Mendark laid the Mirror on the floor of the cave and brought it to life with a touch of his finger. It showed scenes that Karan had seen on it before-gloomy landscapes of the world of Aachan: sooty grass, black hills, endless bogs, mountains like shards of glass, strange towers of fibrous iron leaning over bottomless gulfs. Nothing more. The Aachim gathered round, jostling one another the better to glimpse their home world that few of them had ever known. There were tears in Malien's eyes, and in many others.

"Can anyone here use it?" Mendark asked softly.

"Alas no," said Malien. No one else stirred to take it up.

"Fat lot of use it is!" Karan said acidly. "Or your Secret Art for that matter. Why did you fight over it so long if none of you even know what it's for?"

Giving her a bitter glare, Yggur reached across with an arm as long as an oar and plucked the Mirror off the salt. "I used it to spy on my enemies," he said. Mendark scowled at that. "Though it was not always reliable."

Yggur peered myopically at the Mirror, felt up the edge and touched the symbol. The Mirror went blank, then showed the salty plains and wind-sculpted mesas outside. The view shifted but, though he strained until one side of his face began to freeze, Yggur could extract no scene from it but the Dry Sea.

Mendark called on Tensor to tell them all he knew about the device, but Tensor, still huddled down the back of the cave, did not acknowledge him.

"Here is your chance to redeem yourself, chronicler," Mendark said. "What did you learn from Tensor while you were collaborating with him so eagerly?"

Llian shuffled forward. The boyish extrovert had been cowed; he just wanted to hide in the shadows. "I learned that it was made in Aachan in the depths of time, as a seeing device, and Tensor himself smuggled it here to Santhenar at the risk of his life." He paused, seeming, for the first time in his life, self-conscious in front of his audience. "Despite what was always believed, it is not a thing of power-"

"So they would have you believe!" Yggur spat.

"But it contains many, many secrets," Llian went on, "if anyone can unlock it. Most are hidden-even Tensor couldn't find them." He paused, trying to remember something. "Hold on! Faelamor said she had a key to the Mirror in Thurkad!"

"In Thurkad?" said Mendark.

"What, an actual key?" Tallia interjected.

"That's all she said."

"What else did you learn?" asked Mendark.

"Well," said Llian, gaining confidence, "we know that Yalkara stole the Mirror from the Aachim at the fall of Tar Gaarn and eventually took it back there when she built Havissard. She added these characters around the border." He touched them with a finger. "Though none of the Aachim knew what they meant. That's right isn't it, Malien?"

"It is so. She must have added this awful moon symbol too." She shuddered.

"Faelamor was sure that Yalkara had done something to it," said Llian. "That it was part of her purpose. I suppose that's why Faelamor wanted it so badly."

"Well, Shand," said Mendark. "You were quick enough to snatch the Mirror up after Rulke was gone, and quick to spout incomprehensible prophecies. What aren't you telling us?"

"I know that I can't use it!" Shand said vehemently. He paced back and forth, the salt gravel crackling underfoot. "The Mirror is like a book of history. It has many tales to tell, and some of them great ones, if you can put them together from the fragments that it allows you to see. But it's a clever, cunning thing, this Mirror of Aachan, and I'm not strong enough to force the truth out of it. None of us are-not even you, Mendark."

There was a long silence. The heat grew ever more oppressive. Tensor huddled in a corner, head bowed, eyes closed. No help there, Karan thought, eyeing the ruins of the Aachim with pity tinged with contempt.

Shand limped over to the entrance and eased the curtain ajar. Salt dust blasted in, and air as hot as a furnace.

"Shut the door!" they all cried together.

Shand's thin hair, white with salt, was outlined against the light, then he pushed the canvas back in place.

"So the whole business has been for nothing!" Karan burst out angrily. "All that I went through, and Llian too! The destruction of Shazmak. Yggur's stupid war! All the dead. Poor Rael. How he loved Shazmak ..." Her voice trailed away.

"Less than nothing," said Tallia, and even her voice was drear.

"Had I left the Mirror in Fiz Gorgo none of this would have happened," Karan said miserably.

"Perhaps," said Mendark. "Or perhaps you just allowed Rulke to advance his plans a little."

"You who have not had Rulke in your mind have never known fear," said Yggur with a shudder.

"I have known fear!" said Karan.

"And will again! I never forget an injury, Karan!"

Karan looked up sharply. Yggur was staring blackly at her. "Oh really!" she snapped. "How many people did you kill, trying to get it back? Ten thousand? Twenty? No one could count the people you've injured. If I were to cut your throat right now I'd be doing the world a service." She raised her little fist.

Yggur kept staring right through her. "You won't," he grated. "You're too soft!"

She shivered and turned away to Llian.

"But after all," Yggur said quietly, "your part was only a little part. The criminal folly was Tensor's."

Outside the wind roared. The canvas boomed. Tensor's sagging frame was wracked by a spasm that made him seem boneless. Slowly he raised his noble head to peer at Karan. In this light his huge eyes showed violet, but they were lifeless. Then the shutters came down, to Karan's relief, and he lowered his head again.

