by J. F. Penn
"Do you have any more illustrated books?" Xander asked.
The librarian nodded. "The Nuremberg Chronicle is one of the largest and most lavishly illustrated of the books dating from the fifteenth century. It tells the history of the world and has nearly two thousand woodcut illustrations."
Mila stepped forward. "Do you have a list of people who have visited and what they looked at?"
The librarian frowned. "Of course, but it's private information."
As she walked away, Mila turned to the others. "We need to come back later, after dark, so we can access those records."
It was after midnight when they crept back into the grounds of Hereford Cathedral, skirting around security lights and heading straight back to the library. Mila took a tiny piece of map parchment from her pocket and poured some water from a bottle over it. She laid it over the electronic locks and then used her magic to freeze it, cracking the locks from the inside. Sienna smiled. "Nice skill."
Mila grinned. "We all have our tricks." She looked over at Perry. "And it's less damaging than fire."
Inside, the library was quiet, and the four of them went straight to the librarian's station. Perry sat down at the computer. "I'm not all flames and fire, you know." He began tapping at the keyboard, looking for a way into the databases.
Sienna and Mila concentrated on the pile of old visitor books stacked in rows behind the desk. Xander stood watching for a moment, his eyes darting to the next room. "I think I'll go have a look at the Nuremberg Chronicle while we're here."
Mila raised an eyebrow as he walked off. "Xander is obsessed with illustrations."
The visitor books dated back over the last thirty years, so they pulled the older ones down first, flicking through the pages. It was strange to see the handwriting of people who'd visited many years ago. How many of them had passed on now? How many had found what they were looking for, and how many more had discovered new questions?
"Come and look at this," Perry said suddenly, his voice excited. Sienna and Mila went to stand behind him.
"Look, there was a break-in reported around the time the last group of Mapwalkers crossed over. They must have accessed the map then."
"But we still don't know which part they used to travel through," Mila said. "At least it gives us a narrower window to check the archives."
They turned back to the visitor books, pulling down one after the other.
Then Sienna saw her father's writing on the page, his distinctive sloped letters in purple ink. She touched the words with gentle fingers, thinking of him standing here in the library, a frown on his face as he concentrated. Did he think of her at all? She shook her head. She could only hope there would be time to ask him.
"He requested Meditations on a Medieval Labyrinth, so they must have gone through the labyrinth part of the map."
"Then that's the way we'll follow," Mila said. "Are you ready?"
Sienna nodded. "You put the books back, and I'll get Xander."
She left Mila re-stacking the shelves and walked through the library into the next room. Xander stood by a window, the light of the moon touching the book lying on the desk in front of him. It was chained to the wooden lectern, and she could see the detailed illustrations from across the room, the colors still bright after so many years. Xander sketched a dragon, a beast of scales and teeth and power, into the pocket journal he held. It was fat with extra notes and pages, and Sienna could only imagine what he drew in there, the creatures he held in his mind.
Xander looked up at her footsteps, his face taut with concern, then relaxing as he saw it was her. He indicated the page. "I've always wanted to illustrate a dragon, but Bridget asked where we'd put it and how we would hide it from the city." He shook his head with a sigh. "Such mundane questions when we should be using our abilities to the full, not hiding them."
Sienna walked closer and looked at the intricate lines on the page. "How do you create them?"
"The creatures can't come alive on any paper. I have to draw them on the edges of existing maps, preferably vellum or leather. I can't create maps from nothing as you can."
Sienna shrugged. "As I supposedly can. I haven't actually created a map yet."
Xander closed the book, his hand touching it lightly with respect. "The most powerful Illustrators have always worked closely with Blood Cartographers. Perhaps we could –"
Footsteps came from the corridor behind them, cutting off his words. Mila poked her head around the doorway.
"Come on, you two. Time to get going."
The four of them walked back to the Mappa Mundi, which lay within its protective case. Mila froze one of the panes of glass and made a hole big enough for Sienna to reach in and touch the map.
She hesitated, her heart beating faster. "So what do I do again?"
Mila took her hand. "Put your fingertips over the labyrinth and fix the image of it in your mind. Just think of the Borderlands as a country with multiple ways in. This map is one of the doors, but it should be where the last group of Mapwalkers went through and then we'll try to pick up their trail on the other side."
Sienna nodded. "And you can all come through with me?"
"We'll link hands," Perry said. "But it's a bit like a gate. You're opening it, and then we can come through after you. We're all Mapwalkers, remember that."
"I just don't want to leave anyone behind."
Perry smiled. "It's okay. We're coming too. We're not missing out on this adventure."
Sienna put her hand through the hole and touched the smooth skin of the map. It had a vibration under her fingers, a certain texture. She sensed that, as Xander had thought, it was not of Earth-side, but from the Borderlands originally. A creature that had once existed on the other side had somehow come through here, slaughtered away from its home and now revered as part of history.
Sienna placed her fingertips over the labyrinth and held out her other hand. The three others put their hands over hers, and Sienna closed her eyes, letting the sensation of lifting take her up and out of herself, over the city of Hereford. Spreading below her was the skin of the world with Jerusalem shining like a beacon further out on the horizon, but below her, she could see a form of the labyrinth. It called to her, and she dived back down into it.
