2

De Courcey.

There could be little doubt that Ghislain was some connection of Margot’s, though whether Margot herself was aware of his existence or not was impossible to determine. She had certainly never mentioned any missing relatives, as far as Florian could recall; did that mean that this Ghislain had nothing to do with her, despite the coincidence of his surname? Florian longed to return to Argantel and question Margot on the subject at once, and to this end he did his best to find his way back down to the bottom of the house, and the mirror that had brought him through. But the thick, syrupy light that drenched Laendricourt confused his perceptions. His eyes ached and watered, pierced by the brutal glitter of bright golden light off cold, hard glass. Doors blurred, shifted and vanished before he could reach them, or when he did manage to hurl himself over their inviting thresholds he never found that the rooms beyond resembled the chambers he’d glimpsed through their inviting archways.

He went towards a grand bedchamber hung about with dappled drapes and panelled in wood, but ended up in a glass-walled conservatory abundant with trumpet flowers. He thought he saw a stone-walled storeroom, once, through a high archway, and tried to go in, for he had travelled deep and down and hoped this might carry him back into the cellars. But it melted away as he approached, and he stepped out instead into a ballroom so heavily grown over with roses that he could see little of its walls or ceiling. He turned and went back the way he had come, but the corridor beyond was gone and he came out instead into a room full of mirrors.

The room had too many sides, and the quantity of mirrors made it impossible to gauge its proportions. Everywhere he looked he saw an infinity of depthless glass stretching endlessly away; the effect was dizzying. Florian instantly decided it would be best not to linger long in there, but when he tried to retrace his steps he found that the door had once again slunk away, and there were no more in evidence anywhere. Everything was mirrors, and he was trapped.

Moreover, none of the mirrors showed his reflection; only each other’s.

‘All right, then,’ said Florian to the empty room, and sat down cross-legged in the very centre of the floor. Someone had inset a mosaic impression of a rose just there, and traced its edges in shadow. It gave him an obscure sense of satisfaction to sit on it. ‘I have never met a more ill-natured property,’ he said with great indignation. ‘All a person can reasonably expect of a house is that it should carry one in the proper manner through a sequence of the usual kinds of rooms, but this is beyond you! If you must be so dreadfully inconvenient then I shall simply sit here and read.’ So saying, he drew the little blue book out of his pocket and opened it up.

His performance was only partly bravado. It had actually struck him, as he wandered unproductively through the maddening house, that some of the places he found were not unfamiliar to him. Riffling quickly through the book, he soon found the first familiar scene: those red trumpet flowers against hazy glass walls, playing some unheard melody. And there, several pages later on, was the boot-room, its painted complement of boots and shoes different, no doubt, from the ones he had seen, though just as disorganised. There was the ballroom grown over with roses, and the scullery piled high with dishes; the music-room, the greenhouse… they were all in the book.

He began to turn over its pages with a greater interest, wondering whether all of the paintings contained therein reflected actual rooms in this unfamiliar version of Landricourt. He was soon strongly persuaded that they did.

Who had created such a collection? He was no longer convinced that it was Pharamond’s work; perhaps his master had bound the paintings up into a book, but how could he have painted them? For that matter, supposing even that he had not painted them — how had he come by the pictures at all?

Moreover, why had anybody gone to such trouble? For these were no slapdash sketches. The tiny paintings had been created with great skill, each chamber of Laendricourt brought to life in mesmerising detail. Florian paused at a rendition of a small library, through which he remembered passing himself at one point earlier in the day. It looked almost as he remembered it, complete to the stacks of books overflowing from the bookshelves and piled upon the floor.

How he should like to go to one of these places, and make a direct comparison! The matter intrigued him greatly, for he began to feel that the book was not a mere curio, done for art’s sake. The detail was too intricately rendered, the colours too vivid, the collection too comprehensive. Could any book about such a strange, slippery place as Laendricourt ever be mundane?

What a pity it was that he had foolishly got himself trapped. Energised, he sprang up from the floor and marched upon the nearest of the mirrors, a great, oversized article towering far over his head. It was a narrow, skinny thing, and when it finally consented to display his reflection he found that he looked narrow and skinny, too, and a bit stretched around the neck. A disconcerting image. He examined it for some time, optimistically pressing his hands to its cold, inflexible surface in case he should fall through it, as he had done late under the Gloaming of last night. But it would not oblige him, and neither would any of the other mirrors — each different in size, proportion and arrangement to the next, as though it offended them to be too similar to their neighbours.

