The Stitcher's Debt

The Court of Broken Mirrors

Rowan went down on his knees on the cellar steps, flinging the match away from him, but the dying ember never touched the damp wood. The cellar was plunged into darkness, save for the fiery, golden thread in the channels that ran up the forearms of young Vance.

"Master Vance," he gasped, seizing the old man by the shoulders with shaking hands.

Vance was light, positively light, all bone and sinew wrapped in wool, the twin of dry twigs tossed on the fire. Instead of legs, he had a dissolving cloud of the grey Void-ash trailing from his ankles, and the tiny embers that occasionally escaped the clutches of gravity hissed and died on the floorboards.

"Don't... don't touch the thread, boy," Vance's milky eyes rolled upwards, blind and unseeing, fixed on the golden glow emanating from the palms of Rowan's hands. He sounded as if there was a shard of copper in his lungs, each ragged breath producing a metallic ring. "They used mirror-water in the shop, unstitched thirty years of my life in the span of five seconds. Had to bind my soul to the cellar walls, took part of my history and buried it in the foundations, just to have a voice left."

Sterling descended the wooden steps, silver dagger in one hand, the other trailing along the side of the stairwell. His boots, highly polished, made a ringing noise on the frost-rimmed oak, the scent of the cellar thick with something metallic and cloying.

"How much time do you have, Vance?" the nobleman asked, pausing on the first landing. "The harbor was just abandoned, the second strand snapped twenty minutes ago."

"The harbor was a diversion," Vance wheezed, pressing a handkerchief soaked in blood to his mouth in an ineffectual attempt to stifle the ragged, racking coughs wracking his thin body. A new layer of the grey ash seemed to eat away at his trousers, creeping past his knees, devouring the folds of his waistcoat. "They did not break the second strand at the docks, Rowan. The Guild was lured there, but the real second Anchor lies in the Court of Mirrors."

Rowan frowned up at the older man, his own hands still tinged with the golden glow of the thread. "The Court? Sterling said they deal in mirror-water, not Anchors."

"The Court is the Anchor, boy," Vance rasped, already growing weaker as the grey ash ate away at his ribs, his fingers digging into the leathers of Rowan's lapels. "A little over fifty year ago, when the First Weavers found themselves incapable of stabilizing the eastern seam, they traded a living mirror, a noble daughter of the Glass Guild for the enchantment of the Great Looking-glass in the lower ward. The woman is the second strand, and Sterling's family..." Vance's lips curled into a mirthless smile, "...his father was the one who tied the knot."

Rowan turned sharply to stare at the nobleman.

Sterling stood motionless on the landing, his face ashen, the fingers of his right hand absently tracing the edge of his charcoal grey sleeve as he concealed the silver pocket watch behind it.

"You knew," Rowan hissed, already feeling the dangerous heat of the Weaver's anger in his voice. "You knew what was in the Court."

"I knew my family owed the Void a favour," Sterling said softly, almost regretfully. "I did not know exactly what the payment was to be. It makes no difference to you, Weaver. If the Glass Daughter has been unwritten, this entire corner of the East Ward will not exist by dawn."

"Vance, who is doing this?" Rowan spun back to confront the dying master. "Is it Aldous? Is the Council selling the strands?"

"Aldous is barely more than a clerk," Vance muttered, his eyes growing hazy as the grey ash reached his waist. "Look for the woman... with the obsidian needle. Vesper... she goes by the name Vesper. She walks the glass... she is picking the threads from the inside..."

Vance's hand tightened around his sleeve before suddenly unfolding like a sandbag of brittle grey ash that rose to brush Rowan's cheek, then drift away through the opening in the trapdoor as the remnants of the old master's body silently dissolved to reveal a pair of leather aprons, a pair of rusted pliers and a brass key attached to a length of braided leather cord.

Rowan sank onto the cellar stairs, his lungs burning, the dull warmth in his palms growing with an unholy intensity. He fished the iron pliers from the leavings of Vance's body, slotting them carefully inside his coat next to the ones that hung from his own belt.

