by Carrie Ryan
“What happens to it all?” Marrill asked in a small voice, unable to look away from the creeping emptiness.
Ardent sat at a table behind her, hunched over the Map to Everywhere and examining it closely. He didn’t even look up when he answered her. “It is destroyed. Utterly.”
The rumor vines at the ship’s stern echoed his words softly, as though even the plants understood the solemnity of the situation.
The thought of so many worlds—of so many possibilities—destroyed struck terror in Marrill’s heart. She didn’t understand why anyone would want to cause such a thing. “But why would the Master do that? Why unleash the Lost Sun and destroy the Stream?”
Ardent lifted a shoulder. “To finish what Serth began, I imagine. The Master seems to have been operating as Serth’s second in command after all.”
That didn’t make Marrill feel any better. “Will there be a way to fix it? I mean, once we figure out how to stop him?”
Ardent took a deep breath and let it out slowly, considering her question. “No,” he finally said. “I’m afraid that everything the Lost Sun touches will be gone forever.”
A gruff voice nearby grumbled. “You guys ever noticed that every world you visit ends up broken or destroyed? I’m just saying. Folks should really cross you off their invite list.” The Naysayer lumbered toward his fishing lines, tugging on each one to check for a fresh catch before settling into his chair. Karny immediately jumped into his lap, nestling in the crook of one of his arms and purring contentedly.
Marrill didn’t want to consider the truth of his words. “But we can stop him, right? Before he gets to Meres and destroys everything?”
This time Ardent did look up. He slumped back in his chair. “I don’t know.”
The rumor vines took up the sentiment:
Marrill blinked. Since when did Ardent not have the answers?
“Well, all we have to do is figure out how to get the Lost Sun back into the Map again, right?” she asked, gesturing toward the table. “And the Dzane did it before, so there’s got to be a way.…”
“And maybe it would work again if there wasn’t something wrong with the Map.” Ardent lifted it between them, and that’s when Marrill noticed the hole in the center of the parchment.
The rumor vines continued to echo what was now obvious:
Marrill frowned and caught Fin’s eye. He seemed as surprised as she did. She moved closer to get a better look at the Map. “Isn’t that where Margaham’s Game was?” she asked, tracing her finger around the edge of the hole.
“It is.” Ardent stood and began to pace. “The Map is the embodiment of the Stream itself. The void created by the Lost Sun is growing, and with every step, the Lost Sun is opening up more of it. If I had to hazard a guess, and it seems that I do, my hypothesis would be that the deterioration of the Map will mirror precisely the destruction caused by the Lost Sun.”
“So,” Remy interjected, “more and more of the Map will be destroyed as the Lost Sun destroys more and more of the Stream?”
“You could put it that way,” Ardent grumbled. “If you don’t like precision. Or extraneous quantities of verbiage.”
The rumor vines tried to take that one up, but it just ended in a tangle of random words.
Marrill stared at the Map, her eyes tracing all the worlds swimming across its surface. All the places she’d never get to visit. All the places that would disappear unless they stopped the Lost Sun. Including, eventually, her own world.
“But maybe the Map will still work,” she offered. “Maybe the hole doesn’t matter.”
Ardent let out a sigh. “I’ve already tried.” To demonstrate, he gripped the crystal Key and held it against the surface of the Map. Nothing happened.
“What about using the wish orb?” a deckhand Marrill didn’t recognize proposed. “Couldn’t you just wish this all away?”
Ardent shook his head. “I wish.” When no one laughed at his halfhearted joke, he cleared his throat. “The wish orb is powerful. It contains perhaps the purest, most concentrated water on the Stream, outside the Font of Monerva itself.”
He tapped his fingers against the railing, thinking it through. “My guess is that partially filled, it could possibly contain the power of the Lost Sun for a short period of time, but not stop it. Not for long. And using the wish orb would unleash the Salt Sand King and the Iron Tide, which would, of course, certainly only serve to make matters worse. You’d have three entities vying to destroy the Stream rather than just one.”
“Right,” Fin said, glaring at the deckhand. “So no using the wish orb. In fact, maybe we should keep it in a very, very secure location.”
