Sable Vorn's Arc

Chapter 3 of 8

By morning, Sable understood the hidden map's cruelest flaw. The old man had traced its coast to the marked place, a spot beyond every road she knew. Her own finished maps stopped short of it. Between her last inked line and the mark lay blank paper. She could read the destination now. She could not reach it. Without a route, she could not leave, and the green glow had already climbed past her elbow. "I can't draw what I've never seen," she said. She pressed her sleeve down over the light. "If I walk out with no path, the patrols take me before I clear the city." Gandalf Grey leaned on his gnarled staff and studied her unfinished maps. Faded ribbon hung from the wood and swayed. His eyes moved between two sheets, and when he spoke, his voice seemed to answer itself, low and doubled. "You've been drawing the wrong thing, girl. You draw roads. Roads have watchers." He tapped the blank edge of her map. "But water doesn't answer to the masters." Sable frowned. "Water." "There's a channel through the reedland past the wall," he said. "It runs into the country no scribe has bothered to chart. Follow it, and you follow the map's own direction. No gate. No road. No watchers." Her heart lifted, then sank. "I still have no chart of the reeds." "Then make one as you go." He pushed a fresh sheet across the table. "You're a scribe. Draw what you cross." Sable sat and worked through the day. She copied the hidden map's line onto blank paper. She matched its curve against the old man's memory of the channel. He named a dry hummock deep in the reeds, a place a body could rest above the water. She marked it as a shelter point. She did not draw a finished map. She drew enough to start. At dusk she packed her satchel. The old man handed her a stub of candle and a warning. "Keep to the water. The reeds hide you from eyes." He paused. "They don't hide you from noses." Sable slipped out through the back and reached the wall where the reeds began. The channel cut through them, dark and slow. Rot-tinted cattails leaned over the bank, their heads split and weeping. She stepped into the shallows and followed the water. Her new map guided her past the first bend, then the second. The city's lamps fell behind. For the first time in a week, no wall boxed her in. She reached the dry hummock at full dark and crouched to rest. Then she heard it. A slow crunch of reed stalks behind her. She turned. Yellow eyes hung low in the dark. A wolf stood at the water's edge, black-coated, long fangs bared. Its nose lifted toward her glowing arm. It had followed the mark across the open ground, and now it knew which way she ran.