The Door in the Moon (16 page)

Sarah had no idea what the artefact was, but she saw clearly its effect on Summer. The fey queen's face flickered; as the small man slipped the flower into the gilt braid of his uniform, she stared at him with slowly considering eyes, her disdain seeming to kindle into a new fascination.

Venn whipped out his sword. “Give me that.”

Janus smiled. “I see it has more power than I thought.”

Venn moved; the sword jerked up, but the Replicant laughed as the blade sliced through him harmlessly. Then he shouted, a great cry in French. Venn roared in frustration but already the mob was on him. As Sarah gasped, two men hauled him back, snatched the weapon away, and then began dragging him, kicking and struggling, toward the sobbing prisoners.

“No!”
she screamed. “Let him go!”

Wharton too was yelling, but Summer's small fingers held him, a tight vise. As she turned away he managed to yell, “Sarah! Get that flower!” and then he was gone with Summer into the acrid smoke and the moonlight.

Sarah took a breath, twisted between the men, and threw herself at Janus. The Replicant was startled, for a moment almost off-guard, but then it grabbed her wrist, and its grasp was like a manacle of ice.

“Venn!” she yelled, terror bursting out of her in a scream.

Venn saw, struggled, but he was struck down and dragged away, and now the tyrant's grip was an agony, and she was sobbing with the pain of it and she knew he would take her back with him, back to the end of everything, and the world would be lost in the black hole of the mirror.

“Let her go!”
Gideon was there. He came swiftly out of shadow like a flicker of green leaves. Without a word, he leveled the glass weapon at Janus. The Replicant released its grip.

But Gideon fired anyway.

The flash was brilliant, stunning, like another huge firework. For a moment it dazzled them both. When they could see again, only gray smoke drifted across the empty lawns.

“Did I hit him?” Gideon whirled around. “Is he still here?”

All about them the night was a panic. The château was ablaze now, its windows roaring with flame, its white classical columns blackening and cracking in the heat. Servants and musicians and cooks and entertainers fled in terror, the mob smashing every window with delight.

In a crash of sparks, part of the roof collapsed.

Gideon grabbed Sarah and pulled her back. She held her seared wrist; stared around. “Where's Venn?”

“They've taken him. With a lot of others. The carriages—”

She broke away, raced to the drive, but already the carriages had rattled away, the horses whipped to madness, the terrified coachmen fleeing.

Helpless, she stood with Gideon and watched them go. Toward Paris.

Wharton watched too as Summer led him away from the blazing building. At the edge of the dark lawns they stopped.

“That man Janus,” he said sourly. “He's your real enemy.”

Summer looked at him as if she had forgotten who he was. “You think so? Actually, Janus is what I call a really
interesting
mortal.”

As she led him into the Wood he looked back, and for a moment thought he saw the small dark form of the tyrant silhouetted against the flames, staring up in calm satisfaction, and two great beasts, like dogs with eyes of burning coal, racing in and out of the inferno, the flames leaping harmlessly down their backs.

J
AKE HELD THE
sword comfortably on his lap as the carriage jolted. He watched the small man sitting opposite.

The vicomte was in a perfect sweat of terror.

“Monsieur Englishman,” he said at last. “Listen to me. I will give you ten thousand
livres
in gold for my release. More than that, I will—”

“Save your breath, chum.” From her corner of the carriage, Moll was curled up in satisfied calm. “You ain't got as much as a church mouse left by now. Not when that mob get into the house.” She grinned at Jake. “Timed it to a whisker, Jake. Spot on.”

He nodded, silent. Her ruthlessness chilled him, but he knew something of it was in him too, and if he could find Dad, all the aristocratic houses in Paris could go up in flames for all he cared. And yet the stench of smoke, the terrible scorch of flames against the sky, crackled in his memory.

“They were there,” he said, bleak. “Venn, Sarah. All of them.”

“Well, we can't do anything about that now. Got to stick to the plan, Jake. Got to get your dad. They can look after themselves, that Oberon Venn can, anyway. But, blimey, who was the looker in the red dress? Wouldn't want to get the wrong side of her.”

“That was Summer, Moll. She's”—he shrugged, despairing—“what you might call not quite human.”

Her eyes widened. “Straight up? Lord, Jake, there's some loopy stuff goes on in that century of yours!
Not human
meaning from some other planet?”

