Sephirot, p.23
Sephirot, page 23
Bolin took a slurping sip of the soup he was eating. “Certainly you do.”
“I don’t!” His voice rose. Daiyu looked at him, eyes wide with alarm, then she dropped her gaze. “My apologies,” he went on, in a quieter tone. “I meant no discourtesy. You have shown me nothing but kindness, taking me in and healing me when I was gravely wounded. I would have died without your care, and Daiyu’s. And I value everything I have learned here. But I can’t stay. Chesed is beautiful, and I would have thought any man would be a fool to leave it, but...”
“It’s not the end of your road.”
“Yes.”
“Then leave, and my blessing goes with you.”
“It’s not that easy. I have called up portals before, in Netzach, and Tiferet, by simply... I don’t know, it was like I told them to appear, and they did. In Gevurah, I created a portal from my own blood. But here, I don’t think that would work. This isn’t a place you can push around in that way.”
“No,” Bolin said. “It isn’t.”
“Then?”
Bolin shrugged. “Then figure it out.”
His forehead creased with frustration. “I’ve tried. Don’t you think I’ve tried? All the doorways in this house lead to other rooms, or to the outside. None of them take me out, set my feet back on my path.”
“Then you haven’t tried the right door.”
“You’re being deliberately cryptic.”
Bolin smiled. “No. Not that. Never that.” He frowned, looked up at the ceiling, considering his words. “You have done mind puzzles, perhaps? The sort of riddles we give children, that require you to see things from a different angle?”
“Sure.”
“When you have the flash of insight, the understanding that allows you to solve the riddle, it is an exhilarating feeling, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Suppose instead of allowing you to think about it, I gave you a riddle and told you the answer immediately. What then?”
“There’d be no point to it.”
“So.” Bolin’s shrewd gaze locked on his.
“So what?”
Bolin gave a harsh sigh of exasperation. “If I am not allowed to be deliberately cryptic, you are not allowed to be deliberately stupid.”
He shook his head. “Okay, fine. I get your point. But it doesn’t bring me any closer to the solution.”
“That is because you have not had the flash of insight yet.”
Duncan’s frustration continued to ramp up through the evening, and after a few more fruitless attempts to get Bolin to give him an answer, any answer, he decided to go to bed early. He walked down the shadowed hallway toward his bedroom, and as he opened the door, he saw Daiyu standing in her own doorway, still, her hands clasped in front of her.
“Duncan,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.
He turned, frowning. She rarely ever spoke to him without his speaking first, but now, she was looking directly into his eyes, with a resolve that he had not seen in her.
“What is it, Daiyu?” he said, dropping his own voice to a hush.
“When you were talking to my father tonight... It was in my mind to ask you, why are you so determined to leave us?”
“I thought I explained that.”
She shook her head. “All of that vague speech about your not being done with your journey. It is foolishness, do you not see that?”
He looked at her in surprise. “I have never heard you speak so boldly. But I was only speaking from my heart. I’m sorry if it seems foolish to you.”
“What if you are wrong? What if you leave now, only to go to another world like the one from which you escaped, one where you will be beaten and tortured and killed? You were fortunate enough to flee from them, and find healing, once. You might not be so fortunate a second time.”
“I can’t just stay here—“
“But why?” Her voice rose. “You still cannot answer that. Here there is work for you to do, good work, and the solace of a quiet home to return to.” She looked down, and the fire died out of her speech. “And I had hoped... I hoped that one day, you would speak to me... about... that perhaps you and I could be together.” The flush that spread across her cheeks was visible even in the gloom.
His heart gave an unsteady gallop. Why had he not anticipated this?
“Daiyu,” he said, his voice stumbling, “I had no idea you felt this way. I would never want you to think I would spurn you.”
“Then why? Why would you leave? Is there another, somewhere, in one of the worlds, who holds your heart?”
How could he answer that? Yes, there is... and she looks exactly like you?
But even Libby Chen now was a distant dream, like someone he had been involved with in another lifetime. He shook his head, and said, “Not anyone, not any more. It isn’t that there’s another woman. Or at least there hasn’t been, not for a long time.” How long ago, now? He wasn’t even sure.
“Then why?”
He shook his head. “I feel like it’s necessary, that if I stop here, that everything I went through in Gevurah will have been for nothing. That they will have won.”
“I do not understand. We have nothing to do with the evil men who did those things to you.” She was near tears, but held tight reins on her emotions. Her body was immobile, her lips barely moving as she spoke. But for her voice, she could have been a marble statue.
“I know.” He passed a hand over his face. “I’m explaining myself badly. But the point of all I’ve been through—the fighting, and the running, and suffering under the whip and the threat of execution—is not to spend the rest of my life in idleness.”
“Our work is not idleness—“
“No, but this place is. Chesed... it’s like a wheel slowly turning, never a hitch, but never going anywhere. If I stayed here, I would get swallowed up. I would become part of the wheel.”
A pair of tears coursed their way down Daiyu’s carven marble cheeks. “I would have given myself to you.”
