The Wheel of Osheim

TWENTY-FIVE

We stood with Dr. Taproot at the fort’s shattered gates, an island amid a sea of mist, the skies above us bible black and strewn with diamonds.

“You have to come with us!” I said. “Who could be more help to us in stopping the Wheel than a real live honest-to-God Builder! Your people built the damn thing!”

“And I have spent a thousand years failing to turn off the machines that drive it,” Taproot replied. “The key has assembled what it needs to do the job.” He spread his arms toward the four of us. “If I were required for your success then the key wouldn’t let me leave-it would find a way to keep me here. That’s how the thing works. Loki’s a tricky bastard. So stick with your plan. Go to Osheim and try the key.”

“That’s your best advice, Taproot? Try it?” Snorri seemed unimpressed.

“You must have more than that.” I tried to keep the whine out of my voice. “Where’s the wisdom of the ages? I ask you! I mean, you’re older than my grandmother. Hell, you’re older than Kara’s.” I waved toward the völva. Taproot made Skilfar’s three hundred years seem youthful.

Taproot smiled apologetically and gestured up at the night sky. “The light of the sun is new-born, hot from the fires of heaven, and speaks cruel truths as the young are wont to-but starlight, starlight is ancient and reaches across an emptiness unimagined. We are all of us young beneath the stars.”

“Very pretty,” I said. “And not much help.”

“My boss had it on a sampler behind his desk.” Taproot shrugged.

“Loki?” Snorri rumbled, his face a mask. “You worked for Loki?”

“Trust me, it would do you no good to know.” Taproot started to pick his way across the debris toward the rippled surface of the mist, lapping the slope just beneath us.

“Trust you?” I called after him. “Loki is the father of lies!” I thought of Aslaug. Even she had warned me against Loki.

“A lie may be built of many truths, and the truth fashioned from innumerable falsehoods stacked heaven-high.” Taproot waved a longfingered hand at us over his shoulder. “Good luck on your quest. I’ll do what I can to buy you time. Don’t waste it.”

He stood knee-deep in the mist, the slow currents reaching up to wind the whiteness about him. Three more strides and he was gone.

I found his lens in my hip pocket late on the second day. Fingers hunting a coin discovered the cool smoothness of glass and I fished out the silver hoop. The old man must have slipped it in there-perhaps as we stood at the bottom of the shaft. I held it up to the sun, letting the light sparkle through it.

“What’s that?” Hennan nudged his horse my way. He was a decent rider by now.

“Just some toy.” Watch me. I held it to my eye and peered at the boy. He looked no different. With a shrug I let it slip back into my pocket.

Two more days took us through increasingly war-torn country. We reached the rearguard of the Red Queen’s army and passed into the outskirts of Blujen. We camped in the rain, our tent pegs driven into mud made black by ashes. Fires burned in the woods, they burned on the ridges to the west, and in the ruins before the city walls and out beyond them. Flames guttered in the windows of empty stone shells that were once the homes of rich men.

We crowded four into a tent that would have been snug for just Snorri and me and, in orichalcum light, watched the rain dribble through the wax-cloth. Several companies of Milano skirmishers had their camps set around us. On the foremost tent pole we flew the crossed spears of Red March to dissuade patrols from skewering us through the cloth and asking questions afterward. Come morning we would make the journey over the rubble of the city gates and into Blujen town to find the Red Queen. A trip better made in daylight if you hoped to survive it.

Occasionally a distant cry would break the night. Red March forces were still playing deadly games of hide and seek with the surviving Slov defenders amid the burning ruins. I hoped to be in and out with minimal delay, two Slov armies were rumoured to be only a day away, their outriders already circling through the farmlands just a mile from Blujen’s walls.

Sleep came quickly as it does at the end of most days on which you’ve covered thirty miles. I lay dreamless until Kara woke me, crawling over my blanket to the flaps, her hair brushing across my lips. She disappeared into the night and sleep went with her, leaving me stranded in the darkness, alone with my thoughts. Also a snoring Viking and a boy who kicked in his slumbers. Time passes slowly under such circumstances, but even taking that into consideration there comes a point when you realize that you’re not getting back to sleep, the völva has been gone too long for just answering nature’s call, and that no matter how you lie a rock will still be sticking into you.

