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There were more floors to von Nighburg’s hidden world than the one they arrived on. They found stairs leading downward in the room just outside the central chamber and, after a brief deliberation, Johan ruled out exploring them until they had gone through everything on that floor. The room with the stairs looked very much like a kitchen. There wasn’t anything like a place to cook but there were cupboards and cabinets with dried food and dishes in them. A pitcher of water stood on the corner of the counter by a tin sink.

The other two rooms on that floor proved equally mundane. Riker and Tanner wanted to split up and search them as quickly as possible but Johan put his foot down and insisted that they move together so he could keep an eye out for arcane meddling from the master of the manse. By the time they actually descended the stairs into the bottom floor he was starting to share their impatience.

If not for the fact that he’d had to spend a good ten minutes breaking the wards and traps on the mirror gate between the Cove lighthouse and this place Johan could have easily mistaken the building for a simple house in the countryside. There were no windows but the storage room, kitchen and small reading room they’d seen on the main floor were painfully mundane. It wasn’t until he peeked around the switchback in the stairway and saw the mirrors that the illusion of normalcy faded.

The bottom floor consisted of two rooms. One formed a large ring around the outside of the manse, the other was a circular room on the interior. The part of the outer room where the stairs let out was mostly empty but an open door to the interior stood just to the right of the last step. The inner walls of that room were lined with mirrors. Unnerved, Johan carefully peeked in the door, confirmed it was empty, then gingerly closed it.

“Something wrong?” Riker asked.

“Not as such, although I have a bad feeling about what I saw.” Johan started forward, hustling to get around the outer ring as fast as he could while still acting with prudence.

“More mirrors than a funhouse,” Tanner muttered. “What does a black hearted murderer want with a place like that?”

“Most likely he stored the children there, in moon prisms, when he wasn’t using them for whatever he used them for,” Johan said. “A mirrored box is a good way to store magic based on light while maximizing its longevity. My own lightbox functions on similar principles.”

“But the room was empty,” Riker protested.

“Which means he’s most likely taken your daughter out for some reason.”

“Such as?” A dark done filled Samson Riker’s question.

“Hopefully we find her before we find out.”

Further discussion was cut off when they rounded the bend to the final quadrant of the outer ring and found it stuffed to the gills with blacksmith’s tools. The ringlike corridor was a good fifteen feet wide and the central room added an equal distance to the diameter. So there was plenty of room in the outer space for all kinds of things. Johan was not an expert on the craft but even he recognized an anvil, several different kinds of hammers and tongs, a post for beating out bowls or helmets and a sulfurite powered forge suitable for smelting metal a few ounces at a time.

“Dust and ashes,” Tanner muttered. “Now I’ve seen everything.”

Johan ignored the old sailor’s words and focused on the lit candle Sheriff Warwick had given him before they stepped through the mirror. It took a moment to tune in on the sheriff, which was an odd sensation. He’d expected the experience to be like talking to someone else except in his mind and the constant buzzing of Tyson’s Nine in the back of his head had reinforced that impression. It shouldn’t have.

In reality he found himself sharing loose sensations and glimpses of vision with the sheriff and, once Warwick understood what he’d found, Roy in other parts of the manse. It took a bit for Johan to make Roy understand what he’d found and ask if he thought it was significant. Unfortunately neither of them knew for sure. However a quick look told Johan there was no iron in the area where as he did find several small ingots of silver and brass. Ultimately they agreed there probably wasn’t anything there of consequence.

After that Warwick expressed curiosity about whether they’d found signs of von Nighburg yet. He was growing concerned that their quarry might have created a second exit to the manse and used it to slip out past them. Johan tried to show that it was impossible to build two entrances into a shallowing. A second gap in the walls of the space would weaken it to the point of collapse, which he tried to show the others. It didn’t seem like they understood but he got a sense they were willing to take his word for it. After that they broke contact.

Johan blew out a sigh and stood up from the crate full of brass he’d been sitting on, wondering where they should move next. Tanner was examining the end of the hallway where the stairs came down from above. He’d poked and prodded the floor and walls there but came away empty. “If there’s another floor below this one the entrance isn’t here and, structurally speaking, it’s the best place for it.”

“What about the mirror room?” Riker asked.

“It’s worth looking at, I suppose,” Johan said, “although my gut tells me he’s not here. If he was I don’t know how he got past-”

The constant hum in the back of his mind cut out abruptly. For a split second he wasn’t sure what had changed, Johan had basically tuned it out by that point, but then he realized the candle magic was gone. “Riker,” he said, voice suddenly hoarse, “get ahold of Brandon by tap.”

The big man grunted and rapped out a pattern on his bracelet. “Something wrong?”

“Cassie’s song just cut out and we need to figure out why.” He unlocked the panels of his lightbox then readied one of his two remaining spare mirrors in his off hand. “We should head back to the central chamber.”

Tanner glanced from him to Riker. “We haven’t heard back from them yet.”

“We can start moving that way, won’t hurt anything so long as we keep an eye out.”

“Ears open, too,” Riker added.

“Fair, that.”

Knowing the layout of the tower made the return trip shorter, but only marginally so. Something was afoot in the tower now so Johan made it a point to use his mirror to carefully glance through each doorway and stairway before they went through. By the time they got to the kitchen they were all wound pretty tight. Hearing Sheriff Warwick laughing on the other side of the door did very little to help them relax and Johan saw that Tanner, in particular, got very tense.