10
Sienna opened her eyes.
It was dark, but the air smelled different. Whereas the inside of the library had a sense of dust from the pages of old books, the air here smelled of smoke and ash. Sienna looked around.
They stood on a street, hemmed in on all sides by shelled-out buildings, towering close and dog-legging away so she couldn't see very far. It was a warren of narrow streets, not even big enough for a car to drive down, an urban labyrinth. Empty rooms looked down on them like vacant eyes, the stone crumbling, a place where nature had started to reclaim the emptiness.
"It's Old Aleppo," Mila said. "The part of the city pushed over the border."
Sienna felt the shadow as a visceral sense on this side. It was like a darkness pushed down inside her all her life, which had suddenly found its way to the surface. All the things she'd been told she couldn't have, or be, or do, suddenly welled up inside her like a rush.
A shadow rush.
She didn't have to be a good girl here. She could take what she wanted. She could be who she wanted. There seemed no limit on what was possible in the Borderlands. It was dizzying, intoxicating and Sienna felt the thrill of the dark side in her veins as they walked. A sense of losing control to a point but without having a drink, without taking drugs, without loosening the mind in a way she would have to do on Earth-side in order to feel this way.
Mila looked over with a half-smile on her face, recognition in her eyes. "That feeling is why the Ministry send us in teams. Because if you come over on your own, there's a chance you won't return. You could go native with the rush, and then you'd be lost."
"Have you ever been over on your own?" Sienna asked.
Mila raised an eyebrow. "What do you t
hink?"
Sienna grinned. Together the four of them walked through the ruined city. It had the haunting echo of lives long forgotten, the beauty of decay inherent in the buildings left behind. Sienna glanced into one shattered space. The walls were a fresh orange color, and a blue frieze ran around the edges as if it had only been painted yesterday. But the doorframe was rotten and broken and the floor covered in sand and rocks blown in on a cruel wind.
Could there be any true beauty without the knowledge it would fade? Sienna thought of the flowers she sometimes took to her mother and how they were only fresh for a few days before dying. This place felt like that. Like it was once a blooming flower now fallen into decay. Entropy had taken it to dust, as it took us all eventually.
It started to rain. Sienna looked up at the dark clouds overhead. "How does the weather get here?"
Mila laughed. "The weather doesn't know the border, so the same rain falls on us and the Borderlanders alike. But natural events sometimes drive people over, like earthquakes and eruptions. Time is different the further out you go towards the Uncharted. There are still some out there who remember the destruction of Pompeii."
Sienna shook her head in amazement. It would be fascinating to meet someone who had seen the eruption of Vesuvius, yet for them, it would have been the end of all they knew.
"How do you know what's here in the Borderlands?" she asked.
"It's a challenge as the edges are not entirely mapped," Mila said. "They move over time as people and places are driven off the edge of Earth-side. Those who are not wanted, who fall between the borders, find a place here. But, of course, there is a hierarchy between those who have been here the longest and those who arrive every day. There are refugees here too. Sometimes I think we are driving them over here on purpose." Mila sighed. "Sometimes I don't know which side we're on."
They walked down the cracked street under the arches of a ruined hall, the stone pockmarked by artillery shells. Sienna picked her way through the rubble, over fallen masonry and discarded furniture. There were signs of habitation in the rubble, a chipped cup and saucer, the tattered remains of a book, the springs of a bed frame.
Suddenly, they heard shouting up ahead.
The four of them huddled in a doorway, sheltered by a broken wall. The sound of running feet came closer and then a group of men passed, their faces set in determination, each with a half-moon tattoo.
"They have people here who can sense the border opening," Mila whispered. "They're looking for us."
After the men passed by, the group walked on with light feet, staying alert in the shadows. The smell of smoke from a fire wafted from a doorway and Sienna stopped to peek inside. A man lay on the ground, his face thin and drawn with pain, his limbs curled. A woman knelt by the fire boiling water in an old tin can, a baby next to her in the dust, a blanket wrapped around its thin body. The woman looked up with fearful eyes.
Sienna saw just another human there, someone who wanted to look after her family, someone who wanted to stay alive. She could understand why those in the Borderlands wanted to come back over to Earth-side. This place had been pushed out because nobody cared. The powers that be made their maps and decided what was important, who was important. The rest disappeared over here, cast adrift to survive alone.
The sound of shouting came from up ahead, deep voices raised, orders given. The woman turned back to the fire, not even flinching at the noise. Sienna walked on quickly after the others as they darted between alcoves in the buildings.
Perry turned around as she approached. "Try and keep up, we wouldn't want to lose you in here."
"Where are we heading?"
"The center of Old Aleppo. It's a souk, a trading market that stood for seven hundred years. At least it did stand until the war on Earth-side which now continues over here."
"Who's the fighting between here?" Sienna asked.
