bright sunlight. She slowly rotated the image, one of the talents that made her such a brilliant artisan and geomancer. She could recall, as clearly as a picture, anything she had ever seen. If it was any kind of mechanism, like the workings of a clock, she could make it operate in her mind so as to identify the flaws in it.
Recalling the outside of the globe was trivial. Next she brought to mind the second layer, rotating it until she had put together a complete image of the surface. The third layer proved more difficult, since more of it was obscured by the upper layers. But soon she assembled the separate views until she had that too.
The fourth was more difficult again. Large sections were covered by the copper band, and when she mentally moved the globe to rotate all the inner layers, she tended to lose the image she already had. It took most of the night before she was sure she had it perfectly. Thinking about the fifth sphere, Tiaan fell asleep.
The following day she was too exhausted to do more than her mapping as they crossed the mountain range to tropical Taranta, although Tiaan did remember to take out the globe and inspect it under bright sunlight. After much rotating of the inner spheres she felt sure she had seen the entirety of the fifth and sixth layers. That night, after the meeting, she fitted them into her mental model of the globe and felt that she had achieved a feat no one else could have done.
The following day, not even her beloved work was able to keep her awake, so a swathe of country along the north-eastern rim of Faranda went unmapped. She hoped the omission would not prove costly.
They reached Nys, a large town on the north-west coast of Faranda, which marked the turning point in the journey. After this they would be heading south, back towards Fiz Gorgo and winter. It took all her spare time to complete her image of the seventh layer and fit it into the mental model. The eighth would be almost impossible, for it was dim and almost completely obscured by the seven layers rotating above it. She was looking forward to the challenge.
Completing the surface of the eighth sphere was like doing a jigsaw puzzle through a pinhole. She had hundreds of separate tiny images in her head, but could not see enough at a time to fit them together. In despair, she put Golias’s globe away and went back to her mapping.
Towards the end of the odyssey, Tiaan was sitting, as usual, on the platform at the back of the thapter. Malien had followed the coast all the way south, and then south-east. Here Faranda became a narrow, mountainous peninsula like the handle of a spoon, extending down to Tikkadel, midway along the Foshorn, which resembled its bowl. To her right was the Sea of Thurkad, then the island of Qwale. Running towards her was the short Sea of Qwale which separated the island from Meldorin.
On her left, clearly visible beyond the mountains from this altitude, lay the white-crusted immensity of the Dry Sea, so vast, arid and hot that seldom had it been crossed. Tiaan had eyes for it whenever she could spare them from her mapping, though that was seldom. Unfortunately she had little time for spectacles at the moment. A chain of powerful nodes ran down the handle of Faranda, so close together that many fields overlapped at once, and it was difficult to sort out which was which. Malien seemed to be having trouble too – the note of the thapter kept swinging high then plunging low.
What kind of fields were out there, in the Dry Sea? The urge to investigate was overwhelming. Tiaan could see the rainbow shadows of a number of odd, elongated fields, but their sources were too far off to discern.
At Tikkadel, Malien turned right to cross the Sea of Thurkad, intending to pass over Qwale, which as far as they knew still resisted the enemy, and thence on to Meldorin Island.
As the thapter turned, Tiaan felt a bulging pressure in her head, as if a balloon was being inflated inside it, and a momentary shearing pain. Purple lights began to pulse behind her eyes and more bright spots drifted across her vision, resembling the migraines she sometimes suffered after overusing her talent. Colours exploded in her mind. ‘Aah. Help!’ she groaned, putting her hands over her eyes