The Glass Sentence (The Mapmakers Trilogy) Read Free

hardly heard the remainder. She was watching Shadrack, wishing desperately that she could be sitting beside him rather than gazing down from the upper balcony, and she was thinking about what would happen if Wharton’s plan passed and the Age of Exploration came to an end.
    Shadrack had warned her already that this might happen. He had done so again the night before, as he practiced his speech for the fifteenth time, standing at the kitchen table while Sophia made sandwiches. She had found it impossible to imagine that anyone would hold such a close-minded view. And yet it seemed, from the response of the people around her, that it was all too possible.
    “Does no one want the borders to remain open?” Sophia whispered at one point.
    “Of course they do, my dear,” her benchmate said placidly. “Most of us do. But we’re not the ones with the money to talk in Parliament, are we? Don’t you notice that all the people who clap for the likes of them are on the
ground
floor—in the pricey seats?”
    Sophia nodded forlornly.
    Finally, the bell rang and Wharton triumphantly left the stage.
    The timekeeper called, “Mr. Shadrack Elli.” There was a smattering of polite clapping as Shadrack strode to the dais. While the clock was being set to four minutes and thirteen seconds, he glanced up at the balcony and met Sophia’s eye. He smiled, tapping the pocket of his jacket. Sophia smiled back.
    “What does that mean?” her companion asked excitedly. “A secret sign?”
    “I wrote him a note for good luck.”
    The note was really a drawing, one of the many Shadrack and Sophia left for one another in unexpected places: an ongoing correspondence in images. It showed Clockwork Cora, the heroine they had invented together, standing triumphantly before a cowed Parliament. Clockwork Cora had a clock for a torso, a head full of curls, and rather spindly arms and legs. Fortunately, Shadrack was more dignified. With his dark hair swept back and his strong chin held high, he looked self-assured and ready. “You may begin,” the timekeeper said.
    “I am here today,” Shadrack began quietly, “not as a cartologer or an explorer, but as an inhabitant of our New World.” He paused, waiting two precious seconds so that his audience would listen carefully. “There is a great poet,” he said softly, “whom we are fortunate to know through his writing. An English poet, born in the sixteenth century, before the Disruption, whose verses every schoolchild learns, whose words have illuminated thousands of minds. But because he was born in the sixteenth century, and to the best of our knowledge England now resides in the Twelfth Age, he has not yet been born. Indeed, as the Fates would have it, he may never be born at all. If he is not, then his surviving books will be all the more precious, and it will fall to us—
to us—
to pass on his words and make certain they do not disappear from this world.
    “This great poet,” he paused, looking out onto his audience, which had fallen silent, “wrote:
    No man is an island, entire of itself; Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. . . . Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
    “I need not persuade you of his words. We have learned them to be true. We have seen, after the Great Disruption, the great impoverishment of our world as pieces fell away, washed into the seas of time—the Spanish Empire fragmented, the Northern Territories lost to prehistory, the whole of Europe plunged into a remote century, and many more pieces of our world lost to unknown Ages. It was not so long ago—fewer than one hundred years; we remember that loss still.
    “My father’s mother Elizabeth Elli—Lizzie, to those who knew her well—lived through the Great Disruption, and she saw that loss firsthand. Yet it was she who inspired me to become a cartologer by telling me the story of that fateful day