You Are Here: Tales of Cartographic Wonders

by Lindsay Buroker

  As he withdrew from inner space he coiled his body tightly, his mass blossoming until it pulled him free from the ceiling, accelerating him as he fell. At the last moment, one guard felt some press of the air and began to look up—and Hiui lashed out with both legs, snapping his neck before he even saw his killer. The impact thrust Hiui towards the second guard, who was still turning in surprise at the muted crack of bone.

  The bladed tips of Hiui’s nails sank deep into the guard's throat, severing arteries and veins, collapsing his windpipe before he could make a sound. He pulled back a clawed fist and all five nails broke free, serrated barbs finer than hairs clinging deep in the flesh, plugging the wounds and preventing any violent gush of blood. Not so within—stains darkened beneath the skin as the dying man clutched at his neck, wheezing, wide-eyed and mouth gaping like a fish, until he slumped down the wall and fell still.

  Hiui crouched, looking up the corridor towards the distant light—no movement, no sound of alarm—and turned to the door, but heard no sound from behind it either.

  His attack had been quiet, but not silent. Someone would have responded, if there was anyone on the other side. Maybe it wasn’t a guardroom at all. He flexed his fingers and soft new nails slid into the exposed beds, hardening as they met the air. In two minutes they’d be ready, until then he would have to rely on his off hand.

  He reached for the faint gleam of the door’s handle, but there was no give. He searched the clothing of both men and discovered a small key on the belt of one. The keyhole was not on the door but the wall beside it. Blind fingers brushed the wooden panels until he felt the slightest movement, prised it open, fitted the key.

  There was a faint grinding as it turned. Still no sense of movement from beyond.

  This time the handle moved. He eased it open and narrowed his eyes as muted light fell in a thin shaft between door and frame. In the small room revealed, two lamps were mounted on the flanking walls, wicks trimmed low to burn long, their light focused horizontally with mirrored shades, the floor and ceiling both in shadow.

  There was no doorway in the facing wall where Dyffar believed the secret passage would begin—he hardly expected to find one—but something else stood between the walls at the centre of the room. A squat, sturdy platform, and upon its surface a glass case in which was propped a slab of pale, smooth-grained stone.

  Delicate tracings of text covered it, lines of them carved into the stone, and beneath each another row finely painted onto the surface. So many words, the characters too tiny in their detail to make out in this dim light, but it could only be one thing.

  The Bilingual, just as Dyffar had known.

  And it was his.

  Hiui stepped forward and felt smooth, icy coldness beneath his feet in the darkness.

  There was a distinct click from the far corner of the room.

  He ducked low, knees bent, ready to dive or leap—but then, like the guard had done in the moments before his death, Hiui sensed movement from above him. He raised his gaze in time to see a blur in the darkness above the lamps, then he was caught in a loose mesh of flexible links, a heavy net, weighted down still further by solid metal globes the size of his clenched fists.

  One struck his head, stunning him, two more swung into his stomach and side and doubled him over with the force of their momentum. He staggered under the weight, gasping, flinching as the platform toppled, spilling the precious Bilingual into the shadows on the floor.

  Instinctively he reacted, thrusting the globes away and seeking refuge in inner space, thinking to slip out through the loose net before more guards arrived—and as he did so white agony flowered across his body, a fire that torched his skin but sank deeper too, like long hooks in the flesh, preventing his retreat from the outer world.

  He was overwhelmed, all consciousness gone even before he fell.

  When his mind seeped back to him, he was being dragged on his toes, hanging awkwardly between two guards, one before and one behind. His arms were bound by heavy chain-linked manacles and the footfalls of the guards were sharp and ringing. Each carried an oil lamp that swung disorienting fields of light and shadow that seemed to gleam on the walls and floor. The path turned and twisted then entered a room, small to judge by the press of the air. He was thrown down, head cracking against stone tiles, spinning the room wildly.

  When the sickening motion eased, he realised the stranger and the soldier he had evaded in the corridor were present, watching as the two guards erected a cage around him. Its walls were a shining grid of blade-sharp edges, interlocking in a pyramid with its point above his head. Awkwardly the guards thrust long poles through hinge-tubes between the cage walls, down into the floor, anchoring the cage. Each pole locked down the one before it, and a thick pin slotted cross-ways though the last, holding the whole in place.

  The walls, the ceiling, the floor, his cage… all shone metallic in the weak light. The weighted net had been all metal too. The implication made its way through the aching of his brain and body.

  This place had been prepared.

  The guards stepped back, allowing the two senior figures a better view. “This is a male,” said the soldier, addressing the stranger. “They spy and steal, hide themselves with magic. Their females are bigger, they do the fighting.”

  He tapped the cage by Hiui’s head with a fingernail. “Say something, creature. Have you the document that lured you to us? We have been waiting for one of you to come.”

  Hiui only clenched his jaw.

  The stranger stepped closer and spoke then, leaning to look into Hiui’s face as he did so. Despite his inability to distinguish any meaning in the alien words, Hiui marvelled at the sound. A new language, complete and fluid, as different in sound and structure from the Other’s tongue as it was from the People’s.

