“The places that stay the same aren’t as hard to look at,” she said. “I have to admit it doesn’t make me like them much better than the others.”
Most of the patterns in that spot weren’t familiar to Olvir, or the distortion was too great. He had a vague impression of motion, of multicolored bodies sleek with scales, which could have been dragons or snakes or fish. Size and shape both eluded him.
There was no motion now except for theirs. All the rest was rigid, changeless, bound in a single senseless form.
“No. There’s nothing good here,” said Olvir.
And the sea of silver, whatever it was, waited.
Chapter 38
It was a mirror.
Olvir and Vivian stood where the last colored patch of the Battlefield ended, feet still on featureless black ground, and stared across the expanse of silver glass.
Lines marred its surface every yard or so. They were the same thin crevasses that appeared when a normal mirror cracked, but Olvir had never seen glass break so straightly. Each fracture was a smooth ray heading toward the center. None intersected until they got to the middle, where a slim object stuck up a few inches above the ground.
“Can you tell what that is?” Vivian asked.
“No. I should be able to from here, but then, we should have been able to see all this more clearly from farther away,” Olvir said, indicating the mirror-land. “And we would certainly have noticed the sky, if any of this place made sense.”
Where they stood, the sky was blue. It even stayed the normal distance from the ground. That changed just over the border. A wall rose up as far in front of Olvir as he could see, one fashioned of flashing darkness and light. It filled the world above the mirror. The cracked glass gave back its reflections, blazing bright and then vanishing in darkness that he couldn’t see through, despite the power Tinival gave him.
Olvir tried to find the point where radiance became shadow and swiftly gave it up. He might channel the power of one god by dedication and hold part of another by birth, but his eyes were mostly human. Searching for the joining point made them feel about to fall from their sockets.
“I’d give quite a bit for you to tell me that this is only a diversion and our real path is off to the right,” he said, “but I suspect we’re not that lucky.”
“I’m afraid not. For one thing, there’s no ‘off to the right.’”
That was true. Just as the flashing sky went up forever, the mirrored ground ran to both right and left without ever stopping. If there was any land beyond it, then Gizath and Letar’s fight had severed it completely from the rest of the world. Maybe a dragon could have flown over it or a stonekin army tunneled beneath, but Olvir greatly doubted it. Scars ran deep.
Besides, he and Vivian could neither fly nor tunnel.
Forward and backward were the only options. Back meant failure, the ruin of the world, and very probably their own deaths. Forward might not end differently, but that way lay at least a chance—if Sitha’s prophecy held true, and if they’d interpreted the spider correctly.
Olvir wished he’d never heard the wordif.
Gingerly, he took the first step onto the mirror. He heard a series of snaps, exactly the sort of sounds he would have expected, and froze, waiting to see what would happen.
Nothing did.
No new cracks appeared. The mirror held him. Only the sound acknowledged what would have taken place under normal laws.
“This is not going to help my headache,” said Vivian. “At least I still have a head, I suppose.”
She flinched at the sounds anyhow when she stepped onto the mirror. Olvir wasn’t sure either of them would stop doing so before long. Everybody learned young to react to that sort of noise: whether prized glasses or thin ice, it meant something important had broken.
That remained true, he supposed. It was just nothing either he or Vivian could help.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“No, but that won’t change for waiting. You?”
He forced himself to smile. “The same.”
They began to walk. The thunderstorm sky closed in behind them.
* * *
