Turn 5 of 6

Go inside and bring the correction directly to Master Ombrey

The doors are unlocked, as they always are at this hour. The Hall never closes completely — someone is always working, always correcting, and the locks were removed decades ago by an order you have never seen written down. You step inside and the smell hits you: ink, sized paper, the faint mineral tang of the acid baths used to fix contour lines. It is the smell of your working life, and today it settles on you like a second skin. The entrance corridor is dim, lit only by the high windows that stripe the stone floor in pale bars. Your boots echo.

Sennet follows you as far as the courier's alcove, where she unshoulders her satchel and begins filling out the delivery confirmation log. She does not look up as you move past her toward the stairs. The building is quiet in the way it always is before the junior cartographers arrive — not silent, but held, as if the ink on the maps in the archive were still wet and might smear if someone spoke too loudly. You climb the stair to the upper floor, where Master Ombrey's office occupies the corner room. The door is ajar. The lamp throws a wedge of amber light across the landing.

You knock once, and his voice comes immediately, as though he has been waiting.

"Come in." Master Ombrey sits behind a desk that is buried — there is no other word — under layers of map sheets, correction folios, correspondence, and the small brass instruments he uses to measure the scale of submitted work. He is sixty-one, narrow-shouldered, with the permanent stoop of a man who has spent forty years bent over a drafting table. His hands are stained with ink at the cuticles, the way yours are. He looks up at you over the half-moon spectacles he refuses to replace, and his expression is neither surprised nor unsurprised. It is the expression of a man who has been expecting something, though perhaps not this specific something, and perhaps not today.

You place the correction sheet on the one clear corner of his desk.

"This arrived this morning," you say. "The Vale of Aster has been removed." You say the name deliberately, watching his face. You say it because you are in a room full of maps, because the Hall is built on the principle that what is written endures, because if the name is a finite resource then spending it here, in this place, to this man, is the best use you can think of. The words leave your mouth and hang in the lamplight like something visible.

Master Ombrey does not flinch. He does not look confused. He looks at the correction sheet, and then he looks at you, and what you see in his face is not recognition but weariness — the deep, structural exhaustion of a man who has carried something heavy for a long time and has just been asked to set it down in front of someone. He removes his spectacles, folds them, and places them on the desk with a precision that suggests he is buying himself a moment to choose his next words.

"Sit down," he says. He pulls a second chair from against the wall, clearing a path through the paper with his foot.

"I want you to tell me exactly what you remember." His voice is careful and measured, and underneath it there is something you have never heard from him before — not fear, not guilt, but the quiet, practiced calm of a man who has rehearsed this conversation in his head and hoped he would never need to have it. He picks up the correction sheet and holds it to the lamp, running his thumb across the smooth blank space, and his mouth tightens. He does not look surprised by what he finds there.