We sipped our tea as we watched the building, but we did not see the Shadow leave. Plenty of other people left and entered the apartment block a a man in a dapper pinstripe suit and purple handkerchief, but he was too large to be the Shadow. A girl in the starched uniform of a maid hurried back with overflowing bags of food shopping. A woman in a red dress struggled to hold the door open. A man on the street paused to help her. She pushed the wicker chair around, speaking to the child within. He was a small boy, long-limbed but with the unnatural thinness of illness. The boy clutched a blanket about his face, looking up at his mother.

I see a girl, no, a woman, in a wine-red dress. Her child is ill, eaten from the inside...

The words Maske spoke at the seance came back to me. The woman's hair fell from her bonnet, obscuring her face. She thanked the man and continued up the road, her dark red dress swirling behind her like a waterfall of blood. I wanted to follow her, but what if it were only a coincidence and we missed the Shadow as a result? And how would I explain it to Drystan? We need to follow this woman I saw in hallucinations...

I shook my head.

We had lost the Shadow. He might have left through a back door, or slipped out when we were not looking. Or, most likely, he lived there and was having his dinner behind one of those windows. Watching us.

"We can't keep sitting here. And we can't perform publically until we've done something about the Shadow," I said.

"I know." He sighed. "I've been thinking. But I don't think you'll like my idea."

He leaned close and whispered his plan.

He was right. I didn't like it at all.

But it was the only way to catch the Shadow.

9.

MIRROR MAZE.

"I had to sell another of my automata today. Each time, I sell my least favorite, but that means that each time I part with the next, it grows harder. I sold the golden tamarind monkey, and it was a shame. I hope its new owner cherishes it.

"At least soon it will be the Night of the Dead, and I should have more bookings for seances. It will delay the date I must sell the next.

"I still have all of Taliesin's automata. Those I shall never part with, no matter my finances. Someday I'll figure out how he makes them tick. Then I'll be one step closer to revenge."

Jasper Maske's personal diary.

I grew no closer to learning more about Maske.

My arm healed, until it no longer hurt to perform card tricks. Maske taught us magic daily, and he spent a lot of time in his workshop, the distant buzzing of saws and drills drifting down to us as we studied. I tried asking Maske questions, but he found a way to dance around them.

Drystan and Maske went out one day to play cards with some of Maske's friends. I raised an eyebrow at that.

"They're only Maske's friends, and innocent ones," Drystan told me. "They bet with buttons, not coins."

I declined joining them. I had no desire to play cards with strangers while keeping up a false accent and disguise all evening. In any case, it was my "woman's time", which still made me feel... conflicted. Mostly, I felt more or less masculine, but during these times I felt more female.

I tidied the loft. Ricket the cat rubbed my legs, demanding that I pick him up. I did, and he tucked his head under my chin, purring. I wandered through the hallways with him.

My feet took me to Maske's workshop. I stopped and stared at the black door, the doorknob in the shape of a brass fist. I set Ricket down, and he trotted away. I tried the doorknob. Locked.

I remembered the key ring in a drawer in the kitchen and made my way there. One of the keys was made of brass; the key head an open hand with an eye on its palm. I took the key ring back upstairs, staring at the brass fist of the doorknob.

I should not pry. I should not pry....

I twisted the key in the lock. The door swung inwards. Darkness greeted me. I hesitated, almost closing the door and locking it again. But then I stepped into the blackness.

A small light switched on automatically and I jumped.

It was not a workshop.

Mirrors surrounded me. Some were normal and some warped, making me look short and fat or long and gaunt. Everywhere I turned, a version of a guilty Micah Grey looked back at me. I tried to walk forward but I kept bumping into mirrors. I knew there had to be an opening, if I could only find it.

Eventually, I found one and stumbled forward. The air felt cool. I could smell sawdust, oil, and metal. The workshop was just behind this maze, but I couldn't find it unless I found my way through it.

I do not know how long I spent in those glass hallways. I admitted defeat and tried to leave, but I couldn't find my way back. I held my hands out in front of me, leaving smudged fingerprints on the glass.

After a time, I gave up. The mirrors must have moved and I was trapped. All I could do was wait and hope that when Maske returned from his cards, he checked his workshop. I did not relish being found out, but it was my own damn fault.

Time dripped past. After an hour, hunger gnawed at my stomach, and I had to use the washroom. I took a coin from my pocket and it flashed, reflected in many mirrors, as I walked it over my fingers. I tossed it and it tumbled toward me. I reached up to grab it, but it bounced off my knuckle and rolled.