  How perfect a strategy, he thought, fighting to hide his dismay. With a second language as a resource, no coding was necessary. There need be no recognisable connection between the two, and without comprehension of their shared meaning every message would be incomprehensible.

  The stranger observed Hiui’s reaction. “I said, we are as interested in your language as you are in mine.” In his mouth the Others’ tongue was weirdly malformed, the sound and rhythm of the words wrong, though comprehensible. “There are none of your kind in our lands,” he continued. “In time that will be true of these lands as well. With your help.”

  Hiui felt a rush of hate fill him. “The People will destroy you both!” he spat—in the People’s tongue. The stranger made an interested noise in his throat, and Hiui locked his teeth together, cursing inwardly.

  The soldier signalled to one of the guards, who handed him the Bilingual. “You sought this?” he asked, and held it close to the cage. It was not etched stone but fired clay, one corner broken away from its spill in the trapped room.

  The soldier tossed it carelessly aside and it split into three pieces against the floor. “Just bait, creature. Meat in the snare. Maybe you’ll be bait for more eventually, but we’ve plans for you before it comes to that.” He bared his teeth in an ugly smile. “Much to talk about, creature. Much to do.”

  Hiui held himself rigid, a poor show of defiance from his knees.

  The soldier turned, signalling for the guards to follow, the stranger departing at his side. The closing door shut out the last of the lamplight, and in the windowless room even Hiui’s sensitive eyes could make out only the haziest of shapes against the gloom, all of them cut up into mosaics of blank-grey shadow by the fine mesh of his cage.

  Once all witnesses were gone, he slumped in defeat.

  *

  “So different,” Dyffar had murmured. “Two ways of living, of working the world.”

  Hiui needed no more convincing, but was content to hear her tell it all again, or to say anything, just so long as he could enjoy the sound of her voice.

  He curled against her side, under the comforting weight of her arm. She had appeared a giant before, striding from his mo
ther’s glade, warring with her frustration. Here in the darkest shadow of her grotto she seemed smaller, but with a deepness he was unable to draw away from.

  He had tried to and failed during their play together, trapped in the unbreakable cage of her limbs no matter his struggles. Until his struggling become the urge to escape into her, not from.

  Something was changed in him. Maybe not absolutely, not yet, but still. This is the beginning of it for me, he thought.

  “It is like the sexes,” she said, fingertips disturbing the tan fur of his chest, stroking his pelt apart to reveal fleeting rainbow trails in their wake. For a moment Hiui felt as though she was seeing into his mind—then he understood that she spoke of her strange tablet still.

  “I would not employ that argument,” he said.

  “No?” She sat up beneath the low canopy of fronds that had given them privacy. “It is apt. Our ways are different, male and female, but through them we explore the same world. Is it so impossible that more than one means of speaking arose amongst them? They do not speak our language, of course, so there exist two already. Why not a third?”

  “There are not three sexes…”

  Dyffar grunted. “I cannot conceive how it came to be, I simply know it is the case. The People must be convinced of the truth if we are to resolve the conflict in our favour.” There was a sudden tension in her, a resumption of the air she had carried before their long, sweet day together.

  “That will not be easy.”

  She smiled. “I convinced you.”

  “You failed to convince my mother.”

  Dyffar rose to her feet, pressing the foliage apart, and stretched. “I had hoped to have a supporting voice amongst the six when I went before them, one to whisper in their ears on my behalf, but nothing has changed. Sedduq may not accept my claims, but she is not the Messireen embodied.”

  Except that she may whisper against you, Hiui thought. “Will you take your proof to them?” he asked.

  “Why, when I take my word?”

  “May I see it again?” he asked, instantly hating how like a child he sounded, knowing from her chuckle that she heard it too.

  “You may,” she said. She touched the oldest tree of her glade, caressed its bark with intelligent fingers. The rough folds parted like ancient, opening lips and the startling blue of the parchment was revealed within. The tree sealed itself as she turned away and passed it to him.

  “Keep it safe for me until I return,” she said, and bent low, held his head in one hand and pressed a soft, heavy kiss onto his mouth. She released him, but with the same hand pushed him down until he lay beneath the low foliage that had hidden them through the day. “Now lie still, unless you want your special little secret spread all over the forest by Waeo and the other gossip-mongers.”

  Her hand withdrew, the large, heavy leaves closing over him. From beneath them he was just close enough to catch the faintest hint of her songcall, the subvocalised chant that carried further than any audible tones of bird or beast, seeking out her carrier’s ears.

  Waeo responded immediately, split the air as he darted to her side from whatever duty nest he kept in the forest nearby. “Take me to the Messireen,” she ordered. Hiui heard the peculiar, textured sound of her body being drawn into inner space after Waeo, and moments later they were on their way.

  Alone, Hiui looked at her prize, pressed in on itself like a flower not yet spread, but his mind was distracted by Dyffar still. All females seemed suddenly redefined, though he knew nothing new than he had a day before.

