Barker Cartwright's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Barker Cartwright spread six maps across his workbench, and every one lied to him in the same way. Each showed the frontier clearly. Each stopped at the same jagged edge, where the ink ran out and the paper stayed blank. Beyond that edge lay the wildlands, and somewhere in the wildlands lay the relic he had spent two years chasing. He tapped the empty space with one claw. No road. No river. No mark to follow. He could pack his boots and his coat and walk east for a month and still die lost, having charted nothing. He rolled the maps and stared at the wall. A frontier trader had once mentioned an old hermit who lived past the last outpost. The hermit, the trader said, had walked places no mapmaker dared. Barker did not trust the story. But a bad lead beat a blank page. He took his coat and went. The cabin sat alone in a clearing of stumps. Weathered logs, a leaning chimney, ivy crawling the eaves. Barker knocked. The door opened a hand's width. A chihuahua peered out from under a dark hood, leaning hard on a wooden cane. He was small and ancient, and his brown eyes moved over Barker like a customs officer counting coins. "Explorers," the old dog said. "Always the same. You want the empty part of the map filled in." He did not sound impressed. "Cornelius Shade doesn't hand out miracles at his door." "I can pay," Barker said. "Everyone says that." But the door swung wider. Cornelius shuffled inside, cane thumping the plank floor. Barker followed. The cabin smelled of woodsmoke and old paper. On a table sat a thick book bound in cracked covers. Barker reached for it. Cornelius's cane cracked down on the table an inch from his paw. "Careful. That's older than your grandfather's grandfather." The chihuahua opened it himself, slow, one torn page at a time. Inside, faded ink showed the wildlands. Trails. Water. A route threading past the frontier's edge, deep into the blank country every other map refused. Barker's heart kicked. "How much?" Cornelius closed the book and rested both paws on his cane. "It isn't for sale. My legs are done walking. But my eyes still work." He studied Barker's coat, his boots, his mud. "You carry it. I read it. We go together, or you go blind. Choose." Barker looked at the book, then at the old dog who owned the only path he needed. Alone, he had a blank page and a death sentence. With Cornelius, he had a route and a passenger who could not walk fast and did not trust him. "Together," Barker said. Cornelius smiled without warmth. "Then we leave at dawn. And when the wildlands try to kill us, you'll wish you'd stayed lost."