“She was, that is—the mask she wore was my mother’s face.”
“Like someone you knew,” she agreed. “I think they trick us that way. The gods can look like anyone they want. They can be anything.” She looked at the green-and-black phial in her palm. “We think we’re acting upon our own whims and choices, but we’re not. We’re guided, ushered through the unseen pattern, some labyrinth or maze—like the world has all its spirals, we’ve each got our own.” She pondered. “Our memories of Edgeworld could be called dark reflections, but you can’t pour a potion on a memory. That can’t be what it means.”
He apprehended where her thoughts had led her, and he looked around as if expecting the answer to present itself. From the booth at the mouth of the tunnel, a large man in a sleeveless tunic emerged, carrying a bucket. He walked to where the gutter began and tipped the bucket, pouring gray and soapy water into it.
“The water,” said Diverus, and he left Leodora and went back into the tunnel. Up the street the stilt walker was gesturing in her direction, but she turned to follow Diverus.
He stood at the side, overlooking the drainage channel there. The water, with bits of debris floating in it, looked black and greasy. When she came up beside him and peered down into it, she could make out both their faces, like flowing apparitions. “Can there be a darker reflection than this?” he asked.
“Water in shadows.”
“Or at night,” he added.
“Should we wait for night?”
“I don’t know. If it was night, would we see our reflections in the water?”
“Not without a torch or a lamp. So then, maybe this is what it meant?” She smiled at him. “Only one way to find out, I suppose.” She made to pull the cork from the phial.
“Only a drop, Cardeo said,” he reminded her.
“I know.” She tilted the phial ever so slightly. A thick drop of glowing blue liquid formed on the lip of it. The drop clung tenaciously as she held the container outstretched over the water.
“Jax!” called a voice, and she glanced up to see the stilt walker approaching along the thoroughfare and surrounded by dozens of people.
Diverus watched the blue drop let loose of the phial and start to fall. He recalled the other thing the figure had warned. “Leodora,” he asked, drawing her attention back to the business at hand. “Where are we going?”
“Pons Asinorum,” she answered as the drop hit the smooth surface in the drain.
“Jax,” Clererca called, but her voice wavered strangely, as if the tunnel was distorting it. Diverus’s hand found hers and gripped her tight as the blackness in the water turned bright and spread with impossible speed between the paving stones, then across them from every direction, congealing into a great oval, like a mirror. From the opposite side of the oval, oriented upside down to them, two faces looked back—ebony dark and with burning red eyes. Leodora thought of the Brazen Head’s riddles, of reflections and of which side one stood upon, and she said, “I want to be on the other side.” Still holding his hand, she placed one foot into the reflection. Diverus yelped as her weight fell through the reflection and tugged him in after her.
They stumbled as if they’d been running. She fell to her knees but stood up again immediately, compelled by fear. She faced a cherubic little man and a tall woman. Their eyes blazed like flames, and their skin was a dull blue. Their hair was black, shot through with oily blue streaks like reflections upon the wings of a raven. Their ears curved to points at the top, and their noses were long and sharp. The man babbled something that sounded like “Kadnari muus kelado pwee.”
She shook her head that she didn’t understand and happened to look up, which must have been down, for there far above/beneath her was a surface of luridly bronzed water. Vertigo rushed over her and she clawed at the air, certain she was about to fall away. Diverus tugged free of her hand and dropped to hands and knees on the metallic street above/below. She knew she must fall. No one could be upside down like this and not fall.
And then the world wheeled about her, the water was flowing overhead, spreading into a burnished liquid sky, and Diverus was kneeling by her feet.
On every span she’d entered there had been a moment of disorientation, of