A Duel of Exasperation

Ealasaid

The man standing in the curved silver glass wore Murchadh's heavy canvas duster, Murchadh's oil-spotted cap, and Murchadh's perpetually sour scowl.

He also stood perfectly upright inside a sealed, parabolic mirror eighty feet above the void floor.

"Glazier Ealasaid," the reflection barked again. The voice rattled through the chamber with the familiar rasp of a man who swallowed coal smoke for thirty years. "Step away from the lens and vent the primary arc. We're shutting the beacon down."

I kept both boots planted on the steel mesh of the catwalk. My right hand stayed wrapped around the shaft of my iron deadblow hammer, while my left rested against the knurled brass wheel of the secondary steam bypass.

"Shut it down?" I asked, keeping my voice level over the hiss of the turbine below us. "Right now?"

"You heard the order," the reflection snapped, leaning closer to the outer curve of the glass. The fabric of his coat stretched with mechanical perfection, matching every crease and grease stain I had seen on my overseer during the dawn muster. "The lower conduits are fouling. We have an auxiliary pressure surge in sector four. Dump the coal bed and drop the shutter."

I tilted my head, looking at him through the heat shimmer rising from the mantle.

"Sector four doesn't have an auxiliary pressure line," I said mildly. "Sector four is an unpressurized oil sump."

The figure in the glass did not blink. His posture hardened, his jaw setting in what was meant to be an intimidating display of rank. "Don't recite schematics to me, glazier. I signed the maintenance roster this morning. Vent the boiler before you blow the header."

"That's very authoritative," I replied. "Truly. You've almost got the rasp right. But there's a problem."

"Obey the order, Ealasaid."

"Murchadh caught a spray of boiling caustic soda across the left side of his neck six winters ago," I said, pointing the flat head of my hammer toward the glass. "It left a purple scar shaped like a split turnip running from his jaw down into his collar. You put yours on the right side. You forgot to account for the mirror."

The reflection froze.

For three seconds, the only noise in the lantern room was the steady, rhythmic chug of the feed pump and the high whine of the rotating prism.

"Also," I added, tapping the steel toe of my boot against the grating, "the real Murchadh smells like stale pipe weed and fermented cabbage. You don't smell like anything at all. In fact, you look far too clean to work for this company."

The harsh lines of the overseer's face melted.

The canvas coat vanished first, dissolving into a ripple of quicksilver that ran down the surface of the lens like rain on a windowpane. The broad shoulders tapered, the gray stubble receded into pale, luminous skin, and the stooped posture straightened into an impossibly fluid silhouette.

A young man looked back at me from the silvering. His dark hair drifted in an invisible current, and his eyes held the pale, iridescent sheen of crushed abalone.

He tilted his head, studying me through the curved glass with an expression that bordered on genuine annoyance.

"You are remarkably irritating," he said. His voice no longer carried Murchadh's gravelly bark. It was smooth, cool, and layered with a strange, harmonic resonance that made the teeth in the back of my mouth ache.

"I get that on my quarterly reviews," I told him, shifting my grip on the bypass wheel. "Who are you, and what are you doing inside my primary optic?"

"Your optic?" He let out a soft, breathy chuckle that sounded like glass wind chimes shivering in a draft. "This glass sits on my people's hunting ground, little mechanic. You humans drag your roaring iron into the sky, burn our air into ash, and then claim ownership of the light you steal."

"I don't steal light," I said. "I scrub soot off leaded quartz so transport skiffs don't ram into floating reefs of jagged basalt at forty miles an hour. It's an honest wage."

"It is a slow poison," he countered. He pressed his palms flat against the inside of the glass. The surface gave slightly beneath his weight, bulging outward like a stretched membrane of mercury. "Every hour this beacon screams into the dark, my kin starve. The glare strips the marrow from our ribs."

I looked at the thinness of his wrists, the sharp prominence of his cheekbones beneath the translucent skin. Whatever creature he was, the hunger in his posture wasn't an act. His frame possessed a predatory lean, but it was drawn taut by deprivation.

"If you're looking for a meal, try the galley on the lower deck," I suggested. "Cook makes a mutton stew that could strip paint. It might even sustain a ghost."

"I am no ghost," he murmured, his pale eyes narrowing. "I am Tighearnan. And you are standing between me and the dark."

I slid my deadblow hammer into the leather loop on my belt and drew my heavy iron spanner.

"Well, Tighearnan," I said, setting the jaws of the spanner against the locking nut of the main relief valve. "You might want to step back from the focal point."

He raised an eyebrow, entirely unimpressed by the tool in my hands. "You cannot strike me with iron through the silvering, glazier. The boundary holds both ways."

"I don't need to strike you," I said. "This line here? It's the superheated caustic blowdown from the primary manifold. Five hundred and twenty degrees of pressurized steam and chemical solvent. If I open this valve, it vents directly across the interior concave curve of this reflector to flush the carbon buildup."

I tapped the brass casing with the wrench. The metal gave a sharp, resonant clang.

"At that temperature," I continued evenly, "the silver backing boils off the quartz in about four seconds. I'll have to file six accident reports and explain to the port authority why the lens is ruined, but whatever is living in that chemical layer is going to get vaporized into a greasy smudge."

Tighearnan stared at the valve, then shifted his gaze back to my face.

He was searching for a tremor in my hands. He didn't find one. I had spent eight years working on high gantries surrounded by boiling pipes and sheer drops; bluffing an uninvited reflection did not rank among my greatest terrors.

"You would destroy your own beacon?" he asked, a sharp edge entering his melodic tone.

"I would destroy the lens to save the tower," I replied. "And right now, you're an unauthorized obstruction. So here is the bargain: get out of my glass, or I turn the wheel."

For a long moment, the tension hummed as loudly as the turbine beneath our feet.

Then, Tighearnan smiled.

It was not a pleasant expression. His mouth stretched wider than human bone should allow, revealing two rows of needle-fine, translucent teeth that caught the arc light in glittering points. Shadows pooled in his eye sockets, deep and cavernous, stripping away every trace of the handsome youth he had projected a moment before.

"You have sharp eyes, Ealasaid," he hissed, his voice echoing from every reflective surface on the platform at once—the brass gauges, the polished handrails, even the oily puddle beneath the gear train. "Sharp eyes and a stubborn tongue. But a mirror has two sides, and your beacon cannot burn forever."

"Try me at shift change," I muttered.

He laughed—a harsh, splintering sound that made the lantern glass shudder in its frame.

Before I could twitch my wrench, his form fractured into a dozen prismatic shards. The light bent, scattered across the silvering, and vanished into the crystalline depths of the reflector, leaving only my own tired, grease-streaked face staring back from the concave surface.

The lantern room fell back into its regular mechanical rhythm.

I stood alone on the grating, listening to the heavy hiss of the steam lines. My pulse was thumping against my ribs, hard and fast, but my hands remained steady on the cold iron of the valve.

I wiped a streak of sweat and soot from my forehead with the back of my glove.

"Great," I muttered to the empty air. "Just great. Now the vermin has a name."