You Are Here: Tales of Cartographic Wonders Read online

  He tried to empty his mind of all thought and give the enchanted map nothing, but to his horror a pinprick of red appeared over the imperial capital of Kalist—the same city in which they now stood.

  “Aha!” cried the Archmagus. “I knew it. It’s that golden-haired singer you go to moon over in the evenings. I doubt as a failed apprentice she’d spare you even a second thought, but I think an enchantment that renders you horrifyingly ugly in her eyes would make certain you never could be together.”

  The Archmagus’s triumphant smile faded as the map changed to show a sprawling building of dark stone studded with glimmering crystalline towers: the Schola Arcanum. “What’s this? Is there some artifact or treasure you’ve secretly been lusting after? Have you been dreaming about stealing from me, fool?”

  Again the picture evaporated and was replaced. Now they gazed into the Hall of the Dragon, the black bones of Old Balgeron nearly obscuring the ceiling. The Archmagus studied the scroll for a long moment, and then turned towards Jerrym, confusion clear in his face. “What do you desire there?”

  Jerrym shrugged helplessly. “…I don’t know.”

  The Archmagus frowned. “Come with me.”

  As he swept past Jerrym, he grabbed a handful of his apprentice’s robes and began dragging him towards the shimmering blue portal. The imp riding the Archmagus’s shoulder tightened its talons so it wouldn’t be shaken off, and stuck its forked tongue out at Jerrym.

  Sorcery enveloped them as they passed out of the sanctum, and when it cleared they stood beneath the arched entrance to the Hall of the Dragon. The Grand Vizier groaned and buried his face in his hands. “Why do wizards insist on teleporting? It gives me the worst headache.”

  The Archmagus strode into the center of the hall. He turned slowly, peering into the corners of the otherwise empty room, and then glanced upwards at the dragon’s skeleton. “Is it the wyrm’s bones? They do have some magical properties, though nothing you could make use of with your paltry abilities.” His eyes snapped back to Jerrym. “What is it? What do you desire here?”

  Jerrym swallowed, looking around the hall. What could it be? What was in the hall that he…

  Oh.

  Without stopping to consider the wisdom of what he was doing, Jerrym plumbed his depths for all the sorcery he could muster. The Archmagus was wrong—levitating objects was one of the few spells he could reliably cast. He reached up, thrusting his power around the stone in the ceiling from which the dragon’s skeleton dangled on its silken string. He pulled, and the stone loosened, ever so slightly.

  But not enough. “What are you doing?” the Archmagus snarled, placing both hands on his staff and summoning forth a protective ward. “You’re using sorcery. Do you think to challenge me?”

  Jerrym strained, pouring every ounce of his strength into his spell.

  The stone did not move. But then it was like something else was there, helping him, and the weight of the bones seemed to increase. Almost as if the dragon was straining to be free.

  The stone tore loose, and Old Balgeron plummeted towards the ground. It looked to Jerrym like the dragon’s jaws opened as they enveloped the Archmagus, piercing his wards and then his body with sword-length fangs. A great plume of dust exploded up from the force of the ancient bones smashing into the floor, and when it cleared only a single arm remained of the Archmagus, extended from the ruin of the dragon’s skull, still clutching his staff.

  Jerrym walked forward as if in a daze. He bent down and pulled the staff from his master’s hand. Would it reject him, as the Archmagus had said?

  Power flooded him, coursing through his body like a river swollen by the spring storms. Jerrym laughed. He noticed the imp flapping above the fallen skeleton, goggling down at him, that cursed smirk finally wiped from its face.

  Jerrym gestured and the imp vanished in a puff of greasy smoke and a pained shriek. Gods, that felt as good as he always thought it would.

  He turned towards the shocked Grand Vizier. “Tell the emperor there is a new Archmagus.”

  A clatter of bones came from behind him as the huge pile settled, and he turned. It almost looked to Jerrym like Old Balgeron was grinning at him.

  The Grand Vizier nodded, his face bloodless. “Y-yes, Archmagus.”

  “And send some servants over from the palace to clean up this mess.”

  Another shaky dip of his head. The Grand Vizier couldn’t seem to tear his eyes from the former Archmagus’s limp arm.

