CHAPTER 53

THE COBURG IVORIES

Mr Sharp stooped over a table in front of the glass cabinet, stripped to his waistcoat with his sleeves rolled up. His coat was neatly folded on the chair at his side, and he was honing his blade on an oiled whetstone with long precise strokes. He was quietly whistling a melancholy tune which anyone listening would have identified as an old ballad known as “The Parting Glass”.

Emmet stood beside him, not looking like he was listening, or indeed looking at anything in particular. He had mended the mirror, working without a break for days, painstakingly sticking the pieces back to the frame with a fish glue that was still adding its unpleasant odour to the shuttered room despite a fire he had kindled in the grate to draw the air up the chimney.

“You will please be so kind as to guard the house especially vigilantly when I am gone,” said Mr Sharp. “And I would be greatly obliged if you made sure no harm comes to Miss Falk, whether by the agency of others or by her own hand should her mind become sufficiently unstable as to make that a possibility, which I greatly fear it may.”

Emmet nodded.

“Thank you, my old friend,” said Mr Sharp, testing the blade with his thumb. Satisfied, he slid it into the left-hand sheath hanging from a leather harness looped flat around his shoulders. A matching knife hung on the right. He ignored that blade and reached down to his boot from which he extracted a third blade which he began to sharpen with the same deliberation as the other.

“Do you know how the Murano Cabinet came to be here?” said a voice from the doorway.

Mr Sharp turned his head without breaking rhythm with the knife on the stone. The Smith was standing with a leather-wrapped package in his hands, watching him.

“No,” said Mr Sharp, turning back to his honing. “And I had hoped they would not try and get you to persuade me not to go into the mirrors. I assure you my mind is made up, and my resolve adamantine.”

“Well, Jack,” said The Smith. “Adamantine, eh? You’re quite the poet these days.”

“I cannot be cajoled out of this,” said Mr Sharp, aware that The Smith, and indeed no one else, had called him by his true first name since he was a child.

“I shouldn’t dream of it,” said The Smith. “I think you’re right.”

The rhythmic sound of steel on stone stopped abruptly.

“You think I’m right?” Mr Sharp said, voice hollow with surprise.

“Desperate measures for desperate times,” said The Smith cheerily. “Go down fighting. It’s what we always do, if you think about it. It’s not as if The Oversight hasn’t dwindled to less than a full Hand before. I remember thinking the same thing the last time…”

“The last time?” said Mr Sharp.

“In the old premises. On Pudding Lane.”

“Before the fire?” said Mr Sharp. “Before the Great Fire?”

“That’s the one,” said The Smith. “About half a minute before the damn thing started, as a matter of fact.”

He beamed at the younger man.

“Nice knife,” he said.

“Wayland,” said Mr Sharp slowly. “How old are you?”

“Older than most, younger than some,” said The Smith.

“And why haven’t I asked you this before?” said Mr Sharp, looking as though he had just found something unexpected and unwelcome at the back of his mind. “Why has this not… occurred to me?”

“People don’t and it doesn’t: ask and occur, I mean,” said The Smith. “You’re not the only one who gets into folks’ minds and draws a veil over some things…”

Mr Sharp slid the knife back into his boot thoughtfully.

“Then I must really be in great peril,” he said, “if you’re revealing this to me now. You must think I really am not coming back to talk about that with the others. I mean I know there’s always been a smith in The Oversight. I just hadn’t thought it was the same smith…”

“When things are calm, I go away for years at a time, travel the highways and byways, a traveller, the wayland smith. People forget and then welcome me back. It just needs a little thought adjustment and it works well enough,” said The Smith with a self-deprecating shrug. “But we’re not here to talk about that.”

“Why drop the veil now then?” said Mr Sharp.

“Because you need to know that I know what I’m talking about, and do what I tell you,” said The Smith. “I’d much rather you came back, and came back the way you left. Seems I’m fond of you, for all your stiff, proud ways. And just coming back’s hard enough. You need to come back to the right here, the right now, and you need to come back as the right you.”

“I…” said Mr Sharp.

“No, you don’t,” said The Smith. “Sit down and listen.”

Mr Sharp sat. The Smith opened the doors of the cabinet.

“I asked if you knew how this blessed Discriminator cabinet got here,” he said. “Any idea?”

“No,” said Mr Sharp.

“It was a gift from one of the Rabbi Falk’s friends. A fellow freemason and Kabbalist and what-not,” said The Smith. “All that stuff and nonsense by which clever men miss the truth. Anyway, he was a Venetian, hence it’s Murano glass, and he certainly was clever. He was called Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt, and as much of a mouthful as his name was, he was more than twice the handful. Never could keep his fingers off anything he took a fancy to, always picking up the tools and such in my workshop and putting them back wrong. Anyway, water under the bridge; he’s dead and gone now. Thing of it is, he knew this cabinet here was powerful, but didn’t know how to use it. Lost a woman he loved in it once, hiding from her husband who surprised them up to no good, and never got her back.”

