There were four of the masked creatures now, standing two to each side of the mirror, watching her with their blank faces. She was aware of movement around her, more of them filtering in. They were shy, but so awkwardly eager to please, it was cute.

This time, the mirror cleared to show the inside of a cave with a huge pool of water, hot enough that steam rose into the air and condensation dripped from the walls. Isaac, dressed in his tattered coat, entered with a box in one hand and a lantern in the other. He set them down by the side of the pool and heaved a sigh.

“Would it kill him to get a proper shower?” Isaac said. He unlaced his shoes and pulled them off, then shrugged out of his coat. “I mean, we’ve got the hot water, it should just be a matter of plumbing. There must be a book somewhere with a plumber in it.”

He pulled a bar of soap and towel from the box, then went to pull up his shirt. Alice put a hand over her eyes.

“That’s enough,” she said.

When she peeked through her fingers, the mirrors had gone back to showing the marble courtyard. Reflected Alices were everywhere, dozens of them, standing all around the circle of mirrors in their colorful dresses. Every one wore a blank-faced mask. Alice waved at them, feeling a little light-headed.

“What next?” the mirror image said. It could have been any of them, or all of them. “Who next?”

“Show me . . .” Alice wrinkled her forehead. It felt as though she was missing something, something important. Her hand reached toward her pocket, then stopped. Her thoughts had gone hazy. “Show me Geryon.”

The old Reader sat on one side of a table, looking across at another old man. A chessboard sat between them, yellowed ivory pieces arrayed against glittering obsidian. His opponent was a black man with a frizz of gray hair and a nose like a hawk. Geryon glanced down at the board and scratched his enormous sideburns, and a knight slid forward and to the left of its own accord.

“Then you agree that it may be a problem,” he said.

“It may develop into a problem,” the other man said. He reached out, put a finger on a pawn, hesitated. “The labyrinthine have never been so restless, but we still hold the whip hand.”

“Do we?” Geryon watched as the other man’s finger tapped the pawn. “Sometimes I wonder.”

“They need our power to keep the Great Binding intact. If we wanted to, we could simply let the prisoner escape.”

“And what then?” Geryon said. “How well would we fare without the power of the labyrinthine?”

“Well enough. Some of us were old even before the Binding, you know.”

Geryon frowned. “Are you going to move that pawn, or just polish it?”