The Glass Sentence (The Mapmakers Trilogy)

by S. E. Grove

  Help us escape them, please, Sophia implored the Fates.

  For several minutes they lay silently, listening to the whir of the wheels against the rails. The metal roof was hard against her ribs and she palmed the surface desperately, feeling as though a sudden jolt or turn would toss her away like a crumb brushed from a sleeve.

  Then she heard it, the sound she’d been dreading: the rear door of the railcar slamming shut. Someone had stepped out onto the balcony. A moment later, she heard the clang of boots. “They’re on the ladder!”

  Theo braced himself. “We have to run.” He rose, stepped over Sophia, and put his hand out. “Come on!” She pulled herself up and tried to get her balance. Theo let go and began moving toward the next railcar.

  Sophia took a few steps forward and then broke into a halting run. She turned to look over her shoulder, nearly toppling; Mortify was climbing onto the roof. “Run!” she shouted. “Keep running!”

  Theo reached the edge and in one easy bound jumped to the next car. Though the distance between them was only a few feet, Sophia felt her knees buckle at the prospect of hanging in midair above the moving train. She looked over her shoulder again; Mortify was halfway across and he was somehow, despite the moving train, loosening the long rope of the grappling hook from his belt loop. Sophia crouched, her knees shaking, and then jumped.

  Fly, Sophia, fly! A distant pair of voices reached her: the memory of her parents, holding her high above the ground. For a moment she did fly, or float, caught in midair by the wind. She looked down and saw the tracks, two long black smudges on a gray canvas, and then her feet landed on the other roof, as if the two hands that held her had let her down again gently, safely.

  She ran haltingly across the whole length of the second car. The train moved under her each time she put her foot down, and every step threatened to pitch her sideways. She held her hands out rigidly, balancing herself. Mortify had jumped the gap between the first and second car, and he began closing the distance. He loosed the grappling hook and held it deftly in his right hand, readying himself to throw it.

  Theo and Sophia jumped, one after another, onto the third car. The violent clang of metal striking metal sounded over the rushing of the wind. The grappling hook had struck the edge of the car and Mortify was hauling it back toward him like a fishing line. “We have to jump off,” Theo shouted.

  “No, wait,” Sophia said. “Look!” A train heading in the opposite direction had stopped on its parallel tracks to allow their train to pass. In a few seconds it would be beside them.

  “Perfect,” Theo shouted. “Get to the first car.” He took off, and Sophia ran with abandon now, her arms flailing at her sides, no longer looking to see where her feet landed. She kept her eye on the front of the train, covering three railcars, then a fourth, and then a fifth. They were almost at the front. The other train loomed, waiting.

  “All right,” Theo yelled. “Let’s go!”

  Then they were abreast of it. A burst of air shook the car. Theo quickly regained his footing; then he took a running start and jumped. Sophia glanced behind her. She had only a few seconds. She saw Mortify, a car-length away, launch the grappling hook. It seemed to hang in the air, suspended: a whirling shape that caught the light of the rising sun. The bright cluster of silver grew larger, swinging toward her, its sharp points glittering as they twirled.

  Sophia yanked herself back to the present. Don’t lose track of time now! she told herself desperately.

  She ran with all her might toward the edge. She jumped. A moment later she felt hard metal slam against her face, her back, her knees; she was rolling—rolling fast, like a marble over a table top. She could find nothing to hold onto, and the edge rose up before her. Suddenly something fell across her legs, pinning her down. She opened her eyes. Her head was hanging over the edge of the railcar, but she was safe. Theo had tackled her, and his weight was holding her in place.

  She scrambled up just as the train jolted into motion, heading east. The other train was already far in the distance. “Where is he?” she cried. “Did he follow us?”

  “He didn’t jump,” Theo said, raising his voice to be heard over the mounting noise. Sophia saw with surprise that he was smiling at her with frank admiration. “That was totally reckless, but it worked.”

  “What?”

  “Waiting until the last second so he couldn’t jump after you.” He pointed to the far edge of the roof. The grappling hook hung from the ladder like a snagged kite, its rope dangling.

