Aster Wood and the Lost Maps of Almara (Book 1) (21 page)

The howling had stopped completely, and now he and I stood silently together in the moonlight. He stared off into the night, dominance carved into his face. This was
his
land.

I stared at the stone wolf for what seemed a long time. Whoever had carved this statue had possessed fantastic skill. Even from the ground I could see the details in his fur, the delicate shape of his ears. Everything about him seemed alive, everything but his eyes. Cold, flat stone looked out at the surrounding valley.

I moved around the base, looking for what, I didn’t know. All around each of the square sides were inscribed these words:

At the place where the sun meets the land

Lies escape they have surely not planned

Discover the code and you’ll see

The way forward to win you the key

I walked around the podium again and again, trying to make sense of the inscription. It told me to go somewhere where the sun met the land. But where? This place seemed to be in a perpetual state of darkness.

I moved on to the next line,
escape they have surely not planned
. My hand dragged along the surface of the monument, feeling the roughness of the rock as I paced around it. On one side several horizontal notches were carved out, just deep enough for me to fit my fingers into. I stopped and moved my hands back and forth over the rough grooves. Maybe this line was about my escape from Maylin, my journey back home. Who would want to keep me from escaping Maylin?
 

Discover the code. Of course! I stopped pacing and took the book from my pocket, When I opened it a wave of relief washed over me. The pages were full, top to bottom, with writing. This was it! It wasn’t a map, that was true, but this little tome would give me what I needed, I was sure of it.

I walked around the base of the statue again, looking for a place to enter the code, but found none. I ran the last line through my head again and again.
The way forward to win you the key
.
 

I circled it again, searching this time with my hands. Starting at the ground the base rested upon, I worked my way up each side of the rock until my fingers were extended all the way above my head. Still nothing. I took several steps back from the base. Maybe I needed to see this whole thing differently.

I slapped myself on the forehead for my own stupidity. The horizontal notches I had been running my fingers over, they weren’t just random notches cut into the stone. There were five of them extending from a foot off the ground and all the way to the flat top of the pedestal. It was a ladder.

I fitted the toes of my boot into the lowest rung. The carving was so shallow that I could barely get a hold of it with my foot. Extending my arms to the rung above my head I gripped the rock hard with my fingertips and began to climb.
 

My first few attempts to ascend the structure resulted in my flailing and tumbling to the snow below. But on the fourth try I was finally able hoist my weight up onto the platform. I carefully stood up on the edge of the base and came face to face with the stone wolf.
 

He was gigantic. Standing as tall as me, his eyes were almost perfectly level with mine. No snow stuck onto any surface of his body. I reached out to touch the stone, and was surprised when I didn’t feel rock beneath my fingertips, but the soft warmth of fur. I snatched my hand back, alarmed, but he didn’t move. I stretched out my hand to touch it again, entranced. My fingers could press in on the fur, but it otherwise remained entirely motionless. What was this thing?
 

I carefully lay my ear against its back, listening. I heard no heartbeat or other sound. I was both relieved and disappointed by this. So it wasn’t alive then, but something else. In such a lonely place, part of me had been hoping to hear a sign of life beneath the marble. Though the idea of being greeted by a huge, live wolf was terrifying.

I dropped back down to my hands and knees and began to brush away the snow that covered the rest of the platform. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. My icy fingers moved over the four distinct notches carved into the base. Above each rectangle shaped notch, strange ciphers were written. I pulled out the book and flipped through the pages in the moonlight.

The book was split into three sections. Each one had a large set of characters decoded several times into different types of what I could only guess were alphabets. I focused on the first character of the code on the stone and searched the book for its twin.
 

I found it quickly enough in the third section. This part of the book only had about thirty different characters translated, and I saw with relief that several of the translations were written in letters from the alphabet that I had learned back on Earth. Was I supposed to draw the letter? It seemed a logical conclusion to write it onto the stone, but with what? I reached out a single, frozen finger and traced the first letter in the sequence onto the bare stone, which was J.

Before my finger had even begun the loop on the bottom of the letter, the path it had taken on the stone came to life. Gold shimmered beneath my hand as I completed it, and then the next. And the next. At last I found the final letter in the code, an E, and completed the word.
 

J-A-D-E
 

A loud click came from the base as an unseen lock slid into place.

I stared at the stone, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. No secret compartment opened in the floor. No other codes or letters alighted on the stone. I rested on my hands and knees, searching for some sign that I had accomplished something. But the unforgiving stone had remained hard and lifeless.

Then I heard it. Breathing. Right above my head. I closed my eyes, willing it not to be true, but the hot breath that blew over the back of my neck was undeniable. I slowly sat back on my heels and, trying not to scream, looked up at the statue.

He looked right back at me. No longer was the wolf made of stone. His fur rippled with the movement of his breath, shining white hot in the moonlight. His eyes, now full of life, stared deep into mine.
 

I had little control over what happened next. In my primordial brain the alarm bells were ringing; I needed to escape this predator. My mouth hung silently open as I stood and backed away from the beast, completely forgetting that I was fifteen feet above the ground. I backed right off the edge of the platform and fell to the snow below.

You might think that landing in snow would have broken my fall, but you would be mistaken. The snow, only a foot or so deep in the center of the basin, was maybe enough to keep me from breaking my ankle, but definitely not enough to keep me from injury. The pain shot up through my leg and I yelped, clutching at it and writhing on the ground, the wolf above all but forgotten. In the background of my own cries of pain I heard whining. I looked up just in time to see the wolf jump down from the platform.
 

I tried to scramble upwards but I was unable to put any weight on my leg. The whining continued, and slowly the animal made his way over to me, snorting giant plumes of vapor into the frigid air. I struggled to push myself backwards in the snow, but there was nowhere for me to escape to. He approached me, snuffling the air around my neck. I lay back into the snow, breathing hard with terror and panic.

