Catherine Fisher: The Slanted Worlds

“Get lost!” Jake snapped.

They were identical. Triplets. Their faces were podgily pale, their small arms folded. They each wore cheap round spectacles, and stared at him, calm in the chaos.

The first one said, “The Black Fox will release you, Jake.”

The second nodded. “Speak to the Man with the Eyes of a Crow.”

“And the Broken Emperor lies,” the third one said, “in the Box of Red Brocade.”

He stared at them in astonishment.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he snarled.

2

I will seek both high and low

both near and far and farther

In summer sunshine and in snow

in wood and field and water.

I will search and I will ride

all the wide world over.

I will scour both time and tide

until I find my lover.

Ballad of Lord Winter and Lady Summer

“ARE YOU SURE this is all the ID you’ve got?” The young man at the desk looked at her research student card doubtfully.

Sarah gave him her most winning smile. “Your receptionist said that would be enough. My tutor at Oxford made the appointment by phone. Professor Merton?”

“Ah. Right.”

He glanced at the computer screen, typed something. She held her bag tight and watched his doubt dissolve.

“It’s here. Can you sign in, please.”

She wrote Sarah Venn in round letters and put the pen down. He tore the label off and fixed it in a plastic clip. “You have to wear this. And the white gloves. Please remember it’s strictly forbidden to take photographs of delicate materials and manuscripts, or to remove anything from the museum.”

She nodded as she fixed on the label. The words Oxford and Professor were certainly enormously effective. The fact that she had made the appointment herself, faked the ID, and invented the professor, even more so.

She crossed the room and sat in a chair by the window.

It looked down into the vast interior courtyard of the British Museum, the transparent latticed roof high above pure blue in the cold spring sunlight. She had never been here in her own time—the time she was starting to think of as the End Time, the days at the end of the world. Back then, London was—would be—Janus’s territory, and this place part of his vast, forbidden Halls of Lore.

She took off her coat and unwound her scarf. Below, tourists browsed the bookstalls, munched on sandwiches at the tea stalls. Their children ran and screeched in the echoing space.

She couldn’t get used to it.

The freedom.

The way they lived as if nothing would ever happen to them.

And yet within a generation or two, all this would be totally . . .

“Here we are.”

She looked up, startled.

The young man was back, with a gray cardboard box file. He laid it carefully on the desk; she gazed at it in intense satisfaction. A peeling label on its surface, obviously years old, read:

11145/6/09 DEE, MORTIMER .

“Who was he?” The curator sounded curious.

She licked her dry lips, suddenly nervous. “A medieval scholar.”

“Is it for a thesis?”

For a moment she had no idea what he meant. Then she said, “Oh . . . yes. Yes. My thesis.”

He nodded and moved off, but not very far; he spread a sheaf of papers at a nearby table and began to work on them, giving her a quick, watchful look.

Nothing she could do about that.

Eagerly she pulled on the white gloves.

She took out a notebook and pencil. Then, her fingers trembling, she opened the file.

It contained a yellowing manuscript.

She was almost afraid to start. It had taken so long to get here. Weeks of research in stuffy libraries, hours of lying awake in her damp room in the hostel, worrying, thinking, planning.

It had become an obsession, more important than eating, sleeping, even surviving in this busy, dangerous city; the obsession of finding out everything possible about the obsidian mirror.

She was thin and worn out with it.

But she was a Venn, and they were an obsessive family.

She took out the manuscript; it was a single page, light and crisp at the edges, some sort of thin skin, terribly fragile, smelling faintly of mildew. On top was a more recent note on blue paper. She already knew what that was, and smiled at the familiar handwriting of John Harcourt Symmes, the stout, rather pompous Victorian seeker after magic whom Jake and Venn had met in the past, whom she had once seen burst through time into Wintercombe Abbey.

On the covering page he had written:

This Page is the only surviving fragment of the work of the legendary Mortimer Dee. His book, The Scrutiny of Secrets, is of course, lost, known only in brief quotations by other writers. But this small scrap seems to be in his own hand. My attempt at transcriptions is below. Dee’s work is in some fiendishly difficult code, which I confess baffles me. I can only guess at its meaning, and find it endlessly frustrating. . . . But the man certainly had some secret knowledge of the dark mirror I have obtained and which he names the Chronoptika.

If only I could find out what it was!

She flicked her eyes sideways. The curator was absorbed in his work.

She lifted her bag onto the table, took out a handkerchief, and blew her nose.

He took no notice.

So she slid the tiny camera from her palm and quickly photographed the single tightly written fragment. The camera made the softest of clicks, but in the hushed silence they sounded huge.

She coughed, cleared her throat, had it hidden away before he glanced up, eyes glazed with words, not even seeing her. Then he looked down again.

A desk magnifier stood nearby; she moved it closer and clicked the light on, aligning it over the piece of brittle parchment. Looking in, she gave a great sigh of dismay.

Fiendishly difficult code was something of an understatement.

How could she ever read this? The page was covered with Dee’s tiny, black, indecipherable writing. In places it seemed written backward; in others it ran up and down in random diagonals, or curved into the margins. Everywhere, there were diagrams in strange spindly lines, sigils of lost meaning, alchemical signs, formulae, scraps of what might be Latin and certainly Greek. And all over it, as if the man had doodled and drawn and daydreamed his visions too fast to write, was a interwoven web of drawings, of strange landscapes, towers against the moon, edges of castles and corners of rooms, and trees, many trees, tangled and hollow and gaunt as the ancient oaks in Wintercombe Wood.

She stared, fascinated. The confusing perspectives, the slanted worlds, reminded her of something . . .

And then she remembered, with a sudden chill of fear.

The Summerland.

The kingdom of the Shee, in the heart of the haunted Wood.

She frowned, brought the magnifier closer.

In the curved surface she saw her own blue eye, made huge. As sunlight slanted through the window, one of Dee’s smallest, darkest drawings held her attention.

Ruined buildings, black and smoking, silhouetted against a lurid sky. Searchlights swiveling like pale cones in the darkness.

Sarah’s heart thudded.

Had Dee managed to journey into the future? Had he seen what Janus’s tyranny had done? That place where her parents were chained, where the black mirror pulsed with uncontrollable power, collapsing endlessly inward to a black hole that was devouring the world?

She blinked, pulling back.

She had to decipher this. This single page might give her the information she needed. It might solve her problem, her obsession, her mission.