  “Right.” Sophia took a deep breath. The train began to pick up speed. “We have to get off.”

  “Next station,” Theo shouted.

  They lay against the cold roof as mile after mile of flat land passed by. Sunlight yellowed the fields around them, making fog of the humid air. The metal rattled painfully against Sophia’s chest, and the station seemed ages away.

  Finally, the train began to slow. It rolled up alongside the platform of the station they had passed at dawn. ROUNDHILL, read the wooden sign swinging over the station door. Sophia and Theo crawled to the end of the car and made their way off the roof.

  14

  The Glacine Age

  1891, June 23: Shadrack Missing (Day 3)

  In the chaotic political wake of the Disruption, the Vindication Party emerged as more stable and lasting than most. Founded on the philosophies of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, the party pushed aggressively—and successfully—for women’s rights. Perhaps without the Disruption the Vindication Party would have met with more resistance, but in such turmoil, it laid claim to certain territories that were never again contested. Suffrage became a stepping stone, and soon women could be found in parliament, at the head of major manufacturies, at the helm of universities, and in other seats of power.

  —From Shadrack Elli’s History of New Occident

  SHADRACK HAD SLEPT very little during his nights of captivity. Though they had given him water and a few scraps of food, he could only taste the wooden block. The damp wood, reeking of other men’s fear, left a horrible aftertaste that nothing could erase. His face had not been cut by the wires, but he did not want to test his luck a second time. He had good reason to believe that in Blanca’s mansion the bonnet was only one of several horrors.

  They had moved him from the chapel to a small room in a high turret. His room—a low space that must once have been used for storage—contained only a basin and a ragged length of blanket. A narrow window, no wider than a forearm, allowed a view of the circular drive near the entrance. He used it to keep track of the passing time, doing his best to shake off the chilling influences of the stone walls and the conversation with Blanca.

  She had destroyed Carlton, leaving him a mindless shell. Exactly how, Shadrack did not know, but it seemed clear that she felt no compunction and would easily do the same to him. Nevertheless, he knew that under no circumstances could he help her find the carta mayor. Much as he grieved for Carlton, he drew his mind forcibly to the problem at hand. He could not allow Blanca to succeed.

  The problem of how to stop her kept him awake at night. But he could not concentrate; the mansion was full of peculiar noises. At times he heard a cooing or weeping, faint and ethereal, hovering above a louder and more jarring sound: a near-constant, high-pitched creaking, like that of a pulley or a wheel. It seemed to stretch through his room like a fine, caustic web, allowing him no sleep. It settled in the air, so that even when it stopped he continued to hear it.

  On the second night of his captivity, one of the Sandmen opened the door and placed a cup of water and a rind of dry bread on the floor. “Please tell me what that sound is,” Shadrack said. He was sitting with his back against the stone wall, his injured leg, bruised and sore, resting on the cold floorboards.

  “What sound?” the man asked.

  “That sound—the creaking.”

  The man stood silently for a moment, as if attempting to connect Shadrack’s words with a meaning. His scar
red face worked slowly over the problem. Finally a dim illumination passed into his eyes. “It’s the wheelbarrow.”

  “The wheelbarrow? For what?”

  “For the sand,” the man replied, as if this were self-evident.

  “The sand for what?” Shadrack persisted.

  “For the hourglass.” The light vanished from the man’s eyes, as if the very mention of the hourglass had snuffed out his thoughts. He stepped back and slammed the door before Shadrack could speak again. The creaking continued, sharp as a saw.

  The third morning dawned cool and gray, and Shadrack watched, through his narrow window, what appeared to be travel preparations. The journey to the estate by unscheduled train had suggested from the start that Blanca had powerful ties to one of the railways. The presence of private railcars in the drive with a distinctive hourglass insignia confirmed it. For several hours, the Nihilismians had been loading supplies. At midmorning, two of them appeared at his door and led him from the room.

