Reckless (Mirrorworld 1)

“Will?”

She opened the door to his room.

Nothing.

He wasn’t in the kitchen, either.

The apartment looked as if he hadn’t been there in weeks. But Will had told her he was calling from here. Where was he?

Clara walked past his mother’s empty room, and that of his brother, whom she had never met. “Jacob is traveling.” Jacob was always traveling. Sometimes she wasn’t sure whether he actually existed.

She stopped.

The door to his father’s study was open. Will never entered that room. He ignored anything that had to do with his father.

Clara entered hesitantly. Bookshelves, a glass cabinet, a desk. The model planes above it wore dust on their wings, like dirty snow. The whole room was dusty, and so cold that she could see her breath.

A mirror hung between the shelves.

Clara stepped in front of it and let her fingers run over the silver roses that covered the frame. She had never seen anything so beautiful. The glass they surrounded was dark, as if the night had spilled onto it. It was misted up, and right where she saw the reflection of her face was the imprint of a hand.

5

Schwanstein

The light of the lanterns filled Schwanstein’s streets like spilled milk. Gaslight, wooden wheels bumping over cobblestones, women in long skirts, their hems soaked from the rain. The damp autumn air smelled of smoke, and soot blackened the laundry that hung between the pointy gables. There was a railway station right opposite the old coach station, a telegraph office, and a photographer who fixed stiff hats and ruffled skirts onto silver plates. Bicycles leaned against walls on which posters warned of Gold-Ravens and Watermen. Nowhere did the Mirrorworld emulate the other side as eagerly as in Schwanstein, and Jacob, of course, asked himself many times how much of it all had come through the mirror that hung in his father’s study. The town’s museum had many items on display that looked suspiciously like objects from the other world. A compass and a camera seemed so familiar to Jacob that he thought he recognized them as his father’s, though nobody had been able to tell him where the stranger who had left them behind had vanished to.

The bells of the town were ringing in the evening as Jacob walked down the street that led to the market square. A Dwarf woman was selling roasted chestnuts in front of a bakery. Their sweet aroma mixed with the smell of the horse manure that was scattered all over the cobblestones. The idea of the combustion engine had not yet made it through the mirror, and the monument on the square showed a King on horseback who had hunted Giants in the surrounding hills. He was an ancestor of the reigning Empress, Therese of Austry, whose family had hunted not only Giants but also Dragons so successfully that they were considered extinct within her realm. The paperboy who was standing next to the statue, shouting the news into the gathering dusk, had definitely never seen more than the footprint of a Giant or the scorch marks of Dragon fire on the town walls.

DECISIVE BATTLE. TERRIBLE LOSSES. GENERAL AMONG THE FALLEN. SECRET NEGOTIATIONS.

This world was at war, and it was not being won by humans. Four days had passed since he and Will had run into one of their patrols, but Jacob could still see them come out of the forest: three soldiers and an officer, their stone faces wet from the rain. Golden eyes. Black claws that tore into his brother’s throat — Goyl.

“Look after your brother, Jacob.”

He put three copper coins into the boy’s grubby hand. The Heinzel sitting on the boy’s shoulder eyed them suspiciously. Many Heinzel chose human companions who fed and clothed them — though that did little to improve their crabby dispositions.

“How far are the Goyl?” Jacob took a newspaper.

“Less than five miles from here.” The boy pointed southeast. “With the wind right, we could hear their cannons. But it’s been quiet since yesterday.” He sounded almost disappointed. At his age, even war sounded like an adventure.

The imperial soldiers filing out of the tavern next to the church probably knew better. THE OGRE. Jacob had been witness to the events that had given the tavern its name and had cost its owner his right arm. Albert Chanute was standing behind the counter, wearing a grim expression, as Jacob entered the dingy taproom. Chanute was such a gross hulk of a man that people said he had Troll blood running through his veins, not a compliment in the Mirrorworld. But until the Ogre had chopped off his arm, Albert Chanute had been the best treasure hunter in all of Austry, and for many years Jacob had been his apprentice. Chanute had shown him everything he had needed to gather fame and fortune behind the mirror, and it had been Jacob who had prevented the Ogre from also hacking off Chanute’s head.

Mementos of his glory days covered the walls of Chanute’s taproom: the head of a Brown Wolf, the oven door from a gingerbread house, a cudgel-in-the-sack that jumped off the wall whenever a guest misbehaved, and, right above the bar and hanging from the chains with which he used to bind his victims, an arm of the Ogre who had ended Chanute’s treasure-hunting days. The bluish skin still shimmered like a lizard’s hide.

“Look who’s here!” Chanute said, his grouchy mouth actually stretching into a smile. “I thought you were in Lotharaine, looking for an hourglass.”

Chanute had been a legendary treasure hunter, but Jacob had meanwhile gained an equally famous reputation in that line of work, and the three men sitting at one of the stained tables curiously lifted their heads.

“Get rid of them!” Jacob whispered across the counter. “I have to talk to you.”

Then he went up to the room that had for years now been the only place in either this world or the other that he could call home.

A wishing table, a glass slipper, the golden ball of a princess — Jacob had found many things in this world, and he had sold them for a lot of money to noblemen and rich merchants. But it was the chest behind the door of his simple room that held the treasures Jacob had kept for himself. These were the tools of his trade, though he had never thought they’d one day have to help him save his own brother.

The first item he took out of the chest was a handkerchief made of simple linen, but when it was rubbed between two fingers, it reliably produced one or two gold sovereigns. Jacob had received it years earlier from a Witch in exchange for a kiss that had burned his lips for weeks. The other items he packed into his knapsack looked just as innocuous: a silver snuffbox, a brass key, a tin plate, and a small bottle made of green glass. Each of these items had saved his life on more than one occasion.

treets seemed even more congested than usual, and the trip was endless, until she finally stood in front of the old apartment building where he and his brother had grown up. Stone faces stared down from the gray facade, their contorted features eroded by exhaust fumes. Clara couldn’t help but look up at them as the doorman held the door for her. She was still wearing the pale green surgical gown under her coat. She had not taken the time to change. She had just run out of the hospital.