‘Well,’ said he aloud when he had at last given up on that idea, ‘I never met a more stubbornly unhelpful set of mirrors either.’

They made no reply.

‘I suppose I cannot persuade one of you to turn back into a door?’ he tried. ‘I cannot quite recall which one it was that I came through, but that need not matter. Any door to anywhere will do.’

They made no reply to that, either.

He took up the book again, hopeful that it might contain some clue he had hitherto missed — and, upon flicking through it, found a painting of the very room he was standing in. He had somehow failed to observe it before, and that fact made him suspicious, for he had, he thought, gone through the collection with great care. How could he have failed to discover it, if it had been in the book all along?

‘I hope,’ he said sternly, ‘that you were not hiding yourself from me before. That would be very rude, would it not?’

The painting vouchsafed no response either, and Florian began to feel that he was come among a highly standoffish bunch. He turned the book around in his hands, examining the painting of the mirror-room from every angle, for it seemed to him that the image blurred oddly as he looked at it, and could not be relied upon to hold to any consistent configuration. Flickers of colour blossomed, wavered and vanished, and would not hold themselves still for his perusal.

‘There,’ he said suddenly, and pinned something within the painting with the tip of his forefinger. It squirmed beneath his touch, but this time it did not slink away, and he was able to observe that it was a book. A rendering, in fact, of the very same book he was holding… the book slithered and wormed its way through its own pages, did it? ‘Now, what are you about, tricksy thing?’ he wondered.

He saw it all, in a flash. The book was there, indubitably, but it was there in reflection. Inspired, he released the painting of the little book from his grip — only half watching as it spun away — and turned the page over. On the other side was that orangery again, the one that seemed filled with naught but trumpet flowers. That would do. He held the book up, allowing the painting to reflect in the nearest mirror.

It did not quite work as he intended, or hoped. The reflected image spread to fill the mirror edge to edge, and from top to bottom, but the mirror’s proportions did not allow of an accurate representation of it; the room came out looking too wide at the corners, and waifish in the middle. He tried again through a succession of mirrors until at last he arrived at a handsome, moderately-sized thing clad in a carved, gilded frame. The painting of the orangery filled the mirror just nicely, and everything there looked restored to its proper proportions.

Steeling himself against another disappointment, he walked forward. As he had hoped, the mirror was no longer a mirror, but a door; he encountered no glass, no barrier of any kind, only empty air; and when he had passed through the frame, he found himself in the orangery itself, his nose filled with the pungent perfume of the flowers.

When he turned back, the mirror-door was gone, and the room of reflections had slunk out of sight.

‘Interesting,’ he declared to the empty room, and stuck the book back into his pocket. His theory, then, was confirmed, and the fact that the book had been in the possession of Pharamond Chanteraine began to interest him very much. And he had not forgotten that his master had tried to deliver it into Oriane’s hands. What had he been about? What secrets was the Master of the Emporium hiding? Another theory began to take dim shape in Florian’s mind, and if his enigmatic master had been standing right before Florian at that moment, he would have had some pointed questions to answer. Or, as was more likely, avoid answering, for it was never his habit to take his shop boy into his confidence.

Florian permitted himself a moment’s dissatisfied reflection upon this point, and then dismissed his unworthy feelings. No doubt Chanteraine had his reasons.

He strolled around the hot-house for a little while, experiencing a mild reluctance to leave it again, for it was pleasantly warm in contrast with the biting cold that permeated the rest of the house. But it was no good to linger there long; he would find no way home that way, nor discover anything more about the mysteries that increasingly occupied his mind. It required a few moments’ diligent searching to discover a way out, but at length he found an abbreviated glass door hidden behind a tangle of trumpet-flowers, and opened it at once. He had to bend almost double to fit through, for it was barely half the size of an ordinary door.

On the other side was the music-room.

‘Aha!’ said he. ‘I remember now.’ And he took up the book again, thumbing through its pages until he found the painting of that very room. It soon occurred to him that the painting was not only accurate, but eerily so, for it reflected the room in which he was standing down to its very last detail — even the single red rose, plump and fresh, standing in a porcelain vase atop the gleaming piano; the violet-spun rug upon the floor, one of its corners turned up by a careless step; the pearl hat-pin lying, dust-covered, upon the window-sill.

Florian bent and straightened the rug, ensuring that all of its four corners lay once again flat. When he looked again at the painting, this new configuration of the carpet was accurately reflected therein.

‘Quite interesting,’ he declared. ‘I like you after all, book. I think we will rub along charmingly together.’

