Mr Sharp was not used to being bested, or lost, and he was not at all in the habit of going barefoot. He was, above all, absolutely not accustomed to being a victim. Duty, practice and the warranted degree of personal pride he took in controlling his more violent competencies had long inured him to the sensation of being the most dangerous thing in the dark streets down which his duties as a member of The Oversight conspired to send him. The passage through the mirrors had, however, clearly undone him.
That was it, he thought: it was the mirrors. He was used to the shadows. There was altogether too much light in the wilderness of repeating images in which he had now gone deeply and irrevocably astray. Everywhere he looked revealed a lesser version of himself disappearing up an infinite tunnel of reflections: too much light, too little variation, nowhere to hide, nowhere to truly rest. Certainly there was nowhere to get a bearing. He knew he had slept at least twice since he had woken from the attack that had deprived him of his get-you-home, the Coburg Ivory and his knives and–most humiliatingly of all–his boots.
Being bested was one thing. Being robbed another. But stripping a man of his boots was an entirely different order of humiliation. Taking a man’s boots was to mark him as an impotent discard in the great game of life.
The man Dee–if he was indeed Dee–had gulled him like the most callow dupe, and his bare feet were a badge of his humiliation. Head down, he watched them stumble along the mirrored floor, his brain still woolly and disconcertingly unrefreshed by his last sleep.
These unsatisfactory sleeps were worrying to him because he was normally blessed with the soldier’s knack of taking five-minute naps whenever he could and waking from them promptly and revived. The mirror-bound sleeps–he was almost sure there had only been two but was not even convinced of that, so muzzy was his head–were different: he had no sense of how much time had passed while he was insensible and thus vulnerable. In fact he woke more tired than when he had let his head drop in the first place. Sleeping in the mirrors was draining him, sapping him not only of the very energy that repose was meant to restore, but also somehow enfeebling his ability to think straight. There was no doubt about it: he was losing track of time, just as surely as he had lost any sense of place and direction.
It was all this damned light.
And just when this thought came to him, he saw the black mirror. It came so conveniently that he wondered–fuzzily–if he had somehow called it into being as a respite from the unrelenting glare of the mirrored world. He stopped and turned at ninety degrees to stare in relief at the dark blankness.
It was the precise opposite of all the repetitive brightness in which he had been beset. It was nullity; it was void; it was a sovereign relief as relaxing to his eyes as it was to his mind, and he leant forward, hands splayed against it, and stared into the welcome lacuna, drinking it in with his eyes, greedy as a man in the desert who had stumbled on a well full of clear, cool water.
The blackness was not merely calming and refreshing, it was intoxicating. The longer he looked into it, the more he felt the tense muscles of his shoulders begin to relax, and with time his stiff back slackened enough to allow him to sway forward a little, almost as if swooning with relief.
He hung there for a very long time, staring deeply into the vacancy. Just gazing into it and allowing the void to fill his field of vision seemed to revivify him more than any of the unsatisfactory sleeps had done.
He would stop staring at it in a moment, when he was quite refreshed. He was certain he would do so. There was no urgency in the matter: he had not, he told himself in a voice that seemed to be getting fainter, been looking at the dark for so very long after all. He deserved respite, and his quest would indeed be easier and more prone to success if he allowed himself this brief interlude of replenishment.
He would definitely stop looking into the black mirror in a moment. He was determined on this. It was just so very… pleasant, looking into the featureless void. It demanded nothing of him. There was no harm in it. No harm at all. No harm in… and then his mind drifted away, briefly wondering exactly what it had been that there was no harm in… and then asking himself what he meant by harm… and then forgetting that question too.