Catherine Fisher - The Slanted Worlds

“Let him go.” Sarah’s voice was a growl. Wharton’s face, caught in this rictus of ridiculous surprise, annoyed and upset her. She felt humiliated for him. “I’m the one you should be punishing.”

Summer smiled. “Well, yes. That’s true.”

She did nothing, but the glass suddenly slithered down and became four silver-haired Shee in white satin coats who hauled Wharton by the arms and legs into the room. He came alive like a fury, struggling and swearing terrible army oaths as they threw him down before Summer.

He landed on hands and knees.

Then he saw Sarah.

His astonished relief made her smile. But as their eyes met, she knew he had realized what she was here for, and his relief became wary and cold, and she felt a sudden, unexpected pang.

Of something that might have been shame.

Don’t betray me! she thought.

Don’t.

23

Once—before he met his wife—I asked Venn what he loved best in the world.

“Freedom,” he said.

After Katra Simba, after he was married, I asked him again.

He looked away into the distance. “Leave me alone, Jean,” he said. “You know the answer now.”

Jean Lamartine, The Strange Life of Oberon Venn

“DON’T HURT HIM. He’s my son.”

Jake felt il signore’s surprise jerk the knife tighter. He tried not to breathe.

“Your son, dottore?”

“Yes. Come from England, as he says.”

“I do not believe the lies of devils. I saw the girl vanish. Through that black portal of hell.” The warlord backed, dragging Jake away from the mirror. It leaned like a slant of darkness in the hot room. Flies buzzed in the window.

“Listen to me.” David took a step forward. “You know me. I’ve served you now for four years. I delivered your children. I bound your wound after the battle with the Sienese and nursed you through the fever it brought. I saved your life. ”

No answer. The grip just as tight. Jake made himself hold still. Sweat soaked his forehead. He tried not even to swallow.

“If that’s not enough, I have something to give in exchange,” David said. “Something of great power. Only you should know of it.”

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.