by J. F. Penn
“What for?”
“Something Egyptian, right up your alley. Get going. Don’t keep the Illuminated waiting.”
Zoe grabbed her notebook and pen, as much for something to clutch onto as anything else, something to anchor her hammering heart.
She hurried through the corridors of the Ministry, winding her way toward the library. Thoughts ran through her mind, possibilities about how she could help. Perhaps she might become an important part of the team, or maybe she would just disappoint them and have to leave Bath almost as soon as she had arrived, slinking back to her parents in shame and failure. This was such an important moment in her career. She couldn’t mess it up. But what if she did?
With her mind teeming, Zoe paused at the doorway to the library and took a deep breath. There was only one way to discover what came next. She stepped inside.
Rolled maps lined the walls of the first chamber alongside what was left of the ancient books that had survived the fire. A large framed photo took pride of place near the door, an image of what the library had been only months before — and what might be again with time and care.
“Come on through.”
The voice came from the other side of the shelving and Zoe rounded the end to find herself in a smaller annex. This was much cozier than the grand entrance, clearly where the Illuminated worked. The woman clothed in maps turned around. She was beautiful in the way of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, women of ivory skin frozen in time, captured in the moment before their inevitable death. Something about her made Zoe want to curtsey.
“Welcome.” The Illuminated stepped forward, maps rustling around her as she held out a hand. “I’m Bridget. This is Sienna and John.”
Zoe shook Bridget’s hand, shocked into silence. She stood with those considered royalty amongst the Mapwalkers. John Farren was a legend of many explorations and the Antiquities department had much he had collected on his travels. He was marked by scars, bowed with the pain of torture, but his eyes were still a steely blue.
Sienna’s reputation was new, an estranged daughter who turned out to be far more than expected, with powerful blood magic that both empowered the Mapwalkers and endangered their future. Many within the Ministry considered her arrogant, given too much responsibility before she was ready purely because of her heritage. But Zoe saw doubt in Sienna’s eyes, a fragility she had not expected. There was also a palpable sense of misgiving in the room.
“Hi, thanks for inviting me over.” Zoe cursed the words almost as soon as they were out. She needed something better to impress the magical elite.
“We’re hoping you can help us.” Sienna pointed to the desk.
An old book lay to one side with a figure sketched in ash on its ivory pages, turning in a vortex of shadow and light. Next to it, a journal open to a page of hieroglyphics etched between the lines of a hand-drawn sketch.
Zoe found herself drawn closer, her love of Egyptology quashing the nerves that skittered through her veins. She bent to the page and examined the finely drawn images, translating the symbols in her mind. They were well-known passages from the Book of the Dead, and time slowed as she let the words wash over her.
She turned the page and a scent of cedar wood rose as if she were with the man who wrote these words, copying them from the walls of a chill tomb surrounded by the dust of the long dead. These were no common symbols. They were reflections of what she had seen in the golden layer of Wadi Hammamat. Zoe couldn’t help the gasp that escaped her lips.
“What is it?” Bridget came closer as the others gathered round. “What do you see?”
Zoe pointed to a set of glyphs on the page. “These symbols are incredibly rare, a form of Mapwalker magic used to place maps within maps within maps.”
John frowned. “A third layer of cartography? I’ve heard rumors of this, but I’ve met no one who could make or decipher them. A bloodline lost in the genocide of the east, perhaps.”
His words echoed through Zoe, a call to her ancestral past. “My mother’s family are from Armenia originally. We’re Weavers.”
“Weavers?” Sienna sounded curious. “You mean you weave cloth?”
“And magic,” Bridget said, her eyes piercing as she looked at Zoe with new interest. “Weavers can layer objects with a magical thread and some can even manipulate the cords of the world.” She placed a hand on Zoe’s arm. “Where have you seen these glyphs before?”
Her touch was gentle, encouraging, but Zoe also felt an edge in the hard lines of the maps that encased her body. There was only one authority here.
“I’m restoring a map down in Antiquities. On one plane, it’s an ancient quarry, but as I stitched, I found a layer below, that of a treasure house hidden under the rock. Then I found a golden thread to a third layer, a set of tombs. This glyph marks the door implying it is a way through the border in the realm between the living and the dead. There is no exact translation that I can find, but it means something like ‘impossible.’” Zoe pointed to the journal. “This person knew something of Egyptology to translate such a word. Perhaps he was in the tomb, perhaps he found a way inside.”
“Could you find such a place if you were in that quarry?” John asked. His words made Zoe’s heart beat faster again. Something within her wanted this so very much.
“I don’t know. Perhaps.” She whispered the last word, like a prayer.
Bridget nodded. “Sienna, get Perry and Mila down here. You’ll go together with Zoe, find these golden chambers, and see if the Map of the Impossible leads you to the Borderlands. In the meantime, John and I will continue searching for answers.”
A decision made, a page turned, a life changed.
Zoe took a deep breath. She was ready.
6
Titus couldn’t tear his eyes away from the skull. It was clearly a warning, but death had already come for the people of the Borderlands and they had little left to lose.
