Map of the Impossible

by J. F. Penn

  Sienna.

  Did Elf hear her name called like this? Were they both summoned for the final reckoning? Sienna shivered as the clouds darkened and a sudden rainstorm blew across the sky, bringing with it rolls of thunder.

  A flash of lightning caught a jagged outline above, the wings of a huge beast with talons raised like a hunter. She had seen something like it when imprisoned within the shadow weave, and she had no wish to encounter such a creature again.

  Sienna dived back down through the clouds, emerging close to the Tower of the Winds. The fortress spiraled into the sky, a citadel of many levels. It was made from pieces of black stone locked together in intricate patterns with fragments of obsidian and black onyx mixed in with the pocked surface of volcanic lava and glossy agate. Polished to a sheen, the tower rose with curves as smooth as glass, impossible to climb from the outside even if someone were to brave its heights.

  She soared around it, sensing the intensity of shadow in the highest part of the tower. Some part of her wanted to land right there, cast the others off into the space between the worlds and go alone to meet whatever waited. Her blood hammered through her veins, a pulse that demanded to be shed. For what was a Blood Mapwalker unless her power could be wielded?

  Sienna.

  The whisper grew louder now with the heady sensuality of a lover’s call. It promised gifts and pleasure, and the dark whorls of shadow on her skin wanted only to give in.

  But the weight of her friends anchored her, and Sienna fought against the desire to rush to the summit. She swooped lower, spotting a library through arched windows with giant books chained to wooden lecterns and shelves full of ancient tomes. She plunged down in her mind’s eye and when she could feel the solid floor under her feet and smell the faint musty vanilla scent of old books, Sienna opened her eyes.

  The others lay on the floor around her. Titus coughed and retched, reeling from his first mapwalking experience. The others were more used to the nausea and lay still for a moment as they recovered. Sienna gazed down at them. They were weak, pitifully so.

  The sudden thought was shocking. These were her friends. How could she think that way?

  Finn sat up and looked at her, his eyes widening as he mouthed a prayer to the goddess. Sienna saw fear in his expression where such a short time ago, there had been only love. What was happening?

  She gazed down at her bare arms, now deeply mottled with black symbols that writhed on her skin as if alive with dark magic. There was a mirror against one bookcase and she walked to it quickly. The same marks now covered her face and neck, signs of shadow whirling on her skin, winding in and out of her tattoos depicting the city of Bath. Sienna’s entire body was now a fusion of light and dark, a battleground for the Shadow — and it felt good.

  Sienna knew that Finn was right to be afraid. Her power was rising. She needed to ascend the tower but the others must not come with her. She didn’t want them to see what she might become — or what she might do to them once she reached her goal.

  Zoe rolled onto her hands and knees and pushed down the queasy sensation in her stomach. They should have a name for the travel sickness that came with mapwalking, but then naming it would only make it seem more normal, and there was nothing normal about traveling through a map made from the blood of a friend. She looked around for Perry, saw him lying near her, his face pale, no longer traveling with ease. She reached out a hand—

  A gasp.

  Zoe looked up to see Finn’s horrified expression as Sienna gazed at herself in a mirror. Dark whorls of shadow eddied across her skin and in the reflection, Zoe saw Sienna transformed. The blood that ran through her veins now channeled the power of the Shadow and yet, her eyes were still clear and bright. Somehow, she managed to keep the darkness in some kind of balance — but for how long?

  Zoe’s vision shifted, and she saw the strings of the world bend around Sienna, warping away from her as if repelled by her aberration, then attracted back in. They hummed with increased power, charged by her very presence. Whatever was happening, it intensified the closer Sienna came to the peak of the tower.

  It wasn’t much further now, but this was a strange place to make their last stand. The vast library was round with a central staircase the only route up from below. A single narrow doorway with stairs of black stone wound up to the higher levels.

