Elaine picked her way over a floor of broken stone and brick and other building debris, moving slowly deeper into the cellar.
Every time a sole came down it raised a small grinding sound. Broken glass caught what faint white light there was in the dark, like a countless number of opened eyes, flickering as she moved.
The cellar was much lower than it was in her memory.
The collapsed ceiling pinned most of the iron racks. Several fire-blackened beams stood slanted into the wreckage, and the walls were covered in cracks the explosion had left. In some places you could see straight up to the floorboards and broken pipes hanging down from the room above.
Elaine turned side-on and squeezed between two rows of twisted racks.
The cloak caught on a sharp metal edge with a very small tearing sound. She stopped, reached back and worked the cloth free slowly, keeping the movement as light as she could.
A small fall of dust came down from overhead. Elaine glanced up.
The blackened crossbeam above her was swaying gently, and small stones kept coming down through the cracks and landing in the standing water at her feet, opening ring after ring of muddy ripples.
She didn't dare stay here long.
Though she was rather curious about what exactly she had set off that night, to have caused an explosion that violent.
She went on, making out by what weak light remained on the walls where the collection used to stand.
The glass cases that had once stood in neat rows were all shattered, their doors fallen crooked on the floor, and all that was left inside was some scorched cloth, and the traces of other people having been here.
Footprints, more or less. Officialdom had plainly already been through.
White outlines had been drawn around several of the emptied positions. But Elaine remembered that the whole of House White's cellar had been empty long before that, so whatever official body had come through, there had been nothing here for them to take.
She went round an overturned iron cabinet and finally saw the deepest part of the cellar.
It was where the white mirror had stood.
The stone plinth had been cracked in several places by the blast, and yet the scorching around it was nothing like as bad as elsewhere. The dust lay thin, as though something had once pushed the explosion and the fire away from that spot.
Elaine stopped in front of the plinth and slowly crouched.
A white flake the size of a fingernail sat quietly wedged in one of the cracks.
She put out a hand, and did not touch it straight away.
Since the officials had already gone over this place carefully, there was no chance they had missed something that obvious.
Still less when the white mirror itself had stood on this very plinth. Even if they had no idea what it was, they should have taken every fragment nearby along with everything else.
Unless this thing had appeared afterwards?
Elaine didn't quite understand it, but she was certain of one thing. These things were guiding her here.
She looked at the white flake in the crack for a while. It reflected none of the light around it, and its surface would not hold her face. Only an unvarying pure white.
Almost exactly like the white mirror in her memory. The heat came into her chest again.
Stronger this time, as though a heated wire ran from her heart out to her shoulder. Elaine's brows drew tight and she pressed a hand to her chest, but the white lines beneath the cloak were already surfacing beyond her control.
At first only a few very faint traces. Then they spread outward along her collarbones, across her shoulders and arms, all the way to her fingertips.
The white flake in the crack trembled slightly.
Elaine's instinct was to draw back, but the moment her fingertips left the plinth the flake lifted out of the crack.
Without a sound. And while she was still taking in the shock of it, all around her a great many mirror fragments of much the same size rose into the air at the same moment.
Like sheets of thin paper lifted on a wind, they gathered slowly together until they formed a smallish "white tornado" that came towards Elaine.
"Wait..."
She tried to throw herself backward, with no idea what was happening.
The white flakes fastened straight onto the back of her hand, then stuck to one another and converged towards her chest.
A cold touch bored in through the skin. Before Elaine could so much as shake them off, the edges of the flakes had gone transparent and were sinking into her skin a piece at a time.
Violent pain burst out from the back of her hand, and along the line running from both hands to her chest a dry heat rose. And Elaine herself began to give off a not especially strong white light in the dark cellar.
She staggered into the iron cabinet behind her. Its door rocked from the impact with a harsh metal scraping.
At the same moment, every broken piece of glass in the cellar lit up.
The wreckage of the cases, the shards on the floor, even the pool of muddy water at her feet: anywhere at all that could reflect showed her own shape back clearly.
Long silver-white hair hanging in disorder at her shoulders, very little colour in the pale face, and the chest and shoulders crawling with glowing white lines.
A second later, every reflection went blank at once.
Elaine opened her mouth and no sound came.
The warmth in her body seemed to be drawn rapidly off by those blank mirror faces. Her limbs went cold and her heart beat hard inside her chest.
The fragment, no bigger than a fingernail to begin with, kept expanding inside her body.
Not a change in volume.
More as though something that had always been incomplete had finally found its last position.
The white lines swept over her neck, her arms, her waist and stomach, and a fine stinging kept coming from beneath the skin. Elaine went down onto her knees among the rubble, palms braced hard against the ground, her long silver-white hair hanging into the standing water.
The reflection in the water raised its head. And Elaine's head was quite plainly still lowered.
She froze.
The "self" in the water watched her quietly through a shifting layer of light, then slowly lifted a hand and set its fingertips against the other side of the surface.
Elaine's chest seized. In the next instant the reflection in the water broke apart, and every white light around her broke with it.
The cellar fell back into darkness.
Elaine lay flat on the cold ground, breathing in great gulps. The white lines on her dimmed by degrees and finally sank back into pale skin, as though none of it had ever happened.
Only on the back of her right hand there was now a very faint white mark in the shape of a mirror.
There was no time to examine what had changed about her body, though. The brief white light had plainly alerted the watchers outside.
Confused footsteps came from overhead almost at once, and several harsh beams of light swept down into the cellar through the collapsed stairwell.
"There's movement down there!" Noise and voices were building up around the place.
Elaine forced herself upright, her limbs still weak. This was not the moment to complain about it. She went back the way she had come, into the narrow passage in the corner hidden behind broken brick.
The lights behind her drew closer, though it would take them a while yet to find this stinking sewer. Elaine felt her way forward along the damp stone, nearly tripping over rubble more than once.
By the time the watchers got out as far as the city sewer, she had already seen that the White manor was ringed about with lights and carriages.
Fortunately the sewer outlet was a street away from the manor, which was the only reason she wasn't spotted at once.
She had no time to brush the dust off her cloak. She vanished quickly into the night.
Hopefully she hadn't stirred up any trouble... hopefully.
Publicly Disclosable Information #2
The difference between Sacred Objects, Relics and Sealed Objects
SACRED OBJECT: standard equipment formed by the power of the Canon, or produced to specification in bulk by a church or an organisation. Clearly structured and registrable for use, generally carrying no risk and no side effects, or else risks and side effects small enough to sit within a controllable range.
RELIC: a special item out of antiquity, a disaster site, or an unknown civilisation. Its origin and its principles are usually unclear. Its capability may be stable, or may conceal danger. It generally carries side effects, and the capability and the side effect are not proportionate to one another. Before a Relic is used, its capabilities and its side effects or risks must be established in advance; an ordinary member of staff may apply to use one only in the course of a special assignment.
SEALED OBJECT: an anomalous existence placed under seal on account of contamination, loss of control, or active harmfulness. Not limited to artefacts. It may equally be a corpse, an organ, or some other living body. Private possession and unauthorised activation are forbidden in principle. Sealed Objects are generally extremely unstable and dangerous, and generally carry appallingly severe side effects or risks.