The Glass Sentence (The Mapmakers Trilogy)

by S. E. Grove

  Considering Dr. Hopish’s crucial role in implementing the newly passed Patriot Plan, the connection with parliament’s decision at the State House cannot be overlooked. Indeed, certain of Dr. Hopish’s colleagues in the ministry, as well as several respected members of parliament, readily assume that the injury was no accident. “I have no doubt,” said Mr. Gordon Broadgirdle, MP, “that Hopish has fallen victim to the unrestrained violence of foreigners bent on the vengeful extinction of our nation’s leaders.”

  “How terrible!” she exclaimed.

  “It is,” Shadrack replied, running a hand through his hair. “As if Carlton’s tragedy were not bad enough, all of this will only lead to greater support for the Patriot Plan. They are of course blaming foreigners for all three incidents.” He shook his head. “What a disastrous twenty hours.”

  They were both silent for a moment. “We will be all right, won’t we?” Sophia asked quietly.

  Shadrack sighed and held out his hand. Sophia took it. Despite her uncle’s look of exhaustion, his expression was reassuring. “We will be all right,” he said. “But there will be changes.”

  “What kind of changes?”

  “I won’t lie to you, Soph. This is a difficult time, and it will remain that way even after the immediate furor subsides. I am most worried about the end of August. As I said yesterday, I would not be surprised if the borders were closed entirely by the ridiculous Protection Amendment—even to us.”

  “If”—she swallowed hard—“if they did that, then we couldn’t leave.”

  “No,” Shadrack agreed.

  “And . . . the people from New Occident who are in another age now?”

  “I see your point,” he said after a moment.

  “Their papers are here. If they want to come home now, they won’t be able to get in. And, after August, we wouldn’t even be able to go out to—to meet them?” She looked down, avoiding Shadrack’s gaze.

  He stood and put his arm around her shoulders. “You’ve always held out hope, Soph.”

  “It is foolish, I know,” she muttered.

  Shadrack tightened his grasp. “It is not in the least foolish,” he said forcefully. “To hold out hope, to be willing to expect the impossible—these are courageous things. You have wonderful resilience.”

  “I guess.”

  “All you need, Sophia,” he went on, “is something to do. You lack the way to apply your exceptional patience, your persistence.”

  “I don’t know what I can possibly do about it.”

  “Yes, Soph, but I know,” he said, stepping back and releasing her. “I meant to wait a few more years, but we can’t. The time has arrived.” He looked her in the eye. “Sophia, you have to make me a promise.”

  “Okay,” she said, surprised.

  “Only a handful of people in this Age know what I am about to tell you.” Sophia looked at him expectantly. “I won’t ask you never to speak of it, because I know you will use your judgment and speak of it only when you must. But,” he said, looking down at the floor, “you must promise me something else. You must promise me that you won’t . . . You won’t decide—you won’t even consider,” he corrected himself, “going in search of them without me.” He met her eyes, his expression earnest. “Can you promise me that?”

  Sophia pondered in silence for several seconds, feeling confused, alarmed, and hopeful all at once. “I promise,” she whispered.

  “Good.” He smiled a little sadly. “I hope the long wait will have served its purpose in teaching you caution.” He walked to one of the bookshelves and removed a thick leather-bound volume. Reaching behind it, he seemed to turn something. Then the entire bookshelf, which reached from floor to ceiling, swung slowly outward. A wide doorway with a set of steps leading downward stood revealed.

  Sophia gaped for a moment, too astonished to speak. Shadrack reached into the open passageway and turned on a series of flame-lamps. He smiled at her expression. “Well? Don’t you want to see the map room?”

  “This has been here all the time?”

  “It has. It’s where I do my most important work.”

  “I thought when you closed the door you were working in your study.”

  “Sometimes. I am usually downstairs. Follow me.” He led her down the steps, which turned twice before opening onto a basement Sophia had never known existed.

