The Glass Sentence (The Mapmakers Trilogy)

by S. E. Grove

  From the balcony, Sophia could see beyond the walls in every direction. To the south, the craggy face of the glacier stretched to the horizon. To the north were the deserted plains of the Baldlands and the gray contours of Nochtland. The city seemed pitifully small from such a distance: no more than a rocky bump in the glacier’s path.

  At the center of the balcony was a stone sphere almost as tall as she was, and balanced on it was a miniature reproduction of the pyramid itself, cut in glass. Her eyes traveled down the length of the wall, over the thousands of maps that spiraled toward the base of the pyramid. They recounted a long, continuous history of the Age. Surely, Sophia thought, the map on the pedestal is the last—the last memories stored for the creation of the pyramid.

  Before approaching it, she walked to the edge of the balcony. The sight made her dizzy. She stepped back to steady herself and then leaned cautiously forward once again. The frozen lake was visible in its entirety. The map of the world lay below her, created by some unknown hand with some unknown instrument, trapped below the ice. It was not still. A restless light appeared to move across it, altering the colors and patterns below the surface. Sophia was mesmerized, uncomprehending. What vision of the world did it reflect? What possibilities of past and future did it capture in its frozen depths?

  She pulled herself away from the balcony railing with a sense of piercing sadness. How can I destroy all this? she thought. There was no doubt in her mind that the memories from the four maps were meant to be hers, but she could not bring herself to do the thing that would make those memories real. Below that frozen surface lay a world of knowledge, visions, truths. She imagined the slender current of water that carried the story of how her parents had left New Occident, never to be seen again. It lay somewhere there below the ice, containing all the secrets of her parents’ lives. Sophia was overwhelmed with such a sense of longing to know—to finally know—that she sank against the railing.

  As she leaned forward, she heard an unexpected sound—a footfall. Someone had followed her. Someone had climbed all the way up through the pyramid without being seen and was about to step onto the balcony beside her. Sophia steeled herself against the Sandman with the pistol who had pursued her in the underground cavern. She did not feel afraid; her stomach hardened as if preparing for a sudden blow.

  But it was not the man with the revolver. As the person who had followed her came into view, Sophia drew back inadvertently. The veil was gone and the scarred face was pale against the unbound hair, which was tousled and tangled and wet with snow.

  Blanca had found her.

  37

  The End of Days

  1891, July #: #-Hour

  Enday: the term used by followers of the Chronicles of the Great Disruption to designate the day when a given Age comes to a close. The term is ambiguous, as it remains unclear whether it used merely to designate the conclusion of a calendar Age or rather to mark the destruction of one Age giving way to another.

  —From Veressa Metl’s Glossary of Baldlandian Terms

  SOPHIA STOOD GUARDEDLY before the pedestal, watching Blanca as she stepped onto the balcony. For a moment, neither of them spoke. Blanca appeared hardly to notice her. She walked past Sophia to the railing and watched the lake.

  “I did not realize until after you had left,” Blanca said, “that the maps describe this moment—here, now.” She turned, and Sophia saw her scarred face. “Not the Great Disruption itself—merely its distant echo.” She laughed quietly, bitterly. “But you—you understood. You are a better cartologer than I am, after all. Perhaps because you have no sense of time, your mind floats free,” she mused. “You see things for what they are, regardless of when they are.”

  Sophia did not say anything. Blanca’s dress and cloak were torn, her hands scratched. The Lachrima appeared to have been through some battle with the elements or, worse, with other people, and Sophia wondered fearfully about the state of those people. “What happened to you?” she finally asked.

  Blanca continued as if she had not heard. “When I realized how I had misread the maps, I rushed to the dungeons, only to find that you were already gone. The Nochtland guard told me that you had left through the tunnels, and I understood at once. Did you guess it, or did you read the truth in the maps on these walls?”

  “Guess what?”

  “That these advancing Southern Snows and my home, the Glacine Age, are one and the same.”

