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8

I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe that training to be a Locksmith of the Portals would be like college, and I’d join some kind of series of lectures about treaties, and workshops about portals. Maybe become one of many students.

Like maybe there was some kind of Hogwarts lurking under Portland.

Or maybe it would be like a martial arts class, or…

That wasn’t how things worked.

When I agreed to choose knowledge for my punishment instead of ignorance, Janna thanked me, but then turned and wheeled away right through a red, glowing hole in the air that hadn’t been there the moment before and spiraled down into nothingness as soon as she was through it.

“Did you see it?” Vasco asked quickly, his voice low and urgent.

“The portal? Yeah. Of course.”

“No,” Vasco said, shaking his head so that his wild gray hair shook. “Did you see what happened to the portal?”

“It spiraled down—”

“After.” Vasco stepped in close. His musky, animal-like scent mixed oddly with the undercurrent of violets in the air. “What happened after it spiraled down?”

I shook my head.

“First lesson. Miss nothing.”

“How can I—”

“Perception is a matter of attention. You must learn to stretch your awareness.”

“How?”

Vasco smiled.

He spread his arms and dropped a portal on me.

The portal was orange, and smelled vaguely of cinnamon. As it passed over me — or I through it — I could hear a faint crackling, like a Jacob’s Ladder.

I noticed all that as a sideline, though. Most of me was thinking that this was grossly unfair. How could he just drop a portal on me? Weren’t portals a thing you had to choose to pass through?

Yes and no. That was lesson two, I suppose. Although I was now entirely inside lesson one.

Passing though that portal felt like falling in all directions at once. My poor stomach didn’t know what to make of that, and my inner ear was mostly trying to tell me I’d lost my friggin’ mind.

But I wasn’t falling. I wasn’t even leaning.

No. I was flat on my feet. Standing in a hallway full of mirrors.

Notice everything, Vasco’d said.

Well the first thing I noticed was that while the portal smelled like cinnamon, the hallway full of mirrors smelled like polished silver. Freshly polished silver, with hints of that polish still lingering in the air, along with the dust motes.

The hallway itself stretched out in two directions, as far as I could see. I wasn’t sure how far that was though. Where I stood was lit up brightly, with a yellowish sort of light. But I could tell that shifted no more than a few hundred feet each direction.

And beyond that, I could see areas of blackness.

And then there were the mirrors themselves.

They seemed to come in all sizes and shapes, from tiny little ones that might have fit on the blade of a comb to great big ones that stretched from the reddish carpeting to the ceiling, some fifteen feet up.

Some of the mirrors were framed, and others just bare. Some of them were mounted on the same kind of tan stucco as I’d seen in that passageway inside Mount Hood. Others seemed to be mounted on larger mirrors.

The two nearest me were both round. An oval in front of me and a round mirror behind me. Both about the same size. Like I could have stretched one arm across them, but only just.

The mirrors reflected me. But they didn’t reflect each other.

No. It seemed that each mirror seemed to reflect me standing somewhere else.

The oval one in front of me, it showed me standing on the edge of the basketball courts at Riverfront Park. Only one game going now, and none of my teammates still there.

Just how long had I been gone?

I’d lost all sense of time, once I’d stepped through the — details, Scott — green portal in the doorway of the Portland Loo.

I stopped. Blinked at myself. Noticed the sky — still light, but the streetlights were clicking on all the same.

No. That wasn’t possible. I couldn’t have been gone that long.

I turned around.

The round mirror reflected the same scene. Except my teammates were there. Jolly was talking to Shorty. And there was Metallica greeting Red…

Greeting?

The sky was bright blue up above. And that park was more crowded than it was in the mirror behind me.

I spun. Yep. Clearly late afternoon there, verging onto early evening.

I spun back. Definitely morning. Before I arrived, because I hadn’t been there when Red greeted Metallica with a hug, like an old friend. I’d thought they’d met today, same as me.

Unless this wasn’t this morning I was looking at…

Could it be tomorrow?

Was I looking at the same scene in different times?

I shook myself. Swallowed hard against the rising lump in My throat.

My heart started pounding.

Of all the things I’d seen so far, this … this felt the most fantastic.

Could portals carrying me through time?

If so, could I go back and save the dorach without killing the riskatan?

“Hello?” I called out. “Do I get to ask questions?”

My voice echoed out, returning my own words to me, over and over, until they faded away.

“I guess that’s a no,” I mumbled. But even my soft words echoed back at me twice before fading away entirely.

I picked a direction and started walking.

Every mirror reflected me, but otherwise showed me an entirely different scene.

