The Mirrors of Elangir, chapter 3
Here's the next sneak preview of my new fantasy novel, The Mirrors of Elangir. Chapter 1 is here, and chapter 2 is here.
I reached our street just as the curfew bell rang, and trotted the rest of the way. No light came from any of our windows — Mara would have gone home already, and Uncle must be in bed. I stood in the porch to catch my breath, still not quite believing the ultimatum Shanu’s father had given me. I’d thought things had been going well — to be honest, I’d hoped her parents would help to support us for a year or so after the wedding.
Three months to earn as much money as I had in the last year. Could it be done? Not by clearing junk from dead people’s houses, that much I knew. Four hundred svara would be a very good start to a household for most people. Did I really want such a grasping, calculating man as my father-in-law? No, but I had no choice. People had no influence over who their parents were.
I cast a light spell and went into the visiting room, trying to estimate how much we’d get for the stuff from Dyareg’s house. Fifty svara, maybe, once our costs were taken out, split between Uncle and me. Perhaps seventy-five if we separated the valuable items and found more specialised buyers for them.
My gaze fell on the mirror we’d taken to Yindrath. That had to be worth something now that we knew what it did. If he was right that it was Elangic — and the workmanship and its enchantment seemed to confirm that — it had to be at least a thousand years old. How much could we get for it? I had no idea. On the one hand, it was rare, possibly one of only two in the world. On the other, it had little practical value except as something to see your reflection in. Unless...
I moved to pick up the mirror, and my light went out. I froze for a moment, then backed away, hoping I wouldn’t trip over anything in the dark. I cast another light spell. This one was noticeably dimmer than the first. I went to the kitchen for a candle — Mara, being an indifferent magician, found them easier than making her own light. I lit it with another spell and retrieved the mirror, then went upstairs to my room.
By itself, the mirror was an ornament or a piece of art. But what if we had the other one of the pair as well? Two people could communicate at any distance, as quickly and easily as if they were in the same room. To get the other mirror, obviously I’d need to know where it was. It could be anywhere in the world, but there might be clues in the picture itself that would help me.
I removed the mirror from its leather case and propped it on my chair. I took a deep breath and touched the mirror’s rubies in the sequence I’d discovered.
Straight away the snowy scene appeared before me. I gasped involuntarily at its brightness and sharp detail. Yindrath had said the snow meant it had to be in a high latitude. The sun had appeared at the left of the picture, fairly high in the sky, and I took this as meaning the other mirror was west of here. West and south would put it on an island in the Tian Ocean, or perhaps even the continent of Elangir. The latter made more sense, given the mirrors’ provenance — perhaps in the days when Elangir had an empire, the emperor used these mirrors to stay in touch with the provincial governors.
The city looked deserted. Its walls might hide a multitude, but any inhabitants would surely light fires to keep themselves warm, and I saw no smoke.
I reached under the bed and pulled out a flat wooden box, disturbing a thick layer of dust as I did so. Mara never cleaned under there; perhaps she thought the past was better left buried. With a deep breath, I flipped the catches.
Inside, my father’s navigation instruments shone as brightly as the last time I’d looked at them. That would’ve been a year or so after Uncle had come home and told me he was going to be looking after me from now on. Sight blurring, I set the box on the floor and lay on the bed. I’d thought I was done crying over Father.
I didn’t see him all that often when I was a boy, but when he was at home, he packed in more than other boys’ fathers did in the whole time they were there. I still remembered how scared I’d been of the rhinoceros in the old Zoological Gardens, and how curious I’d been about the bears, sweltering under their fur. Then there were the fishing trips upriver, and the jaunts around the bay in Uncle Tomaz’s rowing boat. Tomaz had done his best to raise me, but Father’s death had dealt me a blow from which I’d never fully recovered.
Well, now I’d just have to do my best. I dried my eyes and lifted the contents of the box onto the table. Among the brass instruments were charts rolled up in leather tubes and a small thick book. The book contained tables of numbers, tide times for all the ports around Asdanund and most of those around Nuhys — a remnant of a simpler time. The charts were mostly of the seas around Asdanund. They looked odd, as the water was full of details — depths and currents, as far as I could tell — while the land was featureless, except for a few prominent hills and buildings. I found one chart of the known world, which showed the north and east coasts of Elangir and only the vaguest sketch of its west and south coasts. Under this was a thin brass plate engraved with a chart of the stars.
The largest of the instruments was an astrolabe, used to measure angles, mainly for determining latitude. That required you to measure the height of the sun above the horizon at noon, and it looked as though that time had already passed at the other mirror, so it would have to wait until tomorrow.
