"Angela?"
The glass clouded, and the sound in the room opened out. "Angela? Are you there?"
There was a restless shuffling under a background that sounded not unlike the room I was in. It was like listening to a live broadcast and the real thing at the same time. Sounds were repeated moments apart — a crow cawed and then repeated itself in a softer echo a second later. The sound of the breeze was resonant rather than distant.
"Can you hear me?"
Unless there was a mirror in Angela's room, or something that acted like a mirror, she would not be able to speak back to me. It was clear, though, that she was close, wherever she was. Yet I was sure I'd been all through this part of the house and seen no sign of her.
I opened drawers in the chest below the mirror and then in the bedside cabinet. In the top drawer of the cabinet I found what I was looking for — a small portable mirror that Alex must have used for plucking her eyebrows or some similar personal ritual. I rested a finger on it.
"Angela, can you hear me?" This mirror also clouded, but now I could hold it near to my ear as I left the room. I walked down the corridor, first one way and then the other, trying to discern whether the sounds came more into sync or less. The difference wasn't great either way.
There were spiral stairs at the end of the west wing, with windows looking out on the lawns and over the countryside. Stepping quickly downstairs, I went back along the lower gallery. If anything the sounds were fainter here, and louder from the mirror. Was that because most of the doors were closed down here? I opened the door into a drawing room, the curtains half-drawn and dead flowers on the grate. No, the sound was definitely fainter.
I closed the door behind me and went back to the stairs, going up two flights to the smaller corridor on the top floor where it was hotter in the summer and colder in the winter. These slanted roof rooms would have been given over to domestic staff originally, but now those that weren't used to store redundant furniture were empty and unused. There was loads of light, but it felt oppressive and stuffy. I walked along and found myself back at the stairs in the main house.
Looking back along the corridor, I was sure I had been all the way along and yet it didn't seem as far as it had to walk along the lower floors. Was this floor shorter? Surely they were all in the same building on top of one another and all the same length? A suspicion formed in my mind. I walked back along the corridor and found myself back at the spiral stairs, but too quickly, too easily. It left me with the irrational desire to measure the corridors and see if they were the same length.
I held up the mirror to my ear. There was still a difference, but less so, than downstairs, or maybe that was simply that we were higher up and more open to sounds from outside? Nevertheless I had the sense that I was missing something.
Positioning myself in the middle of the corridor, facing the opposite end, I closed my eyes and walked forward, counting five paces. I stopped and opened my eyes. The corridor was still there, it hadn't changed. I repeated my actions, and then again. Each time I opened my eyes and checked where I was. By the time I reached the end I was fairly sure I hadn't missed anything, yet I couldn't shake the feeling that something didn't fit.
If I gathered enough power into myself, I knew that I could see the world in a different way. Raffmir, my old enemy had taught me how in order to get me into Porton Down and rescue my daughter. He'd given me the ability to see the fabric of reality itself and even step behind the curtain to cross distances. Fortunately the rest of his plan hadn't worked, and both Alex and I had escaped the fate he had planned for us, but having learned the trick of it, I knew I could do it.
At the same time, if someone was hiding something here then I did not want to call attention to the fact that I'd found it. Blackbird always admonished me for using power without subtlety, as a blunt instrument. Here was a chance to prove I could be subtle if I wanted to.
I had noticed that every time I called power there was a sharp drop in temperature. It was as if I was taking the heat from my surroundings and converting it somehow. That sudden cooling marked my use of power like a red flag — it had given my presence away before. There was, however, plenty of heat up here near the rafters.
Closing my eyes, I tried to empty my thoughts in the way that Blackbird had taught me. At the same time I reached inwards to the core of power inside. It flared inside me and I felt the surroundings cool, forcing me to release it again. That was too much. I wanted something smaller.
I tried again, letting my senses expand, feeling the warm air drifting with dust and musty smells. I imagined the air cooling slightly, just enough to start an air current to bring more warm air. The core inside me remained closed and the air remained warm. The trouble was, air just wasn't my thing. Blackbird could twist the breeze through her fingers but to me it was just air.
And perhaps that was part of the problem. I was trying to do what Blackbird did, but she was a creature of fire and air. My element was the void, the space between things. So how could I use that to my advantage?
The void was a curious thing — the Feyre believed that everything was made of four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water. This made sense because their power was expressed in four distinct ways which loosely correlated to these elements. The void was different. It was what held everything apart and stopped the other elements from collapsing in on themselves. It was the space in which everything else existed, and where the other elements shared space with each other. In contrast, the void and the wraithkin, whose element it was, existed alone.
So if the corridor really was the wrong length, I would know. If somehow the space had been compressed or altered in some fundamental way, as a son of the void, that should be obvious to me in the same way that if someone made the wind blow the wrong direction it would be obvious to Blackbird. Therefore it had not been altered.
But I was also aware that it wasn't the length it should be. On some fundamental level, the corridor was wrong and it set my senses jangling to walk down it. It was just…odd. I had an idea that with enough power I could change the nature of a space and distort it — bend it — to my will, but this was not what was happening here. That would take far more power than was apparent.
But what if the corridor was not changed, but only the appearance of it, like a glamour? That would take considerably less power and would leave the corridor fundamentally unchanged but apparently shorter.
I closed my eyes and let myself drift, sensing around me. It was hard among the layers of wardings in the courts to discern one thing from another — like listening for a coin spinning on the floor of a busy railway station — but it was there. The corridor had a net stretched along it, like the glamour I used to turn eyes away when I did not want to be noticed. It lay along the corridor like a multidimensional mesh of misdirection and concealment.
I found the threads and followed them, gradually teasing them apart, unravelling the magic until it finally snapped apart and the corridor shifted. I opened my eyes and the formerly light corridor had acquired a dark section, within which was a door.
I stood outside listening. There was no discernible sound from inside but maybe that was also cloaked in glamour. I turned the handle and pushed the door open. Inside was a plainly furnished room with a chair next to a table with a book open upon it. It looked clean but bare. The windows were set low and looked out over the countryside, and there was a door through to another adjacent room. I looked as if it had been occupied recently.
I stepped in, intending to see if there was anyone in the next room. The door swung closed behind me and it was only the glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye that made me veer away. A heavy chair crashed against my shoulder and I was thrown sideways by the impact.