“Okay, the Map and wish orb are out,” Remy said. “How long do we have to figure out another solution?”
“Until the Lost Sun arrives at Meres and pours his power into the Font, I should think,” Ardent said.
Remy rolled her eyes. “Right, I know that.” She looked to Coll. “But how long until that happens?”
The captain shrugged. “Depends on how fast he’s moving.”
Ardent stared toward the horizon. “Walking speed.”
“Seriously?” Remy scoffed. “Dude’s the most powerful entity that exists, and he’s going to walk all the way to Meres? You’d think he would magic up a boat at least.”
“The Lost Sun does not create,” Ardent said. “Plus, I imagine that’s exactly why he feels no need to rush. Because he is the most powerful entity on the Stream. He’s confident nothing can stop him. Besides,” he added with a chuckle, “it wouldn’t be easy to sail a ship when every step you take destroys the world. The whole thing would keep sinking out from underneath you. Unless of course—”
“Well, less than a week,” Coll said, cutting Ardent off. He stood by the table, his fingers stretched across the Map, connecting Meres to the hole. “That’s how long we have.”
Everyone fell silent, lost in thought. Marrill slumped against one of the masts, staring up into the sky, hoping for inspiration to strike. High in the rigging, a trio of pirats scampered across the yard. Squeaking among themselves, two of them maneuvered a scrap of cloth into place over a tear in the sail as the third dangled from his back feet, using a tiny needle and thread to sew it into place.
For a moment Marrill wished she could trade places with the creatures whose only concern at the moment involved fixing the sail rather than fixing the world.
She blinked. That was it! She pushed from the mast excitedly. “What if we repair the Map?” she asked. “If we fix the hole in the Map, we can use it to retrap the Lost Sun, just like the Dzane trapped him in the first place. Right?”
Ardent snorted. “Well, certainly. But you can’t just fix the Map to Everywhere.”
Marrill put her hands on her hips. “Why not?”
“Well, because it’s Dzane made. It’s not like you can stitch a patch on that hole and call it a day!”
“Why not?” Marrill repeated.
Ardent flapped his hands through the air in exasperation. “Because… well… because you can’t! I mean, the power you would need to pull it off—”
“So the great wizard Ardent isn’t wizard enough to fix it?” Fin poked. Marrill smiled at him.
Ardent opened his mouth, then closed it. “I’m not saying—”
Coll cleared his throat, a mischievous smile on his lips. “Come on, Ardent. I’ve seen you do things no other wizard could ever do. Are you really telling us you’re not wizard enough to patch a map?”
Ardent’s nose twitched. One eyebrow popped up. Marrill could see the pride wrestling with the thoughts behind his eyes. “Okay, yes, I think I could possibly manage it.” Marrill grinned, giddiness bubbling through her. “BUT!” he said, raising one finger. “We would need the very same ingredients that the Dawn Wizard used to create the Map in the first place. Anyone know where to find those?”
Coll’s eyes dropped to the deck. Fin looked around, like he wasn’t sure who Ardent was talking to.
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p; Marrill’s smile drooped a little. But hope still flowed through her. So long as there was a chance, she couldn’t give up. “What do we need?”
Ardent stepped close, giving her his grandfatherly smile. He was doing his best to look earnest, but Marrill could tell he was humoring her. “Well, we would need the right parchment, of course. And ink. We’d then have to take it all to the Font of Meres, before the Lost Sun gets there, and use the headwaters to redraw the secrets of the Stream straight onto our new Map.”
Fin rubbed his hands together. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s swing by the Khaznot Quay and snag some supplies—they’ve got everything you need if you know where to look. Then it’s off to Meres and bam—crisis averted.” He took the Map from Marrill and started examining it for the shortest route to the Khaznot Quay.
“Not so fast, my random stowaway,” Ardent said. “We can’t just grab any old scrap of cloth and staining liquid. We would need parchment capable of expanding and shrinking and twisting and growing and containing all the possibilities of the Stream, which are endless. And frankly, I’ve never heard of anything like that, other than the material of the Map itself.”
