Turn 2 of 9

Go to the Hall and demand to see Master Ombrey about the correction

You leave Sennet Aur in your kitchen with tea she does not drink and instructions to wait. She nods, still wearing that careful blankness, and you do not know whether she will still be there when you return. The fog has not lifted. It presses against the streets like gauze, and the river is audible somewhere beyond the warehouses, breathing. You walk. The Cartographers' Hall stands at the end of Surveyor's Row, a building of grey granite with iron lamp brackets that are never lit because the Hall keeps its own hours. The doors are open at this hour, as they always are, because corrections do not wait for courtesy.

Inside, the air smells of sizing and ink. A clerk sits behind the intake desk, young, with the careful posture of someone who has been trained to handle difficult paper. She looks up when you enter. She does not ask your business. She has seen this before — the look on your face, the folio under your arm, the anger that has not yet decided what shape to take. You ask for Master Ombrey. She hesitates, then says he is in the vaults and has been since before dawn, which is unusual but not forbidden. She offers to send word. You tell her you will carry it yourself.

The vaults are below the Hall, reached by a stairway lined with survey plates from the old kingdom, their ink faded to the colour of rust. The air grows colder as you descend, and damper, and there is a sound like water moving behind the walls. You find Master Ombrey in the third chamber, standing at a long table spread with maps — not the new ones but older sheets, decades old, their edges soft with handling. He is a tall man, sixty-one, with the stoop of someone who has spent too many years bent over fine work. He does not look up when you enter. His fingers are tracing a line on a map that is almost the same colour as the paper, as though he is reading something that is barely there.

"You removed the Vale of Aster," you say.

He stops. His hand goes still, two fingers resting on the paper, and for a long moment the only sound is that water-noise behind the walls. Then he straightens, slowly, the way a man does when his back has decided to remind him of its opinions.

"I did," he says. His voice is calm, measured, the voice of a man who has rehearsed this conversation or simply expected it.

"Sit down. I'll explain what I can." He pulls a chair from beneath the table, its legs scraping against stone.

"But I should tell you first — I expected you sooner. I left instructions that the correction go to you directly. Not to the regional surveyor. To you." He meets your eyes for the first time, and what is in his face is not guilt or secrecy. It is the expression of someone who has been waiting for a particular kind of trouble and is almost relieved it has arrived.