“I know,” he said, trying to think of a way to assuage her pain, and finding none. He reached out and touched her arm, but she pulled away, looked down, and took a step back into her room.
“Then there is nothing more to be said,” she said, in a voice that was barely a breath.
She closed the door, leaving him standing alone in the shadowy hallway, feeling an ache worse than the physical pain he had endured, coupled with shame and helplessness and frustration that would have brought a shout of rage to his lips had such an outburst been possible in this tranquil place.
In the end, he simply turned, and went into his own bedroom and closed the door.
And it remains to be seen, he thought, as he undressed in the dark, whether I will be able to leave in any case. So all of this anguish may, finally, accomplish nothing at all.
Daiyu said nothing more about their encounter. When Duncan got up the next morning, and met her as she was preparing breakfast for herself and her father, she was as courteous as ever.
And as distant. She was dressed in a warm wrap of a deep ultramarine, hair up in a loose knot at the base of her neck. Beautiful as ever, but unreachable. She would not meet his eyes, and asked him only if he needed anything before she went out to join her father in the workshop.
“No,” he said, his voice hollow. “No, I’m fine.”
She gave a little bow, picked up the two bowls of hot cereal, and carried them outside, where the cold air made curls of steam rise from them, twist into the air, and vanish.
“Except for the fact that I feel like shit,” he said, watching her retreating figure through the window. Then he put more water on to boil.
He sat by himself at the little table, eating his breakfast and drinking a cup of strong tea. There had to be a way out of here. The compulsion to leave was becoming overwhelming, even though he had every reason to stay. A promise of peace and quiet, doing work that was at least more meaningful than pushing around numbers on accounting sheets. A home to live in, with a man who was wise and kind, and who took him in to heal him of his wounds, and then allowed him to stay when he had no real necessity to do so. And a woman who, with no encouragement whatsoever, would be his lover, and who looked exactly like the lover he had left behind.
What man would say no to this?
“I would,” he whispered into the still tranquility of the little house.
It was a beautiful life, but it was not for him.
After cleaning up, he went into the mirror room, and walked up onto the altar. He once more saw his reflection, wavy dark hair tied back into a thick pony tail, jaw edged with a neatly-trimmed beard, jagged white scar on the right cheek. A deep, anguished knowledge in the brown eyes.
“I understand, now,” he said, to himself. “But what good does it do me if understanding sucks?”
He reached out, for the first time, to touch the cold glass surface of the mirror. And where his fingertips touched it, it rippled, as if he had been looking at his reflection in a still lake.
He jerked his fingers back as if stung, and frowned. “What the hell?” he said, under his breath.
He reached out again, and tapped the surface. The surface beneath his fingertips had the cool smoothness of glass, only a little less solid. Once more, waves radiated out from where he’d touched it, making his reflection shimmer. He pushed harder, and the tips of his fingers sunk into the mirror. When he retracted them, they were coated with silver, as if he’d dipped them in mercury. He flicked his hand at the mirror, and silvery drops scattered from his fingertips, flying glittering through the air. They skittered across the mirror’s face and were absorbed, making little circular marks on the surface that were gone in an instant.
“It was easy enough once you saw it, wasn’t it?” said an amused voice, and he turned to see Shao Bolin standing in the doorway. “But you had to discover it yourself. I don’t even know if it would have worked if I had simply told you about it.”
“So this is the portal.”
“Apparently so.”
“Where will it take me?”
Bolin shrugged. “I don’t know. Does that matter?”
He shook his head. “No. No, I don’t think it does.”
Bolin nodded. “So.” He gestured toward the mirror.
He hesitated. “Where is Shao Daiyu?”
“She is in the workshop. She could not bear to watch.”
He looked down, feeling the anguish rising in his heart again, harder to endure than whips or knives. “I’m sorry. If I could stay, I could have loved her.”
“She knows that. It doesn’t make it less painful. But know you go with her love, however you were unable to reciprocate it.”
“I never meant to hurt her.”
“Most of the hurt in the world is accidental. Such is the way of things.”
“Thank you for everything you have done for me. I will never forget it.”
Bolin shrugged. “Much of the good is accidental, too. You came our way, we helped you. One day you may happen on someone, all by accident, and you will help him. It all balances, if you take a large enough view.”
“Goodbye.” He wondered whether this wry little man was expecting a hug, or a handshake, but Bolin only smiled and raised both hands in farewell.
“Feet back on the path, then,” he said.
“Yes.” Duncan swallowed. “Tell Daiyu I’m sorry. And tell her goodbye for me.”
He turned, and stepped into the mirror. Like a stone falling into a pond, the glass swallowed him up, shuddering for a moment, and then once more becoming still, silver, inert, giving back only what was put into it.
Chapter 8
Da'at
Duncan stepped forward, turned around, and found himself facing a mirror.
It wasn’t an oval mirror with a silver filigree edge, as it had been in Shao Bolin’s house. It was a long, rectangular mirror, from floor to ceiling. He half expected that from this side it would be a transparent window, and that he would see into the mirror room, perhaps catching a glimpse of Bolin watching him—but all he saw was his own reflection.
