As she leaned forward, she heard an unexpected sound—a footfall. Someone had followed her. Someone had climbed all the way up through the pyramid without being seen and was about to step onto the balcony beside her. Sophia steeled herself against the Sandman with the pistol who had pursued her in the underground cavern. She did not feel afraid; her stomach hardened as if preparing for a sudden blow.
But it was not the man with the revolver. As the person who had followed her came into view, Sophia drew back inadvertently. The veil was gone and the scarred face was pale against the unbound hair, which was tousled and tangled and wet with snow.
Blanca had found her.
37
The End of Days
1891, July #: #-Hour
Enday: the term used by followers of the Chronicles of the Great Disruption to designate the day when a given Age comes to a close. The term is ambiguous, as it remains unclear whether it used merely to designate the conclusion of a calendar Age or rather to mark the destruction of one Age giving way to another.
—From Veressa Metl’s Glossary of Baldlandian Terms
SOPHIA STOOD GUARDEDLY before the pedestal, watching Blanca as she stepped onto the balcony. For a moment, neither of them spoke. Blanca appeared hardly to notice her. She walked past Sophia to the railing and watched the lake.
“I did not realize until after you had left,” Blanca said, “that the maps describe this moment—here, now.” She turned, and Sophia saw her scarred face. “Not the Great Disruption itself—merely its distant echo.” She laughed quietly, bitterly. “But you—you understood. You are a better cartologer than I am, after all. Perhaps because you have no sense of time, your mind floats free,” she mused. “You see things for what they are, regardless of when they are.”
Sophia did not say anything. Blanca’s dress and cloak were torn, her hands scratched. The Lachrima appeared to have been through some battle with the elements or, worse, with other people, and Sophia wondered fearfully about the state of those people. “What happened to you?” she finally asked.
Blanca continued as if she had not heard. “When I realized how I had misread the maps, I rushed to the dungeons, only to find that you were already gone. The Nochtland guard told me that you had left through the tunnels, and I understood at once. Did you guess it, or did you read the truth in the maps on these walls?”
“Guess what?”
“That these advancing Southern Snows and my home, the Glacine Age, are one and the same.”
Sophia shook her head. “I didn’t know what the four maps meant either. I didn’t know anything until I got here and read these maps. The glass maps in the walls.” She paused. “And then I knew they were about this place, and that I had to destroy it.” Sophia dropped her head. “I’m here, but I can’t bring myself to do it.”
Blanca turned with a sigh and again looked out over the frozen lake. “Poor child. You truly have no sense of time. Do you know how long you have spent here, from the moment you left the caverns?”
Sophia felt a flutter of anxiety in her stomach. “No.”
“More than nine hours by the clock of the Baldlands. Twenty-five hours by the clock of New Occident. Two days have dawned.”
Sophia gasped.
“You would probably linger on here until the end of time, were you left to your own devices,” Blanca said wistfully.
“More than an entire day,” Sophia whispered, her voice choked. “I thought perhaps an hour—or two.”
“While you have been contemplating the maps of the Great Hall,” Blanca said, facing Sophia once again, “I have lost my chance to save the Glacine Age. The glaciers have advanced quickly. They have already covered the carta mayor. We are too late.”
“I don’t understand. You wanted the Glacine Age to cover the earth. Why didn’t you just wait for the glaciers to follow their own course? Why even bother to find the carta mayor?”
“You have not yet gone beyond the hall,” Blanca said, with a weary wave of her hand. “You have not seen the Glacine Age as it exists now.” Her sigh seemed to carry years of exhaustion. “From the moment I learned who I was—from the moment your uncle freed me—it was my goal to return to my Age. I finally found my way to Tierra del Fuego, where I discovered a portion of the Glacine Age, whole and intact. Do you have any idea—can you imagine—the joy I felt at the chance to walk once again in my own Age? To be home? I had so longed to hear my own language. To hear my name—” She uttered a sound that seemed unlike speech, but that suggested by its intonation a vivid lightness: glad and bright and somehow young. “You must know what I mean. You have hardly been gone from New Occident, and yet I am sure you long to return there.”
Sophia knew it was not the same, but recalling her home on East Ending Street, she had some sense of what Blanca felt. “I think so.”
“Well then,” Blanca said, her voice catching, “imagine what it would be like to return to Boston, your beloved city, and find it deserted—in ruins. Not a living soul anywhere. Only the remains of the lives that once filled it.”
Sophia could not help but glance through the pyramid’s wall at the ice city below. “The Age was deserted?”
Blanca gave a bitter laugh. “Entirely deserted. The whole of the Glacine Age was an empty shell—a lifeless husk. Its people were long since dead. Its cities were falling into ruin. All that remained was ice and stone. The world I remembered was gone—is gone.”
“But I don’t understand.” Sophia moved back to stand against the wall. “Isn’t this the Age you belong to? An Age with living people in it?”
“No one, it seems, can return to the world of their own past.” Blanca moved to stand beside her. “It is, indeed, my Age. But I was twenty at the time of the Disruption, and by the time I returned, more than eighty years had passed. The Glacine Age as I knew it was destroyed. The ice triumphed. Every living thing perished. Nothing but the glaciers survive.”
“But I saw people walking below,” Sophia protested.
“You saw the Lachrima,” Blanca said dully. “The Lachrima born of this new border. There are hundreds of them. Those are the only cursed creatures who will inhabit this Age now.
“Comprehending the full destruction of my Age, I gave it up for lost. But then I heard the Nihilismian myth, and I believed there could be truth in it; I felt hope again. If I could find the carta mayor, I would be able to rewrite history, avert the destruction; I would be able to make the Glacine Age whole, living once more.” Blanca stared out at the frozen expanse beyond the walls. “While searching for the carta mayor, I learned that the Age was advancing northward. Like an expanding tomb, the glaciers were overtaking the earth, and my Age—the wondrous Age I knew and loved—would never exist.” She put her hand against the pyramid wall. “I was too late. I am too late.”
Sophia gazed out over the empty city, stunned. She looked south across the vast white expanse, imagining the thousands of miles of deserted ice, the frozen cities slowly crumbling, the underground warrens disintegrating. The glaciers were reclaiming everything in their path. Sophia glanced up at Blanca’s scarred face, and she was sure that she could see grief in her featureless expression. What could possibly be worse, she thought, than losing not only one’s family, one’s friends, one’s home, but one’s entire living world? Sophia extended her hand tentatively and placed it in Blanca’s. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.