"Styx," I muttered. I crawled on hands and knees, groping after the coin, which had rolled under a gap beneath a mirror. I pressed my face to the floor, careless of the dust. The coin was too far for me to wriggle my finger under to grab, but that didn't matter. I had a very small view into Maske's workshop.

I couldn't see much, but I saw the legs of tables, wood shavings littering the floor. Saws, dowels, clamps and nails. Giant frames of wood and metal. I squinted. In the far corner, something gleamed bronze in the low light.

Footsteps from the hallway cut the silence. I held my breath, scrabbling back, trying to make my way back through the mirror maze, but glass met me from every direction. Maske.

The footsteps drew closer. A mirror tilted inward.

Maske stared at me, a sardonic smile on his lips, but his eyes flashed in anger.

I brushed my hands over my dusty clothes, trying to look nonchalant. Maske crossed his arms over his chest.

"I thought I told you that things behind closed doors were best left that way," he said, and I knew without a doubt I had infuriated him.

"Ia I'm sorry."

"Why'd you do it?"

I swallowed. "I don't know anything about you."

"You could have asked."

"I did ask, on the first night."

"And I told you I'd tell you later. You never asked again."

"I hinted."

"Hints can be ignored. Bit of advice, Micah. If you want something badly enough, it's best to say you do."

"Alright. I want to know more about you. If I haven't angered you too much for being an idiot."

He paused, looking me up and down.

"I'll tell you, then. But you'll stay out of this room unless I expressly invite you inside. Do we have an agreement?"

"Yes. I swear it."

He nodded. "Good. Come on, Micah."

I followed him out of the maze and down the stairs, feeling very sheepish and grateful he hadn't been so angry as to throw me out. I had been childish and rude, and I knew it. Maske made a pot of coffee. Drystan was up in the loft. I wondered how the card game had gone, and if they had won.

The tense silence seemed to stretch for ages as the coffee steeped. He brought it through to the parlor and we made our cups. I clutched mine close to my chest.

"So, what exactly are you most curious about, that you break and enter my workshop?"

"Or tried to," I said. "I wanted to know what you were working on, though I know I shouldn't have. But I couldn't find my way past the maze."

He nodded. "Glad I am so mistrustful. You can never be sure. I wouldn't put it past Taliesin to send spies to try and steal my secrets, even after all these years. Mirrors are a relatively easy trick to keep them out."

"I see."

"I am working on an illusion, but I want no one to see it before it is completed. I am superstitious in that way, I suppose."

"I breached your trust," I said. "I'm sorry."

Maske sighed. "No lasting harm done." It wasn't quite forgiveness. "But I'll tell you what you wish to know, at least in part." He inhaled the steam from the coffee, settling back into his seat as he gathered his words.

"Fifteen years ago, I was the best magician in Ellada. I performed for the King and Queen and the other monarchs of the Archipelago. This theatre shone like a jewel. I made more money per month than your little circus made in a year. The papers all proclaimed my tricks the best illusions anyone could find."

He rested his fingers against his mouth. "I took on a partner. Pen Taliesin." His voice curled around the words. "He could perform any trick seamlessly... but at the beginning, his stage performance was atrocious. Though the trick was faultless, it would fall flat. The patter was not quite right, the movements too stilted or too energetic for the last, delicate flourish. He gained his renown as an escapologist, for his energy and persona suited that raw, heightened flush with danger. But he did not want to be known as the man who could escape.

"We went into business together. For many years, all worked perfectly. We would invent tricks and illusions, and Taliesin was a genius. His automata alone... some of them were almost enough to rival the Vestige ones. I still have a few of them, despite all that's happened, purely because I cannot bear to part with them.

"Together, we were unstoppable. I performed, and we collaborated on the new illusions, stretching the limit of magic. It was the most wondrous period of my life. I had my wife and my sons to whom I would leave all my secrets."

Maske sighed. He recited the tale as though it were a story he had written. "But, as you may guess, that is not what happened.

"I didn't know that Taliesin burned with jealousy and rage that I was the one in front of the audience. He felt cheated. You know what I speak of."

I did indeed. A memory of flying through the air, the perfect tautness as I controlled every muscle to propel my body about the trapeze. Knowing the exact moment to hold out my hands to catch Aenea. Training with both Aenea and Arik, laughing together, trusting each other. I longed to be back on the trapeze.

"Unbeknownst to me, he had been perfecting his own stage persona. I thought he was content to be behind the scenes except for his escape acts.

"He decided that I craved the limelight for myself. And I did. I was young and foolish, confident in my own power and blind to the jealousy that turned my business partner against me."

Maske paused. "I'm not proud of what happened next. There was a show held in the Crescent Hippodrome. The King and Queen chose the Maske of Magic and the Specter to mark the opening of the season.

