The Golden Specific
Page 1
BOOKS BY S. E. GROVE
MAPMAKERS
The Glass Sentence
The Golden Specific
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015
Copyright © 2015 by S. E. Grove
Maps by Dave A. Stevenson
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Grove, S. E.
The golden specific / S. E. Grove ; maps by Dave A. Stevenson.
pages cm. —(Mapmakers ; book 2)
Summary: Thirteen-year-old Sophia Tims, with her friend Theo, continues to search for her parents, explorers who have vanished as the borders shift within a world transformed by the Great Disruption of 1799.
ISBN 978-0-698-14837-6
[1. Fantasy. 2. Maps—Fiction. 3. Missing persons—Fiction.] I. Stevenson, Dave A., illustrator. II. Title.
PZ7.G9273Gol 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2014034892
Version_1
For Alton
Contents
ALSO BY S. E. GROVE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE I: MAP OF THE NEW AND UNKNOWN WORLD
PLATE II: NEW OCCIDENT AND ITS ADJOINING AGES
PLATE III: THE PAPAL STATES
PROLOGUE
PART I: THE LEADS
Chapter 1: The Convert
Chapter 2: The Nihilismian Apocrypha
Chapter 3: The Kestrel
Chapter 4: Truth Telling
Chapter 5: News From The eerie sea
Chapter 6: Wren’s Roost
Chapter 7: Gordon Broadgirdle, mp
Chapter 8: Index A.d. 82: volume 27
Chapter 9: The League Of encephalon ages
Chapter 10: Guided By Remorse
Chapter 11: Alone Among The maps
Chapter 12: Adrift
PART II: THE HUNT
Chapter 13: The Malady
Chapter 14: Keeping Secrets
Chapter 15: Verity Revealed
Chapter 16: Losing Bligh
Chapter 17: Verity’s Helm
Chapter 18: The Road To ausentinia
Chapter 19: Winning Nettie
Chapter 20: Stalking Graves
Chapter 21: Quarantine
Chapter 22: Falconer And Phantom
Chapter 23: Doubting The Champion
Chapter 24: Errol’s Pursuit
PART III: THE TEST
Chapter 25: The Lost Signs are lost
Chapter 26: Goldenrod’s Cure
Chapter 27: Following The Mark
Chapter 28: Wearing The Mustache
Chapter 29: Roads East
Chapter 30: Two Maps, one Year
Chapter 31: Wanderers
Chapter 32: Waging The Campaign
Chapter 33: Casting Votes
Chapter 34: Seven Wings
Chapter 35: White String, blue String
PART IV: THE REJOINDER
Chapter 36: Climes
Chapter 37: Reading The Rule
Chapter 38: Losing The Mustache
Chapter 39: A Dark Age
Chapter 40: Minna’s Phantom
Chapter 41: Making The Arrest
Chapter 42: Picking The Lock
Chapter 43: Confessing The Crime
Chapter 44: Ausentinia
Chapter 45: Rescue
Chapter 46: Leaving Prison
EPILOGUE: THE OFFERED SAIL
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
It is difficult for us to grasp the peculiar glamour and significance the yellow metal held for the conquistadores. We respond instantly to the cool irony of a Hernán Cortés explaining to a Mexican chief that Spaniards suffer from a disease of the heart, for which gold is the only specific; but in that coolness and irony, as in almost everything else, Cortés is atypical.
—Inga Clendinnen,
Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570
In Boston it was still 1799, but elsewhere the Ages had gone their different ways. To the north lay prehistoric snows. Across the ocean lay medieval ports. To the south lay a land of many intermingled futures and pasts. And beyond that—who could say? The world had been remade. Scholars and scientists studied the problem and found no solution. Too much was unknown. Too much of the new world was inexplicable. Consider that we do not even know for certain whether the Great Disruption was caused by mankind and, if so, which Age of mankind caused it.
—From Shadrack Elli’s History of the New World
Prologue
September 4, 1891
Dear Shadrack,
You ask me for news of the Eerie, and I can tell you that there is no recent news of them in the Indian Territories. For more than five years they have not been seen here.
But the rumors are true—I traveled in search of them three years ago, when I had need of a healer. It began with a boy trapped in one of the mines. For days his cries had echoed up through the shaft, terrifying any who came near it. His laments were so painful that all who heard them felt themselves sinking into paralyzed despair, and every attempt to rescue him failed. Finally, they came to me. Four of us hardened our hearts and went into the mines, seeking the lost child. We found him in the deep, deep dark, clawing uselessly at the walls. He came with us quietly, whimpering along the way. Only when we emerged from the mine did we realize that the boy had no face.
The creatures, called “Wailings” here and “Lachrima” in the Baldlands, appear rarely in the Territories. Until I saw him myself, I had only half believed in their existence. Now I had no doubts. I had been moved by the duties of my office to rescue a trapped child; now that I saw his condition, I was moved by pity to seek a remedy. I left Salt Lick in the hands of my deputies and took the Wailing boy north, toward the Eerie Sea, in search of the Eerie and their legendary healers.