However Johan wasn’t expecting Riker to push past the two of them and through the door before he could check it. The big man didn’t speak much and took his time moving around. In that moment Johan realized he’d foolishly conflated that with a steady and deliberate personality. Maybe Samson Riker was such a man. Even if he was in most cases Johan should have been ready for erratic behavior in matters pertaining to his daughter. His usual deliberate pace was gone as well, replaced with a speed surprising for a man of his size.

Johan snapped his lightbox open and hurried in Riker’s wake. Their rearguard were scattered through the central sanctum in various states of unreadiness. Over by the entry room, Brandon stared at the bookshelves with an inscrutable look on his face while the sheriff leaned against the table, still laughing. Cassandra crouched by the door opposite Brandon, eyes wild. The door to the entrance stood open.

Tanner pointed to a loose pile of clay bits and a broken string on the floor. “Look!”

Riker did not look, instead making a beeline for the open door. Johan stayed with him, dragging Tanner along by one arm. “I see it but there’s no time.”

“What about the sheriff?” Tanner demanded.

Johan continued to tug on his arm as he spoke. “I tried to counter that laughter once and nothing worked. Proud Elk and Cassie have the strongest gifts against this hex and if their arts haven’t helped I can’t. Can you?”

The sailor finally relented and let himself be taken along by the other’s insistent pull and they scrambled into the antechamber with the mirror. Riker had at least had the foresight to stop and wait for them. He gestured once at the mirror and looked at Johan. “Is it open?”

There wasn’t time for a detailed investigation but he’d already confirmed the safety of the portal once and hopefully von Nighburg hadn’t had time to do anything else with it in the few moments he’d had before they arrived. “It should be. But we can only go one at a time so I should go-”

However Samson Riker was not willing to wait for him to go first and immediately slapped his hand onto the glass pane and was drawn into the reflective surface.

“Coalstoking idiot.” Johan waited three seconds for the image in the glass to change from distorted smears roughly the same color as Riker’s clothing back to a clear reflection of the room they were in. As soon as the image stabilized he slapped his own hand down and made the trip himself.

He’d been ready to see just about anything except an empty room. There was no battle under way, no corpse or corpses of dead men or, worse, a dead girl. Just the sounds of footsteps on metal stairs. There were times he wished the Sons of Harmon had learned some of the famous magics from other traditions that made people physically stronger and more enduring. Struggling up three flights of stairs, trying to catch up to Riker’s dead sprint, was one of them.

Johan was about as tall as Riker and his stride was a bit longer but the big man was leaning far forward, dragging himself upwards via the railing with all his strength of arm and Johan just couldn’t close the gap. If anything, he fell a few steps behind. Riker reached the top of the stairs while Johan was still halfway down and this time he didn’t wait for anyone to catch up.

Once Riker left the tower silence fell like a guillotine. With only his and Tanner’s clanking footsteps on the stairs and the breath wheezing in his throat there was little to keep Johan’s foreboding at bay. It was his own fault, really. He hadn’t been thinking about how a father would act when his daughter was in danger so he hadn’t been ready for Riker’s erratic behavior. Of course, he wasn’t a father yet himself. That didn’t stop him from feeling like he’d missed something important, something he owed to Roy and even his own wife to understand about leading a family. It wasn’t until the second wave of guilt built up to roll over him that he realized what was really happening.

Johan’s lightbox snapped open and the mirrors angled to give him a look in all directions. He’d placed his sunstone back in the center of the box after the events by the docks that morning and added a couple of charms to the box itself so he could see into the places beside. The places you could just see out of the corner of your eye, where the nastiest things in old tales lived. For a brief moment Johan caught a glimpse of something in the mirrors. He couldn’t say what it was with certainty, there was only a brief impression of a massive head that seemed to be covering its face with its hands in guilt. Or maybe its hands were merging with its face, he couldn’t tell. Then the glass shattered and the lightbox became useless.

With an effort of will Johan pushed back on the unnatural emotions while he clamped the remnants of his lightbox under his off arm then pried the sunstone out of it. He discarded the shards of the box and it clattered away down the stairs. Somewhere behind him Tanner gave a yelp as he dodged out of the way but Johan didn’t have the time or breath to apologize to him. There were still another twenty to thirty stairs to climb.

Stopping to pry the sunstone out was a mistake, starting up again took far more energy than it should have. As he dragged his feet into motion again Johan tried to think of a plan. The creature von Nighburg used to attack their minds was on the move while the eclipse was probably already underway. He had one sunstone and one mirror to work with. He wasn’t an accomplished duelist, like Roy, but maybe Riker could accomplish something through pure mass. Tanner had a cutlass on him but he hadn’t drawn it yet. Roy made him sound like a privateer of some sort but that didn’t necessarily make him a dangerous fighter. It would have to be enough. If it wasn’t then Heinrich von Nighburg was going to get away with whatever he was trying to do and that just wasn’t acceptable.

None of it was acceptable. With another exertion of effort Johan dragged his thoughts away from those emotions and focused on sketching a new pattern on his surviving mirror. A few seconds later he reached the top of the lighthouse. He nearly tripped over Samson Riker when he burst out into the beacon room. The big man was collapsed on the roof, sobbing, his face twisted into such an exaggerated state of grief it would’ve been comical if it wasn’t Johan’s fault.

The air rushed out of him as the futility of his efforts rushed over him. He felt his footsteps slow and his exhaustion drag him down to the floor. Johan let the mirror slip out of his fingers as the futility of trying to make up for his failures this way finally became clear to him. Von Nighburg was taking a girl with a blank expression by the hand and helping her climb up onto the central platform where the lighthouse beacon burned. Far overhead the moon faded to a sliver. The blackguard would be done with his task soon but Johan felt that long before that he would be crushed under the weight of his own guilt…