Finn knelt next to Sienna and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Are you alright? You’ve gone pale.”
Sienna took a deep breath. “There’s more going on here than we know.”
He nodded. “But that’s always been true and we just have to keep going. So, where next?”
Sienna lifted the ragged piece of the Map of Plagues away from its protective outer scroll. It too had lines inscribed upon it, a simple sketch showing waterways and islands. There was a drop of dried blood on the page, the color of rust partially obscuring the lines of a death’s head skull. “The knight had to travel somewhere when he left this place. He must have drawn this and then stepped through it to escape Alexandria. The Librarian kept it with the piece of the map he left behind.”
Mila examined it more closely. “It looks like Venice. Does the trail take us back to Earthside?”
Perry pulled himself up from the wall and limped over. “That’s not Venice in Italy. That’s the Venice of Africa. It’s part of Benin on Earthside, on the northern shore of Lake Nokoué.”
Finn laughed. “Of course, it’s Ganvié Island, the floating city. Like Old Aleppo, it straddles the border, half pushed out from your world into ours. The local Fon tribespeople helped Portuguese slave traders by raiding the villages of other tribes hundreds of years ago. But their religious beliefs prevented them from attacking those who dwelled on water, so the floating city grew out of the homes of those early escapees.”
“You know it?” Mila asked.
Finn shook his head. “I’ve never been but I’ve heard stories. We’ll have to be careful. Its waters cross the border and people are lost between the worlds there all the time.”
Sienna folded the piece of the Map of Plagues and placed it inside a waterproof pouch within her jacket. She pulled out the ritual knife that she kept close to her heart, the knife that had spilled the blood of her grandfather. Any blade would do to make the cut, it was her blood that held the power, but the reminder gave her strength. He had never retreated from his duty, and neither would she.
She ran her fingers over the map of Ganvié, calling on the tendrils of her magic as she strengthened herself for what was to come. Every time she spilled her blood and traveled through the maps, a drop of Shadow entered her — a tiny speck, but still, it built up over years and eventually, could turn the Mapwalker to the Shadow side. Some chose never to use their magic after a certain point, trapped on Earthside or in the Borderlands at the point of turning, like Bridget and now her own father. Others chose to give in and become a Shadow Cartographer, embracing their magic in all its glory.
Sienna looked up at Perry. His father had chosen that path, as had Xander, who had been with them on the hunt for the Map of Shadows. She had thought he was a friend but he had betrayed them all.
There were no limits to the use of magic if you gave in to the Shadow and Sienna sometimes dreamed of the possibilities. Back at Oxford, she had always felt so lost and yet over here in the Borderlands, she could be much more than she ever thought possible. She wanted to give in to the rush. A taste of it was never enough, but it was all she could have right now.
Sienna looked up at Finn and Jari. “Make sure you keep hold of my hand.” She purposefully met Finn’s gaze. “I don’t want to lose you.”
She bent over the map and cut into her palm with the knife, letting a single drop of blood drip down onto the lines, pooling with the knight’s from so long ago. She reached out with the other hand so the team could hold onto her, then she closed her eyes and dived into the map.
In Sienna’s mind, the lines became three-dimensional, lifting from the page to form a city stretched out below. This was the moment she craved and Sienna longed to stay right here in the lines between the map and the physical world. If she traveled alone, perhaps she could prolong the time between, but the others were a heavy weight upon her, forcing her back down to the physical world. She could make out boats below on turquoise water, fisherman casting their nets and a tangle of islands that made up the watery city.
The border appeared as a shimmering line and Sienna made sure to come down on the Borderland side. Finn and Jari would disappear if they crossed back into Earthside without traveling through an open portal. No one really knew what happened to those who disappeared but she wasn’t about to find out now.
She picked one of the huts on stilts that looked like a place of worship rather than a dwelling and dived down into it.
The wooden hut was hot after the cool inner sanctum of the library. The smell of salt water and drying fish wafted through the air. Sienna heard a slithering sound of scales on wood, then the rapid breath of panic as the team landed beside her.
She opened her eyes, trying to focus even as the nausea receded. Traveling this way left her weak, especially when she carried this many people. The tiny wound on her palm throbbed and she could almost feel the drop of shadow suffusing her blood as it healed.
