Map of the Impossible

by J. F. Penn

Ordinary Borderlanders, those with no magic, had always known of the Shadow Cartographers and those who followed the dark path. It had been a minor part of life, but now, bands of mutants roamed the land, taking women and girls back to the Fertility Halls, increasingly spread across multiple locations. Those who protested, who went to try to get their wives or daughters or sisters back, were taken to Elf, the silver-haired banshee Finn had seen stalking the plague field that night. Her magical ability was like a battery, draining, storing and transforming life energy. It was said that those who faced her were dragged away afterward as a husk of skin and bone, mouths open in a last terrible scream.

  Finn turned the last corner into a dirt street a few blocks back from the central slave market. The stench of fish hung in the air from the drying racks nearby, a staple food for those in the trader town, but even that was under threat now. The closing of the border had impacted the giant shoals of herring that once darted through the porous line between the worlds. Nature was out of balance and Finn was sure that those on Earthside must be suffering, too. He could only hope that Sienna was okay.

  He ducked between rows of huts and stood for a moment watching the area, alert for any who might track the Resistance. A dirty tarpaulin flapped at the door of a nearby shack, drawing his eyes, but it was just the wind. Children played with a misshapen ball near a pile of rubbish, but they didn’t even glance in his direction. Those who lived here learned to turn a blind eye almost as soon as they could walk. Better not to notice what went on in these streets.

  Finn hurried to a ramshackle hut, pushed the wooden door open and ducked inside. The point of a sharp blade against his throat stopped him, the cold metal tight against his skin.

  A beat of silence, then the knife dropped.

  “You’re meant to whistle, you idiot.” Titus O’Byrne stepped forward into the light, sandy curls tied roughly back from his face. “I could have cut your throat.”

  Finn smiled. “Just making sure you’re staying vigilant.” He walked further inside. The tiny shack was barely large enough for the two of them, both sizeable men used to more generous quarters. It smelled of yesterday’s soup, old sweat and the reek of the open sewers only meters outside but it was only a place to lie low while they investigated the latest abhorrent attempt by the Shadow Cartographers to shape the destiny of the Borderlands.

  Finn placed the vial gently on the wooden tabletop. “There were soldiers everywhere and this cost us most of the gold we had left. I hope it was enough to keep the man from betraying our location, but I can’t be sure. We need to move on.”

  Titus bent to look at the vial, his blue eyes reflecting the hues of the liquid within. “It’s worth it, brother. This might be the key.”

  Finn smiled at his words. They were brothers in the war against the Shadow, but no one could mistake them for blood relations. Finn’s heritage was evident in his black skin and the regal bearing of an Ethiopian king. Titus was stocky and muscular, with the body of a boxer and a face to match, with mixed Irish and South African blood. They had served together several years ago in the Warlord’s army, but Titus had deserted to join the Resistance in the wake of the atrocities against the refugees, many of whom he counted amongst his kin. Titus had knowledge of the mines and training in chemistry, primarily for warfare, and now he used his talents to fight against the Shadow. He was a brother in every way that mattered.

  Titus ran a fingertip along the edge of the glass vial. “There’s a midwife who lives on the other side of town near the soup kitchen. She helps women infected with this stuff. The … babies they deliver.” He shivered, as if shaking off a bad dream. “She keeps them hidden from the soldiers, but I’m not sure they’re better off …” His words trailed away.

  Finn nodded. “We’ll figure out an antidote. There has to be one. But first, we have to change locations. I know somewhere that might have what you need to analyze this.” He put his hand on Titus’s shoulder. “One step at a time.”

  They packed up their meager belongings, pulled cloaks around to hide their weapons and headed out into the night.

  Finn led the way, cutting through narrow walkways between the shacks, navigating the warren of the shanty town on the outskirts. He had come this way many times, the makeshift city a perfect place to lie low.