"We don't have time to mourn, Rowan," Sterling said, his voice devoid of any mercy. "The midnight tide has come and gone. The Court of Mirrors will be closing its doors in half an hour."

Rowan stood up, dusting the ash from his knees. The golden thread was blazing beneath his skin now, past his elbows, nearing his biceps. "If your family laid that trap, Sterling, then you know the way through the Glass Wardens."

"I know the price for entry," Sterling said smoothly, angling back towards the dark doorway. "And unlike you, Weaver, I did not come empty-handed."

The entrance to the Court of Mirrors lay hidden behind an abandoned opera house in the lower quarter of the East Ward.

Instead of the grand foyer Rowan expected to see beyond the shattered oak doors, two great, gaping mirrors faced each other, each stretching upwards to the ceiling thirty feet above. Sickly green light pulsed between them, making the young Weaver's teeth throb as he crossed the threshold.

Two figures stood in the shadows of the great hall, tall and gaunt, their faces hidden behind discs of mirror-smooth silver.

They wore tailored frock coats of flexible obsidian glass, and in their hands they held long halberds, the business ends of which dripped with the pale, unguent-like liquid of the mirror water.

"No menders," the one on the left intoned, and somehow, despite his voice being the sound of the man's words, Rowan could hear the echo within the walls. "The Stitcher's Guild does not hold sway within the Court."

Sterling stepped past Rowan, fumbling inside his duster coat before withdrawing a small crystal vial filled with a dark, swirling liquid that looked something like the night sky.

"The blood of the Sterling line," the nobleman said, holding the vial up between two fingers. "A small deposit for my father's interest in the Glass Daughter."

The one on the right lowered his weapon, the curved glass blade scraping against the floor with a sound like the keening of a woman. Rowan's golden palms burned in sympathy.

"One may pass," the right guard rumbled. "The pig with the copper thread waits outside."

"He comes with me," Sterling said in an icy tone. "Or I will break this vial right here on these marble tiles and the Court can take his soul as tribute."

The two guards exchanged a long, wordless glance, their silver masks glinting in the eerie green glow. Then, as one, they moved back, their weapons clattering against their shoulders.

"The Great Looking-glass is in the lower rotunda," the one on the left said, his voice like the scrape of broken crystal. "Do not look at the reflections, Weaver. Some have teeth."

Rowan shoved his gloved hands into his coat and followed Sterling down a spiraling stair well of thick mirror glass, the effect of which was entirely disorienting. With each step, hundreds of shifting images of the young Weaver and the nobleman rose in panels from the floor, walking as though possessed the length of the glass walls.

In one, Rowan wore the silver robes of a Guild Master, in another, Sterling's throat was slit with a wire and in a third, the city was gone, replaced by a desert of the grey Void-ash and two pale moons overhead.

"Don't look," Sterling muttered, already narrowing his eyes against the images. "The glass thrives on possibility, and the longer you linger on one thread, the easier it is to be pulled through."

The bottom of the stairwell opened into a great rotunda, the floor a disc of glass two hundred feet in diameter. At the very centre of the rotunda, hanging over an abyss of flowing, swirling liquid silver, was the Great Looking-glass, a twenty foot frame of wrought iron and bone, inside of which stood a woman.

She was clad in a tailored black coat, slashed with silver thread, her dark hair cut short to frame the elegant planes of her pale face. In her right hand she held a foot long needle of solid obsidian, the tip pressing into the glass on the far side of the frame.

"You're late, Sterling," the woman's voice rang out, projecting from the silver pane so clearly Rowan could hear every word, every mocking inflection. She turned her dark eyes on the young Weaver, studying the golden thread in his wrists.

"And you have brought a mender with you," she purred, tilting her head. "How very quaint. I have not tasted an Anchor bloodline in some time."

Rowan gripped the heavy iron pliers in his hand, the golden thread blazing along his veins, his sleeves smoking. "You're Vesper."

"I am," the woman said, tapping the tip of her needle on the glass pane which instantly bloomed with a hairline crack. A tendril of golden mist seeped from the fracture, curling around the rotunda. "And you, Weaver, are standing here on the very thread I intend to sever."