Blankmap: Book I

38. Departure

Everything was chaos. Solomon awoke to anguished cries and the smell of fire. He leapt from his mat, pulled on a shirt, and was one step past the doorway when a heavy hand seized him from the darkness.

"Wait, boy!"

Solomon wheeled around to find Rip Rap staring at him. The old lighthouse keeper's beard was a tangle of wires, and his cheeks were bruised purple. A fresh cut streamed blood down over one of his eyes. There was no sign of the black pipe that had hung ever-present from his lips. In his meaty fist was a fearsome club.

"What's happening?" Solomon demanded.

"Dammerung," Rip Rap grunted. "Ambush." He was wheezing and out of breath, holding his ribs gingerly. "Yer...yer gettin' outta here tonight. Change o' plans."

"No! If they're here, I'm fighting with you."

"Idiot," gasped Rip Rap. "They're here fer you. That thing yeh found, anyway. Yeh've got no choice. Yeh've got to get outta here."

Solomon glared at Rip Rap, feeling robbed, once again, of the chance to revenge himself on the people who had taken his family from him, who were attacking the new family he had made on this jewel of an island. Rip Rap held his gaze without blinking.

"Get yer things, whatever yeh can carry. And don't forget that blasted map."

"Rip Rap..."

"Go! Yer wasting' time! Yeh've got no choice in this. Yeh don't."

The shouting that had awoken Solomon grew closer, and in the light of the distant fires Solomon saw panic in Rip Rap's eyes. Something cracked inside of him then, and his resentment gave way to something like sadness. It was cruel seeing Rip Rap this way, such a powerful and devil-may-care man looking as solid as a broken butterfly. Solomon turned on his heel and ducked back into his room.

In the dark it was nearly impossible to see the contents of his trunk. After a frantic minute he collected his father's history book (with Jacques' letters folded inside) and the sealed pouch that contained the Blankmap. Grabbing an extra shirt, he stuffed what he had found into a turtleskin bag of Melion's and dashed outside. Around his neck was the ancient key to the box he would never need open again. The air tasted of smoke and ash as he shoved aside the door of the house and barreled out into the night.

"There," wheezed the lighthouse keeper, gesturing through the trees at a landscape lit by fire. "Follow that path to the lagoon. Yeh should have plenty o' cover. Take the rowboat that's anchored there and pull harder than yeh've ever worked at anything before. Once yeh cross the reef the southern current should pull yeh to Wokje in a day or two."

"Rip Rap--"

"I know. I know. Get yerself outta here, now. Yeh find yer way to Wokje, make fer The Sign o' the Seahorse. Tell 'em there I sent yeh."

"The Sign of--"

"The Seahorse. Yer outta time, boy. Take this. And run!"

The lighthouse keeper held out a spear, and the young adventurer took it slowly. Solomon looked Rip Rap in the eye a last time. Even through the cuts and bruises, Solomon could see that somewhere inside the man a fire was still burning. They clasped hands, and with a shove, his father's friend sent him running through the trees, bare feet finding the trickle-thin path that would bear him to safety, or something like it. He dared one final glance over his shoulder, and saw Rip Rap spitting blood into the sand before raising his club with a roar and running back toward the fray.

He tore down the path. He had never been on it before, but it was easy enough to find, even in the darkness--the moon hung brightly in the pitch black sky and the light of fires reached him even through the trees. Solomon fought back a lump in his throat. Rip Rap was hurt badly, no telling how badly, and others were surely getting hurt, even killed. For him! Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes as he sprinted towards the end of the trees' cover. Like a fishhook caught in his heart the words tore through him: My fault. My fault. My fault.

Solomon began to choke on his ragged breaths. The thought that he might never see Melion or his family again crashed down on top of him and for a moment the edges of his vision grew black. He was going to drown on land. Just when panic and the exertion threatened to overtake him, he broke through the last of the foliage and stepped out once more onto sand. A hundred yards away lay the rowboat, just as Rip Rap had said. And standing on either side of it, faces shining white in the moonlight, stood two men in purple cloaks.

Though his brain was screaming at him to stop, to turn around, to find some other means of flight, Solomon Hyrax's legs churned on. The men were at least a head shorter than him. As he got closer he saw their dark-circled eyes, their bloodred lips, and was filled with a revulsion he had no name for. Had he breath to scream, he would have done it then, not a cry for help, but of terror. As it was he had no breath. He barely had thoughts. In one instant he had swung the pack off of his back, still sprinting headlong, and with his left hand launched the spear with every ounce of strength he had.

The Dammerung guard gave a mild gasp, as though surprised to find a quivering length of wood growing from his chest, and dropped to his knees in the sand. The other wasted no time. Dropping his own spear, he pulled a dagger from his boot and crouched, ready for Solomon. The young adventurer skidded to a halt. He was unarmed, and his only means of escape were behind a glittering blade held by someone who knew how to use it.

He was angry, then. Angry that this man stood between him and the escape that he hadn't wanted, that he was taking because the people who loved him had wanted him to. Angry that all he held dear seemed ripped from him anew with each passing day. Angry that whoever these people were, these Dammerung, they had left him fatherless, adrift. Angry that he was so small, and the world, that vast place, seemed to make its plans without him. Angry that he had been left with so little choice about anything to do with his own life. And amidst those white-hot sheets of anger, his mind went blank.

When he came to he was in the water. Blood was leaking out from his cheek, as well as from somewhere on his right arm. His left arm was locked around the neck of the Dammerung guard, whose entire face was submerged beneath the gently lapping waves of the lagoon. He was not moving. With a shudder Solomon let go of the man and sloshed back to shore. His legs were prickling with the pins-and-needles of a half-finished underwater transformation.

The din from the far side of the island still reached his ears, although it was muffled by the thick wall of jungle that encircled this small spit of sand. Solomon's breaths came in ragged gasps. He couldn't look at anything but the bodies behind him. They were dead, they were gone, but still they blocked his exit. He would have to slide past them--kneeling in the sand propped up by the spear, bobbing gently in the surf--to get to the little rowboat. Tears joined the blood that dripped down his face, and finally, cursing himself for wasting so much time, he tore his gaze away from the horrors behind him and retrieved his things. He knocked sand off of his pack, looked around at the trees that walled him off from the rest of Kwajro (how frightening they were in the dark, what untold terrors lay behind them, among them!), and dashed for the rowboat. A sob escaped his lips as he dragged the small anchor into the boat, a trickle of blood staining the waves in the moonlight, and he shoved off.

The next hour passed in a blur of exertion. The tide fought his desperate, tired efforts to move the boat out into the lagoon, and Solomon faced the added hurdle of never having rowed before. It took every bit of energy he had left to keep the boat on a relatively steady course--occasionally he began to spin, would overcorrect, and then be forced to repeat the balancing act to right the boat in the opposite direction. At other times, row as hard as he might, he simply bobbed like a cork, and wouldn't move for what felt like an eternity.

At last, with a great whoosh, Solomon felt the boat pulled out of his control in the right direction, over the reef. He had crossed the reef many times now--in boats rowed by others, in his own skin (unfamiliar though the skin was), on the back of a water horse--but this was different. He was dimly aware that tears still spilled silently down his cheeks, but all else in him felt numb. Even his arms and back, which he would have thought would have burned with the effort, were so much dead wood. He stowed the oars when the boat caught the slow but sure current, and, taking the extra shirt from his pack and folding it into a pillow, he laid down in the bottom of the boat as though it were a coffin.

"I didn't ask for any of this," he whispered, and he said no more until blackness mercifully took him.