“What has your friend—your once-friend, I suppose—done to you, then?” Chert asked. “You said he stole something of yours. Was it a mirror?”

“Ah, you see where I am going,” Chaven said almost gratefully. “Yes, it was a very powerful, very old mirror. One that I think was made carefully in ancient days to see, and even talk, between worlds.”

“Where did you get it?”

Chaven’s look became even stranger, a mixture of shame and a sort of furtive, almost criminal, hunger. “I…I don’t know. There, I have said it. I do not know. I have traveled much, and I suppose I brought it back from one of my journeys, but with all the gods as my witnesses, I cannot say for sure.”

“But if it is such a powerful thing…” Chert began.

“I know! Do not task me with it. I told you I was ashamed. I do not know how it came to me, but I had it, and I used it. And I…reached out and…and touched something on the other side.”

It was the tortured expression on the physician’s face as much as his words that made the hairs prickle on the back of Chert’s neck. He almost thought he could sense movement in the room, as though the flames of the two lamps danced and flickered in an unfelt wind.

“Touched something…?” asked Opal, and her earlier interest seemed to have vanished into fear and distaste.

“Yes, but what it was…what it is…I cannot say. It is…” He shook his head and seemed almost ready to weep. “No. There are some things I cannot talk about. It is a thing beautiful and terrifying beyond all description, and it is mine alone—my discovery!” His voice grew harsh and he seemed to pull deeper into himself, as though prepared to strike or flee. “You cannot understand.”

“But what use is such a thing to Okros—or to Hendon Tolly, for that matter?” Chert thought they seemed to have tunneled a bit far from the seam of the matter.

“I don’t know,” said Chaven wretchedly. “I don’t even know what it is, myself! But I…woke it. And it has great power. Every time I touched it I felt things that no man can ever have felt before…” He let out a great, gasping sob. “I woke it! And now I have let Okros steal it! And I can never touch it again…!”

The sounds he was making began to alarm Chert, but to his relief Opal got up and went to the weeping physician, patting his hand and stroking his shoulder as though he were a child—as though he were not twice her size. “There, now. All will be well. You’ll see.”

“No, it won’t. Not as long…not as long…” Another spell of sobbing took him and he did not speak for a long time. Chert found the man’s weakness excruciatingly difficult to witness.

“Is there anything…would you…? Perhaps some more tea?” Opal asked at last.

“No. No, thank you.” Chaven tried to smile, but he sagged like a pennant on a windless day. “There is no cure for a shame like mine, not even your excellent tea.”