Live and Let Drood

damaged during the Drood assault on the Immortals at Castle Shreck, to the point where it didn’t work at all anymore. The reflective surface had been cracked from side to side, and given that a whole lot of people thought there might be something or even someone trapped within the reflection, I made a point of handing the damaged mirror over to the Armourer first chance I got, with strict instructions to drop it somewhere secure, like a black hole, if he couldn’t mend the thing and make it safe to use. Frankly, I’d never expected to see the thing again.
    But here it was, back in my hand. And completely uncracked. The Glass was clear and unmarked, as though it had never seen any damage at all.…
    “I didn’t know the Merlin Glass could speak,” Molly said doubtfully. “Let alone call out to you.”
    “Maybe it never had anything to say before,” I said. “But this is a magical instrument, after all, made by Merlin himself.”
    “You said the mirror was cracked. Now it isn’t. Could it have repaired itself?”
    “Who knows?” I said. “I don’t think anyone in the family knows for sure anymore why Merlin gave the Glass to us in the first place. Or what it was supposed to do. I never did get around to reading all the instructions Uncle Jack wrote out for me. I have to say…I don’t think the Armourer did this. I mean, he’s good, yes, but he’s no Merlin Satanspawn.”
    I hefted the hand mirror thoughtfully, turning it back and forth and checking every detail. Something about it didn’t look right, didn’t feel right. I’d held it often enough, used it often enough, to know thatthe weight and heft of it in my hand now was subtly, unnervingly different. Wrong. I said as much to Molly.
    “Are you sure?” she said immediately. “I mean, it has been repaired. There are bound to be some differences.…”
    “It’s not that. I’ve handled the bloody thing often enough to know that something’s not right about it! It’s never something you just take for granted; with an artefact this powerful, it’s like juggling a live hand grenade every time you use it.”
    I turned the hand mirror over and studied the design on the back. The silver scrollwork was definitely different. I showed it to Molly, and she traced the raised edges with a fingertip.
    “There’s some kind of inscription worked into the design, but I’m damned if I can make head or tail of it,” she said finally. “Not Celtic, not Sumerian…not Kandarian or Enochian…It is vaguely familiar, but I can’t get my head around it.”
    “The design has changed,” I said. “But I couldn’t tell you how.”
    “Put it away for now,” said Molly. “It’s enough that we’ve got it and the enemy missed it. We’re here to look for weapons. Remember?”
    I slipped the Merlin Glass into the special pocket dimension I keep in one of my jacket pockets. I always like to have somewhere secure about me to store dangerous things. If only so I can get at them quickly in an emergency and throw them at other people. I breathed a little more easily with the Merlin Glass safely stored away, and looked at Molly.
    “Speaking of horribly powerful things that the world is undoubtedly better off without…I’ve been thinking about the Forbidden Weapons. I need to be sure they’re still secure within the Armageddon Codex.”
    Molly looked at me sharply. “You don’t really think the enemy could have got into that. Do you?”
    “I don’t know what to think anymore,” I said. “But given that we are talking about weapons so powerful my family locked them away, only to be used when reality itself is under threat…”
    “We should take a look,” said Molly.
    So I led the way, to the very far end of the Armoury, to the final andvery off-limits stone chamber. The Armageddon Codex is kept in a very private, very separate pocket dimension, for maximum security. To get to it you have to pass through the Lion’s Jaws—a giant stone carving of a lion’s snarling head, complete with mane, perfect in every detail. Not stylised in any way, it looks like the real thing, only some twenty feet tall and almost as wide. The Lion’s Jaws are carved out of a dark, blue-veined stone, so long ago that no one now remembers who did the work. It’s a lion to the life; the eyes seem to glare, the mouth seems to snarl and the whole thing seems ready to lunge forward at any moment and have your head off. To open the Codex, you have to pass through the Jaws,