CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A Wilderness of Mirrors

Edie thought for a moment about the fact that she might just have betrayed George. It was a short thought, but a sharp one.

Then the Friar was talking and she was listening, and what he told her quickly pushed the uncomfortable thought to the back of her mind, into a place from which she could unpack it later.

“The mirrors are gateways. Not all mirrors, just mirrors that are set up parallel with each other. They work in two ways: firstly, by stepping into a mirror, a being may move himself from where he is to another place within the city, so long as there are parallel mirrors set up in them.”

“That’s wild,” said Edie, despite herself.

“Oh, it’s much more than wild, I assure you. It’s much more than a mere ‘transporter.’ It’s very powerful, and it’s very, very dangerous. . . .”

“Why?”

The Friar stood up, the swiftness of his movements making Edie flinch. But he was only gesturing for her to take a position in the archway.

“Stand there. Between the mirrors. Do not touch them, because now that you know what they can do, they may be open to you. But look.”

She saw the images of herself and the dimly lit bar multiplying away into the distance.

“You think you are seeing reflections of yourself, again and again. But you are not. You are seeing moments in time. Even a single reflection in a mirror is never yourself in the present, because it takes a thin slice of a microsecond for the light carrying the image to bounce off the mirror and back to your eye. A face in the mirror is always a face in the past, by that tiny fraction. And because of that, we never see ourselves as we are, only as we were—”

He smiled at her.

“Look at the images of your face, repeating off to infinity. Each separate image looks the same, but that’s only because the images you can see clearly are the ones where the differences are so minimal as to be beyond detection. Travel farther through the layers and you travel deeper into the past.”

Edie looked into the mirrors, trying to see where the differences began. She couldn’t. But she felt uncomfortable, as if the mirrors were gazing back at her, somehow.

“How does it work?” she said, looking away.

“The ‘how’ of it doesn’t matter. It’s just something that is, the same way the sky or a sparrow just is. It’s like that, and it’s always been like that. London is a place of power, and it was a place of power before people built the first shelter here. It was a place of power before people built stockades or roundhouses or temples or huts on it; why, it was a place of power before the thought of temples had even occurred to man. It was a place of power when the wide arch of the sky was temple enough for all. Look along the river; look at the Tower of London. Ancient? It’s a Johnny-come-lately. It was a Christian church, and before that a Roman temple, and before that a shrine to a Celtic crow god, and before that a god with horns on his head, and before that only the Raven himself remembers. All pasts are all still there, layered under the skin.”

His eyes were shining. He ducked through the arch next to her.

She turned, uncomfortable in the thought that he might be trying to get behind her in the dark. “So the mirrors not only transport you through space. They can also move you through time, into past Londons.”

“You’re quick, little girl.”

“I’m not a little girl. I’m a glint. I know all about the past.”

“And of course it holds no terrors for you.”

Edie rolled her eyes and blew her cheeks out at him in impatience. “It holds plenty of terrors for me. Don’t be stupid. The past’s not a nice place, is it? I’m just saying I understand about being able to go to the past because it’s sort of what I do. I can get my head ’round that.”

The Friar’s face broke into an anticipatory grin, eyes flashing theatrically at Edie. “You don’t seem impressed, child.”

She shrugged. “Not really. I got enough trouble coping with this particular present. I don’t need more.”

“You don’t need more?”

The more outrage he showed at her lack of response, the less she wanted to appear impressed by the vista of possibilities he was opening up.

“Nah. Sorry. I just can’t really do the past layers of London thing. I mean, I hear what you’re saying, but it’s all a bit . . . crap.”

She hadn’t meant to say crap. She’d meant to say weird. Or maybe scary. But her mouth had taken control before her brain could hit the anchors, and she’d said it. The Friar looked shocked.

“A bit . . . crap?”

“Yes,” she replied. She supposed she meant it, having said it, and all.

“You think different realities, layered pasts are a bit . . . crap?”

“Yeah.” She just wasn’t going to be bullied. “Yeah. No offense, but it’s the sort of thing saddoes talk about when they’ve bonged a bit much or got all boozed up and out of it, you know what I mean? All that magic mushroom mumbo jumbo they think makes sense of what’s going on in their messed-up heads, stuff like all the molecules in their fingernails being galaxies with little worlds spinning ’round them and all . . .”

As someone who had spent most of her life trying not to see strange and frightening things every time she accidentally touched something, Edie had strong views on people who voluntarily monkeyed with their heads in order to think they saw strange things. As someone who’d slept rough in the city and been in and out of more hostels than a young girl should have, she also had come across people who went to extreme lengths to get out of their heads, usually for the entirely understandable reason that they couldn’t get off the streets and out of the cold.

The Friar rose to a height that seemed at least half a foot higher than normal. “Saddoes? You think this is something for saddoes?”

He spat the word, hissing the S’s on each end in disgust.

Once again, she decided not to show she was intimidated by him. “Well. It all sounds a bit . . . crap, doesn’t it?”

“What it sounds like to your young ears is something I have no control over, glint. What it is—” And here he raised his hands over his head and did something to the checkered circular mosaic in the ceiling. It looked as though he had moved two of the rings in different directions. “—What it is, I can show you.”

There was a crump and crunch, and somehow, the world jerked a bit and felt suddenly a lot darker and more serious. And the Friar looked less like a monk and more like a demon, as shadows danced across his face, lit from below. The main reason he looked like a demon was because the light that was casting these sinister shadows across his face was red and dancing like flames, and there had—a moment ago—been no flames in the room. Edie turned to see where the fire was coming from and only got halfway to looking behind her, because she felt a great heat blast sear the side of her face. Her eyes stopped as they swung past the mirror to her right, the mirror that had contained the endlessly repeating reflections of herself, and now contained a blast furnace vision of hell and falling walls and screaming people.

The shock of it made her leap back—and for an instant she felt the cool glass of the other mirror behind her. And she heard the Friar yell, “NO! STAY AWAY FROM THE MIRROR!”

The cool hard glass at her back gave way as gently as a soap bubble popping. The world lurched as Edie started to fall through into a howling firestorm, and a blast lashed her face. Something grabbed her foot, and that’s when things really started to go wrong.