I emerged to find that the rain had stopped and that Kara was sitting on a broken-down wall, watching the slow turn of the stars above the tattered clouds.

“Checking up on me?” she asked as I drew near, stumbling over the unfamiliar ground.

“I wish people would check on me more often,” I said. “I could usually use the help.”

“Your grandmother and her sister have the Blue Lady trapped in there.” Kara nodded toward the glow above the roofs of Blujen.

“She deserves what’s coming to her.” I stood close to Kara now and leaned my hip against the wall she sat on. “She deserves all of it.”

“Does she?” Kara pursed her lips and returned her attention to the stars.

I opened my mouth but it took a while for the words to come out. “Of course! She wants to burn the whole world, Kara! Not a barn or a village or . . .” I looked around, “. . . a city. The whole damn world. Just so she can be empress of the fire.”

Kara sucked her lip. “The Wheel is turning. The wise say it can’t be stopped. All the Lady Blue is doing is pushing it a bit harder. Choosing her own time for the end. A time when some few might survive. If the end’s coming soon is it so terrible to make that end a little sooner?”

“Yes!” I spread my hands and gave her an incredulous look. “Hennan’s going to die one day . . . so let’s stab him now if there’s some advantage in it? The Lady Blue deserves everything my grandmother is going to give her.”

“I suppose she does, but that’s not the same as being wrong. Have you thought about what we’re doing, Jalan?”

“I haven’t thought about much else. The last thing I wanted to do less than go to Osheim was walk into Hell.”

She looked toward the tent at that. “Have you talked to him yet?”

“About Osheim?”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “About Hel. About what happened to him when you abandoned him.”

“I didn’t . . .” Her scowl made me give up my denial. “He says he’s at peace. He doesn’t want to talk.”

“Men. Idiots all of you. Big or small. Young or old.” She shook her head. “He needs to talk. It’s not over until he tells his friends what happened. Any fool knows that. And you’re all he’s got left.”

“Hmmm.” I would place “having that conversation with Snorri” quite high on the list of things I didn’t ever want to do. “What exactly did you mean before, about the Lady Blue not being wrong? The key can save us . . . right? This isn’t entirely a fool’s errand? I mean . . . I don’t mind long odds . . .” Actually I did, I minded them very much. “But a suicide mission?”

“Skilfar says even if we manage to turn off the Builders’ machine in Osheim it might only delay things. The machine is pushing us to destruction but when you stop pushing something it often rolls on a way by itself, and if it’s reached a slope it can keep on going until it hits the bottom.”

“Skilfar says? How would she know? And how would you know what she knows?”

Kara smiled, reminding me of how I had once doted on her. “Individuals like my grandmother can reach out to trained minds across any distance, and when she chooses to speak to me I can reply.”

The warm feelings that had been stirring vanished in a moment as I imagined Skilfar watching me out of Kara’s eyes. For a moment imagination painted wrinkles across Kara’s face, tightened her skin there, loosened it here, pointed this, blunted that, and gave me the ice witch herself, weighing me with the coldest stare.

Kara ran a hand into her hair, as if looking for the runes she had once worn. It broke the spell.

“So we should just give up because it might not work?” I was less hostile to the idea than my question indicated.

“The key could be used to ease a passage from what comes before the conjunction to what comes after. Some might say it would be better to use the key to inherit the future rather than run such a risk to try to save the past.”

“But when the Wheel turns too far everything is going to burn-that’s what everyone keeps telling me!”

“The Blue Lady says there will be an afterwards. Unlike anything we’ve known. And those who pass through the conjunction will be gods in a new world. The Lady Blue isn’t destroying this world, that’s the Builders and their Wheel. She can’t stop it. Your grandmother can’t stop it. Skilfar can’t stop it. We’re all heading toward the falls and no matter how hard we paddle . . . we’re all going over. All the Lady Blue is doing is paddling forward, building up speed to make the jump to something new. She doesn’t care about the Dead King, she doesn’t want what he wants. He’s just the tool she’s using to crack the world open sooner rather than later.”