  The room was fully as large as the entire first floor of the house. Electric flame-lamps dotted the walls and tables. In many ways, it seemed a grander, more orderly version of the library upstairs. Here, too, bookshelves covered the walls and a pair of sturdy wooden tables showed signs of frequent use. The room smelled of old paper, flame-lamp, and polished wood. A thick carpet that muffled Sophia’s footsteps covered the floor, and on one side of the room a sofa and two armchairs formed a small sitting area. But in other respects there was a sharp contrast. A long glass display case such as one would see in a museum glinted under the lights by the rear wall, filled with all kinds of strange objects. Nearby was a set of four enormous oak bureaus, each with dozens of shallow drawers. And then there was the most striking difference of all: the room was tidy and well kept. Nothing was out of place.

  Sophia stood rooted to the spot, staring around her. She was still having trouble believing that such a room existed. “How long has this been here?” she finally asked, in an awed voice. “And why is it so clean?”

  Shadrack laughed. “Let me tell you a little family history—some history that you don’t know. My father—your grandfather—was, as you know, the curator of the museum at the university. And as a curator, he was also an explorer.”

  Sophia nodded; this much she knew.

  “So Father spent a great deal of time not only curating the museum but also exploring the different Ages and purchasing pieces for it.” Again, this was not news. “Well, during his explorations, it was only natural that Father should also acquire things for himself. He was an avid collector, after all. And on his travels to the various Ages, he met people who gave him gifts. The pieces he had purchased for the museum went to the museum, and the pieces that were given to him or purchased for himself were kept here. Father made this space into his own private museum.”

  “But why was it secret?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t—not always. At first, he simply wanted a place that was cool and out of the light in order to keep his treasures safe. But then, as word of his private collection got around, Father began getting visitors from all over New Occident—people who wanted to buy his pieces. Needless to say, he wasn’t interested. As the attention of other collectors and dealers grew more and more insistent, Father decided he would just cause all of it to disappear. He made it known that he had donated his entire private collection to the museum, and then he built the bookcases to conceal the entrance. It took some time, but after a while the collectors stopped pestering him.”

  “And everyone forgot the collection existed?”

  “Almost everyone. When I started studying cartology,” Shadrack went on, “Father suggested I keep my more valuable maps and cartologic instruments here. He had a list of rules that I agreed to observe”—he grimaced—“such as keeping everything tidy. I agreed, and over time I had more maps and tools that needed to be kept hidden. Eventually, after Father passed away, I remade it into a map room, and I’ve kept it that way ever since. And of course it’s still secret, because of the work I do here. Most of it is so sensitive that it must be completely concealed—even from those who live under my own roof,” he added apologetically.

  “Who else knows about it?”

  Something like pain flashed across his face unexpectedly as his dark eyes drew inward, but he recovered himself almost immediately. “Very few living souls know about the map room. My students and colleagues at the university have no idea. Nor does Mrs. Clay. Miles knows. And your parents knew, of course. We spent many hours here together, planning their expeditions.”

  Her parents had once sat in those very chairs with Shadra
ck! She could imagine them huddled over the table, poring over maps from all the different Ages and talking animatedly about routes, and supplies, and strange foreign customs.

  “We did make a mess of this room before every trip,” Shadrack said, smiling. “Here”—he led her to a large, worn map pinned to the wall above the armchairs—“is where we would always begin.” It was a map of the world, dotted with pins of different colors. “After they left when you were small,” Shadrack said quietly, “I kept track of where they’d gone. This was their planned route.” He pointed to a series of blue pins that stretched out across the Atlantic and through the Papal States into the Middle Roads. Sophia had heard why her parents had left many times, but the journey took on a different aspect when accompanied by a map. “The message from our friend Casavetti seemed to suggest he had fallen prisoner while discovering an unknown Age here, in the Papal States.” He pointed to a blue pin. “Somehow, though Casavetti knew the region like the back of his hand, he had stumbled upon something new—and clearly dangerous. They planned to arrive, rescue Casavetti, and return.

