The Golden Yarn (Mirrorworld 3)

John looked around. The Man-Goyl was standing right behind him. Diego the Leonian was guarding the door. Say good-bye to the sun, John, to strolls in the cold morning air, to restaurants and theaters. “Ah, Mr. Brunel! Always an honor! George, take the gentleman to our best table.” His lover’s skin, as soft as the furs she so loved to wear. All for nothing. The endless weeks of hiding, sleepless in lightless tunnels, his skin scorched by fire-geckos, blistered by festering rat bites and poisonous spiders. He still washed himself obsessively, as if he could scrub the memories off his body. Where had he gotten the courage? He couldn’t remember. The first time he’d been truly brave, and he couldn’t tell anyone about it, for John Reckless had died in those tunnels.

“Why Albion, John Reckless?” Hentzau dropped the mirror back into the pouch and handed it to the soldier. Goyl women were beautiful, and this one was no exception.

“Albion was the second stop. First I made my way to Sveriga.” John had tried to get some water—the only thing Goyl truly feared—between himself and the Goyl, but his ultimate goal had always been Albion, with the unlimited resources provided by its colonies, and the cheap labor they got from the slave trade. Both were indispensable for the inventions John wanted to sell there. It had taken him months to smuggle himself on to a freighter sailing from Birka to Goldsmouth.

“And the new face?”

“Tummetotts. They are quite generous with their magic if you’re desperate.” It had been November, deepest winter in Sveriga, and the gnomes were so shy he’d nearly died of cold trying to find them. He’d learned about them in the Goyl archives. There was some debate about whether Tummetotts were distant relatives of the Heinzel, Hobs, and follets or a separate species of Nordic Dwarf. In Sveriga, they were also called hjälpare i nöden—helpers in need. They had to believe you were desperate, or else they wouldn’t show themselves.

“So it’s true they don’t expect anything for their help?”

“Yes. It’s true.” It was bizarre to be having a conversation with a Goyl about Tummetotts, but John had accepted long ago that no word better described his life: bizarre. He tried to calculate the steps to the door of the car. And then what? Would he make it to the well shaft? No. The Man-Goyl might not be a good shot, but Hentzau could still shoot out the eyes of a Gold-Raven in flight, even though firearms just didn’t gel with his sense of good soldiership. He preferred his saber to a pistol.

John felt a brief surge of homesickness for Albion, so strong it caused him a physical pain.

“You needn’t have gone all the way to Sveriga to find selfless helpers,” Hentzau said. “We have stories of eyeless salamanders who fulfill wishes for free. Wagi Aniotiy. Scaly Angels. They supposedly live in caves with phosphorous stalactites. I’ve never seen one, but maybe that’s because I was just never desperate enough…or because I’ve never liked to ask for help.”

“Can I, as a last request, get some fresh air? One final look at the sky?”

Hentzau looked at John with scorn in his milky eyes.

“Still that love for drama. I can assure you, you will be seeing the sky soon enough. Three, four days, and you’ll be back with your kind.”

His kind. That didn’t necessarily make much of a difference, as his kidnappers had proven.

Hentzau smiled as if he’d heard John’s thoughts. It had always been a myth that it was those who loved you who could see through you. It was those you feared who could see through you most clearly.

“You should be grateful, John,” he said. “You so love to play the prophet of the New Magic. I will take you to a land that is still full of its enemies. Albion is already converted.”

The stomping of the locomotive trembled through the metal floor beneath John’s feet. It was he who had shown them how to run trains underground.

“Oh, and before I forget,” Hentzau continued while John wondered which land the Goyl could have meant, “I met your son.”

And that.

“Yes, I heard he stole one of my planes.” John tried valiantly to sound as casual as Hentzau. “He got his fearlessness from his mother’s side.” The stolen plane, Jacob’s role in the Blood Wedding... There hadn’t been much about all that in the Londra Illustrated News, but Albion’s King of course knew more than could be read in the papers, and whatever the Walrus knew, his valued chief engineer was sure to find out.

The female soldier waved in a courier. The man handed a sealed message to the jasper

Goyl. It did not contain good news. The years of imprisonment had taught John to read that stone face like his own.

“Bad news?”

The Goyl’s glance was a warning. No familiarities. Kami’en’s Bloodhound didn’t like people forgetting they were at his mercy. Hentzau folded the paper carefully, as one did when lost in deep thought, and tucked it into his uniform.

“Bad news for which you’re quite responsible,” he replied. “You’re here to make amends.”

The Warning

Compresses and a bitter broth to fight poisons. Alma drove the silver from Jacob’s eyes. He was mortified to learn from Fox that Alma had known about the mirror for a long time. But the old Witch just shrugged when he tried to apologize for all the years of lying. She listened in silence as he told her about Spieler, but when he asked whether she remembered the Alderelf, she shook her head and smiled. “Eight hundred years? You overestimate my age. Some of the child-eaters eat the mushrooms growing under the Silver-Alders to speak with Alderelves, but they give you a wooden tongue, quite literally, so I’ve never tried that.”

Silver-Alders. The nearest one was barely a day’s ride away. Jacob had always thought the custom of bribing a tree with coins, spoons, or rings to grant one’s darkest wishes was based on superstition. He was just considering a visit to the Silver-Alder despite Alma’s warnings, when Wenzel told Fox that Will had been to The Ogre.

Will had come through the mirror? Why? To escape when Spieler took the mirror? But if so, where was Clara? Jacob couldn’t even think her name without seeing Sixteen standing at the bottom of those museum steps. Fox promised to find out where Will had gone after leaving the tavern, and Jacob decided to speak with Chanute. He hoped that among Albert’s endless trove of anecdotes was at least one about Alderelves, or about the child-eaters who communed with them.

The girl who helped Wenzel in the tavern had washed Jacob’s clothes. He was embarrassed by how quickly he dropped the neatly folded shirt when he saw the card slip out from under the sleeve. The handwriting was all too familiar. At first he wanted to throw the card out the window, but then of course he read the words written in green ink:

I am sorry you didn’t want to enjoy my hospitality any longer. Don’t try to find your brother. He’s delivering my present to the Dark Fairy. Call it a peace offering. She herself made sure she can’t harm him, so there should be no reason for you to play his guardian. On the contrary, your brother shall be richly rewarded. But I should take it very personally if someone tried to hinder him in this mission. So, meanwhile, should you be feeling bored (and don’t I know that feeling!), the hourglass you’ve been seeking for so long is in the country house of a Venetan count, not far from Calvino.