Finn put the torch into a metal bracket on one side. “Help me move this.”
Together, they put their shoulders against the rock and with a scrape of stone; they pushed it aside.
The tomb was hacked into the mountain itself, each cut made by hand to honor one so greatly revered. A stone sarcophagus stood in the center, adorned with alchemical symbols and around the casket, the implements and tools of the alchemist himself.
Titus took a deep breath as he gazed around at the tomb. It smelled musty with a metallic edge, like dried blood on a sword after battle. Thick benches of black wood lined the walls, piled with brass implements mottled with age. Bottles of varying sizes stoppered with beeswax lay in boxes, thrown together hastily in a mosaic of colored glass each containing mysterious liquid or powder. If only they had more time. He could spend a generation studying what lay here.
“Who was this guy?”
Finn ran a fingertip across the top of the sarcophagus, tracing lines in the dust. “Some accounts say it’s Nicolas Flamel, a fifteenth-century scribe and seller of rare manuscripts who discovered the philosopher’s stone. It is said that two hundred years after his death, he learned the steps to immortality from a converso on the road to Santiago, a pilgrimage town on Earthside.” He shrugged. “Clearly, it didn’t help him much. His corpse still lies here. But this place has been used by other chemists over time, so perhaps something lies here for you now.”
Titus hunkered down by one of the boxes, his eye caught by spidery writing on the labels. Hemlock, deadly nightshade, snakeroot and rosary pea. All deadly poisons in the right dosage. Sometimes, the same compound could be used in small measure for the good of the patient and where there was poison, there was often an antidote.
The alchemical symbols covering the central stone sarcophagus brought back memories of studying books in the Warlord’s forbidden library back in Old Aleppo. He would creep in at night to read after a day of hard training and no matter how tired he was, Titus always made time to learn. He was muscular and physically powerful, even as a teenager, so it was assumed he was more
brawn than brains. But his mother encouraged him to read from an early age and above all, Titus valued knowledge.
When the Warlord caught him one night with a chemistry book and tested him on his knowledge, Kosai directed him into munitions, helping to research new compounds for war. But Titus had learned enough to understand the balance in nature — that what can destroy can sometimes heal, and perhaps that applied to people as well as plants. After he joined the Resistance, he swore that he would only use his knowledge to help the people of the Borderlands from then on.
Titus knew that the drug Liberation had a natural plant base, grown in vast fields on the plains out east. Perhaps lupine or locoweed, known to cause birth defects in animals, but not strong enough to bring on miscarriage. It was mutated with magic, imbued with something that encouraged the genetic makeup of the fetus to develop new powers, some never seen before. Every day it was used in the population meant more children born under the veil of shadow.
Enough. He would not let it continue any longer.
Titus turned to Finn. “We need a still. Look for glass flasks of different sizes.” He pointed to the benches and boxes on the far side. “Search those — but be gentle. This stuff is fragile and you don’t want to break open one of those bottles. Who knows what we might breathe in?”
Finn hunted through the boxes, and Titus searched his side of the room. He needed to distill the liquid down to understand what it was made of. Perhaps that way he might discover some method to neutralize it. But of course, that would only reverse the natural element of the drug. The magical part could only be stopped by destroying the manufacturing plant. Perhaps his munitions expertise might come in handy, after all.
He pulled out another box and picked through the vials, carefully examining each before laying them gently aside. His fingers were soon covered in the dust of years, but he kept going at a steady pace. As every minute passed, time ticked away for his wife and the baby that grew inside her.
Maria had trained alongside him in the Shadow Guards, a lithe athlete with a ready laugh who pulled him out of the library on sunny days to dance in the water fountains and make love in the dappled olive groves. But he had not known that the women of the guards were encouraged to take Liberation, and if they rejected the drug, it was dosed in their food, anyway. When Maria found herself pregnant, they rejoiced — until the moment she found herself craving the drug, then demanding it, a slave to the blue addiction. That’s when Titus had turned to the Resistance for help.
Now Maria lay tied to a bed in the rebel base in the mountains, screaming as she went through never-ending withdrawal, her mind lost to the drug. The child growing within would likely be mutated and if discovered, it would be sent for evaluation. The Resistance camps were full of such children now, born in secret, some physically altered, others with anomalous abilities, others still completely normal — or so it seemed.
If Titus could find an antidote for Maria in time, maybe their child would be one of the lucky ones. He could only do what lay within his power — and he knew chemistry. He could not hide in the mountains listening to her scream when his action might save her and so many others.
“Is this it?” Finn’s voice broke into his thoughts and Titus spun around.
Finn held a glass alembic, an alchemical still made from two glass vessels connected by a downward-sloping tube. It was dusty, but it would be enough.
Titus cleared a space on the bench top. “Put it here, gently now.” Finn placed it down with care and wiped the glass with the edge of his shirt.
Titus searched in the same box and found an iron tripod, dulled to a dusty grey, to hold the alembic above a flame. He set up the equipment, part of him wishing he had lived in the mysterious time when the alchemists searched for the secrets of transformation. In another life, perhaps Titus could have joined the search for the philosopher’s stone or the perilous route to immortality. For alchemists did not merely seek to turn base metal to gold. That was mere camouflage for their real mission, the true metamorphosis of nature itself.
