“I don’t see—” Then I did. The whole room gave the faintest of shudders and fine white clouds of plaster dust began to sift down over the polished furniture. “Come on!” Everyone’s time had been running out faster and faster. Now the Lady Blue’s time had run out, and somehow I didn’t think she would go gentle into her last goodnight.

THIRTY-TWO

Kara led us through the bulk of the sleeping leviathan, the engine that had broken free the Wheel that once steered the ship of the universe on its straight path through the unending night. The engine that even now nudged the Wheel further and further from true, threatening at any moment to steer us over some precipice into a fall that could shatter worlds.

The pulsing light throbbed throughout the structure, the siren penetrating all corners, making speech almost impossible.

“We have to hurry!” I shouted the words at Kara’s back in order to be heard. “We don’t have much time.” Since we broke the mirror I had been hearing various parts of the great engines come to life, or rather feeling it through the soles of my boots. Beneath the siren the labouring mechanisms groaned and whined, an unhealthy edge to the sound.

Kara turned away from the door in front of her and narrowed her eyes at me over Hennan’s head. “Perhaps the person with the key that opens everything should go first?”

I could hand the key over, but that would feel like handing over my choices. Instead I squeezed past and held key to door until the hidden locks surrendered and the metal slab slid out of my way.

We passed half a dozen facets of the mirror, positioned as if they might be windows into the interior of the Builders’ creations, but each showing the Lady Blue’s sanctum. Twice more I saw the room shudder and on the second time larger pieces fell from the ceiling, along with several mirror frames, and innumerable glittering shards as the broken mirrors had their teeth shaken from them.

“Up?” I looked up the narrow shaft, pulsing red.

“Up.” Kara nodded.

“Will Snorri make it? He’s quite fat.”

Snorri growled, the light gleaming on muscles slick with sweat as the temperature rose around us.

I drew a deep breath, and regretted it. “Smells like the rest of the Builders came in here to die.”

The tight confines of the shaft muted the siren, but as I clambered into the small chamber at the top it returned with full force. I stumbled to the mirror facet set into the wall and slapped the key onto one of the dead screens below it. “Make it stop!”

That last “stop” burst out into a silent room. Kara looked up at me as she climbed out of the hole.

“Well done.” Rubbing her ears, she stepped back to let Hennan out.

“Thank the gods for that.” Snorri squeezed out of the shaft, flexing his shoulders.

“We’re close now. The central chamber is next but one. Through there.” Kara pointed to a peculiar opening, tall, narrow, leading into what looked to be a small cupboard.

The sound of a door crashing open spun us all around. The Blue Lady stood in the doorway of the room beyond the mirror, arms spread as if about to cast some terrifying spell, grey hair in disarray, a cloak of midnight blue swirling around her. Her age shocked me. I knew her to have more than a hundred summers under her belt, but I’d not seen her like this, like something that might be piled in the corpse cart at the back of a debtors’ prison: bones wearing old skin that wrinkled up around each joint. Worse than her age was the way she moved, possessed of unnatural vitality, avid, eyes full of fever. She sprang at the surface between us, covering the distance in a moment. Her face filled the mirror, shrieking curses at us in a language I was glad I didn’t understand.

I took a step back as two gnarled hands covered the mirror facet and the whole thing grew dark. “What’s she doing?” Mora Shival might look a shadow of herself—not a shadow, more as if she had been scraped too thinly across the day—but she still scared the hell out of me. “What’s she doing?”

“I don’t know,” Kara said. “We should keep going though.”

“Where?” I asked.

Kara pointed to the slot she had indicated before.

“But it’s just a cupboard or something . . .”

“The map says it’s through there.” She glanced down at the paper in her hand, frowning.

“Fine.” I pushed past Snorri and stuck my head through the slot. “There’s room for one person to stand in here, and no other way out.”

“Maybe it goes up,” Snorri said.