  Mahogany bookshelves spread like spokes from the middle of the room, leading to arched windows at the end of each corridor, allowing light to illuminate the halls of knowledge within. There were books here that were rare on Earthside, heresies thought lost to history, but each found a place off the edge of the map. Vanished ideas melded into something new, every dark entreaty giving power to the Shadow. Some of the books had crumbled in place, their spines damaged by the years. In another time, Zoe would have taken them for restoration and granted the tomes a new life. But not today.

  “They’re almost here,” Titus shouted, pointing out the window at a dust cloud approaching. Zoe could just make out figures on the wide open plain. A pack of mutants ran on thick limbs, Elf riding high on the shoulders of one colossal beast.

  “They’ll have to come this way to get up to the top.” Finn leaned over the balustrade of the spiral staircase to look down to the levels below. “We need to block this as much as we can.” He glanced over at Sienna. “We’ll buy you time for whatever you need to do up there.”

  She nodded and without a second look, walked through the narrow doorway to ascend the black stone stairs.

  Finn watched her go. As soon as she disappeared, his expression hardened. He dragged one of the huge lecterns toward the hole and put his back against it, muscles bulging, legs straining with the effort. Titus joined him and with a crash, the lectern fell down onto the intricate staircase.

  It was a start, but they would need much more to stop anyone coming up.

  Zoe dragged herself to her feet, pushing aside the leaden weight in her limbs as she helped Perry up. Together they all pulled piles of books off then shouldered the heavy shelves onto one side, sliding them over the holes left in the staircase, slowly forming a great pile of heavy wood blocking the only entrance.

  A dull thud came from way below. The sound of a massive door opening.

  “Keep going.” Finn’s chest heaved in great breaths as he pushed another bookcase onto the pile, now stacked three deep.

  Heavy footsteps came from below, shouts in a guttural tongue and the high-pitched voice of Elf urging the mutants on.

  A hammering sound thumped through the library. The bookcases shook, jolting up and down as if the heavy wood were nothing more than kindling.

  Finn and Titus drew their swords, stepped back into a fighting stance as they faced the stairwell, bodies taut as the warriors took their last stand.

  Perry retreated to one arched window, his back against the wall as he raised his hands, palms up. He closed his eyes and whispered something, a prayer or an entreaty, it didn’t matter which. Zoe could see the frustration on his face as he desperately searched within himself for a tiny glimmer of the flame he once called easily to his bidding. But his palms remained empty. Not even a flicker of light left. She wanted to go to him, but Zoe knew she could offer nothing that would help. He had to face this moment alone.

  The thumping came again.

  The sound of cracking wood and splintering timber. The middle set of bookshelves crashed down, opening a hole big enough to climb through.

  Two mutants surged up through the gap, faces contorted with rage. They looked similar to the giant Hashim, but where he had carried Zoe with gentle arms, these beasts now swung clenched fists like steel hammers.

  One forced Finn back with a flurry of blows, oblivious to the cuts and slashes that the rebel Borderlander managed to land.

  Titus went down under the blade of another, a deep gash on his forehead, his arms and torso quickly bloody and bruised. Finn rushed to stand over the body of his friend, sword flashing in the air, faster than ever, a warrior in his
prime.

  More mutants clambered out of the hole, hacking with their short swords. Finn parried and thrust, dancing around the lumbering creatures.

  But they kept pouring from the hole. There were too many. They were almost out of time.

  Perry tried desperately to rekindle his flame in the maelstrom of the library, but Zoe could see he was broken.

  She stepped in front of him and shifted her vision. The weave of the world appeared in shades of gold and silver thread shot through with black. But now she understood that the Shadow was just one aspect of the whole and it could be manipulated just as other threads.

  Zoe reached out and weaved the cords together, creating a net around the mutants. With one tug, she pulled them away from Finn.

  They struggled and grunted, striking at the air as they tumbled over one another, clutching at nothing. The net was invisible but as strong as her magic, and Zoe clenched her fists as she entangled them further.

