"My image would be worth a pile if he claimed I was Maggie."
"He knows that and no longer cares. Attempting to coerce you into becoming the world's first Maggie in live performance has cost him more than you would have earned him. He's extended my contract fifty years, without any increase in pay."
"I'm sorry, Madrigal!" And I was. "It wasn't my idea to get tangled up in your act or with your assistants."
He sighed and massaged his trunk-thick neck. "How can I get you out of here fast, so neither you nor I suffer further?"
"Tell me about your mirror magic. You know I have some link with the looking glass world beyond. I manifested it here for the first time. I need to know why and how."
"Why should I tell you anything?"
"Why are you so hostile?"
"Why are you playing ignorant? You know far more than I about mirror magic. You were able to abduct the mirror image you left behind here by using remote viewing after you left. Even I can do no such thing."
"I don't know how I did it, Madrigal. I didn't do… anything. I felt desperate to leave no part of myself, of my soul, here for Cesar Cicereau to exploit on his theater stage."
"And so to save some infinitesimal part of yourself from nightly nude exposure on a stage, I and my assistants are indentured for another fifty years."
"I didn't know taking… it… away would cost you anything. How? No one knew about it but you and I."
"Even after the lodge slaughter, Cicereau would have gloated if I'd had some remnant, some illusion of 'Maggie', to add to the act."
"Hector Nightwine would have stopped it anyway. Legally, the image and the nickname are his."
"Possessing that tame remnant would have placated Cicereau even if he couldn't use it on stage."
"How?"
Madrigal looked uneasy.
"How?"
"For his private… use."
"You bastard!"
I stepped out of his reach and flicked my wrist with anger. The silver rope still attached to it snaked around his neck four times, tight.
"You're trying to make me feel guilty for taking back a stolen sliver of myself you were willing to pimp out to Cicereau. I suppose you already do that with Sylphia and Phasia."
The living metal rope tightened.
"No." Madrigal stood very still, all his mighty muscles clenched.
My attack was bluff. I knew his possessive familiars would soon swoop to his rescue.
"They'd kill him," Madrigal said, "and he knows that. Only I can control them. Besides, they are too petite and childlike for him. He likes statuesque women."
Statuesque. I'd never been called that before. Another ego boost. Still, I was a piker in the statuesque department compared to Vida, the dramatic brunet in the 1940s photo I found of Cicereau and friends, including Sansouci and Cicereau's soon-to-be slain daughter.
I relaxed my tense muscles and particularly my right wrist. The rope slid away from Madrigal, twining my right arm up to the biceps and adding a striking snake's head to both ends. It was at rest, but not disarmed.
I was amazed and a bit repulsed by how fast it responded now to my muscle tension and thoughts. It was becoming an unconscious part of me, like a devoted pet.
Madrigal looked pretty amazed too. He eyed it with loathing and wariness.
"All right," he said. "You've convinced me that we've sinned against each other equally." He shook his braided mane with some self-disgust. "These are dark times in a dark place. Come with me. I'll show you everything I know about mirror magic."
Chapter Twenty
The ebony beads terminating Madrigal's braids clicked like Quicksilver nails as he led me backstage.
Madrigal's mirror was tall enough to put on a closet door to examine your best duds in. Standing before it, I found it tall enough to show even him from foot to topmost dreadlock.
I looked like a character from a space comic: blond, blatantly armed and busty.
I didn't need to use my new intimidating persona anymore. Madrigal was resigned to taking me on as a temporary apprentice just to get me out of the Gehenna… and his dreadlocks and his dainty familiars' lethal webs and toils.
"Front-surface glass is a relatively unknown but ordinary product," he said, tenting his big strong fingers against the mirror to make a spider image and giving me the full scientific spiel.
"It's made by vacuum-depositing a highly reflective aluminum coating onto the front of the glass. You get only a single, perfectly clear refection. With ordinary mirrors, you get a faint refection from the front surface, plus a strong reflection-filtered through glass-from the silvered backing. And your fingers couldn't touch their reflection-there would be the thickness of glass in between. The multiple reflections of ordinary mirror glass blur the image compared to the brilliant clarity of the front-surface variety."
"Why do you use it onstage then? I'd think a magician would want to blur perfection."
"Cameras and camcorders nowadays have awesome magnification and quality. I can't even afford a thirty-second of an inch of difference in manipulating certain illusions."
"But you're a real magician."
"Yes and no." He nodded up to the flies, where his agile familiars hung waiting in the dark. "They're the magical creatures. I was just an offbeat magician with a little act in a traveling carnival. I found them feral in the California redwood forest. I took them for wild children. I didn't know them then for the Dread Queen's subjects."
"You mentioned her before when you first explained who… or what Sylphia and Phasia are. Who is she?"
"Maybe the mundane world knew her as Shakespeare's Titania, maybe as Queen Mab. I figure her as a Mother Nature goddess, benign at times, destructive at other times. I believe she rules all the fairy spawn that have shown their faces since the Millennium Revelation: pixies, nixies and the like. I've never seen her, mind you, perhaps that's why I'm standing here now. Her wrath will move mountains, I hear, and I inadvertently kidnapped two of her creatures. They've possessed me. Together, we've created an 'act' that will save our lives. Even the Dread Queen will not enter the hellish head hotel of the werewolf mob. Werewolves prey on the small fey folk, you see."
"Cicereau's werewolves? I thought they were after human game."
He shrugged. "True, but fey queens aren't always in touch with the modern world. She's a suspicious creature, from what I hear. Arbitrary."
"Like the Red Queen in Alicein Wonderland?"
"Yes, prone to offing heads, whether they be floral or human."