GlassFall

The glass did not break so much as it let go. One moment Blade had both hands flat against the Grand Mirror's frame and the taste of static on his tongue, and the next he was falling through a cold that bit at his knuckles before it dumped him face first into loam the color of a dead fireplace.

He got a forearm under himself before his nose found the dirt, and the ground gave under his weight like something that had been soft for a very long time. It smelled of campfires, old ones, the kind that had gone out decades before anyone thought to put a name to the smoke. He breathed it in once, coughed, and pushed himself up to his knees.

Behind him the mirror's frame hung in the air for three more seconds, a crack of silver light holding its shape against a sky that had no business being the color it was, and then it folded in on itself and was gone. No sound. No afterimage. Just the Emberwood, waiting.

"Up," Blade said, to nobody and everybody, and got his boots under him.

The rest of the column spilled through behind him in the ragged order of people who had learned the hard way not to bunch up at a chokepoint. Nell Dorr came first, because Nell always came first, her sourdough crock clutched against her chest with both arms like she expected the new world to try to take it from her. She staggered two steps, caught her footing in the soft ground, and planted herself like she'd decided the spot was now hers by right of occupation.

"Don't you dare drop," she told the crock, not looking at anyone. "Not after what you survived back there."

Kest Rell came through next, shield already up, his crooked shoulder set at the angle it always set at when he expected trouble before he'd had time to look for it. He swept the tower shield in a slow half circle, taking in trees that rose past any ceiling Blade had ever stood under, and said nothing. Kest rarely said anything when there was nothing yet to brace against.

Yara Fen hit the ground already counting. She dropped to one knee in the loam, yanked her tally belt around so the brass cups faced up, and started running her thumb down the row of counting stones before she'd even gotten both boots fully planted.

"Twelve," she muttered. "Twelve through, twelve accounted, and I want every one of you standing where I can see your fool faces before I mark the page final."

Grin came through last, which was how he always came through, pouring off the back of Blade's heels like ink finding the lowest point in a floor. He rose in a slow unspooling, three paces of him lifting off the ground before his shape settled into something like a man standing at ease, and then he tipped his head back and looked up at the sky with the particular stillness he used when he was deciding whether to be funny about something.

"Well," Grin said. "That's one way to redecorate."

Blade looked up too, because there was no putting it off. The sky over the Emberwood was a bruised violet, thick and close, like dusk had been poured over the world and left to set before it finished. No sun showed anywhere in it. No moon either. Just that color, pressing down through gaps in a canopy built from trees that made the drowned oaks of the first layer look like saplings.

The trunks rose in columns big enough to garage a wagon inside, bark the gray-black of char, and their lowest branches hung thirty feet up like the rafters of some church nobody alive had built. Between the trunks the undergrowth was thin, scattered, as if the forest floor had decided long ago that nothing small was worth the trouble of growing.

"Twilight that doesn't move," Grin said. "I've seen worse interior design. I've also seen a lot better."

"Count again," Blade told Yara, not because he doubted her but because a second count cost nothing and he'd learned that lesson in a flooded basement he didn't want to think about right now.

Yara didn't argue. She never argued about counting. She just ran the beads again, lips moving, and said, "Twelve. Same as the first time, same as it'll be the third time, if you want to waste my morning."

"Not wasted," Blade said. "Just thorough."

A brass prompt flickered low in the corner of his vision, patient the way these things always were, like it had been waiting politely for him to finish being alive before it bothered him with paperwork.

SYSTEM NOTICE

TERRITORY UPDATED: LAYER TWO. THE EMBERWOOD.

DEATHS REMAINING: 87

LOCAL CLOCK: UNSTABLE. SYNCHRONIZATION IN PROGRESS.

Eighty-seven. He'd gone into the mirror with the same number, which meant at least the crossing itself hadn't cost him anything. He filed that away as the only piece of good news he'd gotten since the glass broke and went back to looking at the trees.

Somewhere off to the north, low and resonant, a bell rang. Then a second note, pitched wrong against the first, the kind of wrong that made the hair on Blade's arms stand even though he couldn't have said why. A third note followed, further off than it should have been able to travel in the time between strikes.

The moss at his feet moved.

Not blew. Not rustled. It bristled, every strand of it standing up at once like a dog raising its hackles, and then it hummed, a low vibration he felt through the soles of his boots before he heard it through the air.

"Nobody move," Blade said.

Nobody moved. The moss settled back down over the span of maybe ten seconds, strand by strand, and the hum faded with it until the only sound left was Kest's shield creaking faintly on its strap and somewhere behind them, a child's dry, wheezing cough that Blade recognized without turning around. One of Chalk's younglings. He'd deal with that in a minute.

"Bells," Grin said. "Three of them, out of tune with each other, and the ground took it personally. I'm starting to think whoever built this place had strong feelings about percussion."

"You said that like a joke," Blade said. "Say it again like you mean it."

Grin's grin, the wide white crack of it that never quite matched the rest of him, thinned out a fraction. "I mean it. Something in those three notes made the ground react like it was being asked a question it didn't want to answer. I don't know what the question was. I don't like not knowing."

That was as close as Grin ever came to admitting he was unsettled, and Blade took it seriously because of that, not despite it.