He reached out and touched the glass. It was solid, unyielding. He looked at his fingertips. There was no mercury silvering, nothing but his own skin.
He turned away, and about three feet in front of him was another pair of mirrors, angled toward each other. He looked into them, and saw two reflections of himself, one looking over his left shoulder, one over his right.
He took a tentative step forward, into the angle between the mirrors, until he could see multiple reflections of himself, front to back and back to front, vanishing into infinity. Once again, he reached out a hand, and found himself touching a cold polished surface, as hundreds, thousands of Duncan Kyles did the same thing.
A turn to the right brought him face first into another mirror, set at angles to the one through which he had arrived. But there was a gap between those two, a narrow passageway, also edged with mirrors that bounced his reflection back and forth as he squeezed through it. It led first straight, then down some shallow steps and onto a platform made of transparent glass.
Above him was yet another mirror, and he looked up to see his own face staring back down at him. Beneath his feet was room after room, as if he was on the top floor of a glass castle. In some of the rooms below were various mirrors and windows and tall columns that looked like giant prisms. Far down, perhaps three or four floors below, there was a rectangular white space that might have been a doorway made of something opaque, but there was no way to tell how it might be reached, nor where it would lead if he could reach it.
He had come here knowing he would be following his nose. He accepted that he was trading the safe, placid world of Chesed for whatever came his way. This mysterious world was no more and no less than what he had asked for.
He crossed the floor of the room, trying to ignore the disorientation caused by the hundreds of images his motion sent walking to and fro. He stopped… they stopped. In the nearest mirror, he could see himself from the back, a reflection of a reflection from some other surface in the room. This was a novel enough experience, but he quickly lost interest. Any obsession with looking at his own form was spent and over, now that it had apparently served its purpose in getting him here.
But where was here? He had yet to see anyone else. The place was totally silent except for his muffled footfalls when he walked. He went across the room, hands held out in front of him in case some of the walls were closer than they appeared, then up a short set of steps and down another passageway.
It was in the next room, an octagonal space enclosed by alternating panes of mirror and transparent glass, that he found the first thing that was different. In the center was a sheet of what appeared also to be glass, but it was a different sort—milky and opaque, with an oily luster. As he looked, he saw it wasn’t uniform. It was marbled with white and cream bands that swirled slowly, with a motion like the drifting of clouds. He reached out once more and touched it. Underneath his fingertips was a waxy sheet, rigid as plastic, slightly warm to the touch.
And as soon as he contacted it, it started to change.
The surface turned a murky scarlet, like the embers in a dying fire. Then the swirls coalesced into buildings and cobblestone streets underneath a cloudy sky at sunset. In the distance loomed the outlines of larger buildings against the dimly-lit horizon. The nearer ones were tumbledown and soot-covered. There were no people, but near at hand was the skeletal outline of a gallows, with the silhouette of a hanging body, its broken neck askew.
He was looking into the hellish landscape of Gevurah. His back and side ached with the memory of it.
As he watched, the glass went as yielding as clay, and his fingers sank into it. There was a pull on his arm, as if he were being drawn through the glass.
He yanked his hand back.
“Goddammit, no,” he said in a yelp. “I sure as hell don’t want to go back there.”
And the glass instantly returned to its previous milky white opacity.
So that’s how the portals would be in this world. At least it was more straightforward than having to draw one in his own blood.
He walked past the portal and down a long hallway that sloped gradually upwards. Mirrors at odd angles caught pieces of his reflection, some from the side, some from the back. He walked with one hand brushing the glassy walls. Without using a tactile sense to supplement his vision, the place was too disorienting, and he was afraid of falling.
This did not stop him from walking headlong into a transparent sheet of glass that blocked his way. He cracked his forehead and shoulder against it, swore profusely, and then turned away from it, proceeding more slowly now with his right hand on the wall and his left hand stretched out in front of him, as he had in the lightless caverns of Malkuth.
Vision was no good if all it did was confuse. Almost as bad as being in total darkness.
Another portal appeared in the distance. Getting to it took maneuvering around another clear glass wall, but he came up to it, and touched it. This time, the alabaster surface turned a sunny yellow, and when it cleared, he saw the labyrinth that lay in front of the hospital/prison of Tiferet, with its statuary and clumps of nodding sunflowers. His view was from above, perhaps from the balcony where Liam had said the people who ran the place watched the sport, when they fed the monster who lived in the middle. But there was no sign of movement, no guards, no lion-headed giant, nothing but a strangely innocent world of green and gold lanes, cloudless blue skies, and the gleam of bronze statuary.
He removed his hand, and the vision winked out.
A twisting corridor, lined with mirrors alternating with glass panels, led Duncan up to a platform with a third portal. A touch brought a wash of green to the surface, and at this point he wasn’t surprised to see the broad lawn and well-appointed manor house that had been his home for a few days in Netzach. The immaculate gardens were in full bloom, with roses and hawthorns and the little white flowers of straight-sided holly hedges. He turned away. The false comfort he’d received there, floating on a matrix of lies, held as little appeal for him as the torture chambers of Gevurah.