"Taliesin asked me if he could perform at least one of the grand illusions in addition to his escape act. His betrothed was in the crowd, and he wanted to impress her. I was hesitant. But he showed me the act he intended to perform and it was... extraordinary." He trailed off, studying his coffee cup.

"And so I agreed.

"The night of the grand performance, Taliesin and I used all of the best illusions that we had created throughout the years. I brought forth ghosts and transported my assistant from a spirit cabinet into the audience. I levitated a tea set and the teapot poured a cup of tea for a member of the audience. Silken handkerchiefs transformed into white doves, one of which landed on the Queen's outstretched hand. It was perfect." His voice vibrated with emotion.

"During the intermission, Taliesin readied himself for the grand performance. I was jealous: Taliesin had an illusion that was perfection itself, the star of the night's performance on the most important moment of our career to date. And so I made a throwaway comment, telling him that everyone was watching, even his intended, Margaretha, so he should not mess up if he wanted to keep her." He cleared his throat. "I meant it as a jest... or, at least I think I did. Events are hazy, as it was so long ago... I often wonder what my life would have been like now, if I'd only been kinder, more encouraging... such a little thing to lose so much over..."

I knew he had slept with Taliesin's fiancee. I suspected it happened right around this time.

He sighed. "On stage, Taliesin saw the blank, expectant faces. Perhaps he caught sight of his beloved's face, or the King and Queen. He started the trick, but he moved stiffer than his automata. And I realized: he couldn't produce that wonderful illusion. His hands were so stiff the reveal would fail and all would see the deception.

"So I went onto the stage and saved him. I worked it into my patter, made it seem like his hesitation was all part of the act. We performed together, and he recovered. I thought he would be grateful, but he stormed off the stage as soon as the curtains closed.

"The next day, it was my name in the papers, and he was relegated to the "escapologist". He left, demanding his share in the company and loading as many of his props and devices into a cart as he could and driving it away. He said I was poison. I was dismayed, but thought the split was the end of it.

"It was far from the end.

"With his share of Specter and Maske, he purchased a crumbling mansion in the Gilt Quarter and transformed it into a theatre to rival my own. Soon, his name was as infamous as mine. At first, I wished him every success. Our acts were different enough that neither of us suffered, though we were not as profitable as when we worked together."

The words tumbled from him, as if he could not stop the tale. "Taliesin still loathed me, and he was determined to bring me down. Small things, at first. He'd schedule his shows to coincide with mine, with cheaper prices to drag away my customers. He'd take a trick he knew I was fond of, and find a way to make it more exciting.

"A newspaper article would appear the night after a performance revealing how I did my illusion, meaning I could not do it again. During my show, an apparatus would not work properly, meaning he had bribed a stagehand. Once it resulted in an injured volunteer who nearly sued me.

"I fed the flames in turn, finding my own ways to foil his shows and poison his reviews. And so we went, back and forth, each trying to outdo the other. I stayed up long into the night in my workshop, inventing and dreaming up new illusions.

"I did not even notice when my wife began to grow ill. My sons were about your age then. Old enough to hate me."

He bowed his head. There was the smallest bald spot at the crown. "She died. I went to the funeral in a daze, and each time someone comforted me over the pain of my loss, I looked at them as though they were only phantasms of the living.

"My sons left for the former colonies. I think they're in Kymri, now. They only wrote when they needed more funds, and several years ago, I could no longer accommodate their requests, and so I have not heard from them since then.

"I lost everything to Taliesin. Everything. So I challenged him to a proper duel. I called upon the Collective of Magic and they witnessed our terms of agreement. One performance, with each of us showcasing the best of our acts. The audience and the Collective judged the winner.

"I thought for sure I would win. I barely ate. I barely slept. My whole life was magic."

He looked up from the table, to the ceiling. He looked old. His magician's facade had cracked.

"But I lost."

I wanted to know about Taliesin's great illusion at the Crescent Hippodrome. I wanted to know the tricks he and Taliesin performed, and what trick had beaten him, but I knew now was not the time to ask.

"He cheated a sabotaged a bit of my equipment a and I lost. I shut down the Kymri Theatre. I foreswore grand illusion. And here I have remained for the past fifteen years, surrounded by the memories of who and what I used to be."

We sat in silence.

"Taliesin has fallen on hard times," Maske said, a shadow of pleasure and satisfaction coloring his voice. "He was caught possessing a large amount of Lerium and has been fined so much the Specter Shows are barely keeping him afloat. Then the two magicians who worked for him, Mandrake and Crowley, quit due to the shame. The Collective of Magic was all set to ban him from continuing to perform. Ever."

"That's wonderful," I said.