Waywalkers: Number 1 in Series

‘Assured, well-sustained and engages directly with the reader… If I were a teenage fan of Terry Pratchett or Philip Pullman I would love
Mirror Dreams
’

SUNDAY
TELEGRAPH
 

‘A Brilliant book!’

WHS
ONLINE
 

Recommended

TEEN
TITLES
 

‘
Mirror Dreams
is a splendid book . . .

I want to read the sequel. Now’

THE
ALIEN
ONLINE
 

Catherine Webb
wrote her acclaimed debut fantasy
Mirror Dreams
at the age of just fourteen, prompting extensive coverage in the national media and rights sales in France, Germany, Holland, Italy and Japan. Its sequel,
Mirror
Wakes
, was published six months later, shortly after Catherine was named
Young Trailblazer of the Year
by
Cosmo Girl
magazine.

Catherine lives in North London and is currently studying for her A-Levels. As well as writing, she enjoys reading, badminton and chess. She likes cats, space (the stuff with stars in) and Fridays. She is less keen on drizzle, Hammersmith and the number 73 bus. Catherine is currently working on the follow-up to
Waywalkers
, titled
Timekeepers
. You can find out more about her at
www.atombooks.co.uk
.

Mirror Dreams

Mirror Wakes

Waywalkers

Timekeepers

Table of Contents

• Praise for Catherine Webb
  
• About the Author
  
• By Catherine Webb
  
• COPYRIGHT
  
• ONE:  The Linguist
  
• TWO:  Friends and Family
  
• THREE:  Damage Control
  
• FOUR:  Adamarus
  
• FIVE:  Freya
  
• SIX:  Bubble
  
• SEVEN:  Moondance
  
• EIGHT:  The Historian
  
• NINE:  Light and Fire
  
• TEN:  Bearer of Light
  
• ELEVEN:  Could-Be City
  
• TWELVE:  The Faceless Man
  
• THIRTEEN:  Back-up
  
• FOURTEEN:  A Debt Repaid
  
• FIFTEEN:  Defeat Revenged
  
• SIXTEEN:  Picking Up the Pieces
  
• SEVENTEEN:  Immortal Avenged
  
• EIGHTEEN:  Falling in Place
  
• NINETEEN:  Extended Powers
  
• TWENTY:  Traitors and Archangels
  
• TWENTY-ONE:  Open Conspiracy
  
• EPILOGUE:  Brief Victory
  
• Advertisement
  

‘A
n eagle scared of heights.’ That was how one colleague summed up Sam Linnfer. ‘Probably has a mad wife in the attic too.’

Like all rumours, in time this comment circulated back to Sam, whose boyish face split in a grin of delight.

If there was one thing Sam liked about working as… whatever he was, he enjoyed the mystery accorded him by other people. It gave him great satisfaction to take the same trains, eat the same meals, wait at the same bus stops, and still be above it all, if only in the wild, fantastical tales told by everyone around him.

Though Sam was indeed different, everybody throughout the university somehow managed to know him. His sparky smile and disregard of authority endeared him to the undergraduates, and certainly he was bored at the very idea of the life led by the dons, as they ambled through a daily ritual whose high point seemed to be exchanging Latin puns while dining in hall. But neither did Sam truly resemble a student, for despite his seeming youth he had an air of command, one that came from a long, unsung history.

He mostly wore black – a black coat buttoned up around a baggy black jumper, worn over a shapeless black shirt. Sam wore bad clothes as a kind of protection, which no one had yet penetrated. People speculated, most of them inaccurately, on exactly what shape he was beneath all those layers. The idea that he wore black from vanity never survived a first meeting: with these clothes went a pair of terrible old trainers, and a scruffy blue and grey scarf hand-knitted for him by some person unknown. The whole effect was finished off by cuffs that were never done up, shirt buttons that didn’t match and sometimes a jacket, haphazardly patched, that gave him the look of a fashionable scarecrow.

To round off this character, whose contradictions so attracted other people. He had thick black hair, and eyes so dark that they too seemed black. Not that many had met Sam’s eye for long enough to confirm this, since his gaze was something of unrivalled intensity. Though his voice bore the slightest accent, no one was sure where that accent came from. Some said his speech was northern; others held that there must be a touch of Gaelic in him. At one point he was credited with the ghost of a Welsh accent, so it became rumoured that Sam Linnfer had grown up in the wild Snowdonian mountains. A few who cherished difference in any form said he had to be a gypsy. Sam himself, when questioned on his past, was devious.

