So, with his eyes on Number One, the closest suit of armor to him, Pantin reached for the banister at his back and hoisted himself carefully up onto it. When he was sitting and stable, he shifted and swung first one leg and then the other over, finding toeholds between the uprights and staring at the blade of Number One’s glinting pike. He could see all three of the others peripherally now, but just barely.
Pantin began to edge his way along the outside of the banister toward the stairs, feeling blindly for places to put his feet. He could feel a thrumming energy, as if all four suits were coiled animals waiting to strike the second he blinked.
Finally, when he thought he was out of reach of the pike, he transferred his stare over to Three and Four, keeping Number One just barely in the corner of his eye. But now Number Two was out of eyeshot, and free. Pantin forced himself not to look as Two clanked to life, because now he was even with Number Three, who held a short, gleaming sword at the ready.
Number Two flashed into the same peripheral space as Number One and froze dead.
Pantin exhaled and kept edging along. He passed Three and reached the place where the banister curved to meet the stairs and angled down. He stepped onto the first stair, climbed over that banister, then backed down three steps more until he could see all four suits of armor.
He walked rearwards all the way down, just in case, then experimentally turned his head when he was at the bottom. He heard clanking and turned to find all four suits of armor standing in a sentry line at the top of the stairs. But they didn’t try to follow him down, nor did they attempt to throw their weapons after him.
Pantin’s legs gave out. He sagged to his haunches and crouched there for what felt like an hour, until his pounding heart began to calm and the numb, shocked tingling in his body began to dissipate. He raised his fingers to his neck where the splinter had cut him, and winced.
As if to get his attention, a clock he hadn’t heard before tolled, and Pantin, still crouched on the floor, turned to his left to look through the open doorway into the map room. The light spilling from it was gentle and warm and welcoming. He walked over the threshold.
It was the most captivating chamber he’d ever been in, full of carpets in rich, vivid tones and deep, sink-right-into-it furniture in leather and velvet. The bookcases had glass fronts, and the desks had curved, carved legs. Every surface held something fascinating: navigational instruments, globes, boxes of expensive-looking drafting equipment. The walls were papered in a pattern that called to mind gentle, rolling waves, and framed maps and assorted bits of cartography hung everywhere. Some were as small as a book page. Others were bigger than Pantin himself.
He walked up to one of the smaller pieces on the wall, a beautiful collection of the sorts of monsters that he had only ever before seen cavorting at the edges of maps. Some of them here were peeking out from behind a hand-drawn square of rope enclosing the word LEGEND. Inside the rope, under LEGEND, was a handful of symbols meant to help a reader interpret the map.
Most of the creatures surrounding the rope stared eastward, as if the whole group were tracking something beguiling just out of view beyond the dark wood of the frame. One, however, leaned over the top of the symbol box, its claws hooked into the Es in LEGEND, and stared straight out of the picture at the viewer.
It wasn’t quite a dragon, and it wasn’t quite a tiger, and it wasn’t quite a goat. Its horns curled almost all the way from its forehead to the corners of its wide, fanged mouth, and Pantin couldn’t decide if the tendrils framing its head were tufts of hair or tentacles. He leaned in, suddenly fascinated with figuring out what those waving bits were meant to be. Closer and closer, until only a hair’s breadth separated his nose from the glass over the creature.
A puff of warmth gusted gently past his cheeks.
Pantin bent nearer still, staring at the tendrils and trying to work out whether he was seeing suckers or just stains on the paper. Another puff of warm air feathered his face, this one carrying a whiff of salt water and rotting meat. Enthralled, Pantin barely registered it. Up close, the tendrils seemed almost to wave as the creature’s head loomed larger, taking up more and more of the boy’s field of vision.
Another balmy puff of sea and carrion ruffled Pantin’s hair. He didn’t notice.
There was no glass. He didn’t notice that, either, nor the fact that his hands now gripped the frame like a windowsill as the top half of his body angled through it. In fact, he might have been halfway down the thing’s gullet before he noticed anything, if not for the fact that the creature, which was capable of holding itself still for truly stupefying lengths of time but which hadn’t had a fresh meal in years, couldn’t stop itself from drooling.
A single tepid drop fell onto Pantin’s hand. He glanced down, the spell of the creature’s waving tentacles broken, and frowned at the spot of damp between his knuckles. Only then did he register that his top half appeared to be leaning through a window and into perilous proximity of a monster.
Pantin flung himself backwards as the creature’s mouth snapped shut. The world warped, and as he fell on his backside onto one of the map room’s beautiful rugs, the aperture that had somehow opened up between himself and the marginal monster became nothing more than a bit of a map in a mahogany frame again.
It’s a measure of how accustomed Pantin was becoming to