  Sophia shook her head. “I didn’t know what the four maps meant either. I didn’t know anything until I got here and read these maps. The glass maps in the walls.” She paused. “And then I knew they were about this place, and that I had to destroy it.” Sophia dropped her head. “I’m here, but I can’t bring myself to do it.”

  Blanca turned with a sigh and again looked out over the frozen lake. “Poor child. You truly have no sense of time. Do you know how long you have spent here, from the moment you left the caverns?”

  Sophia felt a flutter of anxiety in her stomach. “No.”

  “More than nine hours by the clock of the Baldlands. Twenty-five hours by the clock of New Occident. Two days have dawned.”

  Sophia gasped.

  “You would probably linger on here until the end of time, were you left to your own devices,” Blanca said wistfully.

  “More than an entire day,” Sophia whispered, her voice choked. “I thought perhaps an hour—or two.”

  “While you have been contemplating the maps of the Great Hall,” Blanca said, facing Sophia once again, “I have lost my chance to save the Glacine Age. The glaciers have advanced quickly. They have already covered the carta mayor. We are too late.”

  “I don’t understand. You wanted the Glacine Age to cover the earth. Why didn’t you just wait for the glaciers to follow their own course? Why even bother to find the carta mayor?”

  “You have not yet gone beyond the hall,” Blanca said, with a weary wave of her hand. “You have not seen the Glacine Age as it exists now.” Her sigh seemed to carry years of exhaustion. “From the moment I learned who I was—from the moment your uncle freed me—it was my goal to return to my Age. I finally found my way to Tierra del Fuego, where I discovered a portion of the Glacine Age, whole and intact. Do you have any idea—can you imagine—the joy I felt at the chance to walk once again in my own Age? To be home? I had so longed to hear my own language. To hear my name—” She uttered a sound that seemed unlike speech, but that suggested by its intonation a vivid lightness: glad and bright and somehow young. “You must know what I mean. You have hardly been gone from New Occident, and yet I am sure you long to return there.”

  Sophia knew it was not the same, but recalling her home on East Ending Street, she had some sense of what Blanca felt. “I think so.”

  “Well then,” Blanca said, her voice catching, “imagine what it would be like to return to Boston, your beloved city, and find it deserted—in ruins. Not a living soul anywhere. Only the remains of the lives that once filled it.”

  Sophia could not help but glance through the pyramid’s wall at the ice city below. “The Age was deserted?”

  Blanca gave a bitter laugh. “Entirely deserted. The whole of the Glacine Age was an empty shell—a lifeless husk. Its people were long since dead. Its cities were falling into ruin. All that remained was ice and stone. The world I remembered was gone—is gone.”

  “But I don’t understand.” Sophia moved back to stand against the wall. “Isn’t this the Age you belong to? An Age with living people in it?”

  “No one, it seems, can return to the world of their own past.” Blanca moved to stand beside her. “It is, indeed, my Age. But I was twenty at the time of the Disruption, and by the time I returned, more than eighty years had passed. The Glacine Age as I knew it was destroyed. The ice triumphed. Every living thing perished. Nothing but the glaciers survive.”

  “But I saw people walking below,” Sophia protested.

  “You saw the Lachrima,” Blanca said dully. “The Lachrima born of
this new border. There are hundreds of them. Those are the only cursed creatures who will inhabit this Age now.

  “Comprehending the full destruction of my Age, I gave it up for lost. But then I heard the Nihilismian myth, and I believed there could be truth in it; I felt hope again. If I could find the carta mayor, I would be able to rewrite history, avert the destruction; I would be able to make the Glacine Age whole, living once more.” Blanca stared out at the frozen expanse beyond the walls. “While searching for the carta mayor, I learned that the Age was advancing northward. Like an expanding tomb, the glaciers were overtaking the earth, and my Age—the wondrous Age I knew and loved—would never exist.” She put her hand against the pyramid wall. “I was too late. I am too late.”

