Reckless (Mirrorworld 1)

Will.

He had sounded so lost. Like someone who was drowning. Or someone who was saying farewell.

Clara pulled the grilled doors of the elevator shut behind her. She’d worn the same gown the first time she’d met Will, in front of the room where his mother had lain. Clara often worked weekends at the hospital, not only because she needed the money. Textbooks and universities made you forget all too easily that flesh and blood were actually very real.

Seventh floor.

The copper nameplate next to the door was so tarnished that Clara involuntarily wiped it with her sleeve.

RECKLESS. Will had often made fun of how that name did not suit him at all.

Unopened mail was piled up behind the door, but there was light in the hall.

“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.