Dr. Alistair Finch first noticed something unusual about Emperor Julian Verus on the third day of his appointment as personal physician. The emperor was a man of thirty-six, slight of build, with features that were almost too delicate to be masculine and eyes that held the distant, unseeing look of a man who was watching something that existed only for him. He sat in a chair by the window of his private study, his hands folded in his lap, his mouth slightly open, his breathing slow and deliberate.

"Your Majesty," Dr. Finch said, in the careful, measured tone that court physicians had been taught to use when addressing the imperial person. "I am here to examine you, as you requested."

Julian Verus turned his head with a slowness that was either deliberate or pathological. His eyes came to rest on Dr. Finch with an intensity that was unnerving. "You can see them," he said.

"Your Majesty?"

"The mirrors. They're beautiful, you know. They show you everything. Everything you've done, everything you'll do, everything you've forgotten and everything you're about to do and it's all right there, in the glass, and you can't look away because if you look away you'll miss something important and that something might be the difference between saving the empire and losing it forever."

Dr. Finch had heard variations of this speech from thirty-seven patients before. He had treated madness in the Crimea, in the asylum at Bethlem, and in the imperial court itself, and he had learned that madness had a grammar, a syntax, a vocabulary of its own. The words were different, but the structure was always the same: a mind constructing a world inside itself because the world outside had become too painful, too meaningless, or too terrifying to bear.

"I'd like to see these mirrors," Dr. Finch said, because that was what you said, and because he was a man of science and science required observation before conclusion.

Julian led him to the imperial gallery, a long corridor lined with mirrors that had been commissioned from the finest glassmakers in Bohemia and Venice and installed along every available wall space. The mirrors showed the emperor walking past them, multiplied into infinity, a procession of Julian Veres receding into the distance like a line of soldiers marching toward an invisible horizon.

"Each one is a different version of me," Julian said, and there was pride in his voice, the pride of a man who had built something remarkable. "The one on the left is the Julian who never became emperor. He's a schoolteacher in Wales, and he's happy, I think. The one on the right is the Julian who was assassinated in the garden twenty years ago. He's dead. The one at the end of the hall is the Julian who will rule for another hundred years. He's a monster."

Dr. Finch walked to the end of the hall and looked at the mirror at its farthest point. The reflection that looked back at him was not the emperor's. It was his own. Alistair Finch, Irish, thirty-four, slight of build, eyes the colour of a winter sea, mouth set in a line of cautious professionalism. The man in the mirror looked tired. The man in the mirror looked afraid.

"That's not the emperor," Dr. Finch said quietly.

"It is," Julian said. "You're his mirror. All of you are. Every doctor, every advisor, every courtier. You look at me and you see what you want to see, and I look at you and I see what I need to see, and neither of us sees the truth because the truth is something that would kill us both if we actually saw it."

Dr. Finch did not sleep that night. He lay in his quarters above the imperial kitchen, listening to the sounds of the household settling down for sleep—the clink of dishes, the murmur of servants talking in hushed voices, the occasional distant bark of a dog from the kennards beyond the palace walls. And he thought about the mirrors, and about the emperor, and about the strange and terrible intelligence that seemed to move between them like a third person, neither one nor the other but something created by the space between them, something that lived in the exchange of glances and words and silences and had its own desires and its own agenda and its own definition of what truth meant.

Over the following weeks, Dr. Finch conducted his examination. He tested the emperor's memory, his reflexes, his vision and hearing and sense of taste. He found nothing physically wrong. He prescribed a diet of warm milk and fresh air, a regimen of exercise, and a reduction in the consumption of wine. Julian agreed to all of it with the docility of a man who had decided that compliance was easier than explanation.

And Dr. Finch began to see the mirrors himself.

It started subtly—a flicker in the glass, a movement in the periphery, a sense of being watched that he attributed to fatigue and stress and the natural anxiety of treating a patient whose condition was beyond his understanding. But gradually, over the course of a month, the mirages became more persistent, more detailed, more real. He began to see himself in the mirrors doing things he had not done and would not do: speaking words he had not spoken, making gestures he would never make, wearing expressions that were not his own.

He began to understand, with a dread that settled into his bones like a cold stone, that the emperor was not mad. Or if he was mad, the madness was not a breakdown but a breakthrough—a way of perceiving a reality that existed alongside the ordinary world, visible in the glass and the water and any surface that reflected light back upon itself. The mirrors showed him the empire not as it was but as it was becoming, and the future he saw was not hopeful.

Dr. Finch closed his ledger and blew out the candle and sat in the darkness of his study and listened to the silence, and in that silence he heard, faintly but unmistakably, the whisper of glass on glass, the sound of two worlds rubbing against each other like tectonic plates, preparing to shift.

OTMES-v2 Objective Codes: M = [6.0, 7.0, 6.0, 5.0, 4.0, 9.0, 7.0, 3.0, 7.0, 6.0] I = 0.7 | R = 0.3 | K1 = 0.7 | K2 = 0.5 N = 0.3 | TI = 80.6 | θ = 90° Type: Fin-de-siecle Psychological Thriller | Direction: θ=90° (Mystery/Dissociation)