“You’ve been talking to her!” I knew it for truth as I spoke the words.

“I’ve seen her in my mirror.” Kara shrugged. “She’s not the devil, and I’m no sheep to be led by another’s opinion. I listen. I consider. I make up my own mind.”

“And?” I spread my hands.

“I’m undecided.” She straightened and slid from the wall. Spots of rain began to fall around us.

“But she’s evil! I saw her kill-”

“You say she’s evil because one of the people her cause needed to die was your mother. But the Red Queen’s cause has led to the deaths of thousands, plenty of them mothers. Look around you.” She swung an arm at the ruins.

“I . . . I expect . . .” I tried to find the words to explain why she was wrong. “Most of them probably ran for it.”

“Your people are the invaders. Snorri told me that he saw the onearmed man who tortured you-in a Red March tabard, here in Blujen, walking with soldiers.”

“Cutter John?” I found I was hugging myself and the night seemed colder, more full of terrors. “I thought that bastard would be dead by now.”

“Men who can get information from captives quickly are a valuable resource in war, Jal.”

“It’s a mistake. Red March doesn’t have an inquisition. We’re the good ones . . . I’ll tell the queen. I’ll-”

“Look behind the wall.” Spoken softly to the night.

The rain fell harder now and I didn’t want to look behind the wall.

“Make your own decision, Jalan. But do it with your eyes open.” She brushed past me, bound for the tent.

The rain started to fall in earnest and clouds had stolen the light of moon and stars, but a tongue of flame still licked from a pile of blackened beams ten yards past the wall on which Kara had been sitting. With a curse I hunched my shoulders against the coldness of the raindrops and leaned over the wall where it stood at its lowest.

A girl’s corpse lay curled at the foot of the wall. She lay there as she had lain for our whole conversation, as she had lain when we pitched the tent and while we slept, eyes to the sky filled with cold water. Half her face had been burned black, the skin peeling away in dark squares, but I could tell she had been young, pretty even, her hair long and dark like my mother’s. I almost pulled away without realizing the bundle against her chest was a baby. I wish I had.

We came into Blujen on a grey morning beneath a cold rain. Tears for the dead.

A squad of ten Red March infantry escorted us along the town’s high street. Fire had erased many of the signs of fighting but I didn’t have to look hard to see them. In one place bodies lay in a heap, civilians uniformed in mud, a silent mound. The Dead King would have them hunting me if I stayed long enough for him to register the key. I saw soldiers bringing timbers ready to build a pyre, taking their leisure and complaining beneath their loads. If they had been at Vermillion’s walls a week earlier they would be running to build it!

We spotted the tower before we saw any sign of the Red Queen or her forces. I say we saw the tower but in truth it was only the gleaming reflection of the sky, and as we drew closer, our own reflections warped, along with the surrounding ruins, across the surface of a mirror-wall. The men told me that the tower had been as any other, tall, rock-built, a ring of slit windows beneath a tiled conical roof. As the first soldiers had reached it the mirror-wall sprang up and had held ever since, immune to assault, reflecting back all violence.

The troops occupying the ruins, smeared with ash and mud, some bearing wounds, watched us with hard eyes. They must have known me as the marshal that let Vermillion burn. Some offered up a grim nod as we passed. Perhaps they knew how the Red Queen would deal with such failure and pitied me.

They took us to the royal pavilion, an edifice in scarlet dwarfing the campaign tents of the generals and the pavilions of her lords beyond them. Sir Robero, one of grandmother’s seasoned campaigners from the Scorron conflicts, took the Norse into his custody while a pair of royal guards led me on. I surrendered my sword and dagger at the entrance.

Grandmother’s pavilion had fared better than my tent: a silk outer skin, taut above a more durable waxed felt, seemed to have kept out the worst of the Slovian autumn, though I was gratified to see a collecting bowl to one side being fed by a steady drip-drip-drip from a seam high above.