  “But I do not believe they ever arrived at their destination. The green pins show the places where I heard they had been.” They were scattered all over the world—the Northern Snows, the Baldlands, the Russias, even Australia. “For years, explorers I knew would bring me news. Very few claimed to have seen them firsthand, but they’d heard a rumor here, a suspicion there. I collected every scrap of information and tried to track their route—make some sense of it. As you can see, there’s no sense at all.” He gestured at the map. “Then I stopped hearing about them.”

  They stood in silence for a moment, gazing at the smattering of pinheads. “But you see, Sophia—I did not give up hope either. I wouldn’t have dreamed of heading off without you to find them, and taking you with me then was out of the question. While you were little, I learned everything I could about where they had been seen. And I waited. I waited for you to reach an age when I could tell what I knew. An age when it would be possible for us to go in search of them—together.”

  Sophia took in the far-flung destinations marked by green pins, overwhelmed. “Go in search of them?” she repeated.

  “I would have waited another few years, had I been able to,” Shadrack went on. “But that is no longer possible. You and I need to start making our plans now, so that we can leave in case the borders close for everyone—we have only weeks left. We can’t take the map room with us, so we have to take it all up here.” He tapped his temple with his forefinger.

  Sophia’s eyes traveled over the room and settled on the hopeful, determined face of her uncle. She smiled at him elatedly. “How do I start?”

  Shadrack smiled back, something like pride in his eyes. “I knew you were ready, Soph.” He reached out and placed his large hand gently on her head. “At first, you will have to rely on some of your extraordinary patience, because the first few steps to becoming a cartologer and explorer go slowly.”

  “I can do it,” she said eagerly. “I can be patient.”

  Shadrack laughed. “Then we’ll commence the first lesson. Before that, a brief tour of the map room.” He strode to the wooden tables. “Here’s where I do the mapmaking.” As she walked past them, Sophia noticed that one table had a worn, leather surface, covered with small nicks and scratches. “And these shelves are full of books that are either too valuable or too risky to have upstairs.” He indicated a few that were unusual shapes and sizes and then gestured at one of the large wooden bureaus. “I’ll show you these later. First—here, in the case, are some really beautiful things. Treasures from the other Ages. Your parents found some of them for me.”

  Shadrack pointed to a tall metal cylinder studded with tiny gems. “A map reader from Patagonia,” he said proudly. Beside it was something that looked like an ordinary seashell, but somehow made her think of warm sunlight and the murmur of underwater voices. “A Finding Shell from the South Seas. And this,” he said, indicating a flat, waxy object covered with bright pictures, “is a forest map from the Papal States.” As Sophia looked at it, she envisioned it on a lectern in a room filled with incense smoke and faint candlelight. There were many other mysterious objects.

  “So these are all actually maps?”

  “That’s the thing, Soph,” he said, his eyes gleaming. “We think of maps as drawings on paper—some lines, some words, some symbols. Right?” Sophia nodded. “But in reality, maps come in all shapes and sizes—and in the other Ages, they are nothing like ours. My theory,” Shadrack continued, “is that your parents went astray because they could not read the maps of the Age they were in. They knew a little bit, but they counted on their paper maps to guide them through everything.” He winced. “I counted on their paper maps to guide them. If my theory is correct, there are places you simply cannot navigate without local maps, and that takes an entirely different kind of knowledge. More than skill—it takes a mental adjustment to read and make maps unlike those drawn on paper.”

  Sophia looked at him in wonder. “Do you mean that you make them? You make those other maps?”

  “That,” he replied, “is what the map room is for. In New Occident we mainly draw maps on paper. But maps can be cast in almost anything—stone, wood, earth, sand, metal, cloth, leather, glass—even made on a piece of soap or a broad leaf. Every mapmaker has specialties, depending on where they are and what Age they belong to. And some people, like me, have tried to learn the cartology of other Ages.”

  “But not my parents.” Sophia’s voice was small.