“Oh, she's from this planet all right.” He had no desire to talk about Summer or let worry about Sarah or Wharton distract him, so he glared again at the Frenchman and said, “When we get my father, what happens then?”

“You take him home.”

“How?”

“Well, through the bloody mirror, Jake, how else?” Suddenly she uncurled and wriggled over to him, ignoring their prisoner. “What's the matter, cully? Ain't everything going to plan?”

“So far.” He stared into the dark. “It's just that . . . I've been thinking. To snatch me you had to come into the future. How is that possible, Moll? For us to
journey
backward, well, this world already exists. Or had existed, once. But how can the future be there ready to go into if it hasn't happened yet?”

“Don't know and don't care,” she said. “When you go home you go forward, don't you?”

“Yes . . . but that's different, because—” He stopped. Was it?

Moll shrugged. “Maybe all the time there ever will be is in the mirror, all at once, and we just get off and on like stops on the trolley bus. But if you're fretting we can't do it again, then don't, Jake, because like I said, me and Symmes, we worked hard on the Chronoptika. And if the silly old coot hadn't got married and wasted a few years with some hoity who only wanted his money, we might have done more. Trust me. I'll get you and your dad home.”

There was a stubborn, determined edge in that that made him smile at her. She had unwound her hair; now it was an urchin's straggle again. To the vicomte's interest and astonishment she had pulled on dark trousers and boots and wriggled out of the white dress, replacing it with a ragged coat and a sash with the tricolor colors as soon as the carriage had left the drive of the château. Now she looked more like the Moll he had first known, small and fierce and reckless. And more than a little sad.

“What you said about girls in your time. What's it really like, Jake?”

He shrugged, rocked by the rapid motion. “They can do what they want.”

“Just like boys?”

“More or less.” He had never really thought about it. “At least . . . in some countries they can.”

Wistful, she curled a scrap of hair around her finger. “Get educated?”

“Of course. And for free.”

“Bloody lucky them. But not much of a place for pirate-princesses, I don't suppose.”

He wanted to say “Come back with me, Moll.” He had promised her that once. But somehow the words wouldn't come, as if he sensed danger in them. So when the carriage slowed and Long Tom leaned down and yelled “We're coming up to the city gates,” he was almost glad of the distraction.

If Moll noticed, she didn't show it. She sat up and fixed the vicomte with a glare. “Okay. Don't make a murmur.”

The marquis nodded, licking dry lips.

Horse-bits jangled. The carriage stopped; there was a murmur of voices outside, a few barked questions, Tom's laconic answers.

“Sit tight,” Moll breathed.

The door was wrenched open.

Some sort of citizen guard in a dirty tricolor sash stared in, at Jake, Moll, the vicomte. A slow grin spread on his face. “New prisoner?” he said.

Jake nodded. “Our orders are to get him to the Conciergerie prison. So don't keep us waiting.”

The man eyed him. Jake's hand closed slightly on the sword. The words had been right, but he knew his accent must sound all wrong.

But the man just nodded; the door was slammed and the carriage lurched on.

The vicomte took out a silk handkerchief and wiped his face.
“Sacre bleu,”
he whispered.

Jake breathed out.

Moll edged back the blind and peeped out. “Sweetly done, Jake. We're back in the city.”

When Rebecca had fed the cats she made some tea, grilled three sausages on a makeshift gas burner, put them on a tin plate, and took them to Maskelyne.

The lab was quiet and stuffy. Small green lights winked on the monitors. The mirror, tethered like some monster in its malachite web, reflected only blurs and warped shadows; her hand, her twisted shoulder. One cat on guard watched her as she tiptoed past the cradle where Lorenzo slept. On a shelf safely above, head under wing, the wooden bird seemed to sleep too.

Maskelyne sat at the workbench, facing the mirror. She paused, watching him. He had his fingers wreathed together and he was staring into the darkness, lost in some deep reverie, or maybe in memories of past lives that she could never be part of.

Stupidly, she was jealous.

She came and put the plate down with a noisy clatter. “You need to eat.”

He looked up, startled. “Oh yes. Thank you.”

“It's not Piers's cooking, but it's all I can do. The supplies down here are limited.” She glanced at the mirror. “Still no sign of them?”

“None.” He brooded. “Not even a murmur. As if, on the shortest night of the year, the mirror sleeps. And yet maybe the mirror too has dreams.”

She sat down. “You can feel them?”

