirror-geld lowered the mirror, and then it went down on its many elbows and bowed to us, or as close as it could manage.

“Oh, blessed Saint Adder,” I said, exhaling.

The mirror was passed from one hand to another, down the mirror-geld’s length, until I lost sight of it. I wondered if it had some pouch to store it in or if it had a hoard at the other end of the tunnel, like a dragon. Then, still smiling, it stretched two hands out to me again.

My heart sank. “I don’t have anything else,” I told it. “I’m sorry.”

The mirror-geld swayed. It took me a moment to realize that it was trying to shake its enormous head. It pointed dozens of fingers at me—at us—and then at the palms of the two outstretched hands.

“Uh,” I said.

“Does it want to shake hands?” Javier asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

He squared his shoulders. “Right.” Before I could move to stop him, he’d put out his own hand and walked toward the mirror-geld.

It took both of his hands in his own and gripped his wrists. More hands shot out and seized his ankles. Oh Saints, it’s got him! I thought, then scoffed at myself. The mirror-geld had had us all along.

But it did not eat him or rend him limb from limb or any of the horrors I was imagining.

It lifted his feet up and slid more hands underneath, then moved one up and stretched out another hand a little higher.

He stepped up onto it, and the mirror-geld lifted his other foot up, and offered another hand, higher up its body.

It’s making itself into a staircase. Is it trying to help us get out of the pit?

The hands beckoned to me, and I went forward. Cool gray fingers gripped mine, and I felt it seize my feet and lift them. I stepped up onto the next hand. It gave a little under my weight, and my stomach clenched with dread, but the hand gripped my foot, and then the mirror-geld began to move.

It came out of the tunnel mouth, length after length, lifting itself up like the chime-adder pulling back to strike. It swayed as it crawled, and I closed my eyes, clutching at the hands that held me.

It can’t possibly reach the top. It’s big, but not that big. Is it going to crawl up? Can it do that?

But it did not. The mirror-geld stood, half reared, and then sounds began to come out of it, both familiar and unfamiliar at once.

They were the sounds of hands clapping and fingers snapping.

Percussive sounds. Certainly it had no shortage of hands to make them.

But then the sounds began to smear together and to modulate into something uncomfortably like speech.

It was no language that a human could ever speak, but it had the right cadence, the rise and fall and pause of words strung together.

“What’s it doing?” Javier called down to me.

“How should I know?” I yelled back, and then, contradicting myself immediately, “I think it’s talking to someone?”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

I craned my neck over my shoulder, looking for movement. And there it was, off to my right, another bulky body coming out of another nearby hole. It had the same caterpillar-millipede shape as our mirror-geld, but it seemed smaller.

More clapping and snapping noises rang out, some of them from the newcomer. Newcomers. I could hear another one behind and above me, and another lower down. I closed my eyes, but that didn’t make it any better, so I opened them again and stared fixedly at the gray hands in front of me.