  Finn fell to his knees, gasping for breath in a moment of welcome respite. Perhaps they could hold off the attack after all.

  A sudden white light shot out of the well of the staircase, blowing the Mapwalker team backward and tearing the strings of the magic net apart.

  The mutants rolled out of their entanglement, bellowing with rage.

  Elf rose out of the staircase behind them in a blaze of silver light. The jagged edge of a bolt of lightning with as much fury as the oncoming storm. She looked down upon them, cold violence in her gaze. She raised her hands for the slaughter.

  23

  Sienna ran up the stairs toward the top of the tower. The sound of fighting below soon faded to nothing as she climbed higher. The staircase narrowed, winding tighter as she rose. The walls seemed to suck in the light from the tiny arrow-slit windows, smothering it with pitch like a dying animal sucked to the bottom of a peat bog.

  Her footsteps slowed as she reached an open wooden door carved with runes of power.

  Sienna.

  The voice she had heard high in the clouds was now a caress, inviting her in.

  Sienna pulled her grandfather’s compass from her pocket, holding it in her hands like a talisman, anchoring her to Bath. Her home, her family, her world.

  She stepped inside.

  The circular room had high ceilings with thick wooden beams that met in the middle, vaulted like a cathedral. Between each, arched windows hung with heavy drapes that must look out over the plains in every direction. Etchings covered every surface of the walls, the stone carved into tableaux of war and violence, plague and suffering, lust and cruelty. The shadow side of humanity’s existence.

  Sienna tore her eyes away from the depravity and stepped further into the room. Shadows shifted around the walls, snaking behind the drapes, pooling around the corners of the beams.

  The metallic stink of dried blood hung heavy in the air, evidence of recent sacrifice to the dark power that ruled here. The remains of an offering lay on a stone altar against one wall, a dismembered corpse the size of a child. Sienna gripped the compass tighter, her skin crawling with the sense of being watched.

  A circle lay marked out in the middle of the room, bounded by a ring of skulls. They were all different sizes, some animal, some human, others of mutant origin, some hideously disfigured, others from creatures long extinct on Earthside.

  Within the ring, a vortex of black energy spiraled up toward the roof and high above, an opening led out to the sky. Inside the whirlwind, a dark figure spun in slow spirals, features obscured by tendrils of mist, its shape concealed by folds of midnight cloth that merged with the eddies of shadow.

  Sienna.

  The voice was all-consuming now, and a longing rose inside her, the marks on her skin calling like to like.

  Sienna reached out a hand. The edge of the whirlwind licked along her skin, tendrils of black mist emerging as if to join with her flesh. For a second, there was tension, a skin on the tornado — then it broke, like the surface of water parting. It pulled her inside, the silver compass falling unheeded to the floor.

  She gasped at the chill, the cold of the depths below ice caps, darkness tinged by blue light from a world now out of reach above. Creatures swam just out of sight with scything teeth ready to tear her apart, scuttling legs and unseeing eyes waiting to devour what remained. The sound of her pulse pounded through the water and below that, the howling of trapped souls drowned in the pitch black below.

  Sienna reached out for the surface, desperately clawing her way up, but her limbs were too heavy, her lungs tight to bursting.

  She wouldn’t make it.

  A lithe figure dived in from the ice above and reached for her hand, soft skin but with a powerful strength. As her vision narrowed, Sienna grasped hold and let herself be dragged back up to the world above.

  As her head broke the surface, she took huge gasps of life-giving air. Her rescuer helped her to shore — not a world of ice, but a meadow of green grass, cherry trees and dappled light. Pink blossom blew on a warm summer breeze and flowers spiraled around her as she lay on the bank, the touch of soft petals on her cheeks.

  Sienna.

  Her rescuer was a young woman, her features perfectly sculpted like a Renaissance portrait. A robe of Marian blue clung to her body, wet from the water, and a silver mist hung around her like an aura. The woman from the mosaic at the heart of the border.

