As my fingers were slipping over the wood, I looked down below. The garm was up on its hind legs, less than fifteen feet from me. Its mouth opened to deliver a blast of flames that would turn me to a blackened husk. With one hand gripping the board, I pulled my sweater and blanket from around my waist, balled them up and threw them directly into the gaping opening. The garm choked and coughed and no flames came out. At least not yet.
I regained purchase with my other hand and fled up the boards as the garm roared again and the flames erupted anew; I could feel them hurtling up the trunk of my tree at me. I leapt over the last short board and threw myself up on the planks. I lay there panting, staring at nothing because my eyes were closed tight.
The garm made one more attempt to reach me and then fell back again. Its innate ferocity was paralyzing.
One sliver later, it turned and headed off. It would look for easier prey. I hoped it would not find any, unless it was Julius Domitar, Roman Picus, or even the smooth-talking Jurik Krone, whom I had decided I could not trust because of that underlying look of hostility in his eyes and because he had said Quentin Herms had broken laws. I would pay good coin to see them encounter a hungry garm. But they possessed weapons the garm feared, particularly a long metal tube that fired out a projectile that would kill anything it hit. We called it a morta. Roman Picus had used one to kill a garm. That’s how he got the boots he wore. And it was said that Jurik Krone was the finest morta shot in all of Wormwood. That was, for me, a discomforting thought.
You couldn’t do much with a dead garm. Its meat was poison. Its blood was like acid. It was said that the claws could still kill after death and that the flames inside it never truly died. Thus, you only could use the skin.
I sat on my bum in my tree, breathing hard, letting my terror cycle down to mere paranoia. The garm was nearly gone. I could barely see its flames now as it moved in the direction of the Quag. I wondered what had drawn it here this night. Then the Quag made me think of Quentin Herms. He’d said he had left me something that would set me free. And I intended to find it.
I looked in the waterproof tuck I kept hanging from a branch. But inside I found nothing. So where else could he have left anything? There was really no other place.
I looked down my tree. Something was itching at the back of my brain, but I couldn’t think what. I went back over my frantic climb up here with the garm at my heels and it occurred to me.
My hand had hit something unfamiliar.
I opened my lantern and peered over the edge of my planks. There was not much to see. Except one thing. I had nailed twenty boards as rungs against my tree’s trunk and now I counted twenty-one.
That was what my hand hit. An extra board that shouldn’t have been there.
If I was right, then Quentin was brilliant. If I hadn’t initially noticed the extra board, who else would have? Probably not even Thansius, as smart as he was.
Trembling with excitement, I climbed down to the board and examined it under my lantern’s light. Fortunately, the garm’s flames had not touched it. It looked exactly like the other boards. I found this remarkable until I recalled that Quentin was a skilled Finisher.
I scanned the front of the board for a message. There was none. But a message on the front would have been too easily seen. I tugged on it. It appeared firmly nailed into the trunk. Now I began to wonder whether Quentin was actually that smart after all. How was I supposed to pull the board out without falling and killing myself?
But as I looked more closely, I saw that the nail heads in the board were not nail heads at all. They had been colored to look like nail heads. So what was holding the board up? I felt along the top edge of the wood. There was a slender length of metal that hung over the board. I felt along the lower edge of the board and felt an identical stretch of metal there. The metal had been darkened to blend in perfectly with the stain of the board. I put one hand on the end of the board and pulled. It slid out from between the two metal edges. The metal had acted as both a track and a support, to slide the board into place and keep it there. Now, with the board gone, I could see how Quentin had attached the metal to the trunk using stout screws.
The board was light. It was probably a good thing I did not step on it while fleeing the garm. I doubted it would have held my weight.
I scampered back up to the top of my tree and sat on my haunches, the board in my lap. I turned it over and there it was: a small, flat metal box. Inside was a scroll. I unrolled it. It was surprisingly long to have fitted inside such a small space.
I shone my lantern light on it and caught my breath. It was a map. It was a map of something I never thought anyone could have mapped.
It was a map of the Quag.
More than that, it was a map of a way through the Quag.
What Quentin Herms had left for me was a way out of Wormwood.
I sat there staring at the parchment like it was both a sack of coins and a bag of serpents. As my eyes ran over the detailed drawings and precise writings, the enormity of what I was holding washed over me. My skin tingled as though I had been hit by a sudden thunder-thrust preceded by spears of skylight.
But when had he placed the board here? I had been here at first light and there had only been twenty boards, of that I was sure. I had seen Quentin flee into the Quag, also at first light. So had he come out of the Quag to place the extra board on my tree after I had gone to Stacks? If so, why? And how could he have survived the Quag in the first place?
Yet this was clearly the message from Quentin Herms. But it was far more elaborate than the cryptic one I had swallowed back at Stacks. This map also could be construed as him contacting me and Jurik Krone had been especially clear on that point. If Quentin contacted me and I did not tell Council, I could be sent to Valhall. For how long, he hadn’t said. But even one light and night in that grim place would be far too long. And since it was illegal to enter the Quag, it would most certainly be against our laws to have a map of the place. That would get me in Valhall faster than Delph could say “Wotcha, Vega Jane.”
But in truth my curiosity overrode my fear. I raised the wick on my lantern and studied the map. The Quag was an unfathomably large place. Quentin had not marked the map with precise distances, but he had included the footprint of Wormwood within the parchment. I studied the two side by side and saw quickly that the Quag was many times the size of my village. Also telling was the fact that the map ended at the edge of the Quag. If there was anything on the other side, Quentin either did not know or else had not put it down on this parchment for some reason.
My gaze ran down the last bit of the map, and then my dilemma became obvious. Every Wug knew that entering the Quag meant death, and I could never see myself going into it. And even if I survived the Quag, where would I be?
We had always been told that nothing lay on the other side of the Quag. In fact, we had always been told that there was no other side. For all I knew, once I left the Quag, I would fall off a cliff into oblivion. But even if I had been tempted to leave, I could not because of my brother and my parents. In his message, Quentin had said I could escape this place if I had the desire. Well, I wasn’t sure if I had the desire, but abandoning my family was not an option. So the easy answer would be to destroy the map since I would never be using it. In fact, I should destroy it right now.