“Barely. Mere colors and smoke drifts. Fleeting like clouds over the moon.” He cut the sausage in half and ate it as if it had no taste at all.

She said, “I want you to tell me about it. What you remember.”

He shook his head, and the scar down his cheek moved in and out of the light. “When I threw myself into it without a bracelet I was scattered, Becky. My whole body and soul, broken to its atoms, split like a swarm of fish when the shark comes. Only now, after years, do I feel I am coming back together. What I was before, what I did, those things are like fragments of a smashed window, a kaleidoscope pattern. My mind works on them obsessively, but they no longer fit together.”

“You did create it, though, didn't you?”

Maskelyne managed his rare smile. “I found it. Long ago, I went searching for it. For years. I climbed mountain ranges, explored the valleys and peaks of the world. I found much obsidian, but never the piece that would be good enough to make my mirror. Until one day, on the slope of an extinct volcano, I entered a deep cleft in the earth, a path that led down and down until I feared I would come to some Underworld, some dark Hades. Then, turning a corner, I came face-to-face with my own dark image and realized I had at last found what I longed for, a slab of obsidian that was perfect, without flaw or blemish, tall as a man, thin as a wafer. So I had them take it to my secret palace.”

“Them?” she asked softly.

He shrugged. “My servants. My slaves.”

The word shocked her. But as if he was feeling along the most delicate thread of memory, so frail that a question might break it, he went on quickly, his husky voice a whisper in the buried room.

“How many years it took, Becky! How much ambition, how much obsessive greed. To polish it, inch by inch, grain by grain, to perfection. No one else was allowed to see it. I kept it in the darkest and most secret chamber, down a labyrinth of passageways. No one knew the way to it but me, and at night, every night, when all the people slept, I was alone with the mirror. My eyes so close to it, my breath misting it. And slowly, so very slowly, I saw my reflection begin to form, appearing on its blackness, my eyes, my hair, my face, until I knew that the long work was done and the glass was ready for my spells.”

She kept quite still. The food was cold and the mug of tea in her hands no longer steamed.

She said, “When was this?”

He looked up at her, eyes dark, as if he was blinded by memory. “Long ago. Too long to remember who I was then. A prince maybe, and a sorcerer. In some desert land far away.”

She wondered swiftly about Egypt, about the Aztecs, about the lost civilizations of Sumer and Ur. Because she knew now that he must have lived many lifetimes, this ghost of hers, long lifetimes always moving in time. Fleeing Death.

“And then?”

“I can't tell you.”

“Can't?”

“Won't.” He ate the last bite of cold sausage. “There are things that shouldn't be told. I was a different man then, Becky. You would not have liked me. I sacrificed everything to the fascination of the mirror, put all my greed into it, all my pride and energy. It became my own dark image.” He looked up. “I was an obsessed and evil man.”

“I don't believe that.”

“You should. I've spent an age atoning for what I made. And I've paid, in pain and fear, and all I want to do now is take this . . . . thing . . . back to where it all began, where no one will ever find it.”

Watching him, she saw how his meshed fingers clenched. “And the coin?” she said. “What about that?”

The mirror rippled.

She felt it happen, a disturbance in her teeth and bones.

The cats, as one, opened their eyes.

Horatio gave a low chatter and swung down into her lap.

Maskelyne stared at the black glass.

“Venn?” she whispered. “Jake?”

“Neither. Sometimes I fear it listens to what we say.” He stood tall, paced along the monitors, checking each one. “The coin was made as a safeguard. Maybe he knew, that man I used to be, maybe he understood that one day the mirror would destroy us all. The coin is a matrix, an unform. But it will only work if the two halves are joined, and they are so powerful I had to hide them far apart, dimensions apart.” He paused, listening. “And now one half is in this house. That scares me. Sarah's idea was ingenious, but without running water over it, the coin is exposed and vulnerable. I have to get it, Becky, and I should try now, before They come back.” He turned. “Will you help me?”

What could she do but say: “Of course. What do we have to do?”

Wharton lay on his back under the moon, staring up. The pale disc shone down on him. Was there a face in it? A man in the moon? A lost man, marooned?

If so, he was that man. He was in deep trouble.

As soon as Summer had walked back into the Wood, things had changed. For a start she'd looked at him almost with disgust, muttered, “Get this creature out of my sight,” and stalked off under the trees, her red dress shriveling to a cobweb of gray.