For longitude, most navigators preferred to use a declinometer, a complex apparatus of pendulums and balances that told you the strength and direction of the local magical field. You already knew your latitude from the astrolabe, so you looked up the field vector in a set of tables, and that gave your longitude to within about a tenth of a degree — roughly six miles, good enough for most work. But unless the mirror was much cleverer than I thought, I wouldn’t be able to measure the field through it.
Where was Father’s declinometer, anyway? I rummaged through the box, not finding it. He had only the one case for the tools of his trade, so why would that one instrument be missing? I might’ve assumed Uncle had sold it, except that there was no second-hand market in navigators’ instruments. But worrying about that wasn’t going to help me find the other mirror. I’d have to use the other method — calculate the difference in local time between the two places.
I had at least a few hours to wait before the stars appeared in the other mirror, and so went downstairs to brew some tea. As I sipped it, I tried to estimate what the pair of mirrors might be worth if we sold them. Couriers charged to deliver letters according to weight and distance. But the picture in the mirror had no weight, and could go halfway round the world as easily as down the street. On the other hand, you couldn’t send messages wherever you wanted, only between the places where the mirrors happened to be.
Perhaps, then, instead of selling the mirrors to a couple of rich or important people, we could keep them and use them to send messages for other people. If we kept one in Symeera and put the other in, say, Darmath, letters could save a nine-day journey by sea — eighteen days for a reply to come back. We could then charge based on how long it took the scribes to copy a letter when they read it in the mirror. Even better, it would be much more profitable than sending a letter by ship, because we’d be paying only for two scribes, not the ship and its crew. I had no idea how many letters crossed the Sea of Mulkara every day, but given that it cost a svar and a half to send one, there was a lot of money to be made if we could do it faster. Of course, before we could start making money, I had to find the other mirror. I drank another two cups and headed back upstairs to watch for sunset.
Waiting made the time pass more slowly. I thought of Shanu — her smile, her laughter, her soft voice — and wondered whether our first child would be a boy or a girl. A boy would be better for carrying on the family business, but she’d want to name him after her father, and I wasn’t sure I could live with a reminder of that man in my house — our house.
Despite the tea, I dozed off a couple of times, but gradually the sun in the mirror sank towards the horizon, and the sky grew darker. A few stars were visible at the top of the sky, not enough for me to be confident of identifying them. The city showed no lights, reinforcing my belief that it was deserted.
I picked up the star chart and gazed out of the window. My room faced roughly east, and so was well-placed for seeing stars as they rose. The night was relatively clear, so I should see plenty of them. Buildings and hills obscured the horizon, which would delay my sighting of each new star by about ten minutes.
I knew a few of the main constellations, and gradually picked them out. There was the Tiger, which meant the one below it was the Dragon, upside-down, defeated but not dead — never dead. The ancients had better imaginations than me, or perhaps not as much to occupy themselves in the evenings. I wondered if they’d held meetings to discuss what to call the constellations, or if some fellow with nothing better to do had announced one day that he’d divided the stars into groups and come up with names for them. Had they thought he was mad? Or had they argued with him — “That group of four isn’t a tower — it looks more like a shield.” “Don’t be daft — our shields are round. Rectangular shields won’t be invented for another five hundred years. It’s a crab.” “A crab? That’s mad.” “No madder than any of these other groups. Who ever heard of a tiger defeating a dragon, anyway?”
Eventually, the sky in the mirror was dark enough to pick out constellations. The first one I recognised was the fuzzy red patch known as the Camp Fire, much lower in the sky than I’d ever seen it. Father had mentioned that as you moved north or south, the stars shifted in the opposite direction, to the point where some disappeared under one horizon and new ones came in at the other.
I picked out the Tiger at the edge of picture, and now realised that I couldn’t see the horizon in any direction. I wasn’t even sure which way the other mirror was facing, though it must be more south than north, and more east than west — otherwise I wouldn’t see any familiar constellations. I’d have to wait for the Dragon to rise over there and make a guess as to how high it was here. Better than that — I could use Father’s astrolabe to measure the height of the Dragon here.
I struggled with the instrument’s bulk to align it with where I’d guessed the horizon was, and then tilted the crosspiece to sight on the lowest star in the Dragon. How had Father controlled this monstrosity? It seemed to require three hands. The best I could manage was that the star was now between seventy and eighty degrees above the horizon, meaning that the other mirror was between five and six thousand miles west of here. I laid the astrolabe on the bed, rubbing my arms to ease some of the fatigue. I could scarcely contemplate such a distance — eight times further than from here to Nuhys. Even without bad weather or any obstacles to sail around, that was a four-month return trip. If we departed tomorrow, by the time we got back, Shanu would have had to accept another suitor.