Guards and officers drew back to clear a path to her wooden throne. The place smelled of wet bodies and old sweat. A dozen lanterns couldn’t quite break the gloom and the rich rugs beneath my feet were thick with muddy tracks. Grandmother sat stiff-backed but older, as if ten years had passed since we last met, iron grey threading the dark red of her hair. “Tell me of my city.”

How much did she know already? I couldn’t see the Silent Sister amongst the crowd. I straightened myself before the Red Queen, now hunched in her chair, and there in the half-light I told Vermillion’s tale. And among all that talk of burning half the city to save what lay within the walls, of her son’s treachery, and of my brothers’ deaths . . . I quite forgot to lie.

“And now we’re riding to Osheim with Loki’s key on the steward’s instructions.” A silence followed my last words. I waited for judgment.

“It is what it is.” Grandmother sounded tired. I’d never seen her tired before.

“I offer you the key, your highness.” I went down on one knee and held the key up in both hands. The old desire to keep it had largely eroded since it became apparent that the key was my ticket to Osheim. “I’m sure it would unlock the Lady Blue’s tower for you.”

“When I most wanted this . . . you gave it elsewhere.” She leaned forward, a gnarled hand reaching. “You seemed to have strong opinions regarding my brother’s right to determine the fate of this key.”

I kept my mouth shut, knowing it would only dig me a deeper hole. The key felt icy across my palms-as if it might slip away any moment.

The queen’s fingers extended toward Loki’s gift, lie-dark and gleaming. “No.” The hand became a fist. “Garyus deserves our trust . . . my faith. You will take this to Osheim and undo the Builders’ folly.”

A sigh escaped me and looking up I closed a hand about the key. “Send someone more suited to the task?”

Grandmother favoured me with a rare smile, albeit a grim one. “It was you who reminded me of my brother’s worth, Jalan. I wouldn’t support his plan only to gainsay his choice of champion.”

“Champion?” I widened my eyes at that, unable to entirely stamp out the burst of foolish pride rising through me.

“Besides,” she said. “You have the Northman with you. He seems capable.”

I begged for an escort north of course, but Grandmother insisted that Red March soldiers would draw more trouble than they averted while travelling through the fragments of empire. I countered that they could travel unmarked by uniform or device, but she repeated Garyus’s nonsense about small groups passing unchallenged where larger ones would draw notice. The actual surprise came when she turned down my offer to unlock the Lady Blue’s tower.

The Red Queen led me from her tent. “Mora Shival’s wall will not withstand my sister for much longer.”

It took me a moment to reconnect the Lady Blue with her name-I preferred to think of her as a title. A name made her too human. Once she was young, like me, like Kara. Thinking of her that way was uncomfortable. Time’s river would carry us on, twisting with each eddy of the current . . . and what might we turn into?

“But . . . a twist of the key and . . .” I mimed the opening of gates.

We stood alone, a rain-laced wind tugging our cloaks, a score of guards ten yards back, and before us the mirrored finger of the Lady Blue’s tower, aiming at heaven.

“They say no wrong-mage has ever left the Wheel.” The Red Queen kept her eyes on the mirror-wall as if seeking some meaning in the distortion there. “They are incorrect. Two have. Mora Shival was one of the two who escaped. She has a gate within her tower. A marriage of her arts and the science of the Builders. A fractal glass. Most of her mirror-doors are broken now, and those that survive will break when this wall is broken. The fractal glass, though, that one will survive and it leads to-”

“Osheim.”

Grandmother inclined her head.

“Wait. If she can run to Osheim why doesn’t she go there now? You’ve said yourself armies are no use there. The Wheel is a better defence than this wall of hers.”

“The heart of the Wheel is hard to endure, even for a wrong-mage. The lady has been weakened of late. She has lost too many reflections to wait in Osheim without great risk. She would only run there if no other alternative presented-or at the end of things when little time remains to the world.

