Chapter Twenty-Three Today When I Was on the Stair, I Saw a Room That Wasn’t There #2
While I’d been chatting with the looking glass, Sam had started shuffling through the papers on the desk. “It looks like the sorcerer kept notes.”
I glanced over at the page he was holding, a sketch of a spider wolf.
Leafing through, we found more of them—or rather, we found creatures that were almost spider wolves.
Some had six legs, or no legs, or four pairs of tentacles instead.
Octowolves? A few of the papers had notes scribbled in the margins: “Can’t walk.
Flopped around. Kill it and start over.” “Poison bite?” On other pages were further sketches of different beasts.
One depicted a bipedal form with a boulder for a head. There was even a sapling whimsically drawn growing out of its elbow. Next to it was a note reading “Stone creatures—more difficult to destroy?”
This wasn’t the work of some helpful soul, studying the creatures in order to better defeat them. This was where the monstrosities had been envisioned, created, tested, and refined into deadly predators. This was where my death had been planned.
“Who lives here?” I said to the mirror. “Who made these drawings and bred these creatures?”
It shouldn’t be possible for a glimmering, abstract impression of a face to look so smug. “Powerful enchantments prevent me from revealing any information about my master.”
Of course they did. Although, with my knowledge of magic, there was a chance I’d be able to break those enchantments. It might only take me five or six years of trial and error, if I got lucky.
“We need to let King Gervase know about this place,” I told Sam, “as soon as we possibly can.”
“You don’t think we should stay here? Lie in wait for…whoever this is, catch them unawares?”
I shook my head, the bloodcurdling shrieks of the monsters echoing in my ears. “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea. When we come face-to-face with this sorcerer, I’d much rather do it with the king’s entire army at my back.”
The face in the hand mirror scowled. “Don’t you dare bring an army to my home. If you try it, my master will rip out your bones and dance in your blood.”
“That’s kind of why I want the army,” I informed it before turning back to Sam. “We have to bring word of this place to the castle, and we have to do it quickly. Before the next attack.”
He took a moment to stomp on a spiked tentacle that had snaked a hairbreadth too close to my foot.
The creature howled in pain and whipped its injured limb back behind the bars of its cage.
“What if we’ve been going in the wrong direction?
” he asked. “It might take us days to find the castle. Weeks.”
I was about to remark that we didn’t have any better options when a thought struck me. “How did the sorcerer know where to attack us?”
“What do you mean?”
“The spider wolves could have been waiting to ambush me on the road. But how did the stone giants find the hunt at a random spot in the middle of the woods?”
Sam shrugged. “Magic, I suppose.”
“Exactly.”
A good rule of thumb when it comes to enchantments is that function follows form.
A magical sword is meant to cut through something, whether that something is flesh, steel, or cheese.
A magical harp will play bewitching music, and a magical goose will lay marvelous eggs of some kind.
I have encountered exceptions to this rule—spinning wheels, as I’ve noted, are so easy to curse they can drop you into a coma rather than doing anything as sensible as producing golden thread.
But the exceptions are rare. In general, if you know the purpose of a regular object, you can make a decent guess at what the magic version will do.
The purpose of a mirror is reflection. Creating an image of whatever’s nearby.
The purpose of a magic mirror is scrying.
“Show us how to get to the castle,” I said to the looking glass.
The glittering eyes glared at me. “No. You didn’t say the magic words.”
I grinned. You didn’t grow up in my stepmother’s household without learning that little trick. “Mirror, mirror on the wall—”
“I’m not on the wall!” it interrupted.
“Really? You’re going to be a stickler about that?”
“Yes.”
A pedantic mirror. Just my luck. “You’re only delaying the inevitable, you know. Mirror, mirror on the desk…” Hm. Grotesque? Statuesque? No effective way of using either one sprang to mind. I glanced at Sam. “Can you think of something that rhymes with desk?”
He hesitated, thinking it over deeply, before saying, “Pesk?”
“Pesk?”
“Like pesky? Only without the y?”
“Doesn’t look so inevitable now, does it?” the mirror said.
“We’ll see about that,” I growled, scooping the mirror up and holding it before me.
I wanted to get this over with. Something that seemed to be made of tongues was throwing itself at its cage door so furiously that I worried about the lock.
“Mirror, mirror in my hands, show me where the castle stands.”
The mirror made a frustrated noise, and a perfect, clear image of the castle formed in the glass, snow coating the battlements and heraldic flags snapping in the wind. Not quite what we needed, but at least I’d managed to make it work. I lay the mirror at my feet.
“Mirror, mirror on the floor,” I intoned, “show us to the castle’s door.”
“This is humiliating,” it grumbled as pictures unspooled across it. At first my face appeared, just like an actual reflection, before the image swooped away from me, down the stairs, out the door, and into the woods, as if the path were being viewed by a bird in flight.
I tried to commit it to memory, making note of the direction and any landmarks I could see. The route veered from the stream, tracing a straight line through the heart of the woods. It was difficult to tell how long a journey it would be.
“I think I might be able to get us there, from that,” Sam said.
“If not, we can check again along the way.” I gathered up the protesting mirror, and I grabbed a handful of papers as well. “Let’s take whatever evidence we can.”
Sam picked up the rest of the notes. It would definitely be easier to use those as our proof than to bring one of the sorcerer’s creations back with us. Even the little ones were too much of a risk. The old king, I remembered, had died of a poisonous bite. I had no wish to meet the same fate.
We hurried out, the cries of the monsters vanishing into silence the moment we left the secret chamber. I hoped when I returned, it would be to tear the whole place down.