Темное, кривое зеркало. Том 5 : Средь звезд, подобно гигантам.

Beside him Delenn was still sleeping, silent and still and as beautiful as a statue touched by the sunrise. He brushed her hair with his fingers and was surprised by just how cold she was, like marble not yet warmed by the sun.

He rose from their bed and walked through to the bathroom. There was no sound at all. That was unusual. There was always.... something. There was no night on Babylon 5, not really. There was always someone up — security guards, the usually nocturnal Brakiri, the terminally insomniac.... someone.

He poured some water and splashed it on his face, hoping it would wake him up. It did no such thing. He rubbed at the stubble on the side of his face and sighed. Sometimes he hated shaving. It was hard enough managing enough co-ordination just to get dressed some mornings, without having to shave as well. Maybe he could forgo it for today. Would anyone really notice? He looked into the mirror to see how bad it was.

Nothing looked back at him.

He started and touched the cold surface. It was there. It was solid, and it was reflecting the rest of the room perfectly. Just not him. He looked around to make sure. Yes, everything was there. The corner of the shower screen, the towel rail on the opposite wall, the window.

The window?

Where had that come from?

He walked slowly over to it, the silence now uncomfortably oppressive. Some strange, primal urge came over him, an overwhelming compulsion to return to bed, to the warmth and safety that existed there and nowhere else, to pull the blanket over his head and hide from whatever was out here.

He hadn't felt this afraid since he had been a child and convinced that the scarecrows were coming to life and trying to get in his bedroom window.

He touched the curtains. They were solid. They were real. They had that texture of dampness and roughness that spoke of a most definite reality.

He could have sworn this room hadn't had a window before.

He threw the curtains open.

A dazzling light seared his eyes and he stumbled backwards, raising his arms instinctively, but knowing it was too late. It had blinded him, the light was tearing him apart, filling his mind and his soul and covering everything it found there, like a layer of oil over the surface of an ocean.

Will you come to find me?

The voice came with the light, repeating the question over and over again.

Will you come to find me?

He reeled away from the window, falling backwards. He reached out frantically, seeking anything to stabilise himself. A firm, stone hand caught him and helped him steady himself. Slowly, awkwardly, he pulled his hand away from his face.

There was a grey robe in front of him, almost like a monk's. He could see no face inside it, in fact there was no sign of anything inside it, anything at all.

"Will you come to find me?" said a voice from the robe. "You have been asked that already. Someone tried to warn you. You did not listen, did you?"

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Babylon Four. Before the fire, before the fury, the calm before the storm. Someone tried to warn you of what would come, dressing up the warning in dreams and whispers and premonitions. You did not listen. Will you come to find me?"

Understanding dawned. "I did go to find her. I went to Z'ha'dum. I...."

"Left her there? How can you blame her for what happened?"

"I don't know. I shouldn't, but...."

"Emotions. Irrational little things, aren't they? Or so I'm told. You should have listened to the warning, but it was just one more door you closed behind you without really looking at what was beyond it. How many of those have there been?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Who are you trying to convince? Me — or yourself?"

"I don't even know who you are."

"Do you even know who youare?"

"I...."

"Don't answer that. You can't. Ask yourself this, though. What other warnings have you ignored? What other doors have you slammed shut and lost the key for? What else have you forgotten or lost or simply not understood?"

He looked down. There was a dagger in his hands. Blood was dripping from it.

"We all sacrifice a great deal on the altar of victory. When does the time come when the sacrifice becomes more than the God is worth?"

"I don't know."

"No, you don't. Think on that, for a while."

The man in the monk's robe was gone. The dagger was gone. The window was gone. The light was gone.

John Sheridan reached one trembling hand to the mirror and looked at his reflection. It had returned, and for the first time in his life he seemed to be looking at a stranger staring back at him.

* * *

Galen was precisely an inch and a half taller than he was. That was such a tiny thing to harbour so much envy over, but there it was. Emotions were rarely rational, and jealousy even less so. Galen's magic came from the cold, the sterile, the scientific. Vejar's came from the imaginative, the fantastic, the spiritual.

He didn't need to watch Galen perform more parlour tricks to know that his magic had grown stronger. Something had freed it, while he had been left to wither. Left here in the dark.

"How are the others?" he asked bitterly, trying to make conversation, however futile or pointless. As if he really cared. The technomages had abandoned him just as much as Delenn and Lethke had.

"That's not what I came here to talk about, cousin."

A mission of some kind. Yet another tempting and honourable and glorious opportunity to be killed or mutilated or generally to suffer for the good of someone else.

"I'm not listening," Vejar snapped. He turned back to his mirror and looked at himself. For now, the mirror was just that — a mirror. There was no magic in it, but then there never had been.

Or that was what people would think. The first lesson Vejar had ever learned was that there was magic in everything. A sunrise, a morning breath, the touch of a lover, the opening and closing of a fist.

Someone had once asked Elric if he could make the dead live. Elric had smiled that curious, thin smile of his and stretched out his hand, spreading his fingers wide and then clenching them together so tightly that the veins on his wrist bulged.