The journey became much longer than intended, and the presence of the boy, much as I pitied him, left me despondent—almost fatally so. It was only by chance that, at the edge of the Sea, we came across an Eerie who was traveling east. She understood my errand at once. “How far has he traveled since becoming faceless?” she asked me. I could not tell her. She examined his hands, as if to answer her own question. “We will try,” she concluded. Without more discussion she agreed to lead us to the nearest Weatherer—their name for those Eerie who are most gifted as healers.
We traveled for ten days to a place I have tried to find since and cannot. A strange corner among the pine trees, where the winds from the glacial sea make sounds like the voices of murmuring mourners. The Weatherer lived in an earth-sheltered house made of pine, with a roof of sod. It
was dusk as we approached, and I saw deer and birds, squirrels and rabbits hurrying into the woods, avoiding our arrival. They scurried over the pine needles and fluttered into the branches, and they left the place in total stillness.
The Weatherer was hardly more than a boy himself, and I never learned his name. He stood waiting for us; he had anticipated our arrival. Without even glancing at me, he led the Wailing boy by the hand to a smoothed tree stump. He placed his hands over the Wailing’s face, as if protecting it from the cold. Then the Weatherer closed his own eyes, and I could sense all of his thoughts and intentions moving through him into the boy. The Wailing leaned forward into his hands, as if accepting a blessing.
I felt the change before I saw it. The forest around us seemed to pause, as if every tree and rock and cloud had taken notice and stopped to watch. The light shifted from the gray murkiness of dusk to a clear and pure silver. I could see dust motes in the air, unmoving as a constellation of stars. The pine needles nearest me seemed to shine like blades. The tree trunks became elaborate labyrinths of curved bark and pierced holes. Everything around me had become more vivid, crystalline, sharp. I felt the sense of despondency that I had grown accustomed to lift and dissipate. Suddenly, the clean forest air seemed to reach through my lungs into every corner of my body, surging through me with a kind of fierce, possessive joy. I have never felt more alive.
I had not closed my eyes, but my attention had drifted to the world made new around me. When I looked again at the Weatherer, he had stepped back from the Wailing. A boy stood before him, whole and intact, an expression of wonder on his realized face.
Since then, I have often contemplated what occurred in those woods, and I have determined that the clarity granted to me in that moment was not unlike that which transformed the Wailing boy. We are all, to some degree, dulled in our senses and our experience of the world. We are all, to some degree, suppressed by layers of accumulated grief. My unmarred features belie the gradual dulling of all those faculties that should animate a human being. We are all, to some degree, faceless.
So, you ask me if I know the Eerie. Hardly. We left the pine woods, the boy and I, having exchanged fewer than twenty words with our guide and fewer still with the Weatherer.
You ask if I could find them again. I cannot. As I said, I have searched again for that forest, and somehow it seems to have vanished.
You ask if the healing powers of the Eerie are true. Without doubt. One who can heal the Lachrima can surely heal those other maladies for which we find only imperfect cures.
Yours,
Adler Fox
Sheriff, Salt Lick City, Indian Territories
1
The Convert
—1892, May 31: 9-Hour 07—
In New Occident, the majority of the people cleave to the Fates, all-powerful deities who are believed to weave the future and past of every living being into their great tapestry of time. Some smaller number follow the True Cross, which has more followers in the Baldlands. The remainder adhere to more obscure sects, Nihilismianism being the most dominant among them.
—From Shadrack Elli’s History of New Occident
ON THE MORNING of May 31, Sophia Tims stood on Beacon Street, staring through a gap in the iron fence at the monolith before her. Junipers, tall and immobile, lined the winding lane that rose to the mansion’s entrance. The building itself, from a distance, seemed cold and forbidding, all stone walls and curtained windows. Sophia took a deep breath and glanced up again at the sign beside the gated entryway. It read:
The Nihilismian Archive
Boston Depository
For the hundredth time that morning, Sophia wondered if she was making a mistake. Reaching into her skirt pocket, she took hold of the two tokens that always traveled with her: a pocket watch and a spool of silver thread. She clasped them tightly, willing them to send her some sign of assurance.
The note leading her to the Nihilismian Archive had arrived three days earlier. Returning from yet another fruitless excursion to the Boston Public Library, she had found an envelope waiting for her on the kitchen table where Mrs. Clay, the housekeeper, had left it. There was no return address and she did not recognize the handwriting; she opened it at once. Inside was a pamphlet. On the front, an illustration of a gargoyle wearing a blindfold squatted below the title:
THE NIHILISMIAN ARCHIVE: BOSTON DEPOSITORY
On the inside, two long columns of text explained the archive’s purpose. It began:
THE WORLD YOU SEE AROUND YOU IS A false world. The true world, the Age of Verity, vanished in 1799, at the time of the Great Disruption. At the Nihilismian Archive, archivists and preservationists have dedicated their lives to finding and collecting the documents of the true world that we have lost—documents from the Age of Verity. With extensive collections pertaining to the lost Age of Verity as well as this Apocryphal Age that we inhabit, the Archive strives to ascertain how far we have strayed from the true path.