Marrill bit her lip. It couldn’t be hopeless, she told herself, not now that they’d figured out a solution.
“Perhaps if I still had access to the Dawn Wizard’s memories, I could use them to find the answers we’re searching for. But now that the Wiverwane has been subsumed by your cat, the knowledge is lost to us.” He waved a hand at Karnelius, who yawned loudly before falling back into a nap.
“No it isn’t,” Fin said.
Ardent glanced at him. “And you are…?”
“A friend with a good idea,” Fin told him.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Ardent said, crooking an eyebrow. “The idea bit being good, I mean. It’s really beyond my purview to pass judgment on what kind of friend you’d make, as obviously everyone puts a different priority on disparate traits when it comes to choosing people to become acquainted—”
Coll cleared his throat, cutting Ardent off. “You were saying?” he asked Fin, eyeing the boy with suspicion.
“The Dawn Wizard’s knowledge isn’t lost. It’s just in a different form. We still have his last will. What if it has the information we’re looking for?”
Marrill plucked her cat from the Naysayer, ignoring protests from both of them. “You think my cat knows how to save the Pirate Stream?”
“I think the Dawn Wizard knew where to go shopping for the ingredients for his Map,” Fin explained. “And I think your cat is the closest we’re going to get to the Dawn Wizard himself.”
Ardent clapped his hands together. “Coll, your new deckhand is quite clever.” Kicking aside the hem of his purple robe, he turned and pointed a finger in the air. “Pirats! Bring me my dullwood pail. We’ve got a cat to dunk.”
A cheer went up around the ship. The many multilegged rodents chirped excitedly, apparently quite thrilled about the prospect of a Karnelius dunking booth.
Marrill sighed. She knew Ardent and Fin were right. But that didn’t mean she liked it. When the pirats returned with the pail of Pirate Stream water, she pressed her face against her cat’s neck and whispered, “Sorry about this, Karny.”
Karnelius, for his part, would have none of it. As soon as she began to lower him toward the water, he employed the same tactic he used to evade his cat carrier. He thrust out his legs, bracing his paws against the lip of the bucket. The battle was on.
No matter how hard she pushed, no matter how many of them worked to pry his paws free, they got him no closer to the waiting water. He struggled and squirmed, becoming a whirling devil of fur and claw, twisting angrily until he managed to upend the pail. Everyone scrambled back from the slosh of magical water, except for Ardent, who was oblivious, as usual.
Karny landed on his feet in full puff mode, his ears pinned back and teeth bared. The rumor vines took up the cat’s protest, their echoes growing louder until the entire back of the ship sounded like it was under attack by hordes of angry snakes.
Slowly, Marrill crouched, reaching for her cat. But the moment she got close, the cat took off. He sprinted toward the hatch leading belowdecks but banked away when Fin jumped in front of him. He leapt for a mast, but the pirats chittered at him, forcing him back to the deck.
“Aww, now look what ya done,” the Naysayer grumbled. “He’s all scared. Come here, fella. Uncle Nono will protect you.”
Karny dug his claws into the deck and executed a sharp turn, heading for his protector’s arms. But just as he leapt toward the purplish lizard’s outstretched hands, Remy stepped from behind a bulkhead and tossed an entire pail of Stream water at the cat.
There was no escaping the surprise ambush. The wash of golden water was a direct hit, splashing Karnelius midjump. The cat hung in the air a moment before dropping to the deck and landing on his feet with a sodden splat.
Everyone looked to Remy in wide-eyed surprise, and she shrugged. “You learn a few tricks when you’ve got seven younger brothers and sisters who all went through a phase of hating baths.”
The dripping cat at the babysitter’s feet narrowed his eyes and twitched his tail angrily before opening his mouth and beginning to speak.
To the Council of Whispers, I leave the Face of the Map to Everywhere. I would advise them to share it well and use it cautiously, lest suspicion and jealousy take root in their hearts.
“The Map to Everywhere!” Remy said.
Fin puffed his chest, looking self-satisfied. “So Karny does know something about the Map!”
