Had the sorcerers suffered at the hands of the fae and their magic before learning to best them? Rags didn’t know. But because he was a thief, he couldn’t help wondering if the sorcerers had stolen the magic for themselves.
No, he wasn’t here to wonder. Rags tied the scrap of red around his eyes, felt his heartbeat slow as the world around him faded.
Wherever Mirror-Rags was, it couldn’t get him now. Rags couldn’t hear it or see it. By his theory, that meant it didn’t exist.
Rags bent to take off his boots. Mirror-Rags couldn’t get him, but the floor could. He was going to have to find his way to the end of the labyrinth by toe-touch alone.
He made slow, torturous progress through the maze, bumping into glass, quickly shifting his weight backward the instant he felt the first crumble of stone giving way beneath his bare toes.
He only knew he was finished when he pushed through a panel of something cool, harder than glass, and heard the thunk of a door falling shut behind him.
Rags fumbled with the knot at the back of his head and pulled off the blindfold. Took a deep breath, blinking back his eyesight.
He stood in a room the size of a massive dining hall, only instead of housing feasting tables and chairs, there were rows upon rows of crumbling suits of armor.
Armor made from black bone and fae glass.
Rags would have scoffed at that, but he’d seen what fae glass could do. An entire enemy army could be felled by glancing into a polished breastplate, captured by their own deadly reflections.
What was this place, that it had once held an armory that would have outfitted every Queensguard on the Hill? And why was Rags so determined to think up questions that, if asked, would only get him into trouble?
Clear across the end of the hall waited another door. This one had only one handprint on it.
“Gloves again?” Rags did his best not to look over his shoulder. A cold wind lingered behind him where the door had shut, and he couldn’t shake the image of Mirror-Rags prowling on the other side, trapped behind glass.
Waiting.
Just like Morien the Last was waiting for news of Rags’s progress.
Rather than face the horror of Morien after dodging the great ax swoop of terror that had come with outrunning his murderous mirror twin, Rags decided to turn his mind toward getting the next door open.
It didn’t matter what happened between those doors. All that mattered was surviving to the end.
Eventually Rags discovered he needed to find the one crumbling suit of black-and-silver armor equipped with a glove bearing a special pattern, which worked like a key to open the fifth door—all while a polished juggernaut made of black bone rolled after him, hungry to squish him flat.
And so on.
“How come you can’t just pop to the end of this place?” Rags asked Morien when the sorcerer appeared with a pittance: another bitter, metallic, stomach-numbing apple.
Morien looked at Rags like he wasn’t going to answer. But, to Rags’s surprise, an answer did come.
“The rooms beyond do not fully exist before the trial to enter them has been solved. I can do many things, but I can’t send myself somewhere that doesn’t exist. Yet.”
The bastard vanished after that, and Rags was alone again. More doors awaited, his sole choice to learn how to open them, or die.
Down was the vague trajectory Rags sensed, when he had any sense of direction.
The sky became the earth, and the earth became the sky. He was swallowed in darkness, its mouth, throat, belly. Weak light pulsed from the strange symbols on the walls. They were neither mathematical nor naughty pictures, the only two picture languages Rags recognized. These were fae and fancy and infuriatingly vague, lines that merely suggested shape and movement. As his eyes adjusted to the markings, he’d catch a glimpse of something familiar: a reptile tail carved to slither up the rockside, or a wary feline eye glowering from above.
Living door to door, disarming traps, subsisting on Morien’s magic apples. Resting, occasionally, in the safe spaces between. Brief naps to restore energy, somehow, no nightmares. He began to wonder if he’d ever feel sunlight on his skin again, or breathe the smoky, sultry, stinking-but-alive air of Cheapside.
Soon, he had to stop wondering.
When Rags stepped through the seventeenth door into a round room, he found that the eighteenth door