  Most people here were just passing through, forced on to work the mines or serve in the Warlord’s army, others for the Fertility Halls, and still more to the farmlands. There were many mouths to feed in the Borderlands, many who went hungry and took handouts from the soldiers who controlled the food supply. The blue poison was an addictive liquid that the destitute begged for, that dulled their minds and took the edge off their hunger. It was added to food in the trader town and handed out on street corners, sometimes in exchange for pleasure quickly taken.

  A giggle came from the shadows as they passed by. A young woman sat with her back against a dirt wall, filthy and stinking clothes stretched over a swollen belly. Maybe only a few weeks until she gave birth. She might have been pretty once, but now she looked ravaged, her skin taking on the hue of a corpse. Yet she smiled coquettishly, as if she wandered through fields of poppies without a care in the world.

  “Take your pleasure for some blue, why don’t you, boys?”

  The sweet smell of something like marijuana hung in the air but it was nothing so mundane as that form of escape. The blue drug was known by many names. Some even called it Liberation because those who took it were finally free from their enslavement, no longer caring about death — or those they left behind. The women who took it gave birth to mutants, many taken to the Castle of the Shadow, most never seen again.

  Titus stopped and bent down to the young woman. He pulled half a loaf of bread from his pack and gave it to her. “Eat this. You’ll feel better.”

  She looked confused, as if she hadn’t seen real food in a long time and didn’t know what to do with it. Then she tore at the bread with both hands, stuffing pieces quickly into her mouth. Titus turned away, his shoulders stooped as if he carried the weight of her suffering away, but Finn knew the young woman and her unborn child were already lost. They walked on through the streets, leaving her behind. One more life consumed by the Shadow.

  Finn heard trickles of information from his Resistance sources, some undercover in the castle itself, risking their lives to reveal the truth. The blue drug twisted the genetics of the unborn, adding a dash of chaos into the mix so new mutations emerged. On Earthside, the numbers of those with magic dwindled, but here in the Borderlands, their numbers grew every day, cultivated as part of a new order dedicated to the dark plans of the Shadow Cartographers. The children were tested for their magic and many were found wanting. They were taken for sacrifice at the Tophet, or shoveled into the plague pits. Those with a touch of magic were siphoned, drained of what little they had. Finn had heard tales of the silver-haired Elf sapping newborns dry, leaving their tiny corpses as husks to blow away in the wind.

  Finn’s sister, Isabel, had died in the Castle of the Shadow, his baby niece lost to him when the traitor, Jari, had betrayed him in the hunt for the Map of Plagues. Titus, too, was driven by love to find an antidote to the blue, but Finn knew it went deeper for both of them. There were rumors that the drug was made in a camp by a lake out east and for the sake of all the sisters and daughters of the Borderlands, they were determined to find the source and destroy it.

  The edge of the city soon bled into the desert, ever encroaching sand that claimed more dwellings by the day. Finn and Titus trudged out into the dunes, the way made harder as their feet sank down with every step. Far ahead, the stark lines of a ruined temple cut a line through the cliff at the base of an escarpment. As they drew closer, Finn remembered the last time he had come here — with Sienna and the Mapwalker team, on the way to the forgotten city of Alexandria and the library at its heart. But this time, the temple was a waypoint for a different reason and Finn could only hope that the sanctuary still held its long-forgotten treasure.


  By the time Finn and Titus made it to the entrance of the ruined temple, clouds hid the face of the moon. Statues of the old gods stood in alcoves around the walls, some with faces smashed in by followers of Moloch, devourer of children, and others painted with curses in languages from foreign shores. Finn walked slowly to the stone altar, his footsteps echoing in the empty space. Dried garlands of marigolds and lilies bound with ivy hung from its edge, evidence of believers who still honored the lost religion. The temple might be empty now, but its power still lingered.

  Finn knelt in front of the altar, holding his sword in front of him as he had knelt so long ago back when he entered his father’s service as a soldier in the Shadow Guard. But now he pledged allegiance not to the half-moon, but to the people of the Borderlands, and to the Resistance. He prayed for guidance and for strength in the inevitable battle to come.