I reached our street just as the curfew bell rang, and trotted the rest of the way. No light came from any of our windows — Mara would have gone home already, and Uncle must be in bed. I stood in the porch to catch my breath, still not quite believing the ultimatum Shanu’s father had given me. I’d thought things had been going well — to be honest, I’d hoped her parents would help to support us for a year or so after the wedding.
Three months to earn as much money as I had in the last year. Could it be done? Not by clearing junk from dead people’s houses, that much I knew. Four hundred svara would be a very good start to a household for most people. Did I really want such a grasping, calculating man as my father-in-law? No, but I had no choice. People had no influence over who their parents were.
I cast a light spell and went into the visiting room, trying to estimate how much we’d get for the stuff from Dyareg’s house. Fifty svara, maybe, once our costs were taken out, split between Uncle and me. Perhaps seventy-five if we separated the valuable items and found more specialised buyers for them.
My gaze fell on the mirror we’d taken to Yindrath. That had to be worth something now that we knew what it did. If he was right that it was Elangic — and the workmanship and its enchantment seemed to confirm that — it had to be at least a thousand years old. How much could we get for it? I had no idea. On the one hand, it was rare, possibly one of only two in the world. On the other, it had little practical value except as something to see your reflection in. Unless...
I moved to pick up the mirror, and my light went out. I froze for a moment, then backed away, hoping I wouldn’t trip over anything in the dark. I cast another light spell. This one was noticeably dimmer than the first. I went to the kitchen for a candle — Mara, being an indifferent magician, found them easier than making her own light. I lit it with another spell and retrieved the mirror, then went upstairs to my room.
By itself, the mirror was an ornament or a piece of art. But what if we had the other one of the pair as well? Two people could communicate at any distance, as quickly and easily as if they were in the same room. To get the other mirror, obviously I’d need to know where it was. It could be anywhere in the world, but there might be clues in the picture itself that would help me.
I removed the mirror from its leather case and propped it on my chair. I took a deep breath and touched the mirror’s rubies in the sequence I’d discovered.
Straight away the snowy scene appeared before me. I gasped involuntarily at its brightness and sharp detail. Yindrath had said the snow meant it had to be in a high latitude. The sun had appeared at the left of the picture, fairly high in the sky, and I took this as meaning the other mirror was west of here. West and south would put it on an island in the Tian Ocean, or perhaps even the continent of Elangir. The latter made more sense, given the mirrors’ provenance — perhaps in the days when Elangir had an empire, the emperor used these mirrors to stay in touch with the provincial governors.
The city looked deserted. Its walls might hide a multitude, but any inhabitants would surely light fires to keep themselves warm, and I saw no smoke.
I reached under the bed and pulled out a flat wooden box, disturbing a thick layer of dust as I did so. Mara never cleaned under there; perhaps she thought the past was better left buried. With a deep breath, I flipped the catches.
Inside, my father’s navigation instruments shone as brightly as the last time I’d looked at them. That would’ve been a year or so after Uncle had come home and told me he was going to be looking after me from now on. Sight blurring, I set the box on the floor and lay on the bed. I’d thought I was done crying over Father.
I didn’t see him all that often when I was a boy, but when he was at home, he packed in more than other boys’ fathers did in the whole time they were there. I still remembered how scared I’d been of the rhinoceros in the old Zoological Gardens, and how curious I’d been about the bears, sweltering under their fur. Then there were the fishing trips upriver, and the jaunts around the bay in Uncle Tomaz’s rowing boat. Tomaz had done his best to raise me, but Father’s death had dealt me a blow from which I’d never fully recovered.
Well, now I’d just have to do my best. I dried my eyes and lifted the contents of the box onto the table. Among the brass instruments were charts rolled up in leather tubes and a small thick book. The book contained tables of numbers, tide times for all the ports around Asdanund and most of those around Nuhys — a remnant of a simpler time. The charts were mostly of the seas around Asdanund. They looked odd, as the water was full of details — depths and currents, as far as I could tell — while the land was featureless, except for a few prominent hills and buildings. I found one chart of the known world, which showed the north and east coasts of Elangir and only the vaguest sketch of its west and south coasts. Under this was a thin brass plate engraved with a chart of the stars.
The largest of the instruments was an astrolabe, used to measure angles, mainly for determining latitude. That required you to measure the height of the sun above the horizon at noon, and it looked as though that time had already passed at the other mirror, so it would have to wait until tomorrow.
