the same orange as the thread the plainsman held in his hand.
The answer, she supposed, was the obvious one.
“Travel,” she said.
Sauxa vanished.
A thin orange line appeared in the next room, spearing up into the sky. Or, Lenares corrected, spearing down into the room.
A few moments later Sauxa came walking back into the Throne Room. “That was… odd,” he said.
“Can we go now?” Cylene called from her seat.
“Not just yet,” Noetos said. “Sauxa, we need to repeat the experiment.”
“Why?” the plainsman asked. But Lenares knew.
“We need to know if we can make a return journey,” said the fisherman.
It was disconcerting to see Sauxa vanish, but even more so to see him return. One moment gone, the next moment there.
“I can return myself,” he reported. “Just by keeping hold of the thread and saying the word ‘Travel.’ ”
“A third time, my friend,” Noetos said.
This time even the old man understood. “You want to see what happens if I release the thread.”
A few moments later he returned to report success. “It just hung there in the darkness.”
Noetos leaned across the map and grabbed a strand, then vanished.
“Such an impulsive man,” Sautea said. “I know exactly where he’s gone.”
An odd comment, Lenares thought, as his destination, Fossa, was marked clearly on the map. But the older fisherman wasn’t looking at the map, staring instead into the night sky as though expecting to see his friend returning, sliding down the thread as though it was a rope.
Noetos reappeared about ten minutes later. “We have a problem,” he said.
“Oh?” Bregor said. “What’s happened to Fossa?”
“Nothing beyond what we already knew,” the fisherman replied, wiping at his eyes. “Houses burned, no sign of anyone from what I could see, no lights, boats lying around in the harbour or beached on the rocks. Deserted, destroyed, desolate. That’s not what I meant.”
Bregor gave a huge sigh. “What then?”
“I didn’t end up in Fossa,” he said. “The beam of light deposited me at the top of the Cliff of Memory, about half an hour’s walking distance from the centre of town. It took me a few minutes to work out where I was, actually.”
“The map is inaccurate?” Moralye said, alarmed.
“A little, I think,” Noetos acknowledged. “Enough to be of concern.”
“Only a few minutes’ walk,” Consina said. “Better than walking from here!”
“I’ve worked with maps and charts before, and inaccurate charts are dangerous things,” said the fisherman. “Unmarked shoals, hidden reefs, islands marked on the map but not really there. Hegeoma, what would have happened had I arrived, say, ten minutes’ walk out to sea?”
“Oh,” the woman said, and nodded acknowledgment to him.
“Well, we may not be able to get to Andratan,” Seren said, “but at least we can come close. The sooner we start, the more time we have to walk the extra distance required.”
“Or swim,” Mustar said quietly.
“We can do better than that,” Lenares said, her mind whirling. “I suspect the map was damaged when it fell into Raceme. Bent, perhaps, out of its perfect shape. So all we have to do is send people to various parts of the world and measure the extent to which the map is inaccurate. I can then calculate the degree of error for travel to Andratan.”
“We’d be trusting to your figuring?” Noetos said.
“Unless you think you can do better,” she snapped back at him.
The next hour was likely the strangest in their lives, Lenares considered. Certainly of their journeys so far. One by one she sent people to their chosen destinations: Moralye to Dhauria, Sauxa to Instruere, Seren to Eisarn Pit, Sautea and Mustar to Fossa, as they could not be persuaded otherwise, Bregor to Raceme, Cyclamere to the canopy at Patina Padouk, Consina to Makyra Bay. Everyone but Sauxa and Bregor wanted to go to their own towns; if it were her, Lenares considered, she’d go somewhere storied and exotic, like Crynon or Lake Pouna. Or Ilixa Island, which until this moment had been considered a legend. She ached to take one of those threads in her hand and travel there, but she dared not move from her seat. The travellers might be able to leave their threads and return, but the cosmographer doubted she could climb down from the seat without dire consequences. She imagined the threads winking out, her companions left on their own with no hope of resuming their adventure.
She wondered how many of them would return. Would any of them opt to resume their lives at home, leaving the contention with Umu to others?