  A minute later, Finn stood up, leaning on his sword with a scrape of metal on stone.

  Titus emerged from the shadows. “We need to get out of here before dawn. Patrols come here all the time.”

  Finn nodded toward the back of the temple where stone steps led down into darkness. “This way.”

  He pulled a metal torch from a bracket on the wall. It had a small patch of oil left inside. Finn lit it and carried the flame down the stairs.

  A ritual bathing pool filled the chamber below, empty of water except for a few brackish puddles. A mosaic of cavorting gods in faded colors hinted at the temple pleasures in earlier times, but now it was only a breeding ground for mosquitoes.

  At the opposite end of the room, an arched doorway led into darkness topped with a carving of heaped bones.

  Finn walked on, through the arch and down a spiral staircase into the halls of the dead below the temple. Torchlight flickered across alcoves in the walls, some with linen-wrapped desiccated corpses, others with piles of bones.

  “Only the most powerful were buried down here,” Finn said, his voice echoing through the chamber. “There is one who was buried with everything he worked on, so no one could continue his quest. Superstition keeps people away even now.”

  He stopped in front of a massive boulder roughly hewn into an oval shape and rolled in front of an opening. There were symbols carved into the rock — triangles of fire and water, the circle of the golden sun, and curved lines representing the metals of the alchemist.

  In the center, a roughly carved skull, eyes of pitted rock that seemed to stare out from the abyss. A warning in every culture. Death lies within.

  4

  The door to the Antiquities department of the Ministry of Maps was suitably ancient. Some said it was made of wood from the cedars of Lebanon that King Solomon spoke of in his Song of Songs. Others that it was hewn from the spars of Greek warships after the sack of Troy. Love and war, appropriate reminders of the inevitability of history. Zoe Saroyan pushed open the door and stepped into what had become her world in the last month.

  She had transferred from the Ministry office attached to the British Library in London, a promotion of sorts since the corridors of Bath were hallowed ground and most ancient maps now rested here. Zoe could sense the difference in power. The earth almost throbbed with it, amplified by the magic of those who worked within. But it had been thrown off balance, wounded by the Borderlander attack. The fire destroyed so much, and now it was all hands on deck to restore what remained.

  Zoe was early as usual, but there were a few familiar faces already working, heads bent over vellum, cloth or paper, all diligent in trying to trace the lines on the maps, some burned beyond recognition, others salvageable to those who knew their craft, both worldly and magical.

  Her own magic was muddled, a touch of this and that, but Zoe had found her life’s work in restoration. She could lose herself in the maps, her light touch turning a broken thing into something those with real magic could travel through once more. She was a little in awe of the Blood Mapwalkers, those who could travel through maps, even create their own, whose very essence could transform the boundaries of the world. Her abilities seemed paltry in comparison, but she did what she could.

  At the British Library, Zoe had been responsible for tracing the provenance of older maps, finding those with magic imbued within them so they could be separated from purely Earthside cartography. The collection held in excess of four million individual maps, and even with her touch of weaver magic, Zoe couldn’t work fast enough. But she must have done something right because now she was here, in the Ministry at Bath, part of the Antiquities team drafted in to help Restoration after the fire.

  Each of the workers had a private area shielded by high panels so they could work in the way that best suited their gifts. Magic had a hierarchy, just as any part of society, and the Mapwalkers were no different. Blood Mapwalkers were the most revered — but they also took the most risk, and when they died, their skin became the maps that others traveled in their turn.

  Below them were those with strong fire or water magic, and then those with other kinds of gifts, many of whom found their way to the Ministry over time. Zoe had heard a rumor that those in the Borderlands deliberately bred children of mixed magic, trying to encourage new forms to emerge. But here on Earthside, such things were forbidden and Zoe’s own gift was considered a lesser form. But she could still be useful in her quiet way, and to be honest, she was perfectly happy here in the quiet of Antiquities. She could dampen down the desire for something more — at least, most of the time.