“While we knock on her wall her attention is kept here, her strength employed to maintain her defences. You will have to find and destroy her exit in Osheim. That will be the time to fracture her barricades-when she has nowhere to run. No bolthole. That is when we shall hold her to account.” The Red Queen’s jaw tightened as if she imagined that moment. “When you do it my sister will know, and we will act.”

“You haven’t seen Osheim-it’s huge-how can I hope to find one mirror?” As if turning off the Wheel’s engine wasn’t impossible enough, now I had a needle to find in a haystack five miles wide.

“It will be at the heart of things. You’ll find it.”

Having failed to give Grandmother the key, failed to get her to send someone else, and failed to have her send an army to protect me I only had one place left to run. “What if she’s right?” I summoned up Kara’s arguments. “If we’re all lost anyway, what does it matter if the world burns today or tomorrow? Why shouldn’t the strongest, the cleverest, save themselves if they can save no one else? Have you considered joining her?” I let the “and saving me” go unsaid.

The slap didn’t come as much of a surprise. Not even the force of it, which sent me to the ground clutching my face.

“We’re Kendeths, Jalan!” She loomed over me. “We fight. We fight when hope is gone. We fight while there’s blood left in us.” She dragged me to my feet as if I were a child rather than a man topping six foot. “We fight.” Her eyes fixed on mine, hard as flint. “That woman killed my grandfather. She spilled his lifeblood in my house. She tried to kill me and in defending me my brother and sister were changed . . . twisted into what they are now.” She lowered her voice, the anger fading, her grip on me still iron. “That woman has lived too long and she’ll sacrifice the tomorrows of a million to live herself lifetimes more. Yes, I want to save my city, my country, my people, and yes it’s worth my life, and yours to give them another year, or month, or day. But truly? In my secret heart, Jalan? What drives me is that I will not let that bitch win. She has raised her hand against me and mine. She will die by my own hands. There’s no life everlasting for that one. No new world. This is a war, boy. My war. I am the Red Queen-and I do not lose.”

She let me go and I sagged back on to my heels. I’d known what she would say. I’d known she was right too. Or at least more right than the Lady Blue. Old habits die hard, though, and I had to at least try every escape route.

“If I see her in Osheim I’ll kill her with the sword that killed my mother.” I had my own revenge to take, my own fire, and my own measure of the Red Queen’s blood.

“See that you do.” A rare smile on Grandmother’s lips.

I sighed and tightened my cloak about me. “Lucky I set off for Osheim with the key then. Or none of this would have worked.”

Grandmother turned her head, looking past me. I turned too and followed her gaze. The Silent Sister had been standing at my back, uncomfortably close. She met my glance with her strange stare, one eye blind white and full of mysteries, the other dark as any hole. “Luck? We save luck for the endgame,” the Red Queen said. “You’re going to need every scrap of it for the Wheel. Nobody sees into that future, not a glimpse.”

“I guess . . . I’ll be going then.” Bad as Osheim sounded I really didn’t want to stand there between those two terrifying old women a moment longer. “And if . . . if it all works? What then?”

Grandmother made another of her rare smiles, as grim as the first. “The world will keep on turning. This ending will have been averted, or more likely delayed. The Gilden Guard will arrive within the month to take me to Congression and the Hundred will repeat the same arguments that have rumbled on since my grandfather’s day. Perhaps this time we really will elect a new emperor and mend this broken empire of ours.”

It took a moment to realize that the dry hissing beside me was the Silent Sister’s laughter. I took it as my cue to leave.

Snorri and Kara were waiting for me with the horses by the largest of several supply dumps. The boy was nowhere to be seen. I envied his freedom to wander away.

“We’re going?” Snorri raised his voice over the din all around us. Red March soldiers laboured in ant-like chains under the direction of roaring store-masters to break up and distribute the heaped stocks of food and equipment.

I nodded. “Meet me on the main road, up by the big church. I just need a moment.”

“What?” Snorri cupped a hand to his ear but Kara was already pushing him away, her palm against his chest.

She looked back at me over her shoulder. “Don’t run off now!”