"The Borderlands are not just filled with one people," Perry said. "Factions fight each other for control of scarce resources." He stopped at a wall painted with a half-moon symbol in a dark ochre that could have been dried blood. "There are two factions in Old Aleppo. This symbol belongs to a warlord loyal to the Shadow Cartographers who sacrifices to the old gods. The price of human life is cheap Earth-side, but it's worth even less in the Borderlands. The Shadow Cartographers feed on the energy of violence, conflict and death, so they fan the flames to keep people in constant fear."
The stench of rotten flesh came on the air, a night breeze bringing it across the city. Sienna put her hand over her face, but they kept walking towards it, the smell intensifying.
"The warlord hangs the bodies of the rebels here," Perry said. "Around the labyrinth where the Resistance are known to be active."
The shadows shifted. Six bodies hung on the wall, hands tied behind their backs, hoods over their heads.
"We have contacts in the Resistance, those who trade for information. That's where we're going."
They walked past an abandoned temple. Holes in the roof let in shafts of moonlight. Sienna caught a glimpse of a mosaic on the back wall showing a god devouring his children.
Mila dropped back to walk next to her and pointed in at the statues of old gods. "Anything lost from Earth-side remains here in the shadows, including belief. There are people here who crawled over the border in the aftermath of ethnic cleansing. Those who escaped the massacres of Rwanda, of Srebrenica. The Borderlands claim those who would otherwise disappear on Earth-side." Mila shook her head.
"Is anyone born here?" Sienna asked.
Mila frowned. "Of course, there are children here, like anywhere. Some are Halbrasse, half-breeds. The Shadow Cartographers are trying to spawn a new generation of Mapwalkers, those who can cross the border like us. But to create such children, they risk creating abominations, those in whom magic twists into something that shouldn't live."
Sienna shivered. No wonder they needed to stop these people coming back over. For how could those on Earth-side stand against the inhumanity done here? The blood-soaked land did not forget what had been done to it, and the people who remained on the Borderland were the scars, the living tissue of what had gone before.
Mila stopped in front of the ruined building. "Things here are often not what they seem. You need to be careful. The Borderlands have a way of slipping inside you." She put her hand up, gesturing for them to stop and wait.
Sienna ducked into a doorway with Perry and Xander as Mila walked into the depths of the temple alone. The stones either side of the door were smashed, broken into pieces as if a gigantic hand had punched through them in anger. The thick beams stood out, charred and burned. It was a derelict skeleton, clouded with ash. Sienna looked down into the dust and noticed pieces of bone, shards of skull. They walked upon the bodies of the dead.
A few minutes later, Mila appeared at the broken door and beckoned them inside. Huge pillars dominated the space, rising to a roof that had been split asunder. A shaft of moonlight pierced down to the floor where carved spirals made the pattern of a labyrinth. There were sculptures in each of the alcoves around them, voluptuous goddesses with wreathes of dead flowers, the skeleton of a child in the lap of one. An offering to the dark goddess.
Mila stood with a tall man dressed in black leather. He turned at their approach.
"You didn't say you were bringing so many." His voice was deep and resonant. He stepped into a patch of moonlight and Sienna saw him more clearly. He had the regal bearing of an East African king, the limbs of a long-distance runner, the dark eyes of a moonless night. His head was closely shaved with stubble on his chin, highlighting a strong jaw.
"It's not safe here," he said. "We have to get moving."
Mila gestured towards him. "This is Finn Page. His father, Kosai, is the warlord here in Old Aleppo. Finn is the leader of the Resistance."
Finn turned to Mila. "If I do this, you'll keep your side of the bargain?"
She nodded.
"Then we must go now."
Finn l
ed them out of the back of the temple, and they wound their way through the streets past the doorway that Sienna had glanced into before.
Finn turned around. "Wait here." He ducked into the room, and Sienna heard the rumble of his deep voice. He came back out a minute later, his face like thunder. "Follow me."
As Sienna walked past, she glanced into the room again. This time the woman had a loaf of bread, tearing at it hungrily as she shared it with her husband.
"My father has the relics with him tonight," Finn said, as they stalked through the ruined city. "The ritual is on the outskirts at the Tophet. We have a way to walk, then prepare yourself for Hell."
11
Sometimes the landlocked city was so hot that the air dragged through Finn's lungs with each breath and even though they were miles from water, it made him feel like he was drowning. Tonight was one of those nights, and the cloying stink of smoke from the pyres made it worse. He loosened his shirt at the neck, breathing more deeply, trying to push down the fear rising within him as he led the Mapwalkers deeper into the city.
Twisted metal lay in piles against sandbags covered in dust from destroyed buildings, the faint smell of buried corpses beneath. Trees grew in the rubble at the side of cracked roads, their leaves mottled black with disease but Finn heard the coo of a pigeon as they passed, evidence of life in the ruins. Soft voices came from one of the skeletal buildings behind it, scarred by the bombing he had only heard about. There were no guns in the Borderlands, although his father and his men spoke of them often, their voices lowered in remembrance of what they had lost during the wars that had devastated their native lands. Finn had been born here, a child of the Borderlands, so it was hard to know what was truth and what was myth in the stories they told.