In the silence a cry rose from far off in the city. A woman’s scream of grief. It rang in the sweltering, shuttered streets. In the pitiless blue sky.
“Do you hear that?” David said softly. “Signore, that is the city crying out to you. That is the cry of death itself.”
For a second, nothing. Then the warlord turned his hawk profile on the guards. “You men. Outside! Allow no one in unless I call.”
They obeyed him without question, though one glanced back, catching Jake’s eye with a murderous glare. The door latch clattered behind them.
“Speak.” Il signore turned the knife against Jake’s neck. “And be quick.”
David said, “Give me my son and let us both go in safety. We’re no threat to you. In return I will give you this.” He took the vial from the folds of his robe and held it up. The amber substance it held gleamed in the slant of sunlight.
“Some sorcery.”
“Not sorcery. This is medicine. It may cure the plague. There is enough in this flask for you and your family, should you need it. No more exists, not in the whole of this world.”
In the obsidian mirror Jake watched the warlord’s face. Perhaps the dark glass magnified emotion, revealed its intensity, because he was sure he saw the man’s eyes narrow with greed.
Jake tried to pull away. The knife blade, sharp as a razor, jabbed into his skin.
“How can I believe this?” Il signore’s voice was a rasp of doubt.
“You have no choice.”
“No? I could have your son thrown into a pest-pit. Infected with the plague. To see if you can cure him.”
“Take him and I smash the vial to pieces. Shall I do that now?” David held it high. “Because hear this, signore. I am no demon, but a man who has scryed into the future of the world, and I know about this pestilence. You think it’s bad now. It hasn’t even begun. It will sweep Europe like a black rain. Men will die in the fields, at the table, men will drop dead in the counting-house and the church. Their bodies will lie unburied, heaped in the streets, and even the rats won’t touch them. Two out of every three will die, kings and princes and dukes as well as peasants. Your citizens will be decimated, your army reduced to a clatter of empty armor. Trust me, signore. This is horror. This is the truth.”
His urgency hung in the air like the murmured echo of his words in the high ceiling.
Sweat ran in Jake’s eyes.
Il signore did not move. Jake felt the heat of the man’s body in the strangling arm as he said, “Go where?”
“Into the mirror. Back to the place we came from.”
“To England? Or to hell?”
“This is hell. Seeing our children die is hell. Unless we help each other. I’m not offering you damnation, Piero. I’m offering you life.”
The vial caught the sunlight. It gleamed red now, red as blood, a warm comfort in the dim room.
The warlord moved, in sudden, powerful, decision. He forced Jake forward. “Very well. Put the flask on the floor and step back from it.”
“No.” David held the man with a steady gaze. “First you must release Jake.”
They faced each other. Pinned between them Jake felt the struggle of their mutual defiance. He dared not move now, because the knife was a razor’s edge between life and a sudden, slashing death. He kept his eyes on his father. His belief was fierce and blind.
Suddenly he was shoved forward, a violent release that sent him sprawling against David. With the lithe speed of a snake, il signore snatched the vial and thrust it deep in his own robes and without even pausing lifted the knife and stabbed.
“Demon!” he snarled.
Caught in astonishment, David froze. The blade whistled; Jake hauled him aside with a great yell and grabbed the warlord’s arm.
He was flung away like a rag. Something red and scorching ripped down his shoulder, his side, then David had hold of him and they were falling backward, back and back, into the exploding, enfolding embrace of the mirror, and the last thing he saw before darkness was the warlord on his hands and knees, staring dumbfounded at the opening in the wall of his world.
Rebecca burst out of the dark tunnel of the mirror with a scream of terror, straight into a mass of malachite-green webbing.
Crushed against her ribs, the baby screamed too.
The webbing caught her like a fly in a trap. Its mass of sticky threads bounced with the shock.
She picked herself out of it, breathless and confused. She felt as if she had been torn apart and reassembled and that all the pieces were in the wrong places.
“Maskelyne? Piers?”
The laboratory was empty. Strangely dark. Small lights winked on the monitors. Her breath smoked in the damp air. “Where are you?”
The chill silence unnerved her. She stood, turned, gasped in a deep breath. The mirror reflected her bedraggled anxiety. And where was Jake? Why hadn’t he followed?
The baby cried again. She unwrapped the small heavy bundle and uncovered a white face that contorted itself in misery.
“Sshh,” she breathed.
The Abbey seemed more silent than she had ever known it, and the lab darker. There was something else wrong, a new stench of damp and decay.
Something slithered and fell.
She turned in terror, her heart thudding.
The far wall, a dark patched surface of medieval brick, was bowing, swelling outward into the room. As she watched, a brick cracked, a patch of plaster fell off, as if some great unstoppable force was building up behind there, the whole weight of the hillside forcing its way in.
She stepped back.
Then deep in the house she heard an enormous crash.
As if a chimney had fallen.
Or a bomb.
Venn prowled the mirrored hall with tormented anxiety. “Something’s happening. Can you feel it? Something’s changing.”
Gideon, his face and hands pressed to one of the identical glass surfaces, gazed into his own green eyes. He too could sense it. A subtle distortion of space, a contraction. A breathing in.
He said, “The room’s getting smaller.”
“Smaller?”
“It’s closing in on us. Collapsing.” He could hear it now, the soft, creaking shrinkage of the chamber.
Venn turned with sudden purpose to the mirrors. “Then we smash our way out.” He tore at the carved frames, but the gilded wood fell away as if it was rotten, desiccating in his fingers.
“Try this!”
Gideon found a chair, picked it up and crashed it down. Frail wood splintered. They each snatched a chair-leg, and attacked the walls. Already the room was half the size it had been, the floor and ceiling slanting at impossible angles.
Venn smashed the nearest mirror; it starred into jagged fractures. For a moment Gideon was reminded of the crevasses out in the ice field; he leaped back as the pieces fell in great slabs at his feet.
But there was no opening. Behind the first, another identical mirror showed them their own despair.
Furious, Venn smashed that too, and found only another.
Gideon dragged him back. “That’s no use. Think! You must have some power here. The Venns are half Shee, everyone says. Summon it! Use it!”
Venn’s cold stare chilled him.
“No.”
“But—”
“If I do . . . if I start that, where will it end?” He stared at the collapsing room. “That’s what she wants, for me to give in to her, to enter the unhuman world. And it would be easy. So easy.” He took a deep breath. “You above all know that. You’ve heard their music. You went with them.”
Gideon nodded, but panic was growing in him. “I know. But if you don’t, we die here.”
“Summer would never . . .”
Gideon faced him. “Summer would kill us like flies,” he breathed.
Venn was silent. As if he made himself face the truth of that.
Gideon watched the man’s struggle with a cold compassion. “You have to,” he hissed. “The Shee all whisper about it. Ever since Oisin Venn your family have had the choice. The power is there, if you want it. Do it, Venn. Destroy her with her own gift.” His voice was fierce, he knew. His desire for vengeance on her shocked even himself.