With the alembic in place, Titus poured the blue liquid inside, hoping that whatever had been in it last was long evaporated and would not contaminate the sample. Finn lit the tiny pool of oil underneath the flask and within seconds, it began to bubble.
The first drop of liquid appeared at the top of the connecting pipe and slid down into the receiving beaker, with another following. Titus caught the next on his fingertip, its color now faint blue, like the reflection of water in ice. He sniffed it first — only a slight hint of sweetness, like honeysuckle in a far-off hedgerow. He touched a tiny amount to his tongue, closed his eyes and concentrated on the sensation. Chemists down the ages had relied on this most basic of tests and there was no time for anything much more sophisticated right now.
A definite sweetness followed by a dry mouth, his heart beating faster almost immediately. Signs of one of the most deadly plants, easily grown in terrains throughout the Borderlands. Laced with magic, certainly, but the base was a common noxious weed. Titus opened his eyes.
“It’s mostly belladonna, sometimes called deadly nightshade. I’m sure of it. The antidote can be extracted from the seeds of the Calabar bean, which in itself is a poison, so it must be used carefully. The alchemist must have had some.” He searched the bench, rifling through bottles of multi-hued powders.
Finn investigated the opposite side of the tomb. “What does it look like?”
“Black, small like a coffee bean. Maybe ground powder or perhaps in pods about six inches long.”
After a few minutes, Titus unearthed an ebony box and opened the lid to find a black powder inside. A hand-written label pasted on the inside noted the danger of the Calabar. “Found it.”
“How do we know it will work?” Finn asked.
Titus sighed. “We can’t know for sure. The only way is to take it back to the trader town and test it. The midwife I know is ready to try anything to save the women and children in her care. She’ll help us.”
Titus held the box in his hand, knowing that the powder was just as much a poison as Liberation itself. But in the chemistry of plants, this was often true. Dosage was everything and what could save one might kill another.
It was a step in the right direction and he had to do something practical or he would go crazy with thoughts of Maria’s torment. Every night he dreamed of mutated babies thrown into blood pits at the Castle of the Shadow, their tiny faces contorted in screams. Action was the only way he knew how to deal with it all — and he would keep going until Liberation was ended, or until he was.
“Check the boxes for any more of it,” Titus said. “And anything labeled with Manchineel. But whatever you do, don’t get it on your skin. In tiny doses, Manchineel can counteract belladonna, but it is one of the most toxic plants, known as the little apple of death.”
Finn gave a rueful smile. “And I thought my sword was the best weapon.”
After an inch by inch search of the place, they collected up five boxes of powder, three of Calabar and two of Manchineel. Titus wrapped them carefully with lengths of rag found in piles beneath the benches so the boxes wouldn’t leak and then loaded them carefully into backpacks.
At the door to the tomb, he looked back at the cornucopia of alchemy. He could only hope to amass such a heritage by the time he left this earth. Perhaps there would be time after they had ended the Liberation addiction for him to pursue the knowledge he craved. But not today.
Together, Finn and Titus rolled back the stone and left the ruined temple. As they hiked back through the desert, energy renewed by their find, Titus outlined his plan.
“This will be enough for initial tests in the trader town. Once we know what works, we can source more antidote ingredients. They’re tropical plants, so we’d need to go inland.”
Finn nodded. “I know of such a place where we might find them. It has giant beasts and the produce of the rainforest might be just as bountiful.”
“We can send a tea
m out there to find more.” Titus couldn’t help the grin on his face, encouraged by their find and its potential. “While you manage that, I’ll take a tiny batch to the mountains for Maria. She’ll be well again, the baby will be perfect. This will work, Finn, I know it.”
As they walked on through the night, Titus thought three steps ahead, planning the mechanism by which they might harvest the drugs, how long it might take to produce a batch of antidote, and how they could get it to the farthest reaches of the Borderlands. He carried hope on his back and for now, that was enough.
7
Sienna couldn’t have walked much more slowly to the door of the medical wing of the Ministry, but since Bridget wouldn’t let her leave with the team until a doctor had cleared her, she forced herself to go. She tried to think of it as a positive step, valuable preparation before what could be an arduous journey, but her limbs were heavy as if her very being rejected the idea of such help.
Like all the doors of the Ministry, this one was solid wood. A dark grained ebony embedded with a carved Rod of Asclepius, a serpent entwined around a staff, representing the Greek god of healing and medicine. The rod was made from willow bark, used in many cultures as a pain reliever. All of this should have made Sienna feel better, but a sense of foreboding rose inside as she raised a hand to push at the door. There were stories of those who entered here and never emerged again. But there was nothing she could do but face whatever would come. She braced herself and walked inside.
The ancient wooden door disguised ultra-modern facilities within. A waiting room with comfy chairs decorated in shades of sage green, the relaxing scent of lavender. But underneath the calm, Sienna could make out the beep of medical devices in the ward beyond and the smell of antiseptic that betrayed the true nature of this place.