The Map I Never Showed Them

Kindling · page 38 withdrawn

Greetings again, my dear readers. Page thirty eight.

Some of you will remember this one without my help. Six worlds, each with something buried or carved or planted, aimed at a bearing and not a direction, on the theory that a monster driven off does not stop existing, it goes somewhere. Ossul pinned all six to his board and ran thread from each, and three pairs of lines came down on top of each other almost exactly, on a scale of light years, using instruments none of the six worlds know the others own.

Say it the plain way, because the page said it the plain way and I am not going to dress it up now that it is the last time anyone will read it. The Hraedh have been aiming four billion standing graves at Vædrun for four thousand clicks. Vædrun has been aiming a line of counting poles back at the Hraedh for nearly as long. Neither of them knows. Both of them think they are watching empty sky. I am the only entity in the recorded history of the galaxy who has seen both lines on the same table at the same time, and the other two pairs besides, and I have known that for a season and told nobody, on either world, or anywhere else.

That is not new information tonight. What is new is what happens to it in about four minutes.

Nobody else has this. I asked Ossul, that day, not to file the six coordinates as a matched pair, and he did not ask me why, and he did not write anything down, which is the one instruction in his entire career I am fairly sure he actually honoured to the letter. Deep Registry has six positions on file the way it has every position on file. It does not have the thread. The thread was on a second board with nothing on it but distance, and the second board came down that same night. So the map, the actual map, the one where the six lines mean something because somebody laid them next to each other on purpose, exists in exactly one place, which is this page, which is in my hand, over a fire I lit for reasons that have nothing to do with cartography.

When this goes in, the map stops existing. Not becomes harder to find. Stops existing. Nobody has plotted it since, because I asked the one person who could to specifically not.

I did think, for as long as it takes to think a thing and set it back down, about copying the six numbers onto a slip and walking it down nine decks before I did this. It would take him ten minutes with the sewing kit to have it back on the board exactly as it stood. I thought about it the way you think about a chore you have already decided not to do, which is to say honestly, and then not at all.

Here is why, and I would rather you had the plain reason than a better one I could write for you instead. It is not that I have decided, again, tonight, that Vædrun and Jötunheimr are safer not knowing. I decided that once already and I am not proud enough of the decision to want to make it twice in one evening. The plain reason is that sending it means writing Ossul a note explaining why I am suddenly asking him to do the opposite of what I asked him six months ago, and I do not have a spare paragraph in me tonight for a note like that. I have fifty seven more of these to get through. Composing the explanation is more work than not sending it, and that is the whole of the arithmetic, and I am aware how that reads next to four billion graves.

I went looking, before I started this page, for the exact tolerance the reckoner gave me, the fraction of a degree the Hraedh cut their own stone to. I had it once. I could have told you the number without checking. It is not where I go to find it now, and I have stopped being surprised by that and started, instead, just noting it and moving on, which I suppose is its own kind of tolerance.

The page catches at the corner Ossul's own handwriting is on, the coordinates he copied out for me that first afternoon, and for a moment the numbers are lit up brighter than they were on the paper, the way a thing burning briefly outshines the thing it was, and then it is the six pins with nothing behind them, wherever they still are on his board, meaning six positions and nothing else, forever, as far as anyone left standing will ever be able to tell.

Fifty seven slots left. Thirty four gone, ten of them with an account attached and twenty four without, and I ran that subtraction twice tonight because I did not care for it the first time. Vædrun keeps watching empty sky tonight. So does Jötunheimr. So do the other four. I am the last thing that knew otherwise, and in about a minute I will not be either.

This is Lu'kifær Morkinstar. Page thirty eight, withdrawn.