Marrill grabbed his arm. There was something about this will that didn’t sit right with her. After all, things hadn’t exactly gone well for the Council of Whispers. They’d grown so attached to using the Face of the Map to spy on others and gossip that they’d grown roots, literally, becoming the heart of the babbling jungle known as the Gibbering Grove.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Are we sure we can trust it?”
“Do we have a choice?” Fin fired back.
Remy gave a wry smile. “Well,” she said, “at least we know the Dawn Wizard’s will has some information on the Map. And unless you guys have another lead on how to fix it…” She raised up her dullwood pail.
Marrill poked out her lip in defeat. Poor Karny. “Back to wetting down the cat,” she said with a sigh.
Quite a while later, Marrill sat on the edge of the forecastle, legs dangling in the air, thumb rubbing over the growing ragged hole in the Map to Everywhere. Next to her, a sopping and extremely unamused Karnelius droned out an endless list of the Dawn Wizard’s bizarre bequests. So far there hadn’t been anything more about the Map, but she still wasn’t willing to give up.
To Tealeaf the Stinging Fairy, whom I slighted by omitting from the Book of Wondrous Beings, I leave a thimbleful of apologies, distilled from the very first apology ever made, by my brother Kab-Who-Dreams to a rather small stone that he had tripped over in the days before the Stream was born.
Karny sniffled and then let out an enormous self-drying sneeze. Again. The recitation cut off, and the cat went back to grooming himself. Marrill groaned. “Whose turn is it?” she asked.
Remy lay in a nearby hammock, idly flipping through a book on advanced sailing warfare tactics. “Not it,” she said, placing a finger against her nose without glancing up. Coll leaned against one of the masts nearby. He also had a finger against his nose. Even Ardent, who’d been scribbling notes in a tattered journal, had a finger against his nose.
Marrill quickly pressed her finger against her own nose and looked to Fin. He lay on his back beside her, eyes closed as he basked in the warmth of the sun. Marrill’s eyes narrowed. Was it just her or was he clearly trying to pretend he was asleep?
She nudged him. “I went last time. This round’s on you.”
Fin groaned and sat up. “Your cat hates me.”
“He hates all of us right now.”
Near the stern, the Naysayer cleared h
is throat with a wet, guttural harrumph. “Speak for yourselves.”
Marrill rolled her eyes. “So you’re his favorite right now. I’m sure he’ll be quite pleased to curl up with you while the Kraken is dragged down into the pit of nothingness the Lost Sun has so graciously created.”
The Naysayer looked up from tending his rumor vines to shoot her a sour look. “Don’t gotta be rude.”
She knew it was bad when the Naysayer was giving her lessons on comportment. She sighed and shoved the dullwood water cannon to Fin. At least the new contraption Ardent had whipped up allowed them a bit more distance than the pail did. “You wanna save the Stream? Douse the cat and make it quick.”
“Fine,” he said, pushing to his feet. “But you get to run interference this time when Ardent refuses to heal my wounds and decides to throw me in the brig for being a stowaway. Again.”
Marrill tried to keep from smiling. It wouldn’t be so funny if Fin hadn’t turned seeing how fast he could break through the brig’s new singing lock into his own personal challenge. “Done,” she readily agreed.
Next to Fin a deckhand laughed. “That’s what you get for being memorable, Brother Fade—people remember it’s your turn.” He shot her a glare, which only made her laugh harder.
As sweetly as possible, Fin clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, calling for Karny. But the cat was more than wise to them by this point and had already taken off across the ship. At least they’d figured out early to lock the hatches to the decks below. The first time he’d escaped he led them in a chase that lasted at least an hour.
Marrill went back to studying the ragged hole in the Map to Everywhere, ignoring Karny’s hissing and Fin’s swallowed grunts as he chased after the cat.
Ten minutes later she heard Fin shout, “Got him!” And then the familiar sounds of her cat’s voice filled the air:
To the Shell Weavers of Oneira, I leave a bolt of ribbon spun straight from the fabric of dreams. Hold it dear, for from this material did I craft the great Bintheyr Map to Everywhere.