Compounding the mystery, Sam also showed a flair for unexpected languages. On one occasion a distinguished guest was visiting from India on the kind of freebie trip that academics love to call ‘research’. Sam, overhearing him stumble in conversation on a word in English, was not only able to supply the correct term in Hindi, but added some word-play of his own. By the third time something like this had happened, always in some language from far away, it was a subject of gossip for days.

Sam had seemed at first to have no official job within the university. He’d given no seminars and supervised no papers. But when, in a lecture one day, an overworked head of department had been asked a difficult question about traditional Gaian worship, Sam was the one who answered it. There started an unusual relationship by which Sam, for unlimited access to the university’s facilities, helped write papers that would otherwise have taken many weeks more. Departments specialising in ancient studies or remote cultures began calling upon his huge knowledge, counting on his readiness to find out some elusive fact in a frenzy of activity.

His movements acquired a pattern, if not a purpose anyone understood. For five days every month or so, Sam caught the train up from London, ate at high table, and sat in the library writing in unfamiliar languages from forgotten books. Over the rest of the month he could have gone off-planet.

So he had a token job. He didn’t earn much, as a part-time college librarian whose speciality no one quite knew, but he’d never shown much interest in the size of his salary. Of the favours he’d been offered, from easy money through fancy job titles to things the most publicity-seeking lecturer might sigh after, Sam had turned down even the best. At one point he declined a chair, saying he didn’t want to be tied down.

‘Dare I ask, Linnfer, what it is exactly that you do?’ the Master of the college once asked. ‘When you’re not researching, that is.’

‘Ghost-write the papers of idiots who can’t be bothered to write them themselves.’

Taking Sam at his word, the Master brightened. He loved nothing more than getting ahead of a rival in ‘their’ field, as though a subject could be owned by whoever studied it. ‘Anyone I know, or aren’t you allowed to say?’

But Sam didn’t answer. Not from discretion – no, this time he kept silent because he hadn’t just wiggled out of answering a question; for once, he’d told a direct lie. Not that he felt guilty. Some truths were much, much more damaging than the odd small lie.

And no: there was no mad wife in the attic, nor ever had been.

It was late one rainy February evening that Sam trudged up the stairs to his flat, started digging in his pocket for the key – and froze where he stood.

The flat was in one of those huge scruffy terraces around the edge of Camden which have been climbing up-market for forty years but somehow still have leaky taps. The woman who claimed rent from him every week was in her eighties, deaf in one ear and hardly knew Sam’s name. She still called him Mr Samuel, even though he’d been in the flat for three years. But her failing mind, bordering on senile, served perfectly. Sam wanted unreliable witnesses to his movements. If for nights on end he wasn’t in the flat, Mrs Dinken was the ideal person to say he had been, all the time believing it to be true.

But tonight, audible to few creatures but Sam himself, something was moving in the flat. His dark, dark eyes had seen a faint glow from underneath the front door, suggesting that somewhere inside a light was burning. He knew he hadn’t left one on. Staring at the door again, his eyes grew distant and for a moment he seemed to be listening to an inner voice. At length his look of concentration converted to a scowl. He found the key and thrust the door open.

The intruders wore such plain, ordinary clothes that Sam identified them immediately for what they were. Policemen.

One of them brandished a warrant card. ‘I’m sorry about this, sir.’

If he was making excuses even before Sam had entered, it had to be bad.

‘What,’ asked Sam in a very calm, controlled voice that aged his young face and gave him a gravitas quite beyond expectation, ‘are you doing in my flat?’

‘If you could just step inside, sir.’

Seeing no alternative, he entered the small, slightly musty sitting room with its piles of unopened mail, unread newspapers and magazines, and empty coffee cups growing interesting moulds. For all the squalor, though, there was a feeling of organisation about the place, and a sense of homeliness.

There were two of them. Without a further word they indicated that he should go through and sit down at the kitchen table. One of them, the older, sat himself opposite Sam as though about to conduct an interrogation; the younger leant against a worktop with a languid ease that Sam found somehow offensive.

‘I’m sorry to have to trouble you, sir –’

‘But –’

‘The matter
is
delicate.’

Sam pulled off his coat and shoved it carelessly over the back of the chair. ‘Tell me what you want.’

As the officer began to talk, Sam Linnfer resigned himself to a bad night.