CHAPTER 65

THE WALKER BETWEEN THE WORLDS

Mr Sharp walked between the mirrors. Although it did not involve looking down, the first impression he got was a sickening kind of vertigo as he stared ahead and then behind himself to see the infinite disappearing line of matched reflections stretching away into the heart of forever.

Or that is what he called it in his head.

“I am walking into forever,” he said, talking to the ivory balls he held ahead of himself like a lantern. They were the closest he had for company.

He had heard one click as he entered the mirrors, which he took to be the “home” ball at the centre of the nest registering his start point.

“That’s good,” he had told it. “You make sure you can get me home.”

After that he had stopped talking to the balls because he heard the fear he was suppressing in his voice, and also because though there was nobody else to hear it and think him mad, he thought it of himself.

The first mirror he had looked out of was the one he felt Lucy would have walked into, from the limited understanding of how the mirrors worked as told him by The Smith. It was disappointingly black.

Unknown to him this was because the mirror she had been pulled out of had of course also broken, and the shards had been tossed into a midden and buried under succeeding dumps of night soil and other less noxious rubbish. So he resigned himself to taking the long way round, and carefully stepped from reflection to reflection, looking right and left and out of the mirrors on each side, in case there was something that would give him a clue.

One effect of walking in the mirrors was that time went very odd. He walked and walked but did not get tired. And because there was no night or day, he lost all track of the hours. The only other effect he began to notice was that he seemed to be getting thinner as he walked, not in the sense of his waist diminishing, but in the way he seemed to become less substantial, almost less dense, to the point where he held his hand up in front of himself and was sure that for a moment he could almost see through it.

“Perhaps I am becoming a ghost,” he said. He walked on until he thought that maybe the further you got from your starting point, the more see-through you became.

Since he was not getting any sense of where to start looking, he took this as a cue to make his first turn. He heard the next ball in the ivory click as he turned right, and stepped into a new passage.

It looked just like the one he had come from, and he saw how without the Ivories you would be lost for ever in a wilderness of reflections. He tried looking at his feet.

And that’s where the vertigo really did kick in because the floor and the ceiling were also mirrors, reflecting him up and down to incalculable vanishing points.

He sat for a long time and closed his eyes. Cook had been right: it was a fool’s errand. He should swallow his pride and go back. He should have gone back the moment he saw the mirror Lucy must have exited through was black and uncrossable. He was indeed a fool.

And then when he opened his eyes and stood he saw that something had changed. The light was different. The infinite passage was not static. It bounced a little.

And then he realised it wasn’t bouncing, but that a light was approaching and the light was being carried, and the bouncing effect was made by the gait of the light bearer.

He spun and found he’d pulled the longest knife from his belt without conscious thought.

“Won’t need that, friend,” said a man’s voice from behind the light. “Here. I’ll put mine down.”

And the indistinct figure bent and laid a small sword on the floor. When he stood, Mr Sharp saw a tall man with a jutting beard which sprouted horizontally off his chin like a goat’s, deep-set intelligent eyes and a long dark robe. His hair was kept back with a long skull-cap with earflaps, and there was a chain round his neck with a jewel and a piece of nondescript rock attached to it.

“Who are you?” said Mr Sharp.

“Like you, I am a walker behind the worlds,” said the man.

“What is your name?”

“What is yours?” The older man smiled a courtly smile and raised an eyebrow.

“Sharp.”

“Like your blade.”

“If you will.”

“I will. And I shall similarly introduce myself as… Walker.”

Mr Sharp was still on his guard. Smiles cost nothing and hid more than they revealed in his experience.

“Not your real name. Whereas mine is really Sharp. The blade is a mere coincidence.”

The man bowed again and broadened his smile, eyes sparking with great good humour.

“My name is Dee.”

He pointed at the ring on Mr Sharp’s finger, and then showed him that what he had first taken to be a jewel on the chain round his neck was another ring, similarly but more crudely fashioned from gold and a carved bloodstone.

“But you may call me Brother John, brother.”

Despite himself Mr Sharp lowered his knife a little and leant in to look at the lion and the unicorn insignia cut into the stone.

“Dee is dead,” he breathed incredulously. John Dee had not only been Queen Elizabeth’s mathematician and astronomer and much else besides; he had been a member of The Oversight from her reign until the Stuart king came south to succeed to her throne.

“Only in the past,” grinned the other, and sat down on the mirrored floor as if exhausted.

Mr Sharp saw that the light he carried was a fine mesh bag in which were a lot of pieces of frosted glass like Sara’s sea-glass, but of all different colours and shining brightly. As he looked at it, he saw Dee was staring at his Ivory.

Dee saw him see that and laughed.

“What are you doing in the mirrors, brother?” he said. “And what is that preposterous rattle you are carrying?”

“I am looking for someone,” said Mr Sharp stiffly.

“Not me, I hope,” said Dee, looking pointedly at the blade in Mr Sharp’s other hand.

“No,” said Mr Sharp. “No. A girl. What are you doing?”

“Trying to find a way into a new layer,” said Dee, and sat suddenly, looking tired and older. “It’s been a long time.”

He drew his knees up to his chin and leant back on his hands.

“Layer?” said Mr Sharp.

“Sit down,” said Dee, patting the mirrored ground beside him. “You don’t know how this works, do you? Place to place is crude. Time to time is better. World to world is best, for there may be an infinity of worlds nested within each other, and in an infinity of worlds even a dead man may live for ever if he can step from one to the other fast enough.”

And he threw the bag of stones to Mr Sharp who caught them without dropping the knife.

“You want to examine them, go ahead. They help with the light and with the past,” said Dee, rummaging in the inner recesses of his gown. “You can have a couple if you like. Do you like dried pear?”

Mr Sharp sat down opposite him and looked at the glasses in the fine metal net. They were just like Sara and Lucy’s heart-stones, he thought—

—and then he didn’t think anything else for a while because Dee lashed out with his boots, smashing them into his head, knocking him senseless.

When he awoke he was alone.

The Ivory get-you-home was gone.

As were all of his knives except the small one in his sleeve, the one The Smith had given him, which Dee must have missed. His boots were also missing. His head throbbed and his finger hurt and was chafed, from which he deduced Dee had tried to remove his ring too.

He stood and looked around him.

Everywhere looked like everywhere, all the way to forever and back.

“Stupid,” he said. “Stupid.”

Cook’s prophecy and Sara’s fears had come true.

He was well and truly lost in the mirrors.