The Palace of Glass (17 page)

VISIONS

S
HE WAS IN T
HE
front hall, with its grand staircase and walls hung with her father's favorite paintings. In later years, the sitting room had been closed up, its furniture covered in dust cloths, and some of the paintings had been sold; but this was the old house at its height in 1929, when the good times looked as though they might go on forever.

Servants bustled everywhere, footmen in black jackets and maids in long skirts, cleaning and polishing. It was the night of the first big party at which she'd been allowed to sit with the adults when company came over. She'd been ten years old.

She looked down. The ground under her feet was still
marble flagstones, and the sky over her head was still a misty gray. But the mirrors all around her reflected the house in such detail that she could almost believe she'd stepped back in time.
Back to another life.
Normally it felt like those memories belonged to another girl, another Alice.
Or just a dream I was having before waking up.

“Is it to your liking?” The mirror image stood unobtrusively in a corner of the hall, still in her party dress. Behind her, peeking out from a doorway, Alice saw two more copies of herself, both wearing blank-faced masks.

“It's amazing!” Alice said. “There's my old tutor Miss Juniper, and father's man Cooper. And Elpseth, who left when she had a baby. And old Mr. Spiven.” She'd forgotten how many servants they'd had in the old days. They'd always been kind to her. She found herself blinking back tears. “How did you know about all of this?”

“Time and distance are illusions when you look from this side of the glass.” The mirror image leaned forward again, eager. “What else? What else can we show you?”

Alice wavered, a wave of fatigue running through her. It had been a
long
climb up the marble steps, and a trying day even before that.

“Can you show me what's happening
now
?” she said. “Somewhere else?”

“Of course, of course. It's all the same, from where we stand.”

Alice frowned, still not convinced. “Then show me Mr. Black.”

The scene in the mirrors shifted in a flash, and Alice was looking in on the Library storeroom, where she'd once played a deadly game of hide-and-seek with the big servant. Now he was shifting sacks and boxes, muttering to himself as he rearranged the supplies and restacked the crates.

It certainly looks like Mr. Black.
“What about Ashes?” she said.

The mirrors changed again. She was standing in the library, among the dusty shelves, watching a small gray cat stalk silently forward with tail outstretched. A white mouse came into view, sniffing the air, and Ashes leaped. The mouse, too quick for him, darted under a shelf, and he landed in a puff of dust and sneezed.

Alice grinned as she watched him look around, to see if anyone had noticed his failure. Satisfied that he was alone, he gave his dusty paws a couple of licks and sauntered off.

“All right,” she said, warming to the idea. “Can you show me Isaac?”

There were four of the masked creatures now, standing two to each side of the mirror, watching her with their blank faces. She was aware of movement around her, more of them filtering in. They were shy, but so awkwardly eager to please, it was cute.

This time, the mirror cleared to show the inside of a cave with a huge pool of water, hot enough that steam rose into the air and condensation dripped from the walls. Isaac, dressed in his tattered coat, entered with a box in one hand and a lantern in the other. He set them down by the side of the pool and heaved a sigh.

“Would it kill him to get a proper shower?” Isaac said. He unlaced his shoes and pulled them off, then shrugged out of his coat. “I mean, we've got the hot water, it should just be a matter of plumbing. There must be a book somewhere with a plumber in it.”

He pulled a bar of soap and towel from the box, then went to pull up his shirt. Alice put a hand over her eyes.

“That's enough,” she said.

When she peeked through her fingers, the mirrors had gone back to showing the marble courtyard. Reflected Alices were everywhere, dozens of them, standing all
around the circle of mirrors in their colorful dresses. Every one wore a blank-faced mask. Alice waved at them, feeling a little light-headed.

“What next?” the mirror image said. It could have been any of them, or all of them. “Who next?”

“Show me . . .” Alice wrinkled her forehead. It felt as though she was
missing
something, something important. Her hand reached toward her pocket, then stopped. Her thoughts had gone hazy. “Show me Geryon.”

The old Reader sat on one side of a table, looking across at another old man. A chessboard sat between them, yellowed ivory pieces arrayed against glittering obsidian. His opponent was a black man with a frizz of gray hair and a nose like a hawk. Geryon glanced down at the board and scratched his enormous sideburns, and a knight slid forward and to the left of its own accord.

“Then you agree that it may be a problem,” he said.

“It may
develop
into a problem,” the other man said. He reached out, put a finger on a pawn, hesitated. “The labyrinthine have never been so restless, but we still hold the whip hand.”

“Do we?” Geryon watched as the other man's finger tapped the pawn. “Sometimes I wonder.”

“They need our power to keep the Great Binding intact.
If we wanted to, we could simply let the prisoner escape.”

“And what then?” Geryon said. “How well would we fare without the power of the labyrinthine?”

“Well enough. Some of us were old even before the Binding, you know.”

Geryon frowned. “Are you going to move that pawn, or just polish it?”

His opponent looked down at the board, sighed, and pushed his pawn forward. “I could never get the hang of these new-fangled games . . .”