  He unfolded the parchment, revealing the lines of a complex design. Words in the language of the Others were recorded in a minuscule script, some he knew, others not. Beside an unfamiliar term, “blueprint”, Dyffar had written map, the Other name for their depictions of a territory—but beneath the word “Palace” she had added characters that seemed meaningless. No code Hiui had learned could render them equal. Dyffar’s claim, that he looked at the symbols of a new Other language, still excited and disturbed him.

  Like many of the younger generations, Hiui had learned the language of the Others. The growing conflict made it a necessity for spies and warriors alike, but as a result their own unity of voice was clearly no more. Dyffar’s discovery was something else entirely, a revelation about the enemy that shook his concept of them but left no new stability in its wake.

  Unfortunately, few amongst the elder generations had studied the Others to such an extent—some viewed the notion of even uttering a word of that animalistic language to be a corruption in itself—and though the Messireen were wise, they were also old. Even the youngest, his mother, was twice Dyffar’s age, and her response to the notion had bordered on the insulting until she gained a measure of control and made apologies. But Dyffar was determined.

  He looked at the map once more. The People’s language used no script, but near the centre of the image, within a cluster of the white lines, she had traced one line of her own, ending in a coil.

  The supposed location of the Bilingual tablet. Proof of her wild claims.

  He stood, vanishing the map from the outer world for later recovery, and sprang upward, shrinking into inner space until his body had deformed into a thin membrane, lighter than a bird’s feather but broader than a bat’s wingspan.

  The breeze swept him between the trees.

  He still had time to witness Dyffar’s audience with the Messireen, and act accordingly. Even if that act was to defy orders constrained by traditional ways, issued by those unable to accept a mortal threat illuminated by taboo.

  If someone did not, disunity of voice might destroy them all.

  *

  The stranger’s words echoed in Hiui’s memory:

  I said, We are as interested in your language as you are in mine.

  He opened his eyes, but didn’t see the room or the tools of his confinement. He visualised the words as they would be written down—and heard again what the stranger had said using his own alien tongue. At the time, it had been flow of meaningless noise to Hiui’s ears…

  …but then the stranger defined their meaning in the Other’s tongue as well. The Bilingual was not the tablet, an artificial artefact of power.

  It was the man!

  There must be more like him—bilinguals all across the land, wherever the Others pitted themselves against the People. Reading and speaking and writing out new orders, secure in the knowledge that they were incomprehensible to their enemy.

  Hiui concentrated on the stranger’s two utterances, but it was like comparing spoken words with the empty babbling of a woodland stream. Instead he considered only the language he could comprehend, and a strategy came to mind.

  I, mine. You, your. We.

  Simple words of everyday significance, yet vital to the language’s use. Could he identify those in the stranger’s language? He believed he could. Not with absolute certainty, but at least with a degree of confidence—and between them the more complex terms remained.

  With careful study, he could learn to understand the second language just as he had come to understand the first. What did it matter that both of them were, in some way, languages of the Others? He didn’t need to steal a tablet to help defeat his enemy, he could become the Bilingual himself!

  But his excitement faded. This was the stranger’s goal as well. For all he knew, the Others had captured brothers or sisters from past battles, gradually gathering knowledge of the People’s ways to use against them. Any word that passed his lips would only add to their advantage.

  He had to bring what he knew to Dyffar, to the Messireen, give the People a chance to reverse the defeats being inflicted on them. But the metals all around held him apart from inner space, compelling him to this changeless prison.

  Just as inner space distorted, tangled, compressed his body until he could be borne up on the slightest wind like a butterfly, so would any natural-made thing touching him dwindle inward until the moment he loosened the subtle hold he had on it and saw
it billow forth again—but metals, stones, crystals, those things that had never lived. The shackles encircled his wrists so closely they choked the flesh, his hands swollen and prickling, and their metal would hold him back wherever they touched his skin.

  Pain-memory provided a sharp reminder of the price he’d pay for any futile effort to compress the incompressible, whereas any female could free themselves from this confinement with ease, simply by tearing the chains apart—what would he give for a little of their thundering strength today.

  He hung his head. How long could he last, imprisoned here, before he gave up answers to their questions? What fate would befall the People then, born of his foolishness, his weakness? He hefted the shackles, the chain between them heavy, their dull grip upon his arms unshakable.

  If only he had allowed Dyffar to seize him instead, before he flew away.

  *

  Her body had gripped him, and he felt threatened as if by an instant transformation.

  Hiui had taken bodily pleasure and comfort for many years, of course, but that had all been males together—it was sport and relaxation, or bonding amongst the closest of friends. A cheerful act of plunder to provoke some rival, or a prank played on some lovelorn youth who should know better, to teach him to stick to games with his fellows, or…

  But this was so different from his experiences before. He had no words for how or why—it was still only a taking of pleasure, after all—but there was no denying it. He felt something, lying with Dyffar’Kaoi, that took him back to an existence before language. When the world was only himself and the enormity which, through the gradual births of himself and of meaning, became his mother.

  Until this moment, whenever he had shrunk into inner space or withdrew from it again, Hiui had perceived it as something within him, something inherently masculine, the thing more than anything that differentiated males and females. Now, with his body pressed into Dyffar’s, he felt the inner space within her and finally recognised the feminine nature of its pull.