  “They knew the rudiments of other cartologic forms. But not enough, I suspect. They may have found themselves somewhere far from the Age of paper maps, with only a sand map before them. What then?” He shook his head. “That won’t happen again. You and I will be masters of every manner of map when we go in search of them.”

  “What other forms do you know?” she asked breathlessly.

  Shadrack led her to the large wooden bureaus. “Apart from paper, upon which every cartologer of our Age depends, I’ve learned mapmaking with four of the essential materials: metal, glass, cloth, and clay.” As he spoke, he opened one of the drawers in the nearest bureau and removed a thin rectangle of shining metal, which he held up by the edges. It was no larger than a sheet of paper. In the corner was stamped, “Boston, February 1831.” Beside that was a tiny symbol: a mountain range stacked upon a ruler. The rest of the metal sheet seemed completely blank.

  “Let’s leave this out for a moment,” Shadrack said, placing it on the leather-topped table. He opened a drawer in the next bureau and took out a sheet of glass of about the same size. It, too, was entirely blank except for the place and date, “Boston, February 1831,” and the mountain symbol etched into the corner.

  “But they are blank,” Sophia said.

  “Just a little patience!” he said, opening drawers in the third and fourth bureaus. From these he withdrew a thin clay tablet and a rectangle of linen, engraved and embroidered, respectively, with the same information as the other two. He placed them side by side on the table and looked at the array in satisfaction. “There we are. Four maps of the same timeplace.”

  Sophia frowned. “Timeplace?”

  “The meeting of a particular place and time.”

  “These are maps? They don’t even have anything on them. They’re just blank rectangles.”

  Shadrack went to one of the bookcases and ran his hand along the spines of the books. When he found the volume he was looking for, he took it off the shelf and thumbed through its pages. “Here!” he said. He laid the open book on the table. “This is what you’re imagining, am I right?”

  Sophia saw that the book was open to a map labeled “City of Boston.” The familiar shape of the city, with its neighborhoods and waterways and principal roads and rail lines lay before her. “Yes,” she said. “That’s a map.”

  “Now, what would you say if I told you that each of these ‘blank rectangles,’ as you call them, has more informat
ion—a hundred times more information—than this paper map? They not only map the place, they map the time of Boston in February of 1831.”

  Sophia furrowed her brow. “Do you mean like how I map things in my sketchbook?”

  “Yes, very much like your clever way of recording time through drawings and words. Although in these maps, you won’t see pictures and words; you’ll see animate impressions of what was happening then and there. It will feel as though you are actually there.”

  She let out a breath of astonishment. “How?”

  He smiled. “I can promise you that, with practice, you will not only be able to read every map in those cabinets; you will even be able to make your own.” He pulled out a chair. “Have a seat,” he said. “And give it a try.”

  Sophia sat down eagerly and looked expectantly at the four rectangles lying before her.

  “What do you think the first step is?”

  She looked up at him in astonishment. “You mean you’re not going to tell me?”

  He smiled. “That would defeat the entire purpose. As I said, it’s not skill that’s required—it’s the ability to think about things differently. If I tell you, you will simply memorize the method. If you have to discover it for yourself, you will understand how to apply the principle you learn. When we are out in another Age, confronted by a map neither of us understands, we’ll need as much inventive thinking as both of us can muster. Memorizing won’t help.”

  “But I have no idea how this works!”

  “Perhaps not at first,” Shadrack said. “But you have imagination, and it will come to you. I’ll give you a starting point. And this is at the heart of lesson one—a lesson about paper.” He sat down in a chair beside her. “Paper maps are valued all across the Ages for good reason. They’re durable, they’re unchanging, and they’re accessible to anyone who picks them up. That has its uses. But other kinds of maps, while harder to read and in many cases more fragile, are also more dynamic and better at keeping secrets. Those qualities go hand in hand. A paper map is always there, but other maps—well, they sleep most of the time. Something you do has to wake them up so they can be read.”