  Her eyes were the shifting shades of opal and Sienna thought she could see a touch of Xander, maybe a hint of Sir Douglas. The silver hair at her temples mirrored an echo of Elf, yet the woman seemed ageless and Sienna could sense her deep wisdom. How long had she been here sustaining the Borderlands? There was so much Sienna wanted to know.

  Let me show you.

  The woman reached out a hand, and Sienna took it gladly. Together they spun into the air, up into the sky above the meadow and into the clouds away from the tower. They flew across the realm of the Borderlands, rich and teeming with life. So much to explore and learn about. A beautiful chaos, so different to the cornered world of Earthside where everything was ordered and limited. Sienna knew she could never be her complete self there. She could never use her magic in the way she was born to if she went back.

  All this can be yours, Sienna. Join us and we will bring down the border. One world, together at last.

  As Elf rose on a pillar of blinding silver light, anger surged through Perry in a burning white-hot heat. She had taken his father from him. She would not take Zoe and Sienna and his friends.

  Perry let his grief ignite and in that moment, the spark caught within. He raised his hands, opening his palms as fireballs formed and caught alight in blazing crimson dancing with flecks of electric blue. He tapped into the last of what remained of his magic, conjuring the words his father had spoken as he died. For Galileo.

  Perry roared the cry of the phoenix who rises once more within the flame. His entire body flared into a blaze and he ran full-tilt across the library floor, fire catching the surrounding wood.

  Elf turned in surprise and reached out in a blaze of light —

  Perry leapt, spun in the air, and her beam glanced off his shoulder.

  He slammed into her, a human pillar of flame. He wrapped his arms around her and as every cell of his body transformed into fire, Perry split open with metamorphosis, screaming in agony as he became more heat than skin, more flame than bone.

  Within the ring of his grasp, Elf twisted and shuddered, her skin melting. He held her ever more tightly, burning through to the white of her bones, blood boiling, her hair on fire, eyes bulging as she screamed in torment.

  Smoke rose around them, an offering to the ancient gods, those who had split the worlds apart so long ago. Perry felt Elf sag in his arms and sensed her spirit burn up alongside their fused flesh.

  With his last fiery breath, he spun into a pillar of flame, twisting down through the wooden staircase, burning a giant hole and pulling the last of the mutants down with him.

  Zoe gasped for breath as the li
brary burned. Smoke billowed out of the chasm in the center, embers dancing in the air like fireflies as ash rained down. The staircase had collapsed and only the roar of flames came from below. She clutched a hand to her mouth, tears streaming from her eyes, a sob erupting from her throat. Perry was truly gone.

  In that last moment, she had witnessed his transformation from man to a creature of flame and burning wind, a fierce magic that ripped through his very flesh. He had become a master of his craft in those last moments — and it had cost him everything.

  Zoe sat for a moment, her back against the stone of the tower. In the haze of smoke, it seemed as if she were here alone with the crackle of fire and the creak of burning wood. Was this really the end of the Mapwalker team at the top of the tower at the edge of the world? How could they have traveled so far and failed so badly?

  But then she thought of Perry’s face, his determination in those final moments. His sacrifice set a fire within Zoe’s own soul. If he could summon so much in those last seconds, then she could, too.

  She reached out and tested the strings of the world. Somehow, there was still balance. The Shadow had not won yet. Sienna was above in the tower and down here — she tested the cords — yes, Finn and Titus still lived.

  Zoe pulled her sleeve down and held it over her mouth and nose as she crawled through the wreckage of the library, coughing in the dense smoke. She sensed the heaviness of the men before she saw them. Broken bodies, unconscious from the pain of their wounds, barely breathing.

  Finn lay face down over Titus, shielding his friend from the worst of the fire even as his own back lay scarred and ragged from mutant claws and embers from fallen beams.

  Zoe grabbed Finn’s arms and tugged him sideways off Titus’s body and out along the corridor to the window. Muscles screaming, she dashed back through the smoke to do the same for Titus, laying him next to his friend.