“Nope,” Chloe said. “Glass of wine?”
“Definitely. And I think, while we’re drinking, we should probably go over The Horns of Terzos again—in detail,” I said.
Chloe poured us each a glass of Malbec, and I started going over everything we’d written down the first time we’d read through the novel.
“The editor doesn’t exist, and neither does the publishing imprint,” Chloe said as she sat back down beside me on the couch.
“There has to be a clue in here somewhere,” I said.
“Maybe we should try something else?” Chloe asked. “We’ve been staring at this stuff for hours.”
I looked away from my computer and rubbed my eyes. When I opened them again, I found myself staring up at a gift I’d given to Chloe for her birthday. It was a map of Washington State drawn in the style of the maps of Middle-earth that Christopher Tolkien had illustrated for Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
“What?” Chloe could tell I was thinking about something.
“In the Mordecai Kubler novel, Other Poseidon is made up mainly of Washington State, right?” I said.
“Yeah, so?”
“So I have an idea,” I said. “Is that printer on the network?”
“Yeah, why? What’s up?”
I pulled out my phone, took a photo of the map in the back of The Horns of Terzos, adjusted the brightness and contrast, then sent that image to Chloe’s printer.
“Can you bring up Seattle on Google Earth?” I asked.
Chloe started typing while I jumped up and ran over to the printer. Once the page had finished printing, I pulled a rolling chair over to where Chloe was sitting. She’d loaded a map of Seattle from Google Earth, which I adjusted until it was the size of the fictional city of Oudwood from the novel.
They were a perfect match.
It looked like Mordecai Kubler had used an accurate map of North America for his fictional land of Tsippos, and by extension accurate maps of Washington State for the Province of Other Poseidon, and Seattle for the city Oudwood.
“Up here you have The Labyrinth,” I said, pointing to the circle at the top of the triangle on the map of Oudwood, “and there, in the center of The Labyrinth…”
“Holy shit,” Chloe said as her eyes followed my finger. “It’s WorGames.”
“The Tower,” I said.
“Do you think this shit might be real?”
“Look at the bottom-left-hand point of the triangle.”
“Is that the building where you found that weird graffiti behind the dumpster?”
“Sure is,” I said.
I pulled out my phone and dropped four pins in my map application: the exact locations of the three points that made up the triangle or pyramid, and the point in the center of the labyrinth, then I handed my phone to Chloe.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Our map.”
“Fuck me, are we really doing this?”
“Whattaya think?” I said. “Win the game, save the world.”
41
AN UNKINDNESS
In The Horns of Terzos, Xana begins her quest at the bottom-left-hand point of the pyramid, journeys to the right corner, and finally ends up at the top. In the novel, the highest point of the pyramid is known as The Gate.
Passing through The Gate delivers Xana into a world that looks almost identical to her own, but is actually somewhere called The Other Place.
Xana has now entered The Labyrinth.
When she eventually makes it to the center of The Labyrinth, she’ll have to find a way to defeat The Man in The Tower.
“You really think if we hit the three points of this pyramid we’ll actually find this Crow guy?”
“I don’t know. I think we might.”
“Okay,” Chloe said. “Let’s go find your Man in The Tower.”
* * *
—
We decided we’d start by following Xana’s path in the novel from the beginning, so Chloe drove us back to the alley behind the pop-up record store.
We walked over and took another look at the wall behind the dumpster. It appeared to be unchanged, but I took a picture just in case.
After I hit the button on my phone to take the photograph, the light in the alley dimmed a little, and for a split second I thought I saw the symbols come to life and shimmer against the brick wall, suddenly awash in a swirling darkness.
I shook my head and pressed my palms into my eyes. I smelled something familiar in the air, like wet feathers and fur. I was disoriented by the smell, and I could hear blood suddenly pounding in my ears. I tried to shake it off, but my body felt endless, like there were no borders between me and the world, and I was suddenly extremely cold. I knuckled my hand hard against the wall to both try to steady myself and use the pain to pull me out of whatever weird reverie I was falling into.