The Diamond - J. Robert King [19]
The pommel of Hero's dagger crashed into another mirror, and a dozen fiends tumbled into oblivion. He swung for the next, but flesh interposed itself-scabrous and oozing, cracked and sword-worn. Living meat barred the way to other mirrors, lifting claws and grinning with yellowed teeth.
Crying out the names of their mothers and their gods-names not so dissimilar-Paladin and Hero hacked at fiend flesh, winning through to panel after panel. Dead fiends lay heaped across the silvered floor, strange blood darkening the glass, as gate after gate fell.
Ten living fiends stood atop a hundred dead to guard the last looking glass, aflicker with emerging horrors. Hero and Paladin carved a grim path through them.
The last fiend fell, its left head laid open by Paladin's sword and its right skewered through the eye by Hero's dagger. Black blood steamed, and silence fell.
Standing exhausted, Paladin and Hero looked into the last mirror and saw themselves: two blood-soaked warriors burned by gouting acids, stabbed, slashed and bone-broken. Paladin's sword arm changed direction in two places. A severed beast claw jutted from his temple. Hero's ribs showed through a row of gaping wounds, wherein his organs pulsed through a rain of blood. The comrades were walking dead men, too busy slaying to notice that they should die. Now they had time to look.
Hero wheeled and collapsed, lifeless.
Paladin staggered. His world went black. Falling, he smashed his sword against the glass.
The riven mirror collapsed, and the false wounds it had projected onto Hero and Paladin fell away with it.
At last Paladin understood this house of mirrors. He'd thought it a mind of madness, filled with images twisted to obscure the truth, or a sorcerous cage constructed to hold Heart ever captive behind falsities. But it was neither.
The diamond was a mind but was not mad. It was the mind of a world; in any one facet of the diamond, truth was only partially reflected. Truth dwelt not in one angled view of something too large and complex to be fully seen in a thousand images. Truth dwelt beyond and beneath. It could be apprehended not by staring into one reflection but by staring into them all. Paladin would find Heart not by smashing and slaying but only by combining all reflections into the one true creature they mirrored.
He sheathed his sword, helped Hero rise, and stepped into the space beyond the last mirror they'd shattered: a mirrored passage that snaked away through deceptive turns. Its silvered panes held faces: a moon-faced sharper, a much-scarred old pirate, a pale man-giant, a black-bearded mage, a bronze-skinned man in robes of state, a pair of idiot brothers, a crooked lumber merchant…
Paladin ignored these images, grasping the corners of mirrors and pivoting them slowly, one after another. He was opening up the passage, creating a large, circular space. Hero did likewise, pushing back the mirrors on the opposite side of the passage into an inward-curving silver wall.
They worked speedily, repositioning and checking over their shoulders to match alignments. When they completed the first circle, the diffuse starlight that shone through the interior of the diamond intensified. They made a second circle beneath the first, pushing back the mirrors of the floor. When it was done, the room sparkled in warm brilliance.
When they formed the third, the light grew so intense it pushed at the silver and glass it struck, realigning the other facets of the great diamond. Not merely hundreds but thousands of mirrors were brought into focus, blazing like festival sconces, each witness to all that had happened since Heart's disappearance.
At last light surged out to every corner of the diamond-and the vision Hero and Paladin sought erupted into sizzling incandescence before them. Lightning-white the place blazed, around Heart.
She floated in beauty at the center of it all: a creature