I didn’t reply but walked away wondering, and not for the first time, whether she could read my mind.

I wandered the ruins without direction, though remaining within the defensive perimeter. I’d no desire to explain myself to a vengeful Slovian mob. Grandmother had a strong position with a large number of seasoned troops but to hold this ground until I reached the Wheel of Osheim and sealed off the Lady Blue’s last escape would require tactical genius, not to mention all kinds of luck. Her only real hope was that King Lujan would mistake her purpose and hold his strength up at Julana thinking her to be readying an assault against his capital.

I ducked into the roofless shell of a building to get out of the fine rain, blown on a cold autumn wind in such a way that it coats your face and fills your eyes. Standing beneath the arch of the entrance I pondered my options and discovered them to be limited. Somehow I’d found myself headed for the north once more, still bound to the Viking, and by chains I understood no better than the first time. I’d almost been dragged into Hell by the singular force of Snorri’s good opinion of me, though it had taken the force of his arm to get me in there in the end. Now, somehow, the good opinions of many people-from the queen of Red March to that of a heathen child-were driving me into a hell on earth. Quite how so many people had sunk their hooks beneath my armour I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I didn’t like it one bit. The Jalan who had jumped from Lisa DeVeer’s balcony would have run and kept on running. Had a single year truly wrought that much change upon me?

Something drew my gaze into the sooty interior of the house. It had been a grand affair once. I started to identify objects among the clutter of black on black. The shattered bust of some family saint or elder, the jagged hulls of broken vases. I peered more closely-a sword broken into pieces as if it too had been ceramic. I moved the fragments with my boot, noting the bright edges. Stepping forward and leaning down for a better look, I saw that even the surviving pieces of wood, fallen roof timbers, flameblackened and acrid in the rain, were jagged-edged as if they also had shattered, the breaks ignoring the grain. I stood up, making a slow rotation. Everything around me lay in sharp-edged pieces beneath its black coating, as if the whole room had splintered like glass beneath a single blow.

A framed picture leaned against the wall by the door arch through which I’d entered. The only whole thing in the place. I walked to it, reaching a finger to wipe a clean spot. The soot fell away the instant my fingertip made contact. Not just a patch beneath my touch, but every part of it, flowing down like a piece of black silk sliding from a polished table. And beneath it . . . a man’s face, but not a portrait, my own, staring back at me in surprise from the smooth and unblemished surface of a large mirror.

“Hello, Jalan.” I said it. I saw my lips move around the words. But it wasn’t my voice.

“Get away from me!” Those were my words, and yet my reflection’s mouth stayed closed. It watched me with eyes that were not my own. I tried to turn away but that stare held me.

“I’m not your enemy, Jalan. You want to escape. I want to help you escape. You’re a piece on the Red Queen’s board and she keeps pushing you into danger whatever you do. I can help you play your own game.”

“You’re my enemy,” I said, though she was right about the escaping part. “Your hands are red with the blood of my family and my friends. Too much of it to be forgiven.”

She smiled, her mouth more hers than mine now, curved as I remembered it from Grandmother’s youth. “We show our weakness most when we look upon ourselves, Jalan. I’ve watched you watch yourself. I’ve heard the secrets spoken to your reflection-the doubts-the truths, each confession. We all knew you would be special. You or your sister. And we watched you, but while the Silent Sister studied the paths that might lead you through all your tomorrows, I made a study of the man, took his measure. A coward can forgive himself anything given the right excuse, Jalan. Believe me when I say that the sting of any treachery, whether to the living or to your dead, will last only a moment compared to the joys waiting for you. The freedom to do as you want, unconstrained by troublesome morality, unbound by that nagging voice of conscience which others have imposed upon you, infected you with.”

“Lies,” I said.

“The Wheel is turning, Jalan. It can’t be stopped. The change can’t be stopped. Everything we know will end. The decision is not how to fight it but how to survive it. I’ve watched you and you, Jalan Kendeth, are, above all else, a survivor.”