This was it. This was how I was going to die. Not from a heart attack or a bout of asthma, or even whatever it was that Cadoc had planned for me, but instead eaten alive by an impossibly alive wild animal. I tried to close my eyes, to give myself over to the inevitable, but they stayed stubbornly wide.
 

Suddenly I felt something entirely unexpected; a warmth was spreading from the center of my chest outward. I looked down into the face of the beast, and was surprised to find him resting his head on my rib cage. I barely breathed. He looked at me through silver eyes and a low whine came from his throat.
 

Could this really be happening? He didn’t
seem
to want to eat me. I waited, but neither of us moved.
 

I tentatively lifted one hand and touched the wolf’s head between his ears. He blinked at the touch and sighed. My fingers slowly dug into the fur and scratched the skin beneath it, and his eyes closed with pleasure. Was he…tame?

I slowly sat up and he raised his head as I did so, eyes following mine. When he didn’t attack, I risked trying to stand again, and once more crumpled to the ground with a whimper. The wolf watched me try this again and again until I lay motionless in the snow, defeated. He moved then, nudging his head underneath my arm and sliding forward on his belly until it rested on his back. He pushed his back into me, nudging me farther and farther until his body was almost completely underneath mine.

I then did what was probably a very stupid thing. I swung my injured leg over the back of the wolf as if he were the old draft horse on Grandma’s farm, and held my breath.
 

He positioned his legs underneath himself and rose from the ground, me hanging on to two tufts of fur between my fingers. I tried to grab big handfuls of fur instead of just a few strands, not wanting to hurt him, but he didn’t seem to notice the pulling at all. I steadied myself on his back as his feet pranced underneath. Then he lifted his shining head into the night and gave a long howl. The sound echoed across the basin, bouncing back to us until a chorus of howls filled the darkness. It sounded like a hundred wolves were responding to his call. I
 
looked around, expecting to see an army of animals descend from the surrounding hills, but the landscape remained empty.

He moved then and quickly broke into a run. I flopped myself down closer to his back, hugging my arms around his neck to keep myself from flailing around. But I soon realized that his gait was smooth and easy to balance with. I sat back up and watched the land around us zip by in a streak. My eyes watered from the cold air, and I released one of my hands to pull up my hood to protect my quickly freezing ears.
 

It should have been wonderful, glorious. But what I remember most about that ride was that it was freezing, icy cold. His giant head bobbed up and down in front of me with each stride, and though his fur glowed brightly in the moonlight, little heat came off him to warm me. I kept my fingers from freezing by gripping the fur close to his skin, but my face and ears were soon stinging. I bowed my head closer to the wolf as he ran, my head throbbing in protest.
   

As we moved through the night, a new set of howls and yips began to echo around us, different from those clear cries that had driven me to the wolf. What were they? I couldn’t be sure. The few times my frozen body would let me raise my head to look around, I saw nothing pursuing us. I remembered Cadoc with a shudder, and hoped that this place didn’t hide the same sorts of monsters that Stonemore did.

I don’t know how long the wolf ran for. We left the expanse of rolling hills behind us and began a long climb to the top of a mountain range that blocked our path. In the back of my mind I fretted over the condition of the animal, running so hard and for so long, but I was constantly brought back to my own worries. My toes were slowly getting tingly, then numb, and my teeth started to chatter furiously. I tried to stay bent forward to keep what little heat I had left in my body from escaping into the frigid air.

When we finally reached the top of the mountain the wolf stopped. He barely panted at all from his exertion, and I followed his gaze out over the land below. In the far distance a series of lakes stretched out, vast open plains and more mountains to one side. Nothing moved, and the howling had stopped.

He turned and leaped off the peak, and we descended the mountain in a rush of wind and speed. I began to long for home, or Chapman’s warm closet, or Kiron’s cottage; anywhere that I could defrost my body and find warmth again. Little else mattered to me in that moment but to get out of the cold.
 

Finally, after dropping what must have been thousands of feet to the floor beneath the mountain, the wolf came to a stop. He stood erect, his breathing coming faster now, the breath billowing out in big plumes from his snout. He had stopped right at the base of the mountain, and in front of us was a round, silver boulder.

The stone was as tall as my waist, a perfect sphere. Five feet in front of it a rock tablet was set into the ground. The outline of two carved handprints was just visible in the shadow of the moon.
 

The wolf did not move. We had reached whatever destination he had intended. I slumped off his back onto the ground in front of the tablet, curling up into tiny ball, and putting my frozen hands underneath the blanket to thaw. After a few minutes the subtle magic in the blanket began to warm me, more powerful now that I was out of the wind. My teeth slowly stopped chattering, and I was able to think more clearly.

The wolf stood above me, looking between the stone and I expectantly. I got to my hands and knees and crawled over to the tablet, each movement sending a jolt of fiery pain from ankle to knee in my damaged leg.
 

I slid my hands over the stone and found that the small platform was warm to the touch. I eagerly welcomed the heat that spread up through my hands into my upper body. I moved my two palms across the rough surface until they fit neatly into the spaces carved into the rock, greedily searching for more heat.
 

Once, when I was about five, I visited the tiny city petting zoo with my mom. Keeping animals as pets was no longer a priority for people on Earth, but this one small place was built to teach the younger school kids about food production. The more people the government could interest in growing food, the better.
 

Mom had been distracted by the dramatic wailing of a toddler who had been knocked down by an overeager goat, and I took the opportunity to sneak away. I had really wanted to come to the zoo to see the horses, but I quickly found out that they weren’t in the area where they let the kids roam around. Pigs and goats are all well and good, but I remembered the velvet touch of Grandma’s draft horse’s nose, and I was determined to at least find one to say hello to.