There was a mirror here, too, though he did not know if it would answer his purpose, for it did not reach the ground; it spanned the wall from corner to corner, hanging elegantly over the mantel above the fire. Nonetheless, still determined to retrace his steps to the original mirror if he could, he chose a page from the book that depicted a cellar-room filled with huge wine-jars and held it up.

The reflection spread to fill the mirror, just as it had in the mirror-room some minutes before. It was become a doorway, there could be no doubt about that. But how could he go through it, when it hung four feet off the floor?

‘There are no consistent rules to this place,’ he reminded himself. ‘Everything turns about as it wills. Perhaps I may turn myself about, if I will?’

He tried this. First he took the twisted oak stool from before the piano, and dragged it over to the mantel. Then, finding it insufficiently tall, he stole three fat blue cushions from the seat before the window and piled them on top of the stool. A precarious business, climbing up this makeshift mountain, but he managed it, and stepped from there onto the mantel — which, being broad in width and solidly marble in construction, cheerfully bore his weight. He tried, through a (doubtlessly comical) series of ducking and crouching motions to make himself small enough to pass into the mirror, which failed.

‘Hm.’ He went back to the book, and turned it, so that the vision of the cellar room tilted in the mirror and fell sideways.

Then, by some method he did not fully understand, Florian tilted himself until he fell sideways, and the mirror now being a tall, thin thing instead of a wide, narrow thing, he strolled through it with all the nonchalance of a fellow for whom such sideways-tumblings were the most natural thing in the world. He did not glance backwards, to find the music-room turned all side-about behind him; such a view would only disorient him.

He emerged into the cellar to find the stone-cobbled floor blessedly firm under his feet. There was not much space to walk about in that room, for it was of mean proportions, and was so stacked high with wine-jars that only a few square feet of the floor remained uncovered. They were stacked very neatly, those jars, in a regular pattern that ascended to the ceiling, each stone-made and painted. They were too covered in dust for him to discern any particular pattern rendered upon them; clearly they had not been touched in some time.

A door lay behind him. He peeped through it, and found upon the other side two things: a corridor which looked quite out of place, being brightly-lit and painted all over with a mural of trees. Though they were quite obviously only paint and plaster, the trees rippled in the semblance of a stiff breeze — actually rippled, and swayed, and shivered under the wind! It was no mere illusion, no painter’s trickery. The trees seemed to be growing jewels rather than flowers, and each was arrayed in finery of a different hue.

Florian was distracted; but it was not his business to be distracted, not at this time. On the other side of the incongruous corridor — which, he was certain, belonged to some other, quite different, part of the house — he saw another entryway, devoid of a door, and this led into a cellar-room much like the one he was in, only more spacious, and less crowded with wine-jars.

How could he reach it? He was wise to the trickery of Laendricourt by now, and not at all under the impression that he could simply cross the passage and wander into the other room. He would have to try something else.

He backed up as far as he could, and ran three swift steps. A great, flying leap carried him into the corridor, over it, and straight through into the room beyond, without his feet touching the floor at all. Not to any avail, for he did not land in the second cellar-room as he had hoped. He came out somewhere else altogether: a kind of workroom, judging from the three stout, oaken work-benches lined up along the centre. The surface of each was covered in what appeared, to Florian’s experienced eye, to be distilling and brewing equipment — the Chanteraine Emporium was well provided with exactly such paraphernalia, with which Pharamond and Sylvaine concocted their elixirs.

Leaning over the middle bench was Ghislain De Courcey, an ancient, frayed robe forming a protective layer over his regular clothing. By his elbow stood a woman unfamiliar to Florian: clad in ivory lace, with a ribbon of indigo at her throat, she had deep-dark eyes and abundant hair. Her arms were folded, and from her posture alone Florian judged that she was in some way displeased with Seigneur De Courcey.

The inelegant manner of Florian’s entrance could not help but send up a clatter of noise, and both looked his way.

‘Ah,’ said Ghislain. ‘The young man with the grass got into his hair.’

The lady looked long and narrowly at Florian. ‘It has rather, hasn’t it?’ she agreed. ‘A Changeling, do you imagine?’

‘No,’ said De Courcey briefly, and turned back to his work. ‘Born and bred in Argantel, I make no doubt. Only he has strayed into a mirror-pocket at some point in his youth, perhaps, and come out with a little magic got into his blood.’