Another pause, an even longer one. Karan ended it. "Then what are you going to do now, you who have the power to move the world?" There was a fierce icy ring to her voice, and she glared at Mendark, at Yggur, at Tensor, at Malien, even at Shand, though Shand was at the entrance again and had his back to her. None met her gaze. "Do we meekly beg to become his slaves? Or do we creep into some dark hole and wait for him to have his will with our world?"

Shand turned away from the entrance, with the hint of a smile on his blistered lips. "There is one thing you could do, though I cannot imagine it would succeed."

Every eye, save Tensor's, was on him.

"Speak then," said Mendark irritably, when Shand made no move to do so. "It's about time you took some responsibility for this mess."

"The Forbidding came about after Shuthdar destroyed the golden flute. Nothing can move between the Three Worlds any longer."

"Ancient history! Have you anything to tell us that we don't know?"

"Rulke will never stop looking for a way to break the Forbidding," Shand continued equably. "To do so he must remake the flute, or something that can do what it did-maybe this construct. How can we stop him? There's only one way-build our own device, banish Rulke back to Aachan and seal Santhenar off from the other worlds forever."

"That is your proposal?" Yggur said incredulously.

"A suggestion humbly put," grinned Shand, "from a village woodchopper to the mighty."

Yggur turned away in disgust. "Stupid old man. If that could be done it would have been done long ago."

His response seemed to sway Mendark the other way. "Really?" he breathed. "That is very interesting, Shand. Go on!"

"The genius of Shuthdar," Shand began, "was not only that he made the golden flute, but that he knew how to use it. For though the making of the flute was a great task, learning how to use it was a far greater one." He turned and began poking the rags back into the cracks around the door frame.

"It seems that a particular talent is required," he went on. "A rare ability. One that is seldom found in the powerful. It is anti-mechanistic, anti-intellectual. A ..." he sought for the right word " ... a kind of empathy. The Ways between the Worlds are ethereal, complex, ever-changing, and so the player must seek out and tune himself or herself to the destination, and play a melody that is keyed to the Way that exists at that moment, and no other."

The whole room stared at him. Karan wondered how he came to know such things.

"Rulke designed the flute and helped Shuthdar at the making," Shand concluded. "So it is said in the Tale of the Flute. But Rulke never learned how to use it, for when it was completed Shuthdar stole it. Personally, I don't think Rulke would have been able to use it, by himself."

"I don't understand," said Karan. "Rulke brought Shuthdar from our world to make the flute in the first place. If he could do that, why did he need to make the flute at all?"

"That was a summoning," said Mendark. "The most perilous of all the Secret Arts, for half the time it kills the summoner, or the one who is summoned."

"Or both!" Yggur said gruffly.

"And you can't summon yourself," said Malien. "Rulke wanted to move freely between the worlds; that's why he made the flute. What we don't know is why."

"He must have been desperate, to take such a risk," Tallia observed.

"How does it help us?" asked Yggur harshly, wondering if Shand was making a labored joke at his expense. "We don't know how to make such a device."

"Or use it. That knowledge was lost when Shuthdar fell." Shand resumed his seat. "So maybe Rulke hasn't learned how to use his construct either."

"He can't have!" said Mendark. "The Nightland is insubstantial. He can work its fabric into shapes such as his palace and his construct, and into food and drink that will sustain him there, but he cannot make anything real, for there is nothing to make it with. Anything he brings out of the Night-land will revert to the nothingness from which it was made. To make his construct he must come to Santhenar. We've got to know when he does."

"Unless he's here already," Malien muttered. She pulled aside the flap over the entrance. The wind had eased momentarily. "Perhaps he's out there, hunting us." She slapped the canvas closed again.

"Gates can only be made to certain places and the Dry Sea is not one of them," said Shand. "Neither can he make his construct without tools and materials, any more than you or I could. He will go to a place where such things can be obtained easily. Right here is the safest place on Santhenar for us."

"Well, Shand," said Mendark, rubbing his beard, "your proposal interests me after all, though I can't help wondering why you made it. What are you up to?"

"I'm not up to anything," Shand said softly. "I just want to go home to Tullin."

"I don't believe you-you've manipulated things too carefully. We'd be happy to have you back, you know, even after all this time. You could still be one of us."

"No thanks," said Shand. "I've retired."

"I thought you'd say that." Mendark did not look upset. "Getting back to the point, can we find out how to use the flute?"

"I often wondered why Yalkara took the Mirror and kept it for so long," Malien said thoughtfully.

"It was always said that she used it to spy and to twist the perceptions of others, but that never rang true," said Shand. "Had it been said of Rulke or Kandor, or many a human who could have owned it, I would never have queried it. But Yalkara! She was proud, imperious, ruthless ..." He spoke with admiration. "But she would not spy that way, or sneak, or betray. No! That story grew up after she disappeared and it was meant to hide something."

