S. Grove - The Glass Sentence

As the people grew in their accomplishments, they also grew bolder, and some migrated to the aboveground world of ice. The miraculous soil of their age meant that no climate was too harsh; they had no limits. They built wonderful cities upon the glaciers, filling the continents, making those ancient days of insurmountable cold seem a distant nightmare. And they became explorers. In their intrepid expansion across the globe, they learned to create memory maps. Cartology in the glacial Age reached the pinnacle of its achievements.

Sophia stopped. She took her hand from the wall and her mind away from the memories that had absorbed it. Something had interrupted them, but she was not sure what. Had she heard a sound from within the pyramid? No—not a sound; something else. She brought her face close to the clear wall and looked through at the world beyond. The strange storm of snow and lightning continued, but from her high vantage point she saw for the first time that the pyramid was surrounded by an entire city. Almost invisible against the glacier, the white buildings stretched out along broad avenues. She saw, too, the sight that had distracted her from the maps: there were people here and there walking far below.

She could not tell, from such a height, who they were. She did not know if Shadrack and Theo might be among them, having found their way out of the tunnels, or if the people of the Southern Snows were walking along the icy streets, unconscious of the fact that someone from another Age was scaling their pyramid, intent on destroying it.

Sophia felt a spasm of unease and continued walking purposefully up the shallow steps. She knew that she had lost track of time. The skies were the same color, but the strange electrical storm taking place over the glacier made it unclear whether it was dawn, daytime, or dusk. For all she knew, hours might have passed.

From time to time, as she scaled the steps, she tried to catch glimpses of the people she had seen before. But the higher she climbed, the more difficult it was. They had become small specks, moving imperceptibly across the ice. As she reached the top of the pyramid, the streaks of lightning grew brighter and fiercer. Above her, a rounded balcony jutted out from the wall directly below the pyramid’s peak.

From the balcony, Sophia could see beyond the walls in every direction. To the south, the craggy face of the glacier stretched to the horizon. To the north were the deserted plains of the Baldlands and the gray contours of Nochtland. The city seemed pitifully small from such a distance: no more than a rocky bump in the glacier’s path.

At the center of the balcony was a stone sphere almost as tall as she was, and balanced on it was a miniature reproduction of the pyramid itself, cut in glass. Her eyes traveled down the length of the wall, over the thousands of maps that spiraled toward the base of the pyramid. They recounted a long, continuous history of the Age. Surely, Sophia thought, the map on the pedestal is the last—the last memories stored for the creation of the pyramid.

Before approaching it, she walked to the edge of the balcony. The sight made her dizzy. She stepped back to steady herself and then leaned cautiously forward once again. The frozen lake was visible in its entirety. The map of the world lay below her, created by some unknown hand with some unknown instrument, trapped below the ice. It was not still. A restless light appeared to move across it, altering the colors and patterns below the surface. Sophia was mesmerized, uncomprehending. What vision of the world did it reflect? What possibilities of past and future did it capture in its frozen depths?

She pulled herself away from the balcony railing with a sense of piercing sadness. How can I destroy all this ? she thought. There was no doubt in her mind that the memories from the four maps were meant to be hers, but she could not bring herself to do the thing that would make those memories real. Below that frozen surface lay a world of knowledge, visions, truths. She imagined the slender current of water that carried the story of how her parents had left New Occident, never to be seen again. It lay somewhere there below the ice, containing all the secrets of her parents’ lives. Sophia was overwhelmed with such a sense of longing to know—to finally know —that she sank against the railing.

As she leaned forward, she heard an unexpected sound—a footfall. Someone had followed her. Someone had climbed all the way up through the pyramid without being seen and was about to step onto the balcony beside her. Sophia steeled herself against the Sandman with the pistol who had pursued her in the underground cavern. She did not feel afraid; her stomach hardened as if preparing for a sudden blow.

But it was not the man with the revolver. As the person who had followed her came into view, Sophia drew back inadvertently. The veil was gone and the scarred face was pale against the unbound hair, which was tousled and tangled and wet with snow.

Blanca had found her.

1891, July #: #-Hour

Enday: the term used by followers of the Chronicles of the Great Disruption to designate the day when a given Age comes to a close. The term is ambiguous, as it remains unclear whether it used merely to designate the conclusion of a calendar Age or rather to mark the destruction of one Age giving way to another.

—From Veressa Metl’s Glossary of Baldlandian Terms

SOPHIA STOOD GUARDEDLY before the pedestal, watching Blanca as she stepped onto the balcony. For a moment, neither of them spoke. Blanca appeared hardly to notice her. She walked past Sophia to the railing and watched the lake.

“I did not realize until after you had left,” Blanca said, “that the maps describe this moment—here, now.” She turned, and Sophia saw her scarred face. “Not the Great Disruption itself—merely its distant echo.” She laughed quietly, bitterly. “But you—you understood. You are a better cartologer than I am, after all. Perhaps because you have no sense of time, your mind floats free,” she mused. “You see things for what they are, regardless of when they are.”

Sophia did not say anything. Blanca’s dress and cloak were torn, her hands scratched. The Lachrima appeared to have been through some battle with the elements or, worse, with other people, and Sophia wondered fearfully about the state of those people. “What happened to you?” she finally asked.

Blanca continued as if she had not heard. “When I realized how I had misread the maps, I rushed to the dungeons, only to find that you were already gone. The Nochtland guard told me that you had left through the tunnels, and I understood at once. Did you guess it, or did you read the truth in the maps on these walls?”

“Guess what?”

“That these advancing Southern Snows and my home, the Glacine Age, are one and the same.”

Sophia shook her head. “I didn’t know what the four maps meant either. I didn’t know anything until I got here and read these maps. The glass maps in the walls.” She paused. “And then I knew they were about this place, and that I had to destroy it.” Sophia dropped her head. “I’m here, but I can’t bring myself to do it.”

Blanca turned with a sigh and again looked out over the frozen lake. “Poor child. You truly have no sense of time. Do you know how long you have spent here, from the moment you left the caverns?”

Sophia felt a flutter of anxiety in her stomach. “No.”

“More than nine hours by the clock of the Baldlands. Twenty-five hours by the clock of New Occident. Two days have dawned.”

Sophia gasped.

“You would probably linger on here until the end of time, were you left to your own devices,” Blanca said wistfully.