  The haze of dust thrown up by the ancient bones was making his eyes water and throat itch, and Jerrym suddenly felt an overwhelming desire for some fresh air.

  Unconsciously, he smoothed his hair and brushed his robes clean of the gray film that had settled everywhere. Perhaps he should go down to the docks. Alia was singing tonight.

  * * *

  Alec Hutson

  Alec Hutson lives in Shanghai, and has been published in Ideomancer Magazine. He has stories coming out in Timeless Tales Magazine, the science fiction anthology The Newcomer, and his first epic fantasy novel, The Crimson Queen, will be published in December 2016. He can be found at authoralechutson.com.

  THE ROAD TO PAREIDOLIA

  P.J. Richards

  They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step—for me each step is a voyage in itself. I’ve learned to navigate by numberless found maps, they’re my route to freedom and the reason I’m trapped here. It’s my choice, my journey, and now you are here, another sign along the road. If I look close enough at the contour lines, you’ll be marked there, and that assurance gives me licence to speak, because on some level you’re already aware of what I’m going to say. The knowledge won’t condemn you, and my conscience will be clear. So I’ll tell my tale, like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, to unburden, perhaps just for the sake of talking out loud for a short while. It’s all about discovering connections, in the end.

  Pick a leaf from a deciduous tree; to the human eye they are most reminiscent of the landscape we share, perhaps because of our long association. What do you have in your hand? A natural solar panel, a fragile decoration, a tangible fragment of evolution? Hold it closer. Unfocus. There is a way of looking at them if you want to see what leaves really encompass. If you have the patience to stare at the network of fine lines where the sap runs in streams between the cells, and follow their flow into the minute valleys, fields and plains where light is quickened into life, then it’s possible to peer through the depths of millions of years of progression and see every path that was taken or abandoned, every dead-end or teeming highway. If you have the talent.

  We’re all born with the ability, to a greater or lesser degree. It’s plotted onto our brains in ravelled trails of DNA, like Underground ghost-stations; abandoned but still linked to the main system by dark tunnels, waiting to be remembered. The majority of us will carry on oblivious to those hidden destinations, but some feel their presence as we pass by and yearn for the potential they represent. A few, with an inkling of those hidden ways, are drawn to find them. Our childhood daydreams grow into a fascination for other worlds, stories feed the desire to find a Narnian doorway, and for a time it’s completely real before certainty matures into cynicism and the skill atrophies.

  The critical element is upbringing: nurture refines nature, shaping or smothering it, and in this respect I was lucky because my ability developed too early to be conditioned away by social convention. The gift remained as ordinary to me as picking up crayons to doodle spiralling trees and flowers, or watching the clouds knit and unravel pictures for me, and as I didn’t share any of my experiences—and why should I when they were part of my private game?—they were never challenged, ridiculed or dismissed. They simply grew with me.

  It began with my blood. This is one of my first memories, so I couldn’t have been more than four or five years old. I’d spend hours alone, studying the network of the veins in my hand, backlit with the biggest torch I could find. It was one of those old fashioned ones, club-heavy
and encased in a black waterproof skin. I remember how I had to grip the torch between my knees and use both thumbs to push the button; how the tendons in my wrists would burn with the strain until it finally clicked on and flared purple spots across my vision.

  As soon as they’d faded and I could see clearly, I’d settle down, cup my palm over the warm glass covering the bulb and marvel at the sight of the red and orange world of my inner self. I’d trace the tapering paths that kept me alive, half aware that there were more lines, invisible and serious, transmitting the electricity of touch, but what caught my imagination were the ones that flowed like little streams. In my mind’s eye I sailed them like a paper boat on a glowing river, staying hidden under bedcovers, behind curtains, or closed inside the looming wardrobe in my parent’s bedroom for the darkness and privacy I needed.

  That tension between familiarity and strangeness contained an eerie potential, like a visit to a neighbour’s house in which all the spaces were identical, with similar furniture in the same arrangements, but where the small differences unlocked ideas of alternative versions of myself. It was a cliff-edge thrill that I dared myself to feel for as long as the batteries in the torch lasted, or until I fell asleep curled on the folded clothes, or was summoned by an impatient call back to the outside world.

