The Map Maker's Choice

by Matthew J. Krengel

  “Where’s Bella!” Eriunia asked in a sudden panic. Fairies and water rarely went well together. She tried to sit up, but Jane and Jacob pushed her back down and held her there.

  “I’m here,” Bella answered. She walked over and sat down on Eriunia’s chest and looked at her. “You need to be more careful where you overload muskets. You nearly brought the entire cavern down on us.” Her voice took on a lecturing tone as she waved a finger under Eriunia’s nose.

  Jane tried hard not to smile at the sight but finally gave up and started giggling. The sight of Bella lecturing Eriunia was just too comical. Jacob was rolling on the ground laughing, and the fit finally ended with him stubbing his knee on a rock. He was caught between laughing and clutching his bruised knee.

  “Well, it’s good to see everyone’s doing well here,” Coronia said. She broke free of the water and slipped her body onto the stone floor until she was sitting half in and half out of the water. In one hand she held a small bundle of plants that had bright purple leaves and a small white stem. Skillfully, she wrapped four of the plants into a small bundle and then used a strip of cloth torn from Eriunia’s shirt to bind it in place over the bruise. “This should make you feel better almost immediately.”

  Eriunia felt the healing power of the plant flowing into her and the pounding pain in her head lessened. She waited a few minutes and then rolled to her side and slowly propped herself up. A wave of dizziness threatened to make her lay back down, but she gritted her teeth, and finally it passed.

  “So here we are, weaponless and trapped under dozens of feet of water and stone,” Eriunia said as she assessed the situation. She held up her empty quiver and then dumped the last of the water out of it. “Where do we go from here?” Her bow, she was sure, had been smashed to bits during the collapse.

  “Well, if we’re going to make it out,” Coronia replied, “I need legs, and we need to make it into the map room.” She gritted her teeth as she waited for the elf to tell her how impossible it was for a mermaid to walk.

  “Map room?” Jane asked instead. Mention of a room filled with maps connecting to other places made her heart flutter.

  “I found mention of it in some of the passages I explored,” Coronia explained. She flipped some water over her tail and sighed sadly. “I can’t follow the clues in my present form.” She pointed down to her tail.

  “Wait a minute,” Jacob interrupted as he finally connected the dots. “You’re a mermaid—half woman, half fish. How can you just get legs?”

  “Well, it’s not easy, and it can be dangerous, but it has been done in the past,” Coronia admitted. She flipped her tail again as silence descended on the grotto.

  “I have heard of the process,” Eriunia finally said. “There’s every chance you would lose your tail forever. You must understand that you could be giving up your life underwater for one above ground.”

  “I know that,” Coronia replied. She paused for almost a minute before she finally spoke. “There’s someone I love, and he is not a merman. If I’m to be with him, either I must change or he must, and I have heard it’s nearly impossible for a human to become a merman.”

  “Love always brings changes,” Eriunia said softly. “Sometimes they’re changes you don’t end up wanting.” This was a horrible risk for the mermaid, and she hoped Coronia had thought this through. “Humans can be fickle beings. What if, when you arrive back with your new legs, he’s changed his mind?”

  “I’ve made my decision,” Coronia replied. She straightened her shoulders and looked Eriunia straight in the eye. “Not far from here there’s a place where the people of this city maintained an impressive alchemy lab. Inside that room, I believe we can find the ingredients needed for the potion to change me. Do this for me, and I’ll take you to the Lady of Woods Lake and beg her to help you find the machine powering the Divide.”

  “Against my better judgment, I will help you,” Eriunia replied. The look in Coronia’s eyes told her the mermaid would not be ­dissuaded.

  13: Underwater Passage

  Coronia prepared to lead the quartet through another swim as Bella shivered and groaned to the group about her distaste for water.

  “Fairies are not made to swim,” Bella whined to Jane. “If we were meant to be underwater, we’d have been born with scales, not wings.”

  “Like Coronia?” Jane asked with a slight smile.

  “Well, yes,” Bella replied with a straight face. She didn’t see why Jane was smiling. “There’s nothing funny about going underwater and holding your breath for minutes on end.”

  “All right, here we go,” Coronia said. “Hold tight to the rope. I’ll pull you down the center of the passage.” She took a firm grip on the rope each of them held and flipped down into the water. When they were all in the water and signaled they were ready, she dove and accelerated slowly down the wide underwater passage. It was a short swim for her but a long haul for the humans, elf, and fairy holding their breaths so she pulled hard, trying to cut the time.

  The walls of the cave were covered in an underwater slime that glowed with a soft white light that allowed them to see in the dark water. As Coronia’s powerful tail pushed through the water, she debated if she was doing the right thing. The man she had fallen in love with was almost a half a world away but the small amulet he had given her told her he was still alive and waiting for her. He was not rich or powerful, but he was kind and thoughtful. Instead of talking and bragging constantly, he listened to her when she wanted to explain something and helped her when he could.

