I opened the glass folds of my lantern and held the map up to the flame. But my hand didn’t move. It wouldn’t dip toward the fire with the parchment.
You can never go through the Quag, Vega, so what does it matter? Just burn it. If you’re found with it, your punishment will be Valhall! You can’t risk that.
Still, my hand didn’t move. It was as though an invisible tether was keeping it in place. I slowly pulled the parchment away from the flame and pondered what to do. I had to destroy the map. But could I destroy the map and yet also keep it?
My gaze moved to my waterproof tuck. I opened it and pulled out my ink stick. I kept it here because I would draw pictures on my boards of things that I would see from this vantage point: birds, clouds, the canopy of massive trees at eye level. But transferring the map from one piece of parchment to another was not an answer to my dilemma.
So I had another solution.
It took some time, a bit of contortion and a fair amount of ink, but when it was done, I held the map up to the spark of my lantern and let its end ignite. I dropped it and watched it descend to the wooden planks as the ends curled up and blackened. In less than a sliver, it had disappeared to ash that floated away in the breeze. And then even the ash was gone.
I slipped down the rungs with the extra board in hand, put it back into its metal slot and continued my descent. My feet hit the dirt and I looked around, suddenly fearful that the garm might return. But I did not smell it. I certainly did not see it. Perhaps it had gone back to Hel. I hoped with all my heart that it stayed there.
I now had a map that I could never use to leave here. But I had something else. A mystery surrounding a ring that had belonged to my grandfather. It wasn’t simply curiosity, although I had more of that than most Wugs. This was about my family. This was about my history. Which, in the end, meant it was ultimately about me.
SEX: The Delphias
NEXT LIGHT, JOHN and I went downstairs and used the pipe behind the Loons to wash off our faces and hands and under our arms. I was careful with the water on myself so as not to wash off the map marks I had carefully inked on my body while sitting atop my tree. I had been faithful in reproducing them because I knew Quentin to be a methodical Wug. He would have included only necessary details and I desperately wanted to study them more thoroughly, even if I was never going to venture into the Quag. Though I’d always known the Quag was there, seeing details such as were in the map was like learning of a whole new world when I’d thought there was only ours.
Then we ate. Well, John ate. I had already placed my first light meal in my metal tin, which I kept under my cot. I knew most of the clerks in the shops and bartered with them for food and anything else I needed, using nice things that I made out of scraps from Stacks.
A few slivers later, two other Wugmorts joined us at table.
Selene Jones was thirty sessions old but looked younger. She had long blond hair and an unlined face that was wide and mostly vacant at first light. Yet she carried peace in her eyes and seemed wholly satisfied with her life. She ran a shop on the High Street that sold items related to Noc-gazing and predictions of the future.
The other Wugmort at table was twenty-four-session-old Ted Racksport. An industrious and entrepreneurial Wug from his earliest lights, he owned the only shop in Wormwood that sold mortas, along with other weapons. Racksport was a bit taller than me, with broad shoulders, thick legs, a barrel chest, a flattened face, cracked lips, a few whiskers on his weak chin, long, thinning hair tied back with a cord of leather and four fingers on his right hand. It was said that a baby garm had nipped the other one off when Racksport had been hunting it.
He was a hard worker but not a pleasant Wug, and I was glad he slept in a different cot room. He smelled perpetually of sweat, metal and the black powder that gave morta their killing force. I had seen one fired before. It tore right through thick wood and nearly scared me to the Hallowed Ground, where we lay our dead. The way Racksport looked at you, you began to realize that he knew the power he had and he was quite happy that you didn’t have it.
I was relieved when John was finished and we left. We parted company at the door to Learning.
“I’ll be back to get you after Stacks,” I said.
I said this every light so that John would have no worries. And he always replied, “I know you will.”
But this light he didn’t say that. Instead he said, “Are you sure you’ll be back for me?”
I gaped. “Why do you ask that?”
“Where did you go last night?”
“To my tree.”
“Why?”
“Just to think. And I left something there I needed.”
“What?”
“Just go to Learning, John. I’ll be back for you. I promise.”
As he walked into the building, his gaze was on me. And I felt painful levels of guilt for lying to my brother. There was nothing else for it, though. To keep him safe, I had to keep him in the dark.
I turned and hurried away. I had something important to do this first light.
I needed to go and see Delph.
The Delphias’ cottage was due south of Wormwood and the route ran straight and true until you reached two large trees with permanent red leaves. Here, you turned left down a dirt path that wound in among the forest. As I raced along, I looked down at myself, made sure that every inch of my legs, arms and belly where the map was inked was covered, then doubled my speed, running until my breaths became gasps.
As I drew near to the Delphias’, I slowed to a fast walk. Duf was Delph’s father and his only living relation. Unlike Delph, Duf was small, barely more than four feet high. Considering Delph’s great height, I always assumed that his mother must have been very tall. She died when Delph was born, so neither of us had ever seen her.
Duf’s unusual cottage was not made of wood or stone or anything like that. It was made of things that other Wugs had thrown away. It was the shape of a huge ball, with a square door made of rough metal set on fat brass hinges. Next to the cottage was an opening that Duf and Delph had dug into a small hillside. Duf kept the things he used for his work in there.
Duf was a Beast Trainer, one of the best in all of Wormwood. Well, actually, he was the only one in all of Wormwood, but he was still very good. Wugs brought him their beasts and he would teach them to do what you wanted done. He had a large wooden corral with smaller spaces fenced off inside it where the beasts were kept separate from one another.
As I cleared the path and reached the cottage, I paused and studied the beasts Duf had currently. There was a young slep, which made me think Thansius would soon be replacing one that pulled his carriage. There was also an adar, taller than I was, with wings twice my height. They were used to carry things and perform tasks by air for Wugs who owned them. Adars could understand what Wugmorts said, but they had to be trained to obey. And they could also talk back once they’d been trained, which can be both helpful and a great bother. The adar had one leg chained to a peg buried deeply in the ground so it couldn’t fly away.
There was a small whist pup, barely ten pounds in weight, with gray fur and a small, scared face. This hound at full size would be larger than me, but it would take at least a half session for that to happen. Whists naturally liked to roam. They could outrun pretty much anything, including garms and their even more vicious cousins, the amarocs.
Then I turned to the largest creature Duf had now. The creta already weighed about half a ton, though it wasn’t full-grown. It had horns that crossed over its face, huge hooves the size of meal plates and a face that no Wug would like to see coming at him. It was kept in an inner corral where the wood was much thicker. The space was small too, so the creta couldn’t get a running start and crash through this barrier. It would be trained to pull the plow of the Tillers and to carry sacks of flour on its back at the Mill. It seemed to know this would be its plight in life, because it did not look very happy as it pawed the dirt in its small space.