“Here be dragons!” Paul growled it in a comedy pirate voice.
Sted’s world map was inked on a four-foot-wide canvas scroll he’d unrolled and spread to its full eight-foot length across two heavy trestle tables that he’d dragged together.
Karen’s eyes glinted, and Paul knew why. For a start, Ys was marked precisely where the Azores sat in the real world, which was another of her pet theories confirmed.
But the picture was much bigger than just the location of Atlantis, and finally the proof was laid out for them. No one could possibly deny that this map was a mirror image of all the world maps they’d ever seen back at home.
The oceans were big blocks of blue stretching in a thick jagged-edged arc across the northern hemisphere, like a hat with ear flaps for Africa and South America and an off-centre nose flap for Australia, and with the pair of little seas shaped exactly like Britain and Ireland near the top right corner.
The southern hemisphere and maybe half of the northern hemisphere was one huge landmass going all around the world. Most of it was coloured sandy brown, with strips of green marked at the westerly coastal areas of continents and along major rivers in most parts of the world.
Deserts were shown in the palest yellow, and mountains in varying shades of darker brown.
Below the southern landmass, along the bottom of the map, was the ocean that corresponded to Antarctica back at home.
The landmass that corresponded to what Paul knew as the Arctic Ocean was a white continent.
There were two main mountain ranges.
One of them started south of Ys and divided the continent of Atland lengthways, its craggy brown elongated S-shape broken only for a single green valley through which the bright blue River Mosa flowed.
The other mountain range was a huge U-shape. It cupped the entire southern half of the massive continent that stretched from the Africa-shaped Amanzi Ocean on its left, to the South America-shaped Gukumatz Ocean on its right.
Above that mountain range’s north eastern tip was the great Mu Desert that took the place of the Pacific Ocean in Paul’s world.
Its bright green western quarter depicted the huge crescent of fertile land, from Korea and Japan all the way south to New Zealand back home, where for thousands of years the Ba nation had been conquering the desert with irrigation, agriculture, and industry, and which was the heart of their empire.
It had been the Ba Empire’s sudden, aggressive expansion that dragged the world into the eighteen-year War of Earth that formed the background of Paul’s series of novels.
The north western tip of the great U-shaped mountain range was marked with a blob of deeper green, labelled Kama, beside a triangular body of water called the Sea of Mur which took India’s place. That was the sea Borhb had said bordered his and Morhi’s land of mountains and rich jungle.
There was only one other deep green jungle area on the map, a slightly bigger one labelled Du, which corresponded to the Caribbean Sea where Paul and Sarah always loved to holiday.
The Thornes were looking at their jungle home on the map. There were burn marks across Morhi’s left cheek.
Paul hadn’t seen Jack since they’d entered the city gate.
His here be dragons phrase didn’t appear anywhere on the map, but plenty of fantastic pictures did. Dragons and many other fantastic creatures were drawn all over it, with quaint wind illustrations blowing always from left to right and little blocks of tiny inked letters everywhere. It was a work of art.
He read the tiny notation beside where Britain should be. “There are water horses where we live.”
Karen raised her eyebrows.
“Same as old classical and medieval maps in our world,” he said. “Pictures of dragons just mean they fear there’s unknown bad stuff out there in those uncharted places.”
Tamass and Sted stared at him.
“No,” said Tamass. “There are dragons. They’re the biggest beasts in the world. Huge, fire-breathing, flying monsters with talons that’ll rip you apart, and great mouths full of teeth longer than a tall man. Occasionally they’re allied with people of the east. Sometimes they’re allied with demons. Mostly they get along fine without allying with any other creatures. Always, they’re best avoided.”
Sted tapped his slender wooden pointer on the tiny depictions of fantastic creatures in each of the seas that were the same shape as Britain and Ireland.
“Water horses live in the Twin Seas. They are dangerous herd animals that will drag you beneath the waves and eat you. My people used to hunt them, and they used to hunt us. Don’t mock what you don’t know, young man.”
Young man! Paul glared at the top of Sted’s head when he returned his attention to the map. There couldn’t be more than two or three years difference in their ages.
Karen caught his eye, sent him a slow nod, and curled her lip in a small private snarl aimed at the wizard.
He’d never taken her suspicions seriously, back in their safe lives where everything about Tamass’s world had been all harmless fun. Nor had anyone else on the Fearless forum, so she’d stopped banging on about the wizard ages ago.
But here, in the echoing empty hall Sted had ushered them to urgently as soon as they walked through the palace gate, with his cheeks still flaming from that sharp vocal slap, Paul was more inclined to see him through Karen’s perspective.
