As soon as Jack opened the door, he felt something was wrong. A weight which had been resting on the frame was dislodged and the whole panel of dirty wood shook, and a great shattering crash echoed out onto the darkened stairwell. Jack cursed himself, creeping round the door on bare mouldy floorboards, hoping against hope that the glass object he had broken was not what he thought it was.

It was. A mirror.

Jack's vision swam as he caught his own eyes reflected back at him, a patchwork of twisted faces not quite like his, but his.

In this place luck was hard to come by. He had just lost seven years. These years he would need to stay alive. But they would not take them from him.

He bolted back down the stairs through the shell of the mansion he had been searching, no more thought of plunder. Now it was all about self-preservation. The auditors would be coming.

The good point about being in a grand house like this, Jack mused as he ran, was that the long-forgotten family who had owned this husk back when it still some life in it would almost certainly have wanted to hide things from people like himself. And if the Auditors were hunting someone like Jack, they would use Jack's own means to do it.

Jack's boots skittered across the marble of the main hallway, clouds of ash doing nothing to deaden his footfalls, only making the surfaces under his feet slippery. He mounted another staircase, estimating the thickness of the walls as he went, kicked open the door of a bedroom, jumped into a diving roll, and landed in the ensuite, a pistol trained on the door as he drew a protective sigil on the wall with his finger in the filth on the tiles. He then turned on his heel, bolted the door and smeared another sigil on it.

The pistol wavered a little in Jack's grasp as he trained it around the room, looking for a likely point of ingress. He felt a breath on his neck.

"The mirror, Jack," hissed the Auditor. Jack did not dare turn around. He could feel nothingness behind him, a void. He could not bring himself to look into it.

"There's one here too?" he whispered.

"It's under a lot of dust, but it's there above the sink. You should know that's the first thing we'd look for."

"So what now?" Jack tried to affect nonchalance.

"We take your luck." No emotion in the voice, if you could call it that. "Let's see how far you get in this place without it. Finding loot, finding food, finding a place to sleep without someone slitting your throat for your boots..."

Jack felt the ghost of a finger touch the nape of his neck, and then a cold clammy thread being drawn out of him. He shivered, stubled and stubbed his toe on a loose tile.

"Seven years. Best of luck with that." And the Auditor was gone.