Florian did not know whether to feel more interested by the topic under discussion, or annoyed that they spoke freely of his probable lineage and history before his very face. ‘As far as I know, I was indeed born in Argantel,’ he offered, quite as though they had addressed their remarks to him. ‘I didn’t have much chance to question my parents about it, however.’

De Courcey did not respond. The lady looked Florian over again, and then appeared to dismiss the matter.

Florian’s own interest did not so easily subside. He had never before considered that there might be some reason behind the peculiar colour of his hair — as far as he could remember it had always been the colour of grass, and he was not the only person in Argantel with such a characteristic (though the hues did vary). ‘What is a mirror-pocket?’ he enquired, though doubtful of receiving a response.

The lady ignored it, having drifted over to observe whatever it was that De Courcey was engaged in. But De Courcey, after an interval of silence, did at length speak. ‘It has long been known that, should one contrive to trap a quantity of magic in a defined space and surround it with suitably primed mirrors, the effect is to create a never-ending flow. A web, if you like, of magical currents which, endlessly reflected back upon themselves, will tangle and build into a fine little pocket of chaos. Anything finding its way into such a place will not likely emerge unaltered.’

Having just extracted himself from such a pocket, Florian needed no further explanation. He spared a brief thought to wonder what, if anything, had changed about him after that half-hour’s adventure. ‘But are there such pockets in Argantel?’ he said, for he did not remember ever seeing such a place before.

‘Your hair,’ mused De Courcey, ‘is proof that there are. There need not be an array of glass mirrors involved, of course, though it is a popular approach if one wishes to build one. Anything that reflects, and that is suitably receptive, will do the job. It has been known to occur at, for example, a confluence of water-ways, should they chance to be ideally arranged.’

‘Ghislain,’ said the lady, in a tone suggesting she had wanted to interrupt for some time. ‘Just what is it that you are concocting now? I cannot make it out at all.’ She picked up a glass bottle filled with a whitish substance and sniffed it dubiously.

‘Do not drink that one, Nynevarre,’ said De Courcey. ‘You will not at all enjoy its effects.’

Nynevarre hastily set the bottle down.

Florian picked up one that lay upon the bench near his elbow. It had an unusually long neck, and was filled almost to the brim with something viscous and ruby-red. A single bubble formed at the bottom and drifted lazily to the top, whereupon it burst, filling Florian’s nose with a sweet scent. He felt sorely tempted to drink.

‘Syrup of rosehips,’ said De Courcey, glancing Florian’s way. ‘With one or two things added. Potent. You may sample it, if you like.’

‘Is that wise?’ said Nynevarre sharply.

‘Hush,’ was De Courcey’s only response, and coolly said.

Nynevarre folded her arms again, and fixed Florian with a glowering gaze he did not know how to interpret. Was she angered with him?

It certainly seemed that taking a sip of syrup-of-rosehips may furnish a range of results, not all of them positive. But Florian was curious, and feeling intrepid after his various successes of the day. And the concoction was appealing, no doubt about it. Its fragrance tugged at him, its colour dazzled his eyes, and he could not help himself. He tipped up the bottle and allowed a very small quantity of it to pour onto his tongue.

Nynevarre quickly took the bottle off him, and set it safely back down upon the bench, watching him closely. This Florian barely noticed, for all his senses were occupied with the business of experiencing the syrup. It tasted like — like honey and wine, like warm chocolate, like summer rain and fresh bread and the berry cakes his mother had used to make, when she was still alive. It tasted, in short, like everything and nothing; nothing in particular, but everything that Florian had ever loved in his life.

Scents washed over him, the same: the syrup’s own, sweet aroma gave way to a jumble of peach-juice and jelly, of mead and milk, of bonfires in autumn and clear ice in winter and the scent of Margot’s hair. He felt intoxicated, drunk in a way he had not been in years — and at the same time not drunk, far from it. Sharper, in fact, than he ever remembered being before.

‘Too potent,’ said De Courcey, watching him narrowly. The man shook his head, and sighed, and bent back over his work with a dismissive declaration of: ‘Quite useless.’

‘I would not say so,’ Nynevarre disagreed. ‘Not useless at all.’

‘He is magic-drunk,’ said De Courcey. ‘In a moment he will be quite mad, and then he will be himself again, and with what to show for it?’

Florian struggled to focus on the words, for they all fell over each other, and blurred, and in short did everything possible to hinder comprehension. He was sweating, and dizzy; he sat down rather suddenly upon the floor, and held his spinning head in his hands.