He wondered if Sted sensed her hostility.
“There’s no point in looking to the northern lands,” he was saying. “After the war we searched for surviving communities all the way from the Norse countries to the Arctic plains. It’s a near empty wasteland. Isolated small pockets of humanity here and there. The lucky ones who had underground hiding places, mostly. But their societies are gone, and their histories with them.”
He raised his gaze to Tamass and Paul. “That part of your father’s story is lost forever. We’ll never know which Norse country he visited or who he did business with while he was there.”
Tamass shrugged his heavy shoulders. “That’s it, then.”
Sted pursed his lips. “We can try to pick him up further along on his journey. There might still be information to be found. We probably won’t find any, but we definitely won’t if we don’t look.”
The look that Paul and Tamass exchanged said neither of them was particularly excited about the possibilities.
Sted carried on anyway. “I’ve been looking in two directions. First, we know your father collected your mother from Kama, and he had to get from the Norse countries to there somehow. The most direct route would be by sea, so I’ve asked the Sea People ambassador if he can arrange for me to search their trade tax archives for that period.”
Tamass sighed, like a bored boy in a stuffy classroom.
Paul scratched his nose to hide a smirk.
Sted went on, with a harder edge in his voice. “Second, I asked the elders of Tokki where the legend had come from and who related it to them. They claim they don’t know, which is intriguing.”
“Don’t bother going down that path,” Hazel said. “It will take you nowhere helpful.”
“How do you know?” Sted’s tone was getting shorter by the minute.
Hazel made a subtle expression, like a tiny shrug with her face. “I know who passed it to them. It isn’t relevant to your search.”
“Was it you?”
“No,” she said. “It was one of my people, by means and for reasons that are no concern of yours.”
“You daemons!” Sted’s temper boiled over. “What gives you the right to meddle in our affairs?”
Tamass placed a big calming hand on Sted’s shoulder. “Easy, friend. My father was half-daemon, remember, so I’m a quarter-daemon. So is Paul. And Hazel has always been a great help to me, not least two nights ago when she saved our lives.”
While you were safe in bed, Paul added silently.
Sted inclined his head in response to Tamass’s gentle admonishment, but the temper didn’t leave his eyes and he didn’t apologise.
“Bad grace.” Hazel’s voice sounded inside Paul’s head.
He managed to stop his mouth falling open in shock, and she dropped him an amused slow wink.
Sted continued: “When I asked the Tokki elders about the source of their legend, one of them mentioned a name. Not the source itself, but someone who was somehow related to the incident. An itinerant mapmaker called Bryn Prym, a native of Tokki who returns home to visit his elderly parents every midwinter.
“When he was a young man, forty years ago, he told his family and friends about someone he’d met who claimed to have seen a man being attacked by a mob of demons just a few miles south of the eastern Twin Sea. The timing of that claim is close enough to your father’s disappearance to be of interest to us. I’ve sent out word for the mapmaker to contact me.”
He looked pleased with himself about this second nugget of information.
“Where is my husband?” The demand came in a powerful, deep woman’s voice, and was accompanied by doors banging along the corridor outside the hall. “Where is he?”
The commotion came closer, until the hall’s double doors slammed open and a vision stood in the space with her arms spread wide and a laughing smile on her beautiful black face.
“There he is! Welcome home, my love! What are you doing skulking in here?”
Nandi. Queen Nandi.
For years, Paul had imagined her as the goddess on the cover of Santana’s album Abraxas, ebony black skin and glowing with vigorous good health, with long, strong limbs, thick black hair loose and flowing around her wide shoulders, an athlete’s flat stomach, and big firm breasts.
The picture wasn’t far from the truth.
Except that the real Nandi was even more magnificent than his imaginary one, and that unlike the Abraxas model she was fully clothed. She wore a floor-length robe of white silk that left her arms bare and parted to reveal her lovely legs when she strode towards Tamass.
They met halfway from the door, and it was like two great planets crashing into each other. If the Earth didn’t really move, then it should have done.
Tamass swung her off her feet in a wide circle, then leaned forward as she leaned back, cradling her shoulders with one arm while they kissed deeply.
Eventually they came up for air, and she re-adjusted her robe for modesty when her husband hoisted her back to the vertical. “I see we have guests.”
Tamass introduced everyone.
Nandi repeated each name, clearly memorising them and the faces that went with them.
“Well, I don’t know why you’re all standing around in this hall. You’ve had a long journey. Let’s get you bathed and fed.” She grinned. “I apologise for my husband’s notion of hospitality.”
She clapped her hands, and servants came running.