  Sophia gazed out over the empty city, stunned. She looked south across the vast white expanse, imagining the thousands of miles of deserted ice, the frozen cities slowly crumbling, the underground warrens disintegrating. The glaciers were reclaiming everything in their path. Sophia glanced up at Blanca’s scarred face, and she was sure that she could see grief in her featureless expression. What could possibly be worse, she thought, than losing not only one’s family, one’s friends, one’s home, but one’s entire living world? Sophia extended her hand tentatively and placed it in Blanca’s. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  Blanca pressed Sophia’s hand. As they watched, the storm overhead drew north, passing over the pyramid and following the advancing glaciers. Blanca turned her back, releasing Sophia’s hand. “The storm is moving quickly,” she said, more to herself than to Sophia. “There isn’t much time.” Reaching into her cloak, she pulled out the four maps and handed them to Sophia, who held them for a moment, surprised, before stowing them in her pack. Then Blanca drew from her neck the silk scarf that had once been her veil and dropped it over the pyramid that stood on the round stone. “Take this map,” she said. “It will hold some of the answers you seek.”

  Sophia took the wrapped pyramid-map in her arms. “What are you going to do?”

  “We must disperse the waters of the carta mayor.”

  “But why?”

  “I know it is difficult to accept without explanation, child, but the glaciers will stop their advance if we take the carta mayor out of its path. The map must be prevented from joining with the glacier.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sophia said desperately.

  “It is a living map of the world. As its contents freeze, so does the earth freeze. Do you understand?” Sophia nodded hesitantly. “Then understand that, if we can ensure that the waters of the map travel into the warm soil below ground, the glaciers will halt.” She paused. “You know what we must do—you have seen it.” Blanca’s voice was gentle, reassuring “We will roll this stone into the lake. When the stone falls, it will rupture the lake bed, and the waters will channel into the underground tunnels. Unreadable, yes. But safe.”

  “But the hall will collapse! All the maps—and the waters below. Shadrack will never read them. I’ll never find out . . .”

  Blanca looked at her in silence, her scars furrowing with pity. “I know, child, I know. I know what a loss it will be. But you must understand: the carta mayor below us is freezing as we speak. The living map of the world will turn into a solid block of ice. It is too late for me to rewrite the history of my Age, and it is too late for you to read the history of yours. If we preserve the map, you will not read it, but perhaps someone else, in the future, may. The waters could be pooled together, made to figure the world once more. Would you stand in the way of such a possibility?”

  It seemed to Sophia that all the loss she had felt over the years had swelled, drop by drop, into a vast pool as wide as the lake. Now she hung suspended over it. She would fall into it and drown, she knew, and there was no choice but to plunge in. “No,” she whispered.

  “I knew you would say so,” Blanca replied gently. “Then help me bring it down.” And she threw herself against the stone. Her face contorted horribly as she pushed with all her might, but the sphere remained immobile. Sophia stood, paralyzed with indecision, then she put her pack and the map down and moved to help her. The moment she added her own weight, the stone gave way and began rolling. “Hurry!” Blanca cried. “Step back!” She heaved with all her strength, so that the sphere rolled more and more quickly and finally reached the edge of the balcony where it burst through, shattering the railing, meeting a long silence as it fell toward the frozen lake below.

  Time slowed, and the stone hung in midair. It was as if Sophia stood before a window, through which she could see the disappearance of all the truths she would never learn—the mysteries that would remain mysteries. And then, to her surprise, she saw a face. It was her own: the sad, forlorn child who had waited by the dusty window of her imagination. The child did not seem frightened by the prospect of seeing the glass shattered; on the contrary, she seemed relieved—even glad. After all, the window had never given her the vision she so wanted; it had only kept her closed in, away from the world.

  And then time sped up. A violent crash pierced the air as the stone broke the surface of the ice. The walls began to shake. Then a sudden explosion, dulled by the water, struck the pyramid with full force. The lake bed had ruptured.

  She cried out inadvertently.

  “You must leave,” Blanca said. “Hurry!”

  Sophia scooped up her pack quickly, stowing the pyramid map of the Southern Snows alongside the others. “Aren’t you coming?”

  Blanca stood limply at the center of the balcony, which had begun to tremble as the nearby wall supporting it shuddered over the breaking ice. “I have no reason to,” she said. “Go.”