Up on a split root plate the size of a overturned wagon, Sparks had already scrambled to the highest point she could reach without climbing a trunk nobody had cleared for climbing yet. She had her brass surveyor goggles pulled down over her eyes and her little pocket compass out, flipped open, needle spinning.

Or not spinning. Blade watched her tap the glass with one knuckle, the gesture of someone who'd done it a thousand times and expected the instrument to behave the thousandth time just like it had the previous nine hundred and ninety-nine.

It didn't behave.

"That's not right," Sparks said, mostly to herself, tapping again. "That's not right, that's not right, it was pointing north a second ago and now it's pointing..." She turned in a slow circle, holding the compass flat, and the needle followed her like it was chasing something instead of holding a fixed direction. "It's pointing at me. Every time I turn, it just follows me around like a dog."

"Try the other bearing," Rivos called up to her. He'd come through the mirror somewhere in the middle of the column and Blade hadn't clocked him until now, greatcoat dusted gray with loam already, slate and chalk already out of his breast pocket like he intended to start a new ledger page before anyone had finished catching their breath. "The bell struck before the needle moved. Mark that down. Could be the two are connected."

"Could be," Sparks said, and gasped as the needle spun a full half circle and stopped dead, pointing back toward the shattered threshold where the mirror used to hang. "Okay. Okay, that's new. That's new and I don't love it."

"Magnetic north isn't fixed here," Rivos said. It wasn't a question. "It shifts with the bells."

"That's my working theory," Sparks said, scrambling back down off the root plate with the quick, nervous economy of someone who did not trust the ground to stay where she'd left it. "I had four different plats drawn up for forest terrain before we crossed. None of them account for the compass lying to me. I'm going to need new math."

Blade reached inside his gambeson and pulled his father's watch out by its chain, the vintage brass casing warm from being pressed against his chest the whole way through the mirror. He thumbed the latch and the cover sprang open on the same cracked face it had always had, the second hand sweeping its slow, patient circle like it had no idea it had just crossed between worlds.

He held it up next to the direction the bells had come from and counted the seconds against his own pulse, the old habit from a lifetime standing over a lathe where a tenth of a second mattered more than most people would ever understand.

The watch ticked true. One second, one second, one second, steady as a heartbeat that had never once skipped.

But the System's clock in the corner of his vision stuttered. He watched the little readout cycle forward, hang, then jump two digits at once like a projector missing a frame, then settle, then stutter again.

"Grin," Blade said. "Tell me if I'm seeing this wrong."

Grin drifted close enough to look, which for Grin meant leaning his whole shapeless bulk toward Blade's shoulder without actually touching him. "You're not seeing it wrong. Your grandfather's heirloom is keeping better time than the all-powerful cosmic ledger. I find that extremely satisfying and also a little bit frightening."

"Father's," Blade said.

"Noted and irrelevant to my point."

Nell had set the crock down at last, wedged between two roots where it wouldn't tip, and was already moving through the huddle of refugees with the particular brisk energy she used instead of comfort. "Wheel ruts," she called out, though there were no wheels and no ruts yet, just habit talking. "Stay inside where I can see you. Nobody wanders off to go stare at a tree because it's tall. We've had quite enough staring for one morning."

One of the younger refugees, a thin man Blade recognized from the quarry crossing but couldn't name, asked in a voice gone thin with fatigue, "Is it always going to look like this? Like it's about to be dark and never gets there?"

"Don't know," Nell told him, not unkindly, already moving past to check on the next face. "Don't much care right now either. Dark or not dark, you eat what I hand you and you keep your feet under you. That's the whole plan until I think of a better one."

Blade closed the watch and tucked it back against his chest, the ticking a small steady thing under his palm while everything else in this place refused to agree on what time it was.

"Kest," he said. "Three-pace perimeter, tight as you can hold it without stretching your line thin. I want eyes on every approach before anybody sits down to catch their breath."

Kest shifted his bad shoulder, testing the weight of the shield against it, and gave one short nod. He didn't ask why. He never asked why when the order made sense to him, and apparently this one did.

"Yara, once the perimeter's set, I want names. Everyone who crossed, everyone injured, anything broken in the crossing that we're going to need replaced."

"Already started," Yara said, pencil already moving across a fresh page, tongue caught between her teeth in concentration. "Don't rush me and don't tell me my own job."

Blade almost smiled. Almost. The bells had gone quiet, the moss had settled, and the trees stood over all of them in their long silent rows, patient in a way that didn't feel like patience so much as indifference, the kind of waiting a machine does rather than a person.

Grin settled lower, until he was nearly at eye level with Blade, his porcelain grin fixed and thoughtful. "For what it's worth," he said, quieter now, pitched for Blade alone, "I don't like how quiet those trees went. First layer, the water never shut up. Here, it's like the whole forest is holding something in and waiting to see if we're worth the trouble of noticing."

"Then we don't give it a reason to notice," Blade said. "Not yet."

He looked up once more at that bruised, lightless sky, at branches that hung like rafters over a congregation nobody had invited, and set his hand against the watch ticking steady beneath his shirt. Eighty-seven lives. Twelve people behind him who'd trusted him to find a way through the mirror and out the other side in one piece. Whatever rules this place ran on, he intended to learn them before they had the chance to teach him the hard way.

"Perimeter's set," Kest said from somewhere to his left, voice flat and certain.

"Good," Blade said. "Now we figure out which direction is actually forward."