Some I recognized, like the weird statue just outside Powell’s Books downtown. It was a huge thing, made of brushed steel. It looked to me like a giant whisk set into a tripod, so that passersby could push the round end and the bristles would move back and forth, up above.

Another scene was the stag statue, down closer to the river. The stag sat in the middle of a street, on a tiny island of its own.

Other scenes showed ferns and Douglas firs. One showed a dock that looked old and cold. A seaport, not a riverport.

Castles and country sides, islands and forests, mountain peaks and snow-ridden caves. The Colosseum in Rome. The Great Sphinx in Egypt.

That one I had to stop and stare at for a moment, whirling back and forth between the huge rectangle mirrors on either side of me. Both showed the sphinx.

But on my left, the sphinx’s nose was whole, and its face unravaged by time.

After that, the scenes got even stranger.

Dark underground tunnels. Sleek interiors that looked for all the world to me as though they belonged on spaceships.

One, I swear, was on an asteroid.

And then, there were the people.

At the start, they were all humans.

But when I got to the Eiffel Tower, I noticed that there were a handful of tourists that looked, well…

They stood a head taller than anyone else around them, and they looked too skinny to be healthy. Their skins were all the shade of oak bark in summer, and they were stark naked.

But that nudity, it didn’t look nude. They didn’t have, well, genitals. At least, not any kind I could recognize.

Their eyes slanted vertically instead of horizontally, but their eyelids still flapped the same direction that human eyelids do. And their eyes had no pupils. They were all shades of color that looked like leaves. Greens and yellows and reds.

No humans around them were paying them any mind. The humans gave them a wide berth without seeming to notice them at all. These tree people just wandered as they chose, gazing up at the Eiffel Tower like they were just any other kinds of tourists.

And the tree people weren’t the only nonhuman things I saw.

Countless varieties, from the kinds I’d seen depicted in films and TV shows to types I couldn’t begin to guess at.

Creatures of air, and others of fire. Creatures that looked to be made of pure electricity. Werewolves. Snake creatures, and entities that appeared to be composed of trails of black smoke.

Even tiny gnomes in red hats, and great big orcs.

Yes. Orcs. Green skins, small tusks, the whole nine. Just like the elves I saw were beautiful, with hair that looked to have been spun from precious metals, and the kind of skin that models would envy.

I couldn’t keep track of it all. I just found myself hoping there wouldn’t be a test later. There was no way I could remember or describe every setting, every creature, all the wonders I saw.

But of them all, there was one wonder that stood tall and proud above the others.

It was a junction of nine rainbows in the sky.

No. Not in one sky. In nine skies that came together. The skies around each rainbow held their color starkest near their own rainbow, fading to the next sky as they approached the other rainbows.

Some skies were dark blue and purples, others were pale blues and greens, one was orange, and one was a bright, vivid red. Crimson, maybe. Colors were never my strength.

But the place they all came together, that spot was blacker than midnight. The kind of black that made me think of the void of deep space.

I stopped there. Two mirrors in that spot in the hall. Both round, and maybe eight feet across.

And both reflected exactly the same scene.

I hadn’t seen all the mirrors. Not by any stretch. The farther I walked, the farther the hallway seemed to stretch. And I knew it never looped on itself — not so far, at least — because I’d never seen the same mirrors.

Still, from what I had seen, this was the only spot in the hallway where both mirrors reflected the same thing.

And what they reflected, it put me in mind of the crystal cavern. Only there, instead of nine rainbows, they had the seven colors of the rainbow, climbing the walls until they met in a circle just as black as that spot where the rainbows joined here.

Details, Scott. What else do you notice?

I started laughing then. The scent. It was faint. Only just barely noticeable. But it was the smell of violets.

This was the only spot that had smelled of violets. I’d arrived through cinnamon and landed in the odor of polished silver. An odor that had faded in places and grew strong in others, and yet it was always present.

Now that I thought about it, I could smell polished silver here too. Like an overlay above the fragrance of the violets.

But the scent of violets was definitely there.

Violets. The bottom chamber of the crystal cavern smelled like violets.

“Is that it?” I called out. “Is that the secret?”

My own words came back to me, getting softer and softer.

Is that it? Is that the secret?

Is that it? Is that the secret?

Is that it? Is that the secret?

Is that…

No answers were coming. This was either a trap or a puzzle. I had to find my own way out.

And this looked like as good a place as any.

I looked left. Then right. Flared my nostrils in a deep breath, making sure I really did smell those violets.

I turned right and jumped into the mirror.

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