S. Grove - The Glass Sentence

“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 Shadrack! 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.”