He was seeing things. He saw a moonlit copse of ancient trees, a pool of clear water in the centre. He saw an enormous clock with too many faces, hands spinning at impossible speed. He saw a girl who looked like Sylvaine Chanteraine wearing the moth-wing coat, and he saw Pharamond Chanteraine in his workroom, binding up a book. He saw Oriane Travere standing before a mirror, and heard the sounds of clock hands ticking all around her. He saw his employer again, dishevelled and weary, sitting in an attitude of despair upon a bare stone floor. He saw a great many other things, whirling too quickly through his mind for him to grasp their import.

At last the visions ebbed, leaving him shaking and shocked.

‘Don’t try to get up just yet, my dove,’ said Nynevarre, in a far kinder tone than she had addressed to him before. She looked upon him kindly, too, and fussed about him in a manner he found quite agreeable just then. ‘You’ll be weak for a little while, yet.’

He did feel weak, like his limbs were turned to water. ‘W-what was that?’ he managed to say.

‘That,’ said De Courcey in frustration, ‘was far too potent. Nynevarre, I do not know what is to become of this mess. Believe me, there is not much I would not do to please you, were it within my power, but what am I to do here? There is no recipe which does not instantly send my poor subjects mad.’

‘You are doing fine work,’ said Nynevarre soothingly, and winked at Florian.

De Courcey only made a sound of deep disgust.

‘Did you see anything of note?’ said Nynevarre, to Florian this time.

How could he determine whether anything he had seen was of note? He tried to describe his visions to Nynevarre, but he could not make enough sense of them, and the memories were fading from his mind even as he spoke. He achieved a few disjointed references to arbours and coats and his master, none of which, he could easily perceive, made any sense to Nynevarre. Her face lost its kindly, hopeful expression, and sagged into dismay.

‘He is rather mad,’ she conceded.

De Courcey sighed. ‘It will wear off soon.’

Some small part of Florian’s mind was still lucid, and crystallised in that part was one, clear thought: that this was not quite the first time he had experienced something like this. There had been another time, not long before: when he had found the goldish elixir that Pharamond Chanteraine had sent to Oriane, and stolen a sip.

His lips moved, and after going uselessly through three or four incomprehensible sentences he managed to say: ‘Do you happen to know a man called Chanteraine?’

‘No,’ said De Courcey shortly. ‘Save that you have mentioned him before.’

But Nynevarre’s eyes widened, and she clutched suddenly at Florian’s arm, so hard as to bruise his skin. ‘Chanteraine?’ she breathed. ‘Pharamond?’

‘Yes,’ said Florian, satisfied.

‘Chanteraine!’ she repeated, and now she seemed angry. ‘Tell me where you encountered a man of that name! And tell me, at once, where he may be found!’

‘Who is he to you, ma’am, if I may ask?’

Her lips tightened. ‘My disgraceful truant of a brother.’

Florian nodded, and tucked that information away. Then, watching De Courcey closely, he added: ‘And Margot De Courcey? Do you know that name?’

Ghislain De Courcey stiffened, turned, and stared at Florian. And now Florian had cause to be a little ashamed of his sensational tactics, for the stern, cool, sometimes grim man betrayed a terrible pain, and an equally terrible hope. ‘M-margot?’ he said. ‘My Margot? You — you know her?’

‘Very well,’ said Florian, more gently. ‘Please. I know I am an interloper here, but I am a most unwilling one. As are you, sir, I think? Perhaps, we may be able to help each other.’ He added, thinking again of his visions, ‘And unless I miss my guess, it may be necessary to help my employer, too.’

Ghislain De Courcey looked at Nynevarre, who still appeared incensed. He looked uncharacteristically uncertain, but she growled something incomprehensible, sighed, and said: ‘It is high time that somebody unravelled this sorry tangle, to be sure.’

De Courcey looked tired. ‘Twenty-five years and more have I been stranded here — or is it thirty? I cannot now remember — and I have failed in every attempt. Consider that, young man, and contrive to look less cocksure.’

Florian’s optimism was not at all dimmed by this unpromising speech. ‘But,’ he offered, ‘things have changed. You now have me,’ upon which words he bowed, and as Nynevarre rolled her eyes and Ghislain De Courcey looked grimmer than ever, he held up a hand to forestall argument. ‘We have Oriane, who I am convinced is still somewhere about the place. And we have this.’ He took the book from his coat pocket again, and held it up, displaying one of the pages within.

It was the page showing a painting of a workroom, eerily similar to the one in which they were standing.

Now he had their attention. ‘Where,’ Nynevarre breathed, ‘did you get that?’