  And so, long before the related science was brought to my attention at school, this awareness enabled me to see the implication of recurrence. For instance, if the form of a tree snagged my attention, I’d hold up my hand and be able to precisely match my thin blue veins to its branches. If sitting cross-legged with my atlas open on my lap, I’d splay my fingers over an aerial photograph of the braided waterways of a delta, then turn the pages and find the same lines spilling in twisted ropes of orange and black lava, or in mangrove swamps clutching at Pacific lagoons, and then again in the after-image jags of lightning whenever I watched thunderstorms trampling the distant hills beyond the grey blocks of my town. Those patterns were a sanctuary, a playground, a response to nascent spirituality, and nothing else in my early life ever competed.

  Even after I’d grown up and found my place in the world, those harmonies of scale continued to extend their significance. If I watched documentaries showing computer animations of Mandelbrot sets, it would feel like those slow fractal fireworks were bursting in my head because I knew them already: a symmetry I thought only I could see was being backed up by science. The patterns they revealed would repeat and divide, unfolding over and over until existence itself seemed to be on a loop, but where everything else about fractals was affirming, this one aspect disturbed me. There was no reason to pick a single starting point in the system—the very essence of the theory was that zooming in or out made no difference—and contemplating that idea made me dizzy with all its endless falling. I knew something crucial was spinning just past my reach.

  I kept my private domain from intruding on what passed for normality. It existed alongside, relegated to a kind of reverie. I held down a well-paid job, drove a decent car, went travelling, had a succession of unremarkable relationships that, one by one, died of natural causes, and I followed this expected route through life without any family, friends or lovers noticing my state of altered perception. Even so, and almost as a reward for my diligence, I’d take a moment now and then to stare out of a window at trees and lose myself and my everyday worries in their labyrinths. I used them consciously, recreationally and always in secret. I was adept at slipping into the thought forms that took me into my realm and continued to refine that technique by regularly walking a local woodland. Most of the trees growing there were English and sessile oaks; gnarled towers of wood crowned with emerald, gold or bleak driftwood silver, most at least five hundred years old, with thick roots delving and protecting the record of every life that had passed beneath them. Within the shadows of those trees I could pluck a leaf and smooth it flat, concentrate on its fine venation, its stomata, its tessellated cells, and I’d be drawn into a landscape in miniature. The veins were roadways and rivers, the curved edges were the contours of hills and mountain ranges, the tiny outlines of cells and pores were fields and pools.

  But I was still using my imagination more than my sight, projecting what I desperately wanted onto what was there. I realised it was a route that would never take me any further, yet I couldn’t leave it, and found myself vacillating between delusion and scepticism, both of which blinded me.

  The day of my breakthrough was so frustrating I was on the verge of giving up entirely. I’d stared at one leaf after another, pulled with increasing roughness from a low branch, but nothing had happened. The afternoon was stifling even under the mottled shade, hardly a breeze hushed the canopy above; a wood pigeon fluted its lazy rhythm, breaking off halfway through then taking it up again. Only the sparks of irritation at my lack of progress kept me from slipping under the woodland’s soporific spell.

  I was holding a large flawless leaf on my palm, about to drop it, then on a whim held it up instead so that a shaft of sunlight backlit its surface. I gazed at its perfection and my temper was quenched by beauty. For the first time in years, I simply looked, appreciating a leaf for its own sake.

  Leaning back against the oak, having surrendered to the afternoon and the soothing presence of the great trees, I slid into a drowsy state, eyes half closed and unfocused, gazing through the leaf in my hand, past its form and function, beyond my expectations.

  And there it was. The map.

