Page 59 of Hemlock & Silver

A wall of mirror-flesh slid by in my periphery.

A moment later, the hands began handing me up again.

I looked up and saw a second mirror-geld hanging out of a tunnel.

It reached its hands out to me, and the first mirror-geld heaved me up into its arms, patting my feet as it released me.

Then it was up and up again, and then a third mirror-geld, or maybe the first one, had moved into position.

Each one could only get us about ten feet, since they had to keep the bulk of their bodies in the holes to balance the rest, but there were a lot of them.

At least five, I think. Five isn’t a lot when it’s grains of rice, but a great deal when it’s bites of hemlock or forty-foot monsters.

I was past panic again. The mirror-gelds were helping us.

Friendly nightmares. I had no idea what to do with that.

It didn’t make my skin crawl any less. Did that make me ungrateful?

I was grateful to the spider that spun her web in the corner of the chicken pen, catching the flies that liked to concentrate there, but even now, I didn’t much want to touch her.

Unlike the spider, the mirror-gelds were clearly intelligent in some fashion.

Father had said many times that you never judge people by how they look, but he meant things like cleft lips and goiters, not hundreds of arms pasted together in a composite abomination.

Still, the same principle applied. I told myself I was a bad person.

So what else is new?

Maybe I could get used to the mirror-gelds if I had enough time.

It was starting to seem like I might have enough time on the climb out of the pit.

Surely we had been doing this for hours.

My arms were very tired, but it didn’t seem to matter.

The hands pulled and tugged me upward, even when I was no longer moving on my own.

And then, quite suddenly, the hand that grabbed me was warm and tanned and encased in a dark blue sleeve.

Javier pulled me up onto actual solid ground, even if it was the wrong color.

My legs immediately tried to give out, and he grabbed me around the waist to hold me up.

Another hug that didn’t count. I blinked up at him and thought, Shit, I’m in love with you, but what I said was “Oarfish.”

Whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t that. “Say again?”

“It’s an oarfish. The long fish with the things on its head. I was trying to remember… You know what? Never mind.”

“Are you hysterical?” asked Javier with interest.

“What? No!”

“It wasn’t an insult. After that little jaunt, most people would be.”

“Well, I’m not. Anyway, who talks about oarfish when they’re hysterical?”

“Oh, I can think of at least one person…”

I glared at him, but my heart wasn’t in it. It’s not as if he was wrong.

A massive shape heaved itself up onto the edge of the pit, then over. I thought maybe it was our mirror-geld, the first one. It shook itself, rather like a dog coming out of water, except that hands flailed instead of hair.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but I have a couple of questions?”

Javier put a hand over his face and sighed.

The mirror-geld tilted its head, still doglike.

Right. Think of it like a dog. A very strange dog.

The size of a house. “When someone is reflected between mirrors, and the bits fall off, and they… um… glom on to each other… are those bits like the person who got reflected?”

It cocked its head back the other way.

I tried again. “I mean, do they have the personality and memories? Are there thousands of fragments of me running around in the mirrors back home?”

A dozen hands flipped back and forth in an equivocal gesture, then held up their fingers a little space apart.

“Sort of? A little bit?”

The mirror-geld nodded ponderously. Half the hands pointed to itself, and the other half stretched out an arm span apart, holding up their hands.

“You’re very big?” I tried.

Another nod. It pointed to me, made the small motion again, then back to itself and the large motion again.

“I’m small… you’re big… uh… oh! The bits that came from me are a tiny part of something the size of you?”

Several hands clapped in delight as it wagged its head up and down.

I felt myself grinning. This might be a nightmare, but it was at least an interesting nightmare. “But the little tiny ones, are they more of a person?”

A nod, accompanied by equivocal gestures.

“They are, but it’s complicated?”

Nod.

“Do you think you’ll be playing twenty questions in mime for a while, or shall we start trying to find our way back home?” asked Javier.

“Mime, I think,” I said. “This is important. I wish I knew sign language… no, it probably wouldn’t know it, so that wouldn’t work.” I raised my voice. “The little ones, how intelligent are they?” I was thinking of the mirror-geld that the Queen’s guard had stabbed. Had that been a sentient being?

