Turn 3 of 8

Close the door and head to the Cartographers' Hall to confront Master Ombrey

You fold the map and tell Sennet to keep the correction sheet. She takes it with the practiced motion of someone who has delivered a thousand documents and never kept one, but her hand lingers on the paper for a beat too long. You close the door and go to the table where your kit lies half-unpacked. The map goes into the leather case, and the case goes into your pack, and the pack goes over your shoulder. The morning is still cold, still grey, and the lane smells of river mud and the last of the night's woodsmoke.

The Cartographers' Hall sits on the highest ground in Vennmarch, above the flood line, above everything. It is a long building of pale stone with narrow windows, and from a distance it looks like a church that has lost its conviction. You walk the river road north through the waking town — past the chandler opening his shutters, past the ferryman's boy coiling rope on the dock — and the Hall grows against the white sky. There are no carts arriving at its gates, no clerks on the steps. At this hour the building seems to hold its breath.

The doors are unlocked but the front hall is empty. Your boots echo on the stone floor. The smell of ink is everywhere — the iron-gall tang of it, thick enough to taste. Along the walls hang the master maps under glass, each one a quadrant of the kingdom, each one marked with the date of its last correction. The western quadrant shows October of this year. You stop in front of it and look for the valley. The river is there. The road follows it south through the forest. Where the ford should be, where the inn should be, there is nothing — just clean paper and the river continuing south as though it has always run that way, unhurried, through unbroken trees.

A door opens at the far end of the hall and a clerk looks out, sees you, and disappears again. You hear footsteps receding into the building's interior. Someone has been notified. You stand in the hall of maps and wait, your pack heavy on your shoulder, the weight of your own field map pressing against your back through the leather. The master map under glass is beautiful — the lines exact, the lettering uniform, the corrections invisible. It is the work of people who believe that precision is the same thing as truth.

The far door opens again, and Master Ombrey comes through it. He is a tall man, sixty-one, narrow-shouldered, moving with the careful economy of someone who has spent decades at a drafting table. His hands are stained at the cuffs with ink, and his eyes are the pale, washed-out blue of someone who has spent too long looking at fine detail in poor light. He does not look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has been expecting someone to come, and has been hoping it would not be today.