Alice shook her head, and the image faded away. Her weariness had increased. She felt as though she were wearing her pack, and it had been loaded with lead weights. She took a step forward, putting one hand on the mirror for support, and found the glass cool and slick against her palm.

“What else?” the mirror image said. “We can show you anything.”

“Anything,” the echoes repeated, over and over. “Anything.”

Alice's mind was as slow as molasses. Her mouth seemed too thick to shape words.

“I want to see,” she said, “my twelfth birthday. My father . . . gave me a present.”

“Of course,” the mirror image said, echoes chattering beside it. “Of course . . . of course . . .”

The mirror showed her father's study, with its big desk and electric lamp. He sat in his familiar chair, fiddling with the bow on a brown paper package. The door opened, and Alice watched herself enter, wearing a pretty striped dress, a ribbon in her hair, and a blank, porcelain mask.

“Alice,” her father said, smiling the smile she loved so much. “Have you been having a good birthday?”

“Yes!” Alice ran to the desk. “Cooper took me for ice cream and soda, and we watched them fixing the big clock down in the square. I want to learn how to fix clocks!”

Did I really sound like that?
Alice had always thought of herself as grown-up for her age, but the image in the mirror looked like . . . well . . . a child. A normal, happy girl of twelve.
As opposed to . . . whatever I am now.

Her father looked taken aback, but his smile broadened. “I'm sure you'd make a fine clocksmith. Is that what they're called? Clocksmiths?” Alice shook her head, giggling, and he cleared his throat noisily. “In any event, I found this in a shop the other day and thought you might enjoy having it.”

He pushed the package toward her, and she grabbed it eagerly. “Can I open it?”

“Go ahead.”

The mirror-Alice worried at the bow, then slid the ribbon off entirely and tore the paper. There was a book inside, of course. It was an old, battered book, the gilt lettering on its spine nearly illegible. Alice remembered it perfectly. A collection of Greek tragedies, printed in the eighteenth century, a fine piece for any library.

“I thought,” her father said, a little gruffly, “that as much as you love books, it's time you started your own collection.”

“Oh, thank you!” The blank-faced Alice rushed past the desk and wrapped her arms around her father as far as they would go. He hugged her back, then lifted her off her feet, eliciting a delighted laugh.

Alice, the real Alice, found her eyes full of tears. She leaned on the mirror, glass pressed against her forehead.
Her skin felt clammy and slick with sweat. The mist was getting thicker—even the other side of the courtyard was hard to see, and mirror-Alices continued to gather all around. They had changed, they'd all changed. The masks were no longer blank, but split by a black slash of a mouth, crosshatched into huge, white teeth.

“Ask,” the mirror image said. “Ask, ask, ask.”

“I . . .” Alice was breathing hard. It was difficult to get enough air in her lungs. “Can you show me . . .”

“Yes?” the mirror image said.

Deep in her befuddled mind, a bit of curiosity remained.

“My mother,” Alice said. “I want to see my mother.”

She had no memories of her mother, and her father had never even showed Alice a picture. On the one occasion she'd asked him directly, he'd told Alice she was dead, and the thunderous look on his face was such that she'd never dared mention it again. She'd always said that she didn't
need
a mother, that her father was enough. And that was true, but it would have been nice to at least see her face.

“Mother,” the mirror image whispered. “Mother . . .”

The creature sounded a little vexed, as if something wasn't working right. The mirror flickered, like a movie
at the end of the reel, and then went totally, utterly black, leaving the mirror-Alices standing in an impenetrable void.

“Mother?” the echoes whispered. “Mother . . .”

Alice slumped against the mirror, sinking to her knees. She was tired, so tired, and while some part of her mind knew that something was badly wrong, she didn't have the energy to care. Much better to lie here, pressed against the chilly glass, and wait. Wait for . . .

“Mother?” Her own voice, twisted and echoing.

“Strange.”

“Dark.”

“Meaningless. Had our fill. Take her.”

“Take her. Take her . . .”

Alice felt fingers on her arms, her shoulders. Hands as cold as the mirror, reaching out to take hold of her. The glass under her cheek
rippled
like water.

“Take her. Take her . . .”

Something moved in the depths of the void behind the mirror. The faintest twitch, darkness against deeper darkness. Then an eye appeared. Not a human eye—this was a vast thing, as big as Alice, with a silver iris that seemed to glow against the utter blackness. The pupil was a vertical slit, like a cat's, but this was no cat. It was profoundly
alien
—not a mammal, not a lizard or a snake, not anything that had ever walked the earth. Something
other
.

And yet, Alice thought, there was the faintest sense of familiarity, of recognition.

Alice.

The voice sounded in her mind. It reminded her of the Dragon, the way it had spoken to her when she'd entered Esau's fortress. But this voice was older, smoother. In some way Alice couldn't quite understand, it seemed
kinder
. She ought to have been terrified, but she felt nothing but a wave of gentle concern.

Alice. Wake up.

I'm . . . tired. So tired . . .

You are in danger. Wake up now, or sleep forever.

I can't.

You can.