It made the gesture for small again, then tried something more complicated. Two hands held low and tapping across the ground, then lifted up and clasped together. Then it hugged all its arms tightly to itself and looked at me expectantly.

“Um… do you mean us? Rescuing us?”

The mirror-geld shook its head, then made the same set of gestures again, then again.

“Uh… running… scurrying… like insects? You eat insects? No? You collect insects?”

It looked at me as if it thought my brains were a small gesture and shook its head.

“I know people who collect insects,” I muttered defensively.

“I think it’s saying that the little mirror-gelds combine together,” Javier said. “Then maybe they join up to the big one here?”

The mirror-geld pointed to him, nodding, and clapped its hands in evident delight. I tried not to feel jealous.

“So the bigger you are, the smarter you get?”

It combined a nod and a shrug, which I suspected meant that it was more complicated than that, but that I wasn’t too far off.

Maybe there was some kind of upper limit to how big a mirror-geld could be, and the big ones had reached it.

Or maybe there was just a limit to how smart a mirror-geld could be.

I wondered how smart that was. For all I knew, this creature pantomiming at me was a genius far beyond human intellect.

“I wonder if it can read?” I mused. Of course, there’d be no point to it here in the mirror-world, where the writing would be gray on gray, but if I brought regular paper over, maybe it could communicate more effectively—

“I hate to interrupt,” said Javier, “but the guards are bound to come by eventually, and this may not be the time.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Think we could get up there?” Javier asked, pointing up.

The third-story balconies on this side of the villa opened onto rooms for somewhat-less-honored guests, or for the servants of more honored guests, depending on occupancy.

Those rooms would certainly have mirrors, if not so large as the ones in the second-floor rooms. I had no idea if they would be big enough to fit through, but it was worth a try.

“If our large friend here can help us climb, maybe.”

I started to mime what we wanted to the mirror-geld, but it reared up and placed itself against the villa wall. The thumping of many hands taking its weight shook the building, and I winced. If the guards didn’t know where we were before, they did now.

Javier was already climbing hand over hand up the creature’s body. I joined him.

Halfway up, I heard a shout. I looked down, and saw the head of the Queen’s guard standing a good distance away, staring at us.

My heart began thumping, and then I laughed out loud at myself.

What was he going to do? Try to chop the mirror-geld to bits with his sword?

It would be like trying to cut apart a hillside.

To give him credit, he tried. He lunged at the mirror-geld and hacked his sword down into its back. It thrashed in soundless agony, and I closed my eyes in terror as the hands holding me swayed back and forth.

When I opened them again, the lower half of the mirror-geld had twisted, and dozens of hands were slapping at the guard, trying to pull his sword away.

He can’t possibly win. This thing is the size of a dozen elephants.

Evidently he had the same thought, because he backed toward the door, then turned and ran. A moment later I was over the railing, and the mirror-geld hung there like an exhausted caterpillar.

“I’m sorry you’re hurt. Thank you,” I said. “I don’t know why you helped us, but thank you .”

A shrug rippled through it.

Then Javier grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside the room. “Quick,” he said. “Before he gets here.”

There was a mirror on the vanity, throwing a beam of light through the room.

It was maybe two feet by eighteen inches, which was a flagrant display of wealth for glorified servant’s quarters.

It didn’t look large enough to fit me, but I didn’t care.

I stepped onto the chair, got my head and one shoulder through, and dragged myself out the rest of the way, my hips scraping the sides.

I tumbled headfirst onto the floor, acquiring what would probably be some spectacular bruises, but the tiles were warm , gloriously warm. I wanted to stretch out and roll around on them.

The mirror gave birth to Javier a moment later, and it did look uncomfortably like birth.

He did the same headfirst tumble I had, but managed to turn it into a shoulder roll and landed on his back with a thump.

His breath hissed between his teeth, and I remembered the ribs.

“You’ve got to go to a healer,” I said. “I mean the real healer, not me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “And tell everyone we haven’t died or run off.”

“That too.”