Chapter 109. I Was Merely Considering Leaning Toward the Cursed Mirror

Chapter 109: 109. I Was Merely Considering Leaning Toward the Cursed Mirror

The mirror was exactly where Bram had said it would be, and I hated it on sight.

I’d have gone straight down the iron stair if Alicia hadn’t caught my sleeve at the end of the cell passage.

She didn’t pull. She just stood there with her hand on my arm and looked at the violet glow coming up out of the dark, and I could see her adding things together in that quiet, annoying way she has.

"Before we walk into something we don’t understand, we read," she said. "Bram said the director’s office is one level up."

"Whatever is down there, somebody wrote it down first... Bureaucrats always do."

"Sharon and Eveline are going to reach the bottom before we do."

"Sharon and Eveline are going to reach the bottom and wait, because Sharon isn’t stupid, and because she’ll want to know if there’s another way in." She squeezed my arm once and let go. "Five minutes, Roland... Please."

I wanted to argue.

I’d had a knot in my stomach since the front gate, and every step away from the stairs made it tighter.

But she was right, and I knew she was right, and I’d already been wrong once that morning in front of seventeen prisoners.

So I nodded, and the five of us went up the east stair, Alicia, Laura, Holt, Garrick, and me, while Captain Doyle stayed behind with a borrowed short sword to guard the four people who couldn’t walk.

"If anyone comes down that passage who isn’t Sharon," Doyle had said, "I’ll introduce them to the floor."

"You can barely stand," I told her.

"I can barely stand comfortably... It’s different."

I believed her, which probably says something about Sharon’s teaching.

The director’s office was a long, narrow room above the cells, with a plank floor, a window of thick greenish glass that looked out on nothing but rock, and a desk so tidy that it made my teeth hurt.

A rack of leather document cases stood along one wall. A kettle sat on a small iron stove, still warm.

And on the far wall, in a plain black frame, hung a sheet of dark glass about the size of a door.

It wasn’t reflecting anything.

I know that sounds like a small thing. But the lamp was burning, and I was standing about eight feet in front of it, and there was no light on its surface at all.

It was like looking at a hole someone had hung a frame around.

"Don’t touch that," said Laura.

"I wasn’t going to."

"You were leaning to it."

"I was considering leaning."

"Do it somewhere else."

I turned my back on it. The back of my neck prickled for the rest of the time I was in that room, as if somebody patient were standing very close behind me with a cup of tea.

Laura went through the cabinet like a surgeon.

She had a way of handling paper, light and fast and without any hesitation, that I’d never seen in anyone else, and within three minutes she had spread six sheets of cream paper across the desk and was running her finger down the columns with her lips pressed into a thin line.

"Roland," she said. "Come and read this."

"And somebody hold the lamp closer... I want to be wrong about this."

I read it over her shoulder, and she wasn’t... wrong.

’PHASE TWO: FOUNDATION REPLACEMENT.’

It was a plan, and like everything else I’d seen from these people, it was neat. It had a schedule, a supply list, and a line at the bottom for each of the four signatures.

The idea was simple enough that I understood it on the first pass, which was the worst part.

A stolen crystal called the Hollow Crystal, cultivated for two years out of the drained barrier of villages like Harrowmere, was to be installed in the capital by a team that had already slipped into the city.

When the moment came, it would replace the foundation crystal under the Citadel, the one that powered the great barrier over all of Elarion.

It would look the same... It would hum the same... And it would answer to someone else.

"It doesn’t work by itself," said Laura. "The Hollow Crystal can’t hold a barrier of that size without a feed."

"Just look at this diagram... It’s drawing power remotely, through a resonance link, from a larger crystal that’s kept here."

"A Resonance Core," I said, reading the label.

"At Site Nine... Everything in the capital depends on it." She flipped a page. "The earliest execution window is listed as four days from the date on the cover."

"The barrier is supposed to fail on a night called the Harvest Rite, about twenty-five days after that."

"And the date on the cover sheet?"

She turned it toward the lamp. "Ten days old."

I felt the cold go down my spine. "So this is the old schedule."

"It’s the schedule from before Greywater Ford," said Alicia quietly. "Before Corvane lost a fight, and Alder reported it..."

"If I were a man at the top of this and my best soldier had just failed in public, I wouldn’t wait twenty-five days... I’d move."

Nobody said anything.

Holt, standing by the door with his shield on his arm, shifted his feet.

"What about the signatures?" Garrick asked.

He hadn’t spoken since the cells. He was standing a little apart, leaning on his crutch, and he’d been watching the rack of document cases instead of the desk.

I think he was afraid of finding something with a village’s name on it.

Laura pointed.

At the bottom of the last page there were three marks, and I recognized two of them without being told.

The first was a wax seal pressed into the paper, a stylized hawk with its wings folded. Marshal Dorian Kell.

I’d seen it on the ledger at Greywater and on a dozen other documents that Sharon had looked at with a face like a closed fist.

The second was a pair of initials in a bold, slanting hand, with a long flourish underneath. L.T. Lord T., the man in the mirror.

"And this one?" I asked, tapping the third.

It was a round stamp in blue ink, a little smudged, showing a quill crossed with a key. Laura frowned at it.

"Secretariat of the Council," she said. "The clerks’ office..."

"It means somebody inside the Council’s own administration authorized this, or at least stamped it."

"Who?"

"I don’t know... A stamp is a stamp."

"Anyone with access to the office could have used it." She hesitated. "Which is not the same as saying nobody did."

"That’s three names and no faces," said Holt.

"It’s three names that don’t want faces."

I turned over the last sheet and found a table of figures with a column headed D. It was the same column that had shown up in the Greywater ledger, and this time there was a small note in the margin in different ink.

’Delivered by border carriers, Capt. B.’

"Captain B," I read out loud. "Anyone?"

"No," said Alicia.

"Not me," said Laura.

"There are a few hundred captains in the northern garrisons whose names start with B," said Holt, thoughtfully. "It could be anyone."

"It could also be a typo..."

"Nobody who writes like that makes typos," said Laura.

I looked at the plan again, and I made myself think instead of panicking. The Core wasn’t the whole thing.

The Hollow Crystal was already in the city, wherever they’d hidden it, and the people who’d put it there were presumably still walking around. But the Core was what fed it.

If we broke the Core, the Hollow Crystal would stumble. It wouldn’t stop the plan, but it might make it limp, and a plan that limps can be caught.

"We have to destroy it," I said. "Whatever’s down there..."

"If we leave it running, it’ll keep the other end alive."

"And if we break it wrong?" asked Alicia.

"Then we’ll know."

"That is not a reassuring answer."

"It’s the only one I’ve got."