The pamphlet boasted of the archive’s forty-eight rooms of documents pertaining to every corner of the known world: newspapers, personal correspondence, manuscripts, rare books, and all other manner of printed text. It ended with one short but important sentence:
Only Nihilismians are permitted to consult the Archive.
On the back, in the same hand that had addressed the envelope, was written,
Sophia—if you are still looking for your mother, you will find her here.
Had the pamphlet arrived some months earlier, Sophia might have thrown it out with a shudder the moment she saw what it contained. She knew Nihilismians; she knew the ferocity of their convictions, and she knew that those convictions made them dangerous. Sometimes she still awoke from nightmares in which she tried to run along the roof of a speeding train, her feet heavy as lead, while a Nihilismian behind her threw a shining grappling hook straight toward her heart.
But the last year had changed things.
• • •
SOPHIA COULD REMEMBER clearly the moment in December when she ran down the stairs to the hidden map room at 34 East Ending Street, clutching the clue to her long-lost parents’ disappearance. Her uncle Shadrack Elli sat at the leather-topped table beside his close friend, the famous explorer Miles Countryman, and Theodore Constantine Thackary, the boy from the Baldlands who had become one of their small family. The three were silent as Sophia, her voice choked with emotion, read the letter from her father.
He had written it eight years before, telling Sophia that their journey had taken an unexpected turn: they were planning to follow the lost signs toward Ausentinia.
Miles whooped for joy at the discovery, pounding a laughing Theo on the back, and begun making plans for their immediate departure. Shadrack listened with elation, which turned to bewilderment as he reread the message once, twice, three times. “I have never heard of Ausentinia or the lost signs,” Shadrack declared, perplexed. “But no matter! Someone will have heard of them.”
And yet, it became blindingly clear as the days turned to weeks, no one had. Shadrack Elli, the greatest cartologer of New Occident, the man who could create and read nearly every sort of map in the known world, wrote to every explorer and every cartologer and every librarian he had ever known, along with many he had never met. No one had so much as heard or read the words.
Still, Sophia had held out hope. She had faith that while she continued to learn cartology, the Fates, in their wisdom, were planning how to lead her onward with a promising thread of discovery. Their guidance had steered her true before, and surely it would again.
Every so often, a possible lead would emerge, and Shadrack would send Miles or some other explorer friend to hunt it down. Each lead dwindled into a dead end. And as the months went by, and the list of failed attempts grew, Sophia remained convinced that surely another, better lead—perhaps the one that would finally point to Minna and Bronson—would appear.
>
Then in late winter, with the election of a new prime minister, Shadrack was offered a government position as the Minister of Relations with Foreign Ages. Prime Minister Bligh was a trusted friend, and Shadrack could not refuse the offer to replace another friend, Carlton Hopish, who still languished in the Boston City Hospital. Left horribly injured and deprived of his senses by a violent attack, Carlton showed no sign of even the slightest recovery.
As he left at dawn and returned after dinner, Shadrack’s days at the ministry grew longer and longer. Sophia still waited at home for him each evening, eager to discuss her day’s findings, but Shadrack seemingly wearied more each day. His eyes were tired, his gaze, abstracted. One evening at dinner, Sophia left to get her notebook, and when she returned, she found Shadrack slumped over the kitchen table, fast asleep. Little by little, Shadrack’s searching stopped. The lessons in cartology, which Sophia had waited desperately for each evening, stopped as well.
The winter stretched on, and Sophia sank into a long gloom. Shadrack had no time. Miles departed in pursuit of a slim lead, taking Theo with him. Sophia struggled against the feeling that she was alone. She tried, fruitlessly for the most part, to continue the cartology lessons on her own. After school, she haunted the Boston Public Library, poring over every relevant book she could find, and at home she plumbed the depths of the map room, finding more riddles than solutions in Shadrack’s obscure collection. By the time spring arrived, she felt her hope wearing thin. She had difficulty sleeping, and this made her feel forgetful, unsteady, and unsure. There were times, as she drew in her notebook recounting the day, when tears spilled over onto the page. The careful lines of text became great gray clouds; the drawings blurred and puckered; and she could not point to the reason.
And then, finally, the Fates sent her a sign. It first appeared at dusk. Sophia had been watching for Shadrack from her bedroom window when she saw a pale figure lingering by the front gate. It stood indecisively, taking a step toward the street and then a step back toward the house. The cobblestones shone from a recent rain shower, and a low fog had settled in around the streetlamps.