  Zoe primarily worked with the tools of every map restorer. De-acidification and removal of caustic adhesives from incorrect backing materials. Preparation and flattening, bleaching and cleaning, cutting where necessary, re-backing with linen. But she specialized in fixing rips and tears both physical and magical, and she suspected that this was why she had been asked to come to Bath.

  She circled behind her desk, placing her bag underneath as she looked down at the map pinned gently to the surface. The Egyptian papyrus depicted a fifteen-kilometer stretch of Wadi Hammamat in the Eastern Desert made for Pharaoh Ramesses IV on a quarrying expedition. Although initially thought to show only rock formations, a magical imprint had been overlaid in generations past, now disturbed by the degradation of the map. Unless it was restored, the ancient paths would be lost forever. Zoe had studied Egyptology and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics as part of her degree. If she could restore the papyrus, perhaps she could also restore the Mapwalker magic that lay interwoven with its strands.

  She walked to the coffee machine in the corner, a filter system that seemed as ancient as the room itself. She poured herself a generous mug and went back to her desk. In the last few days, she had been preparing the map in traditional ways as she had learned in her degree in Conservation and Restoration from Lincoln University, home to the largest center for such work in the UK. She had already placed re-moistenable repair paper over the worst of the cracks. It was made from high-grade Japanese paper coated with a cellulose gum that would not degrade the papyrus, one of the best ways to both protect what was left and repair the map. But as Zoe looked down at the lines depicting the Wadi, she knew she had done everything traditionally possible as a restorer. It was time to move to the next step.

  Her white gloves lay next to the map, and usually, reaching for them was her first task of the day. But now she left them to the side and concentrated on the map itself. Zoe softened her gaze into the space above the lines and curves and colors of ancient Egypt. As her focus shifted, contours appeared in the air, suspended as if woven from motes of dust and glimmers of sunlight. Tears and fissures cracked through the dimensions, breaking the perfection of the original magical lines and weakening its fabric.

  Zoe raised her hands and began to gently tease the contours back into shape, weaving the magic together as if she stitched an intricate pattern in the air. The room fell away around her as she concentrated, barely breathing as she sensed the holes and gaps and filled them with little drops of her gift.

  As the minutes p
assed, she began to comprehend the unseen undulations of the magical map. She had worked on enough of these multi-layered papyri to learn the conventions of how early Mapwalkers structured their cartography, but this one was different. Zoe frowned as she considered a particular layer over the quarry. As much as she tried to weave the contours together, it resisted her magic; the tendrils coming undone even as she repeated her actions. It was strange, something she had never encountered before, but she was sure her mother would have.

  Her mother’s family had been Christian refugees from Armenia, fleeing the Ottoman Empire in the wake of genocide. Three generations had passed but the pain of persecution and the loss of their homeland persisted, a shared legacy that permeated songs and stories told over and over to keep the memory alive.

  Many of the women of her mother’s bloodline had been renowned weavers — both of cloth and of magic. Her father was a British accountant, a straight-backed man of impeccable manners, a port in the emotional storm that was her mother’s intensity. Zoe was their only child, and whenever she went home to the terraced house in Clapham, south London, they wanted to know everything, all the details of her life. She left London partly to escape their constrictive orbit, but her mother had taught her everything about weaving, and she could use the help now.

  Zoe took a deep breath. She did not want to call her mother and explain why she needed help. She had left London for a reason, and she could work this out herself. She just needed to go back to first principles.

  The first step in untangling a bad weave was to step back and look at it from a fresh angle, to try and work out what could be released elsewhere to free tension from the knots. Brute strength made a tangle worse, whereas gentle easing could solve the problem and leave the strands unbroken. Zoe took a step backward to shift her perspective on the contours that hung in the air. But there was nothing new to see, and she bit her lip in frustration.