Chapter 8: Mirror Blind Spots, as Catalogued by Maret Dun

The meeting was in a room that was not supposed to exist.

It did exist — Elias could confirm this by the pressure of the wall against his shoulder and the smell of cold stone and the faint mechanical drip of a pipe somewhere behind the plaster — but it did not appear on any floor plan he had processed in the Record Room, and he had processed three separate architectural surveys of the Academy's sub-basement level in the past two years. The surveys agreed with one another. They were all wrong.

He had arrived first, which was intentional. Four minutes of empty room told you things a room full of people would conceal. He catalogued them in order: one entrance, the door through which he had come; a second door, frame blackened and sealed with what appeared to be non-standard ironwork, probably original to the building's foundation period; one table, surface scarred by years of use that were not archival; four chairs, mismatched; one ceiling fixture, oil lamp rather than enchanted, which meant no Ministry-issue relay; zero Thought-Watcher mirrors on any of the four walls.