The Slanted Worlds Read Free

freedom.
    The way they lived as if nothing would ever happen to them.
    And yet within a generation or two, all this would be totally . . .
    â€œHere we are.”
    She looked up, startled.
    The young man was back, with a gray cardboard box file. He laid it carefully on the desk; she gazed at it in intense satisfaction. A peeling label on its surface, obviously years old, read:
    11145/6/09 DEE, MORTIMER
.
    â€œWho was he?” The curator sounded curious.
    She licked her dry lips, suddenly nervous. “A medieval scholar.”
    â€œIs it for a thesis?”
    For a moment she had no idea what he meant. Then she said, “Oh . . . yes. Yes. My thesis.”
    He nodded and moved off, but not very far; he spread a sheaf of papers at a nearby table and began to work on them, giving her a quick, watchful look.
    Nothing she could do about that.
    Eagerly she pulled on the white gloves.
    She took out a notebook and pencil. Then, her fingers trembling, she opened the file.
    It contained a yellowing manuscript.
    She was almost afraid to start. It had taken so long to get here. Weeks of research in stuffy libraries, hours of lying awake in her damp room in the hostel, worrying, thinking, planning.
    It had become an obsession, more important than eating, sleeping, even surviving in this busy, dangerous city; the obsession of finding out everything possible about the obsidian mirror.
    She was thin and worn out with it.
    But she was a Venn, and they were an obsessive family.
    She took out the manuscript; it was a single page, light and crisp at the edges, some sort of thin skin, terribly fragile, smelling faintly of mildew. On top was a more recent note on blue paper. She already knew what that was, and smiled at the familiar handwriting of John Harcourt Symmes, the stout, rather pompous Victorian seeker after magic whom Jake and Venn had met in the past, whom she had once seen burst through time into Wintercombe Abbey.
    On the covering page he had written:
    This Page is the only surviving fragment of the work of the legendary Mortimer Dee. His book,
The Scrutiny of Secrets,
is of course, lost, known only in brief quotations by other writers. But this small scrap seems to be in his own hand. My attempt at transcriptions is below. Dee’s work is in some fiendishly difficult code, which I confess baffles me. I can only guess at its meaning, and find it endlessly frustrating. . . . But the man certainly had some secret knowledge of the dark mirror I have obtained and which he names the Chronoptika.
    If only I could find out what it was!
    She flicked her eyes sideways. The curator was absorbed in his work.
    She lifted her bag onto the table, took out a handkerchief, and blew her nose.
    He took no notice.
    So she slid the tiny camera from her palm and quickly photographed the single tightly written fragment. The camera made the softest of clicks, but in the hushed silence they sounded huge.
    She coughed, cleared her throat, had it hidden away before he glanced up, eyes glazed with words, not even seeing her. Then he looked down again.
    A desk magnifier stood nearby; she moved it closer and clicked the light on, aligning it over the piece of brittle parchment. Looking in, she gave a great sigh of dismay.
    Fiendishly difficult code
was something of an understatement.
    How could she ever read this? The page was covered with Dee’s tiny, black, indecipherable writing. In places it seemed written backward; in others it ran up and down in random diagonals, or curved into the margins. Everywhere, there were diagrams in strange spindly lines, sigils of lost meaning, alchemical signs, formulae, scraps of what might be Latin and certainly Greek. And all over it, as if the man had doodled and drawn and daydreamed his visions too fast to write, was a interwoven web of drawings, of strange landscapes, towers against the moon, edges of castles and corners of rooms, and trees, many trees, tangled and hollow and