  I scrambled to my feet, shocked fully awake, gasping as if I’d stumbled headlong into icy water. The oak leaf fell from my open hand and feathered to the ground, green against last year’s brown autumn litter, just a leaf again. I tried to be rational, dismissing the revelation as a dream brought on by the sultry calm of the woods. But even as my mind listed explanations my heart knew that I’d glimpsed something meaningful. There was a strange echo inside my head from a door pushed open then slammed shut. The pit of my stomach tingled as if I’d missed my footing and stepped into thin air. I sank to my knees to pick up the leaf. This was it. It had to be. I turned it in my trembling fingers, watching it catch the sunlight, dark to light to dark, a delicate and subtle beacon. All those years I had walked the path but missed the turning, unconsciously seeking something bigger: an obvious signpost, a clear change of direction, because surely a significant road would be marked, wouldn’t it? Unless I was the first to discover it, and the pathway was mine alone to open wide or barricade? My exhilaration compressed to fear under the abrupt weight of liability.

  I settled cross-legged on the rustling ground, shifting position and sweeping sticks away until no physical discomfort could distract me. Delicately I scooped the oak leaf and cupped it close to my chest where my rapid pulse travelled into the leaf. It shivered in time with my blood. I needed to recreate the state of mind that had allowed me to perceive the map but a meditative state didn’t come easily. The mindset I’d honed all my life was achieved by gathering associations, not by dispersing conscious thought. I breathed normally, waited for my heart rate to slow, fought nerves with discipline, and closed my eyes so that when it felt right I could open them to the sight of the leaf and reconnect with it. I tried to swallow but my mouth was too dry. I brought the leaf close to my face so it would fill my field of vision. Opened my eyes.

  And saw an oak leaf, wilting from the sweat on my hands and the heat of the afternoon. Nothing more.

  I took a deep breath, endeavoured to recapture the sensation that had come with the first encounter, then tried again, but before even looking I knew that all I’d see was the leaf itself, and the superficial likeness to roads and landscapes; an ability that until minutes ago I had treasured. I had glimpsed a deeper reality and was already tortured by a dissatisfaction with everything else. Everything less.

  A year passed. There were no more maps. I preserved the oak leaf until it crumbled, then kept the fragments in an envelope until in a fit of despondency I threw them onto a fire and watched the smoke coil into mocking hooks
and nooses. My mundane life was punctuated with work commitments and the burden of another failing relationship. I was distracted, impossible to please, unforgiving because I couldn’t forgive myself for wasting what increasingly appeared to have been my one and only prospect of finding the map. I was no longer able to treat my talent in the way I had before: as an extraordinary embellishment to my life, never a substitute. Now when I looked into the lanes running through the roots of a tree or the byways of my veins, I was consumed for hours. The mazes drew me in and wouldn’t let me out, and I’d wander their paths searching for the turning I had lost. My talent was twisting from a wish to a curse, blighting what was left of my life.

  For a long while, I was too bitter to appreciate the key that had been with me all along. Ironic that it should have come from the family tenet that had caused me the most anguish. They’d instilled the expectation that I must put down roots, how fulfilment was only possible if you were fixed in one place: a concept that was the polar opposite of the immeasurable dimensions to which I was drawn. That contradiction had halted me in my tracks, yet with the perspective of time it forced me to confront the truth that I’d navigated the entire distance of my childhood and youth using the dead-reckoning of intuition—my next step required precision.

  And so I left everything behind and came to live here in the forest. The conformist existence I’d built to keep everyone happy—that wrong turn—began to disintegrate. To my shame, it was a relief. Before long I’d lost contact with family and friends, so quickly in fact that I wondered what exactly had been holding me to them. Relationships were exposed as nothing more than an institution formed around the fear of being alone.

  Solitude has never bothered me. Without distractions, I could concentrate. I lived simply, watching out for signs, minimising my personal impact to lessen any contamination, aware that the tiniest cause could result in an exponential effect. I hardly moved, ate little, slept less, kept my breathing shallow and maintained a monk-like silence. Knowing the answers would be found within the degrees of nature, where they expand to the universal above and reduce to the infinitesimal below, I bought a telescope and a microscope, set them pointing up and down to form the longitude, and created a latitude of rough shelves made from sticks, displaying hoards of spiralled shells and ammonites, dozens of curled fern leaves pressed between sheets of blotting paper, stacks of pine-cones, whorled sunflower hearts with their dry petals curled back like scurrying legs, rows of split-skull geodes toothed with quartz, brittle fans of white coral, feathers of every kind from chick-down to peacock plumes. I spent entire days poring over my collections and whole nights staring at the sky.