  Shadrack made no effort to resist. He could hardly summon the energy to stand. At first, he thought they might take him to the railcars, but instead they wound their way deeper into the building through long stone passageways. It was Shadrack’s first view of the artwork and historic treasures that filled the mansion. The paintings, tapestries, sculptures, and cultural artifacts overflowing the corridors put Boston’s museums to shame. “Tintoretto,” he groaned under his breath, pained both by his leg and by the brief sight of such a masterpiece hidden away from the world. Indifferent to the fabulous treasures around them, the Sandmen dragged him down several sets of stairs and finally entered a vaulted corridor that ended behind the altar of the chapel. Blanca waited in the center of the room.

  “Shadrack,” she said quietly, ignoring his rumpled clothing and look of plain exhaustion. “You and I are leaving soon. Our errand is more urgent than you realize, and our time is running short. But where we go depends entirely on you.” She hesitated. “I know how much you disapprove of my plan at present, and I realize you need persuasion to assist me in finding the carta mayor.”

  “I’m not sure ‘disapprove’ does it justice,” he replied.

  Blanca walked toward him, the gray silk dress she was wearing quietly rustling, and she gently touched his arm with her gloved hand. “Once I explain, I have no doubt that you will be persuaded,” she went on, as if he hadn’t spoken.

  She pointed to a large calfskin map of the New World that lay pinned to the wooden table. Scattered over the map and making odd patterns across it were piles of sand—black, nut brown, and white. Toward the southern tip of the continent, a handful of white sand blanketed all of the unknown territory still referred to by cartologers as Tierra del Fuego. It reached upward into Late Patagonia. “Do you know what Age lies here—at the very edge of the hemisphere?”

  Shadrack shook his head tiredly. “No explorer has succeeded in reaching it.”

  “It is another Ice Age, like the Prehistoric Snows that lie north of here.”

  He was suddenly alert. “How do you know this?”

  “I have been there.”

  “How did you reach it? I know many who try and cannot succeed in traveling south of Xela.”

  “That is not important at the moment,” she said. “Believe me; the Ice Age is there. What is important is this: the Great Disruption did not occur as you believe it did. You believe the physical earth came loose from time and then came together again, coalesced along fault lines that separated the Ages.”

  “More or less, yes.”

  “It did begin that way,” she said, tracing her gloved finger along the calfskin map. “But it did not end that way. For decades the fault lines have been still. Now, once again, they are moving.”

  Shadrack stared at her in an undisguised mixture of astonishment and skepticism. “Explain what you mean.”

  “It is simply this—the borders of the Ages are shifting.” She pointed to New Occident. “Perhaps you have not been far enough north before to realize that in some places the Prehistoric Snows are melting away before the advance of New Occident. Yes,” she said, before he could speak. “This very site was once bound in ice. But the ice has melted, and trees have sprung up everywhere. Now the air is warmer, and there are people native to your Age. Here, the change is piecemeal and decisive. The snows disappear and new states, contemporaries of New Occident, take their place.”

  Shadrack gazed at the sand, trying to make sense of what he was hearing. Suddenly a set of images, like a scattering of impressions from a memory map, flashed through his mind. But the memories were not from a map; they were his own. He recalled the letter sent so many years ago by the explorer Casavetti, whom his sister and brother-in-law had set out to find: “In this place I thought I knew so well, I have discovered a new Age.” It was this discovery of a new, hostile Age that had led to his capture, which had prompted Minna and Bronson’s journey halfway across the globe.

  In his mind’s eye Shadrack saw Sophia poring over the two maps of the Indies, only a few days earlier. She had asked how a convent could have been replaced, in only a decade, by a wasteland. She had seen the evidence of a similar change. And he had been too blind to recognize the significance of her discovery. With all of his training, experience, and intuition, how had he failed to see it? After a moment of stunned silence, he spoke. “Are all the borders in flux?”

  She shook her head. “Not all—but many,” she said, with a note of satisfaction at Shadrack’s dismay. “And they are shifting at different paces. The border changing most quickly is this one.” She pointed again to Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of the Western Hemisphere. “The border of this Ice Age is the Southern Snows. It has been moving unevenly but consistently northward through Late Patagonia for the last year. Mile by mile, it is shifting toward the Baldlands, and every Age it touches disappears beneath the ice. I believe,” Blanca continued quietly, “your niece is traveling south, is she not?”