For longitude, most navigators preferred to use a declinometer, a complex apparatus of pendulums and balances that told you the strength and direction of the local magical field. You already knew your latitude from the astrolabe, so you looked up the field vector in a set of tables, and that gave your longitude to within about a tenth of a degree — roughly six miles, good enough for most work. But unless the mirror was much cleverer than I thought, I wouldn’t be able to measure the field through it.
Where was Father’s declinometer, anyway? I rummaged through the box, not finding it. He had only the one case for the tools of his trade, so why would that one instrument be missing? I might’ve assumed Uncle had sold it, except that there was no second-hand market in navigators’ instruments. But worrying about that wasn’t going to help me find the other mirror. I’d have to use the other method — calculate the difference in local time between the two places.
I had at least a few hours to wait before the stars appeared in the other mirror, and so went downstairs to brew some tea. As I sipped it, I tried to estimate what the pair of mirrors might be worth if we sold them. Couriers charged to deliver letters according to weight and distance. But the picture in the mirror had no weight, and could go halfway round the world as easily as down the street. On the other hand, you couldn’t send messages wherever you wanted, only between the places where the mirrors happened to be.
Perhaps, then, instead of selling the mirrors to a couple of rich or important people, we could keep them and use them to send messages for other people. If we kept one in Symeera and put the other in, say, Darmath, letters could save a nine-day journey by sea — eighteen days for a reply to come back. We could then charge based on how long it took the scribes to copy a letter when they read it in the mirror. Even better, it would be much more profitable than sending a letter by ship, because we’d be paying only for two scribes, not the ship and its crew. I had no idea how many letters crossed the Sea of Mulkara every day, but given that it cost a svar and a half to send one, there was a lot of money to be made if we could do it faster. Of course, before we could start making money, I had to find the other mirror. I drank another two cups and headed back upstairs to watch for sunset.
Waiting made the time pass more slowly. I thought of Shanu — her smile, her laughter, her soft voice — and wondered whether our first child would be a boy or a girl. A boy would be better for carrying on the family business, but she’d want to name him after her father, and I wasn’t sure I could live with a reminder of that man in my house — our house.
Despite the tea, I dozed off a couple of times, but gradually the sun in the mirror sank towards the horizon, and the sky grew darker. A few stars were visible at the top of the sky, not enough for me to be confident of identifying them. The city showed no lights, reinforcing my belief that it was deserted.
I picked up the star chart and gazed out of the window. My room faced roughly east, and so was well-placed for seeing stars as they rose. The night was relatively clear, so I should see plenty of them. Buildings and hills obscured the horizon, which would delay my sighting of each new star by about ten minutes.
I knew a few of the main constellations, and gradually picked them out. There was the Tiger, which meant the one below it was the Dragon, upside-down, defeated but not dead — never dead. The ancients had better imaginations than me, or perhaps not as much to occupy themselves in the evenings. I wondered if they’d held meetings to discuss what to call the constellations, or if some fellow with nothing better to do had announced one day that he’d divided the stars into groups and come up with names for them. Had they thought he was mad? Or had they argued with him — “That group of four isn’t a tower — it looks more like a shield.” “Don’t be daft — our shields are round. Rectangular shields won’t be invented for another five hundred years. It’s a crab.” “A crab? That’s mad.” “No madder than any of these other groups. Who ever heard of a tiger defeating a dragon, anyway?”
Eventually, the sky in the mirror was dark enough to pick out constellations. The first one I recognised was the fuzzy red patch known as the Camp Fire, much lower in the sky than I’d ever seen it. Father had mentioned that as you moved north or south, the stars shifted in the opposite direction, to the point where some disappeared under one horizon and new ones came in at the other.
I picked out the Tiger at the edge of picture, and now realised that I couldn’t see the horizon in any direction. I wasn’t even sure which way the other mirror was facing, though it must be more south than north, and more east than west — otherwise I wouldn’t see any familiar constellations. I’d have to wait for the Dragon to rise over there and make a guess as to how high it was here. Better than that — I could use Father’s astrolabe to measure the height of the Dragon here.
I struggled with the instrument’s bulk to align it with where I’d guessed the horizon was, and then tilted the crosspiece to sight on the lowest star in the Dragon. How had Father controlled this monstrosity? It seemed to require three hands. The best I could manage was that the star was now between seventy and eighty degrees above the horizon, meaning that the other mirror was between five and six thousand miles west of here. I laid the astrolabe on the bed, rubbing my arms to ease some of the fatigue. I could scarcely contemplate such a distance — eight times further than from here to Nuhys. Even without bad weather or any obstacles to sail around, that was a four-month return trip. If we departed tomorrow, by the time we got back, Shanu would have had to accept another suitor.
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