Half Lost (The Half Bad Trilogy #3) - Sally Green Page 0,53
taken them?”
“I don’t know. If Ledger’s so powerful I think there’ll be some magic involved.”
“Maybe there’s another cut in here that leads to the map room.”
“This is where it’s meant to be. It was on Mercury’s map. It’s this address. The cellar.”
I walk around the room but there really isn’t anything to see. I check the ceiling and the floor and the walls, but there is nothing here. The room is empty.
Gabriel says, “They must be here. We’re just not seeing them.”
“Maybe we have to say a magic word and the maps appear,” I suggest.
“Mercury doesn’t mention that in her diary.” Gabriel starts feeling the walls, saying, “Maybe there’s a hidden room.”
“She doesn’t mention that either.”
I lean against the wall and watch Gabriel wander around the room, pressing at the walls, tapping them and coming up with nothing. “This can’t be right,” he says. “We’re missing something.”
“Obviously.”
“Maybe they were here and Van saw them and Ledger decided to move them after that.”
I have a bad feeling he’s right and we’ve wasted a trip. I growl in frustration and scrape my forehead against the wall. Then something catches my eye. My face is against the wall and the wall of cement or plaster, or whatever it is, is lit from below by my torch. From this angle I can see that the walls aren’t perfectly flat; they are covered in tiny humps and dips, like hills and valleys.
“Gabriel, bring your torch here and shine the light sideways.”
I stand against the wall, my cheek on the cement. “What do you think? Does it look like . . . a landscape?”
And as I stare more detail appears: I can see mountains and then I spot darker veins in the plaster that could be rivers, patches of dark that could be forests, or towns perhaps. I take my face off the wall and the picture fades but when I touch it with my skin it comes back.
I move along the wall a little to see more. “This looks like a mountain with a river running down it.”
I peer closer and it’s as if I’m looking down from high up, the view I have when I’m in the body of an eagle. The detail is amazing. The closer I look, the more I see: plains, trees, and lakes. I even think I can see birds flying, circling below me.
This is a map and it’s powerful magic.
I look over to Gabriel and he’s touching a different wall and I go to check it out. This too is a map but seems to be a different place: a desert, with sand, boulders, and scrubby vegetation. He says, “This is beautiful.”
I remember it from old cowboy movies that I watched with Arran. I say, “Yeah. It’s the badlands.”
Badlands
I reach out to touch the map but Gabriel snatches my hand back.
“It’s just a wall,” I say. I’ve been touching it for the last ten minutes and nothing bad has happened.
“It’s a map. And magical. And we don’t know how it works or what’s in there. Except that Mercury said that if you went to the wrong map you’d get stuck.”
I back off a little from the wall. “So? How do you think it works?” I ask. “Is there an on switch or a spell you have to do?”
Gabriel gets Mercury’s diaries out of my backpack and reads: “Finally found the map room in the cellar of the house in P and it was simple from there. She loves that: mixing the extremely complex spells of the maps with a simple request to gain access to them.”
“So ‘a simple request to gain access’ is what we need.”
“Sounds like it.”
“Any ideas? I mean, it couldn’t be as easy as asking, ‘Can we come in?’ Could it?”
“I have a feeling it really is as simple as that.” Gabriel looks at the wall and says, “I would guess that you touch where you want to go on the map and ask to gain access and . . . maybe it sucks you in, like a cut or something.”
“OK, but which map?” And I move round the room, studying all four walls, all four maps, but I’ve no idea which is the right one. There’s the badlands, a snowy mountainous place, a desert, and a city by a lake.
Gabriel looks at them all too and then goes back to Mercury’s diary. He says, “There’s nothing more. What we need to do is give ‘a simple request to gain access.’”