  “Please, come with me.”

  “Where would I go? I am an outcast. Many times over. I do not belong among men, because of my face. I do not belong among Lachrima, because of my memories. I do not belong to any living Age, because the world I was part of has ended. I have no place; I belong nowhere; I am nothing.”

  Sophia felt tears streaming down her face, and she reached out again for Blanca’s hand. But perhaps the sight of those tears had reminded Blanca of the truth behind her own words, for a terrible cry escaped her lips: a wail, a scream that was heartbreaking beyond measure. She fell to her knees, covering her face with her hands, and her cry poured out into the air, echoing off the breaking walls and filling the hall with the sound of unspeakable grief.

  Sophia could not bear it. “Good-bye,” she whispered. She ran toward the stairs to begin the long descent. The walls were collapsing around her, and she dared not stop to look at the breaking ice below. With her hand against the wall, she ran onward. And suddenly, when she touched the wall, the vision from the four maps burst into view before her. As her fingertips brushed the glass, the graven images seemed to contain more than memories; Sophia felt the throng of people around her, speaking to her urgently from within the maps. They sent their vanished makers out into the world for the last time.

  As Sophia ran she heard Blanca’s cry reverberating through the hall, and she realized with astonishment that she, too, was weeping out loud, a ragged cry of anguish pulled from her throat. Her feet fell clumsily, and suddenly the stairs buckled. The top of the pyramid had collapsed, plummeting into the draining lake bed. The snowstorm raged within the hall. “Not yet, not yet!” Sophia cried, running faster. She lost her footing and slid, the stairs knocking painfully against her legs and back, but she clutched her pack and stopped herself with her feet. Whimpering aloud, she ran on.

  She realized, as she rounded the last turn and saw the wall above her folding inward like a collapsing sheet of paper, that she did not know how to find her way out. She had emerged through the tunnels, and she had seen no opening above ground. Her hand still gliding against the wall, she tried to take comfort from the people around her. They were mere memories, but they had a life of their own. Were they not speaking to her? Were they not pointing urgently to a place in the pyramid wall? Sophia heard, suddenly, a pair of voices that seemed
to emerge from the confusion: a man and a woman who called out to her with confidence and tender encouragement, Fly, Sophia, fly! She looked ahead and saw, with astonishment, a triangular entryway that stood intact. It was nothing but a slit in the wall. It was the way out.

  But it lay several steps away. As she reached the base of the stairs, Sophia realized with horror that the floor had disintegrated. She was standing on a floating piece of ice. Stepping as quickly as she dared, she hurried across and jumped onto another piece that drifted before the entryway. She was almost there. Only a few more steps. She tipped across the ice, and as she breached the doorway with a sudden lurch the floating slab broke into pieces, leaving nothing but icy water in its wake.

  Sophia ran onto the snow and looked across the wide, frozen terrain. Then a sound burst out from behind her: the sound of a thousand maps breaking at once. She turned and watched the hall collapse. The mighty walls shattered: sheets of glass crashed against one another, fragmenting into pieces. Puffs of snow and ice burst upward as the walls crumbled. It was a pile of rubble: broken maps over an empty lakebed, its waters infusing the warm soil below. And somewhere deep within lay Blanca. The air was still.

  Then, with a sense of dread and expectation, Sophia turned slowly away from the ruined hall. Would she see it? Would he be there? She squinted as she looked northward. There were no storm clouds in the direction of Nochtland. The sun shone brightly over the ice. And there, far across the glacier—

  Sophia’s heart hammered. There was a sudden glimmer on the white surface: a reflection of something tiny but bright—like an early star in a pale sky.

  38

  A Fair Wind, a Fair Hand

  1891, July 2: 10-Hour #

  Lachrima: From the Latin word for “tear.” Related to the vernacular, lágrima. In the Baldlands and elsewhere the term is used to describe the faceless beings that are more often heard than seen. The sound of their weeping is legendary, and it is said that to hear the cry of the Lachrima is to know the fullest extent of human grief.