Piers picked up the tea-towel and re-folded it neatly. “Excellency, something else. The alarms. There was someone watching the gate earlier. We should be careful. If it’s—”
“I don’t care if it’s the devil himself.” Venn turned. “Five minutes. And we test this thing to its limit.”
He went out. She stood, looking after him.
Piers said quietly, “You’ve been reading Symmes’s journal.”
It was so sudden, she couldn’t even bluster. “Yes…I found it. I haven’t gotten to the end. I gave it to Jake.”
“There is no end. It stops in the middle of a burned page. Symmes vanished too, they say.” He looked up. “If you’re not happy…”
“I’m fine.” She stared at the empty doorway. “I’m ready. It’s what I signed up for.”
The handle of the lock-up door turned softly. Rebecca swallowed a gasp. Maskelyne, an edge of shadow beside her, did not move.
The wolf growled, a low sound. They saw its claws, long and sharp, slide under the door, its nose savoring their scent. Then it was dragged away. With a crash that made her heart leap, someone kicked the door. “Is that you, Sarah? But then, how could it be?”
The voice was so close, Rebecca felt she could have touched the speaker, if the door had not been between them. It was a young man’s intrigued whisper.
“The wolf smells you. Are you some village ghost? Some echo from the delay?”
The door shuddered again. The wolf whined.
“Are you some Replicant? Or are you a journeyman, straying in time?”
Maskelyne’s fingers held her in silence.
Yelps and scratches.
The purr of a passing car.
The tiny, tiny hiss of falling snow.
Neither she nor Maskelyne moved a fingertip, because they both knew that the stranger was still there, listening, a faint dimness beyond the threshold of the door.
Finally, after a long moment, his voice whispered, “If so, my advice is to journey away and do it at once. Because this time is not a safe one for strangers.”
Then there was just the snow.
After five full minutes Maskelyne whispered, “Gone.”
He leaned over and eased the plank away. When he tugged the door open, snow gusted in, and they saw that darkness had fallen on the bridge. He stepped out, and after a moment, beckoned.
Climbing through, Rebecca saw that despite the chilly wind, the snow was thick. The bridge was white with it, the footprints of a man and a wolf rapidly filling, leading away toward the Abbey.
She breathed out. “Who was he? What was that creature?”
He shook his head. “That wasn’t a man. That was the copy of a man. It seems I’m not the only one looking for the mirror.” He turned to her, and she saw his worry. “Apart from Jake and his tutor, is there anyone else at the Abbey? Anyone at all?”
Rebecca shrugged. “Just that girl.” She frowned. “Her name’s Sarah.”
The door opened.
Jake looked up from the pages of Symmes’s journal, his mind full of the scarred man and the mirror, over the scatter of his father’s books across the carpet. Each was open, and he had out all the letters he could find, and notes, and photos, because he had begun by searching for anything about the Chronoptika and ended by just sitting and reading and remembering.
Maybe the bleak loss showed in his face as he stared up, because Venn stood silent a moment, his glance around the dark room swift with discomfort.
“We’re trying again. Now. If you want to be there.”
It was grudging. But Jake nodded. He pushed the books aside and stood up. “I’m surprised you want me.”
Venn shrugged. “I don’t. But David would.”
14
He conjured snow, he summoned ice,
he frosted lakes and rivers,
he killed the birds in the elderwood,
he blackened toes and fingers.
He said If I can never rest
then all the world will suffer.
I will destroy both man and beast
until I find my lover.
Ballad of Lord Winter and Lady Summer
THE SILVER SNAKE closed around her wrist like an alien hand, but this time Sarah was ready for it.
She stared into the obsidian mirror.
In its convex darkness she saw the room, warped and unfocused, a blur of shapes in the gloom of the winter afternoon. She saw the soft, relentless snowfall outside the mullioned windows.
They were all watching her—Piers at the computer, Wharton perched on a broken armchair, Jake leaning against the stone wall, his arms folded in rigid defense, after his bitter argument with Venn that it should be him.
But Piers had told them both to shut up, and he had clasped the bracelet on her wrist.
Venn stepped back. “Anything yet?”
“No.” Sound was muffled in the soft carpet. It was there to protect the mirror if it fell. She frowned. What if it did fall? Would that be enough?
Venn turned on Piers. “Now?”
“Less response than before. The temporal axis is steady. No fluctuations.”
Her hands were sweating. She stared into the mirror, willing it to change, praying something would happen to its stubbornly solid surface. Glancing at Wharton, she sensed the rising silence of his disbelief. He was a lot shrewder than he looked. Had he told Jake about her?
The room was dim, woven with the dense web of cables between her and the Chronoptika. Its pillars rose into darkness, their capitals adorned with clusters of crumbling ivy leaves and carved acorns. Under some, the faces of green men peeped through bramble, tendrils of leaves sprouting from their mouths.
They were watching her too.
Piers sighed. “Nothing. Maybe we should take a break.”
“No!” It was her own cry, echoing Venn’s.
“No,” he said, walking around behind Piers. “We increase power.”
“I don’t think that’s wise, Excellency. It’s already at the maximum we—”
“Don’t argue with me! Just do it!”
Wharton was on his feet. “I don’t think—”
Venn turned, lean and ominous. “No one asked you.” He came and stood in front of Sarah. “Be ready. There might be a strong reaction. If you feel anything at all, just say. If you can’t speak, raise a hand, and we’ll switch it off. Understand?”
Wharton said, “I want you to know I heartily disapprove of all of this. Jake. What do you say?”
Jake was looking at Sarah. Quietly he said, “We should go on.”
He knows. The knowledge flickered through her fear, her swift sight of Wharton’s shock. He knows I’m not who I say. And he’ll sacrifice me if it means getting his father back.
Venn was already at the controls, that mishmash of Victorian wiring and dials, roped with modern cables. He adjusted a few dials, said, “Now Piers,” and turned to watch the mirror.
Nothing seemed different, but at once the air changed. It seemed sharper, tasted of metal. Jake peeled himself off the wall. A whine he had barely been aware of before was growing, inside his ears, inside his skull. It was climbing to a shrill, subsonic needlepoint of intense irritation.
Sarah was still, focused on the mirror.
She made a small movement, as if in pain.
Jake said, “What is it?”
She didn’t look at him, her gaze caught by her own curved reflection.
“It’s starting,” she said.
Gideon lay on the top of the high wall of the estate and watched the snow settle on the flat roof of the car below. All he had to do was slide his legs over and jump. He would land safely, ankle-deep in the snowy lane. He would be free.
He didn’t dare.
Between him and that safe landing lay centuries of days and nights, sunrises, moonsets. So many lifetimes that almost nothing was left the same from the place he had been born to. He dragged dirty hair from his eyes and lay with his chin on his hands.