"Get to the point, pensioner," said Mendark. "You ramble as though there was no tomorrow."

"We have at least fifty tomorrows before we get back to where Pender's boat is, hopefully, waiting for us. I will tell the story in my own way. Long have I studied the Histories of this matter. I've delved into the ancient libraries; scoured the desert caves of Parnggi for their hoards of clay tablets, and crossed the wide lands from Tar Gaarn in Crandor to Kara Agel, the frozen sea, in the polar south; from the fjords and forests of Gaspe in the east to the bog shores of Lame. And I swear that I've read every inscription on every wall and standing stone in all that way."

How you exaggerate, thought Karan fondly.

"Even then it was quite by accident, and just recently, that I found what I now believe to be the answer. It was seven or eight years ago, if I remember right, and I was at an inn in Chanthed."

Llian sat up suddenly.

"I was at an inn," he repeated, "listening to the young tellers from the college practicing their tales. They were young, mere journeymen and women mostly, but I had been long on the road with only my own thoughts for company and even their clumsy entertainment was welcome. The performances were mostly well worn, and after a time my mind wandered. Then suddenly I was called back by a strange song, a fragment of a tale but chanted in an old mode; one that I, and I fancy my audience, had never heard before. It was bad verse and indifferent music, though told well. It ended with the following curious lines. My translation captures the sense of it, though not the rhyme: "Twos on a darkling demon's day That Shuthdar's mournful call, Shivered time and space in Tara-Laxus.

He vanished through the gateway Like a hundred times before, Sneering as he led them to their doom.

But the flute knew what was coming; It betrayed the master player, The fabric of the world became unseamed.

Legions fell, but too late, the failing was begun, And the Twisted Mirror watched it from the wall.

"What doggerel!" Mendark sneered. "The tellers plumb new lows."

"Tara-Laxus?" said Yggur, puzzled.

"The name struck me like a thunderbolt, for Tara-Laxus was the name of an ancient city in Dovadolo, near the Burning Mountain, Booreah Ngurle. It was the place that Shuthdar fled from, immediately before he fell."

"The Twisted Mirror?" exclaimed Yggur.

"The failing means the Forbidding, does it not?" Llian cried, temporarily perked up by these insights into the Histories.

"I think so. Though it can't mean that the Mirror actually saw the Forbidding, for that did not occur at Tara-Laxus, but days later at Huling's Tower on the Long Lake," said Shand.

"If the Mirror was there when Shuthdar used the flute to escape," Mendark said excitedly, "perhaps it retains the image of how he used it. Tensor!"

Tensor slowly focused on Mendark.

"You can begin to atone for your crimes," said Mendark. "Does the rhyme make any sense to you? How can Shuthdar have had it?"

"Atone," Tensor said in a voice that was the merest husk. "I will atone. My crimes must be scarified from the earth." He turned his piercing eyes on Llian, who retreated again. "All crimes must be paid for!"

"Tensor!" Mendark's tone could not be ignored.

"Tara-Laxus? We called it Snizzerlees. I believe that my predecessor, Kwinlis, dwelt there for a while. He had custody of the Mirror then and took it everywhere with him."

"Kwinlis may very well have met with Shuthdar," said Malien.

"Doubtless that's why Yalkara stole the Mirror," Yggur observed. "And why Faelamor fought her for it. And maybe how Yalkara came to find the flaw in the Forbidding."

"When the song was sung I spoke to the singer," Shand continued, "for I was curious to learn where he had found the lines, and if there were any more. But come," he said, gesturing to Llian, who this time had retreated right into the darkness on the far side of the cavern, "you can tell the story yourself."

"Yes, come out," cried Mendark cheerfully. "Earn your keep, chronicler!"

Llian did not move. Karan was surprised at his reluctance, since that was his trade and his livelihood. But the ordeals of the past week had hurt Llian badly; he just wanted to crawl into a dark corner and hide.

"I remember the time," said Llian. "I did not know what the Twisted Mirror meant then. Curiously, it is not recorded in the Histories. At least, not in those I had access to in Chanthed. I had forgotten the song, although now that I'm reminded I can, of course, recite the whole of the fragment." He stopped abruptly, moving back in the shadows.

"Anyway," Shand went on, "I'm sure that's why Yalkara wanted the Mirror. Somewhere, buried within its myriad memories, its age-old secrets, there may just be the image of Shuthdar using the flute. Perhaps that's how she found her way through the Forbidding."

"But to make the flute ..." Tensor rasped from the back, "you must have gold! Only gold from Aachan will suffice."

His head sank down on his chest. Karan noticed Yggur staring at Tensor, his hand trembling. Mendark bore an enigmatic expression. Was he thinking of the ruination of his onetime friend, or of the opportunity that beckoned?

"But there is none to be had," Tensor went on in a subterranean rumble. "That essence which enabled it to be formed into devices like the flute was inimical to the gate. It could not pass between the worlds. Some of us were lost that way, before we realized ..."

"Do you say, with surety, that there is no Aachan gold to be had?" Mendark demanded.