“Lies,” I repeated, but the worst of it was not that she was almost certainly right about the Wheel being unstoppable. The worst of it was that she was right about me. I could walk away. I could betray any trust to save my own skin. Oh it would hurt, and yes I would curse myself and mope . . . but after? I didn’t think it would break me-not as it would break Snorri if he could ever do such a thing. I didn’t run that deep. I wasn’t made of the same stuff. Snorri was the truth. No give in him. Inflexible. Hold or break, nothing in between. And me? Prince Jalan was a lie I told myself, mutable, adaptable, lasting . . . a survivor. “How can anyone survive the end of everything?”

And there it was. As good as a betrayal. I’d asked the Lady Blue to plant a seed of hope in me. My reflection looked like both of us now-a mixture-her age on my bones, her words on my lips.

“There are ways known to those with power. True power that rests in the mind rather than in titles or lands or the command of great armies. I will bring those who serve me through the conjunction of the spheres and into a new world. But they have to be close at the last moment. Close enough to touch.”

“All I have to do is come through your wall and join you in that tower, eh?” It had been a faint hope at best, but I hadn’t expected it to sour so quickly.

“There is another way. For a man with Loki’s key.”

“I’m listening.” My hand found the key.

“The heart of the Wheel is the centre of the storm. When the worlds shatter like mirrors and all the pieces come sliding down, anyone standing at the heart of the Wheel will pass through without harm.” My reflection held little of me now, just my eyes staring from an old woman’s face.

“I’m told it’s not a place anyone would choose to wait.”

“The engines of the Wheel continue to change the world. The Wheel continues to turn but that was never the Builders” intention. The engines were built to turn it so far and no more, to hold it in place, to give a little magic to each Builder and change their world from one set thing into another. The fact the Wheel kept turning, ever so slowly, was a mistake, an unforeseen event. It’s us that turn the Wheel when we use the power it gives us, and the engines at Osheim help us to turn it considerably faster than we could on our own.

“Their war ended their interest in the matter, and a thousand years turned a little mistake that might have been corrected into a big one that cannot.” The Lady Blue watched me from the mirror, no hint of my face there now. She looked old, though not as ancient as Grandmother and her sister. Her face however, held far less vitality-the skin stretched tight across her bones, paper thin, her eyes clouded. “Some think the key might be used to disable the Wheel’s engines and that doing so might slow the inevitable conjunction. It’s possible, though unlikely, and such a waste . . . the key destroyed to buy a handful of months, a few years at best. Better by far to turn it the other way-put those engines into overdrive, spin the Wheel as the Builders once did and bring about the end in moments. The man who did it would be assured a place in the new order of things and a clean, sharp transition would make it easier for those skilled among us to survive the change and bring through with them not just a few followers but dozens, scores, maybe hundreds.”

“You sent Edris Dean to kill my mother.” I held to the anger-at least that felt clean and uncomplicated.

“It wasn’t an act of malice, Jalan. It was about survival. You know in your heart that when it comes down to burn or don’t burn, you would choose to save yourself over others. That’s honesty. That’s the truth at the core of what we are. You need to-”

Something whizzed past my ear and the world exploded.

I opened my eyes an indeterminate amount of time later and discovered the world less exploded than I had imagined it would be, albeit decidedly odd-looking, as if the entire house had fallen on its side. It took a moment to work out that I was the one who had fallen over.

Some tugging and grunting indicated that someone was attempting to get me back into a sitting position, although they were doing a piss-poor job of it.

“I’m all right.”

I sat up and drew a hand over my face, turning to find Hennan frowning at me. A glance down at my palm revealed it scarlet. “Shit! I’m not all right! I’m bleeding to death!” I staggered to my feet. Glittering shards of mirror lay all around, crunching under my boots.

“You’ve got a cut below your eye,” Hennan said. “A piece of it must have caught you when I threw the rock.”

“Threw?”

“The mirror was doing something to you. It was all blue-like the sky gone wrong. I threw a rock at it.”

“Ah,” I said. “Well.” I glanced about. Just me and Hennan in the blackened shell of a merchant’s house. “Good. Let’s go.”