She lay inside a wooden hut with a tin roof, the others on the floor around her. The planks on the floor had gaps between them that showed the water beneath. Around the edges of the hut were wooden crates, stacked three high. The slithering sound came from within.
Jari sat up, a half-smile on her face. She looked at Sienna with renewed respect and an edge of fear. “That was crazy. What a way to travel. You must jump around like that all the time.”
Mila stood up, recovering quickly. “There’s a price she must pay for it.”
Jari shrugged. “We all pay, in this lifetime or the next.”
As the team recovered, pulling themselves up to sit against the walls of the hut, a hissing came from within the stacked crates.
Finn went to look inside, pressing his face against the slats before pulling back sharply. “That’s a lot of snakes.”
“Voodoo,” Perry said, his voice stronger now. “It’s the state religion in Benin and I imagine that’s continued over here in the Borderlands. Pythons are revered. There’s even a python temple in Ouidah on Earthside. Other kinds of snakes are used in ceremonies.”
Finn nodded. “I’ve heard of these minor sacrifices. They are nothing compared to those performed in the name of Moloch.” He glanced over at Jari who had gone still at his words. “But I’d rather not stay in here longer than we need to. Where do we go next?”
Sienna took a deep breath and pulled herself upright using the wall as support. “Let’s see if we can pick up the trail of where the knight went next.”
Mila’s heart pounded as she put her hand against the door of the hut. She wanted to be out there first, barely able to contain the excitement that had been building since Perry mentioned the Venice of Africa. She had grown up in a London tower-block, a mixed-race foster kid with little knowledge of her birth parents except that her father had been a student from war-torn Sierra Leone. It was further west in Africa than Benin but this was much closer than she had ever been to her possible ancestors.
Waterwalkers, those who could become one with the waterways, were born rarely and many of them disappeared without trace, choosing to remain beneath the waves rather than return to the air. Mila understood that choice. Even now as she looked down between the slats of the hut, she wanted to be in the water below. The channels around the stilts were the real roads and she craved the freedom of traveling at her own speed, darting alongside the sea creatures below.
As she gazed down into the water, Mila suddenly saw movement. Not the shimmer of schooling fish, but something larger, its edges blurred by the ripples of the seabed. Mila frowned. It looked like the outline of a person — could there be Waterwalkers here?
“What are you waiting for?” Sienna’s words interrupted her reverie.
Mila shook her head. “I saw something under the— It doesn’t matter. Let’s go.”
She pushed open the door, barely catching a glimpse of the city on the water before a shout of challenge rang out, deep voices blending together as a group of Ganvié tribesmen thrust sharp spears toward her, their scarified faces fixed in a challenge.
Mila reeled back into the hut, knocking into the others as the tribesmen advanced.
“Wait,” Finn said, backing away, his hands held out in surrender. “We’re on a mission from the Warlord of Aleppo. We have safe passage.” He pointed at Jari’s facial tattoo of the half-moon. “See, his emissary is with us.”
Mila wondered what he was talking about and noted Sienna’s look of puzzlement too. That was more than Finn had told them so far and the idea that he might be working with his father was troubling. But there was no time to find out more as the tribesmen quickly bound their hands behind their backs.
The sound of heavy footsteps came from outside on the boardwalk and an obese man waddled into the room. He wiped the sweat from his bald head with a corner of his tunic. It was tied around his waist with a rope from which hung dried pieces of sea creatures interspersed with shark’s teeth, pervading the room with a rank smell. The tribesmen deferred to him, shrinking away as if he wielded cruel power over them. Mila supposed he was a priest of some kind.
He squinted at Jari in the semi-darkness of the hut. “You’re Aleppo filth. You die first.” He looked around at the others. “The rest will be a grand offering to Requin Géant.”
Sienna stepped forward. “Please, we don’t want trouble. We’re here to find traces of a medieval knight, a man in armor who might have come here a long time ago with a piece of a map. It’s a danger to us all. Please let us go. We mean no harm.”
Mila was sure that a flicker of recognition crossed the man’s face at the mention of the knight, and she definitely recognized the name of their god. Requin Géant. French for giant shark.