  He lived on the rocky shores of an island that, at the time, was referred to as Ionia, where he tended a flock of sheep. As he watched them, he’d carve the most amazing toys from driftwood. She had watched him for months before working up the courage to swim to shore and speak to him. On the shores of that land with his flock in sight, he spoke with her for hours. Finally, they fell in love. Before she left him, seeking a place to gain her legs, he had given her a present, a pendant carved from driftwood and set with a beautiful polished stone. It glowed with an inner light no one could explain, but she knew the glow told her he still loved her and waited for her.

  Her mind jumped back to the task at hand, and with a final burst of speed she pulled Jane, Jacob, Bella, and Eriunia into a wide, calm pool.

  Jane’s lungs were screaming when she finally brought her head above the water and gasped in a huge gulp of air.

  “Thank goodness that’s done,” Jacob gasped loudly. He glanced over at Eriunia, but she was just smiling at them. He narrowed his eyes. “You’re still holding your breath, aren’t you?”

  When she finally took a breath, it was with a triumphant smile that made Jacob mildly irritated. Instead, he turned to Jane and slid an arm around her waist underwater.

  “Hey, you,” Jane laughed. “That tickled.”

  The water was warm and Jane leaned against him for a moment. They had so little time alone right now as they stumbled from one crisis to another. Then she thought about poor Jackie, with her wedding plans completely thrown into shambles.

  Bella had had little trouble holding her breath, even though her lungs were tiny, but she was beside herself being wet. “Look at me,” she cried. “My wings are sopping. I can hardly stand.” She struggled out of the water and looked for a place where she could rest and dry out her wings, claiming they had to dry flat to be of any use again.

  After a minute of splashing about in the water, the others climbed out as well and looked around. The chamber they found themselves in was at least a hundred feet long and fifty wide, supported in the middle with two big stone pillars. The place where stairs had once led up to the surface was a jumble of stones.

  Lining the walls were shelves and more shelves. Books and scrolls filled some, while glass jars and clay pots filled others.

  “Good thing Katar never found this place,” E
riunia muttered. She walked along the nearest wall, looking at the book titles, and spotted several very rare works that many thought had been destroyed. “Look, here is one by Leonardo Da Vinci.”

  “Wait a minute. He was on our side,” Jacob exclaimed. He reached out to touch the book, but Eriunia grabbed his hand and stopped him.

  “That’s a priceless work of science,” Eriunia said sternly. She then pointed at his dripping wet hands. “Shall we at least dry our hands before we just pull it off the shelf? Besides, a great man like him was bound to be able to cross back and forth. He was a map maker of some skill and nearly an engineer.”

  “Sorry,” Jacob muttered guiltily. He fanned his hands in the air and even pulled off his shirt and wrung the water out of it, trying to hasten the process.

  In the middle of the room were globes of glass that glowed as powerfully as a light bulb would have on Jane and Jacob’s side of the Divide. Long tables sat under each of the lights, many covered with beakers and metal pipes. Gears and pulleys hung from the walls and ceiling, allowing for the movement of massive weights. Added to all that were the pages and pages of notes covering the open spaces on each table.

  “Wow! Tasker would have a ball here,” Jane exclaimed. She turned in a circle, trying to take it all in. The pool of water where they had entered was located on the far side of the room, away from the steps that had once led out. “Where do we start?”

  “That shelf over there,” Coronia said. She pointed to one about ten feet away from the edge of the pool.

  “Why that one?” Jane asked. She walked over to the shelf and began reading the names of the books.

  “There is a book in the middle of the shelf that deals with mermaids and mermaid lore,” Coronia told her. “I was able to pull myself out of the water just far enough to read the titles.”

  “That must have been painful,” Eriunia said. She suddenly had a new respect for the mermaid. Not many of her kind would willingly remove themselves from the water. A mermaid out of the water would quickly find herself drying out and in danger of death if she was unable to return in time.

  “I lost a few scales,” Coronia admitted. She turned her tail for them to see, and Jane and the others were able to see the patchwork of missing scales slowly starting to heal.

  Eriunia walked to the shelf and pulled from the shelf the book Coronia pointed to. With the volume in hand, she walked to where the others were waiting near the pool and sat down. Carefully she opened the volume, and everyone crowded in behind her to read. Half an hour later, Eriunia was still paging through the book. Jacob was exploring the room, searching for a way out. Jane was still sitting next to Eriunia, but the elf could tell Jane’s attention was starting to wander.

  “I think we can get out this way,” Jacob called from across the room. He pushed on a boulder, and it shifted easily under his hands. “I feel air coming through the openings in the rocks.”

  “Good,” Jane said. She was about to stand up when Eriunia caught her arm and pointed to the page before them.

  “This is it,” Eriunia said. “A potion that can be devised using alchemy that will turn a mermaid into a person. But it is not permanent.” She fell silent as she continued reading the description written at the bottom of the page. Some of the ingredients were fairly common, and she knew many of them were present here. Others contained in the list were very exotic, and a few exceedingly rare. “Coronia, it says it’s unknown how long the change will last. In one case the transformation lasted for years, while in another it only lasted a few days.”

  “Is there no way to make it permanent?” Coronia pleaded, thinking of all the work she had gone through to bring her this close, the sacrifices she’d made to be able to walk in the sand with her young shepherd.