He reached out and touched the candlestick on the back wall of the cabinet. The wick lit instantly and the light which blazed from it was stronger than anyone would have expected from a single flame.

“The Discriminator,” he said. “The Blood Key, the flame that only kindles for those with enough of the old supranatural blood in them to give them more than normal powers. Because only those with enough of the blood can travel into the mirrors.”

“I do know that, Wayland,” said Mr Sharp.

The Smith smiled at him.

“You know the esoteric power of the thing, but its practical application is more mundane but equally important. It sheds a light.”

He plucked the candle from the holder. It immediately extinguished.

“If you’re in the cabinet and the doors are closed, then you need a light to see the reflections in the mirrors. So without the candle, and any old dip will do, the cabinet won’t work. The Key is the holder, not the candle. That said, your travels may take you into other dark cabinets or rooms. So always travel with a candle somewhere about your person.”

He pointed to the mosaics on the floor and ceiling of the cupboard: the tesserae which made them were black and white and brown, strangely dull and at odds with the freshness of the pale glass swags and twisted pillars that adorned the outside of the cabinet.

“There’s a cathedral in Venice, though it’s not as Christian a place as you might think. These are the same mosaic tiles as they have on the floor there. It’s not a flat floor like you might find in our St Paul’s; it’s a rolling floor, hummocked like the swell of the very sea that Venice sits on. And these compass roses, they’re to guide your travels as you set off on your voyage into the glass.”

He pointed at the floor.

“That one sets where.”

He pointed at the ceiling.

“That one sets when.”

“When? I think I’m lost,” said Mr Sharp.

“You won’t be if you do as I say,” said The Smith, unwrapping the rawhide lace that kept his leather package tied up. “Long as no one changes those mosaic dials, you have a chance of coming back to the right place and time.”

“But the mirrors,” said Mr Sharp. “I thought the mirrors just opened into a series of tunnels between different places where mirrors were set up facing each other.”

“That they are,” said The Smith. “But that’s just the smallest part of it. You can move along the tunnel of mirrors and choose the one to step out of, but you can also stop between mirrors and look at right angles to the tunnel you’re in.”

“What do you see?”

“Another infinite tunnel of mirrors,” said The Smith. “It’s a web of shortcuts behind the world’s scenery–that’s the way I think about it–or a grid. Or a maze. More like a maze really, because the trick is not getting lost.”

He dropped the leather wrapping onto the table and placed the object it had hidden in front of Mr Sharp.

“Don’t lose it, and it won’t lose you,” he said.

“It” was an object that looked at first sight to be an ivory ball about the size of an ostrich egg perched on top of a long stand, somewhat like a candlestick. The stand was elaborately turned, with a spiral-fluted column and a flared base, itself highly decorated with concentric ridges and pierced holes which gave it the look of lacework.

The ball was pierced with large circular holes, each about the size of a plum. Through those holes, on closer inspection, Mr Sharp could see that the ball contained, seemingly impossibly, a whole diminishing series of other ivory balls, each with their own holes bored into them; each of these balls seemed to have a thickness little greater than watercolour paper.

“Know what it is?” said The Smith, watching Mr Sharp examine the intricate object. “You can pick it up. The handle comes out of the stand.”

Mr Sharp lifted it out of the base and felt the nested balls shift as he moved it.

“It looks like the Chinese balls that the tea clippers sometimes bring back,” said Mr Sharp. “Except those are thicker and crudely carved with dragons and such.”

“I suspect that if we were to find others like us among the Chinee, we’d find these balls serve the same purpose,” said The Smith. “It’s a get-you-home.”

“A what?”

“A get-you-home,” repeated The Smith. “Made by a German called Eisenberg, a long time ago. You line the holes up to start, and then as you enter the mirror tunnels, each time you step out of a mirror, one sphere rotates. Step into another mirror? Next sphere rotates. When you want to come back, the holes turn and guide you home. Seven spheres, seven hops. More than that, you’re on your own.”

Mr Sharp took a tighter grip on the fluted handle.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Thank the Venetian,” said The Smith. “He ended his days in Bohemia as court librarian. When he was cataloguing some oddments he came across two of these. They were known as the Coburg Ivories. He sent them to Rabbi Falk, with his suspicions as to how they were to be used.”

“Where’s the other one?” said Mr Sharp.

The Smith looked a little uncomfortable.

“The Disaster,” he said. “They took it with them. It never came back.”