  Shadrack felt the blood rush to his temples; in sending Sophia to the safest place he could think of, he had mistakenly sent her into terrible danger. “But then,” he asked slowly, “the people who are there now . . . ?”

  “They will vanish,” Blanca said. “Or—I should be precise. The advance of the border is rather more . . . damaging. The glaciers do not approach quietly. Everything they touch is destroyed.”

  “They must know of it—the people will flee the advancing border,” Shadrack said desperately.

  “In fact, they have already been told that a powerful force is moving northward. But they believe it to be a weirwind—a destructive weather system and nothing more.”

  Shadrack stared at her a moment, trying to comprehend. “You planted this belief yourself?”

  Blanca shrugged. “I could not have the entire mass of humanity that inhabits the Baldlands rushing north like a torrent of scurrying ants. Princess Justa Canuto, whom I know well, is a typical monarch: she wants most what is best for her, not what is best for her kingdom. It was a simple matter to persuade her that Nochtland would survive the weirwind by staying put. Besides, it will make no difference whether they run or not.”

  “How quickly are the Southern Snows moving?” Shadrack demanded.

  “They began slowly, but the rate seems to be exponential. What began as an imperceptible shift, inch by inch, is now mile by mile.”

  “There must still be some way,” he insisted. “Some way to stop it. What is causing it?”

  “I believe we are causing it.”

  Shadrack stared at her. “How?”

  “The cause is unknown. You, with your spirit of empiricism, will doubtlessly dispute my theory, which is more speculative. I have come to the conclusion that we have caused it by failing to live according to a single time. Do you know how many forms of time-keeping currently exist in the world? More than two thousand. The world can no longer hold such disparate Ages. Time is quite literally being torn apart before our eyes.” She paused, seemingly weighing the effect of
her words. “I knew you would be persuaded. Now you understand: unless we move quickly, the entire world will be engulfed by the Southern Snows.”

  “Move quickly where?”

  Blanca gestured at the map in frustration. “I do not know, Shadrack. This is what you must tell me. We have to reach the carta mayor before it, too, is encased in ice. Then you, the only living cartologer who can write water maps, must revise it. You must restore the world as it was before the Disruption.”

  “But there is no such thing as a world before the Disruption! You are plagued by the same delusions as your Nihilismians. There can be no restoration of a lost past. Assuming there were a carta mayor, and assuming we found it, and assuming I could revise it in time, how would I determine the proper age of the globe? We do not know when the Disruption occurred. In our Age? Four hundred years after it? To what Age would I restore the world?”

  When Blanca spoke, Shadrack could hear her smiling. “To mine.”

  “That is pure hubris,” he replied impatiently. “We cannot know that our Age—”

  “To mine. Not yours.”

  “To yours? What do you mean?”

  “We are not from the same Age, you and I,” she said. “What your Age is to man’s prehistoric past, my Age is to yours.” She paused. “Imagine an Age where peace holds sway over every corner of the globe; where there is perfect comprehension of the natural world and its science; where humankind has reached the apex of its endeavors. This is where I come from. You have not heard of it, Shadrack. It is called the Glacine Age.”

  Shadrack listened to the fervor in her voice with astonishment. “Forgive me if I fail to be impressed. If the Disruption has taught us anything, it has taught us that no Age is perfect or inviolable.”

  Blanca planted her gloved fingertips in the sand. “I don’t believe you understand, Shadrack—the Glacine Age is superior to all other Ages in every way.” She shook her head, and when she spoke her voice was pained. “Do you have any idea of the mistakes that humankind has made over the Ages? The terrible acts of destruction, the missed opportunities, the inane cruelties—the Glacine Age is entirely beyond them. Imagine a world without those horrors. In the Glacine Age, all of the world’s terrible mistakes lie in the past. They will vanish like specks of sand in the sea. It will be as if they never existed.” She paused and gave a little sigh of pleasure. “You will revise the water map, Shadrack, just as you would a paper map: erasing it carefully, line by line, to redraw a completely new map. You and I will draw the Glacine Age, whole and intact, so that it covers the world.”