  “It doesn’t say,” Eriunia said finally when she finished reading. “But whoever worked here was truly a master of the craft of alchemy. The ingredients alone are worth a fortune, and the books and knowledge . . .” she stopped and looked around. “It could be that the secret is hidden in another of the books.”

  “Make me the potion,” Coronia begged. “I’ll take my chances that it’ll last and I may spend years with my love.”

  Eriunia knew she couldn’t say no to the mermaid. Not with Tasker’s life hanging in the balance, and perhaps the fate of the whole world. The potion would not take long to mix.

  “Give me an hour,” Eriunia replied. “We can dispatch someone to guide you through the underpaths from Duluth after we’ve freed Tasker. I’ll do whatever I can to bring you and your love back together, I promise.” She crossed to the table nearest to the pool so that the mermaid could watch and started working. Jane hung nearby, fascinated with the idea that alchemy could actually work. Even Bella came out, her wings finally dried, to watch.

  “On our side, alchemy was dismissed as a fake science practiced by frauds and cheats,” Jane explained. She watched as Eriunia rummaged through a shelf until she found a small bottle of a clear liquid.

  “It has some uses, but most of those who claim to know its secrets are just that—cheats,” Eriunia replied. She carefully measured a single drop of the clear liquid into a clean bottle before her and continued. “Those who truly have mastered its secrets can turn lead to gold and diamonds to dust. Although why anyone would want to turn a diamond into dust is beyond me.” They both chuckled at the idea of turning something priceless into the most basic substance on the earth.

  Eriunia let her attention focus completely on the bottle before her and started telling Jane and Bella what they needed.

  “Brown bottle on the top shelf marked ‘purified tears,’” Eriunia told Bella. “There should be a small, short bottle marked ‘mermaid tears.’ I’ll need that, too.”

  “I’ll find it,” Bella replied. She winged her way up to the shelf and started to explore among the bottles.

  “Jane, if you and Jacob could go to that far shelf marked ‘gemstones’ and find the ground sapphires, blue sapphires. Those are the jewels of the ocean, both in color and use,” Eriunia said. She let her finger slip down to the next line on the directions, and then she paused for a moment. “Coronia, you’re the only one who can help me with this ingredient.”

  “What is it?” the mermaid asked.

  “I need the thing most precious to your heart in order to make the potion work on you,” Eriunia said with a grimace. “Then three drops of your blood and a scale. The more things directly from you we put into the mixture, the more powerful it will be and the longer it should last.”

  The mermaid was silent as she slowly lifted the small wooden necklace and gemstone up and stared into its depths. “If this is destroyed for the potion, he’ll think I’ve died. It’ll crush him.”

  “Without something very precious to you, the change will be random and unfocused. We need to focus the change to a human form and tie it to you,” Eriunia replied.

  “Here,” Coronia said finally. With a shaking hand, she undid the clasp on her necklace and handed it to Eriunia. “Just make this work, please.” Then with a determined look on her face, the mermaid reached down and grasped a scale from the end of her tail. With a swift yank she pulled it loose, grimacing as she fought back the pain. A few drops of blood fell free of the wound and stained the water slightly pink before fading away into the depths.

  “I will,” Eriunia promised. “I’ll make it work.” With the necklace and scale in hand, she turned back to the table and surveyed the gathered ingredients. “I think we’re ready to begin. The drops of blood will be the last thing we add. Oh, Jane, I’ll need three drops of your blood, also. You’re human.”

  Jane nodded, though she looked a little worried.

  “Coronia’s will be added first, then yours, to tell the transformation that it is changing her from mermaid to human,” Eriunia ­explained.

  * * * * *

  Puck hur
ried down the street as the enormity of the events in Duluth started to sink in. The Divide was being tampered with and distortions were occuring with terrifying results. Things were being grabbed from the far side of the Divide and transported back and forth between worlds. Nothing was safe. Already, hundreds of people were flooding into the docks and quays of Isle Royale, and the island was filling up quickly. He didn’t think the flow would stop until the island was bursting at the seams. Suddenly Puck thought that maybe trying to establish a cold iron works in the deep of the north woods might be easier than staying here.

  “Stop it, Puck,” he muttered to himself. “If the Divide comes down, nowhere in the world will be safe.”

  Still, as he continued on his way, something bothered him about one of the incidents he had heard about. A big metal land vessel had come careening out of the darkness and smashed itself across the hillside. Things caught in the passage through the Divide did not normally come through in one piece unless they had an anchor. To him, it did not sound like someone was trying to bring the Divide down, but that they were trying to engineer a mass movement of people and objects through the barrier. That idea terrified him so badly he stopped to lean on a nearby wall for support. He could imagine the Adherents gaining the power to move their entire army through the Divide at will. Or in the midst of a battle, transporting a division behind enemy lines. They would be unstoppable.

  “That’s it. I’m going to find out once and for all,” Puck muttered. At one time he had asked Tasker if he should attempt something similar, but the dwarf insisted it was too dangerous. Now Puck wasn’t so sure. He found himself in front of the castle. One of his goblins stood near the castle gate. “Go find Carvin,” he ordered the goblin, “and tell him I’m going to check on something. I will be back as quickly as I can.”