The Cartographer Complete Series

by A. C. Cobble

  More shouts and a high-pitched squeal drifted through the door of her cabin. Pettybone was haranguing the crew mercilessly. One thing she’d learned from the treacherous Captain Haines was that it didn’t do to have others manage your work. If the crew needed discipline, it was best they saw it come from her.

  She closed her books and left them on the table for another time. Now, she needed to train her men to be the best damn aircrew the empire had ever seen, or close enough.

  The Cartographer V

  “Winchester,” muttered Oliver. “Where did you stick my maps of the Southlands?”

  “They ought to be in the drawers, m’lord,” claimed the valet.

  Grunting, Oliver tugged on a brass pull and hauled open a heavy drawer. Three yards long, a yard and a half deep, the thing was a huge custom job set underneath his drafting table in the center of his study. There were half a dozen such drawers spaced around the edges of the table, and they were sized for large maps to lay flat. Against the wall, he had more drawers and shelves. The drawers stuffed with original maps, the shelves with rolled copies. Those were on cheaper parchment or smaller excerpts showing just a section of a territory excised from a larger depiction.

  That’s what he meant to do now, sketch out a small version of the coastline around Durban in the Southlands for a new factor traveling there. He was fulfilling his role as a Company cartographer and trying to act normal. But after Derbycross and the attack against the Feet of Seheht, he hardly knew what that meant anymore.

  “Can’t a clerk handle this, m’lord?” complained Winchester, stooping on the other side of the table to peer into another drawer, shuffling through the maps. “These are the tropics, m’lord, so I think it must be on your side.”

  Oliver glared at the valet. “No, Winchester, a clerk cannot accurately copy my maps. It’s more than just drawing lines on a page, you know?”

  “Is it, m’lord?”

  “Frozen hell, Winchester,” griped Oliver. “Any fool can trace some lines, but any fool is apt to include errors. Without proper training, they wouldn’t even know it. A map is more than just a line designating a coast. It has to capture the nature of that coast. It has to convey the feel of the place, the sense a traveler would need to understand a new territory as they arrive. A well-drawn map allows the user to experience a land, which is far more important than just tracing a coastline or a road. I’ll give you an example. Outside of Durban, there’s a narrow channel through the reefs. It was used by pirates for centuries. Discovering it, and the false maps that were displayed in the markets of that city, made the Company a small fortune. We can’t trust that kind of interpretation to a clerk. They might draw the lines with accuracy, Winchester, but not with the truth.”

  “Are you saying your maps are inaccurate, m’lord?”

  “I’m saying when you read my maps, you know where you’re going,” snapped Oliver.

  “Understood, m’lord.” Holding up a map, Winchester asked, “Is this the Southlands?”

  “Those are the Darklands, Winchester,” advised Oliver. “Can’t you see the river down the center?”

  “I saw the sea was to the north,” complained the valet.

  “There is sea to the north of Enhover as well,” mentioned Oliver, “but you didn’t think the map was of our beloved nation.”

  “Perhaps the map didn’t quite capture the feel of the place, m’lord,” piped the valet, laying the map back down in the drawer.

  Oliver snorted. “Nice attempt, but it isn’t my map. It’s the Darklands. I’ve never been there. No one from Enhover has been in years, I suspect. Not even the factors in Durban will venture east to that grim place.”

  “Because of the sorcery, m’lord?”

  “Because of the sorcery,” agreed Oliver. He pulled out a map and settled it on the table. “Here it is, the Southlands. When I drafted this, there wasn’t much known of the place, just the coastline, the terrain around Durban, and the steppe. See here, this is the channel we found. It allowed us to bring our freighters into the port and avoid harassment from the pirates that flit about the place like flies on a carcass.”

  Leaning closer, Winchester peered at the map. “The steppe. That is this blank space in the south?”

  “It is,” confirmed Oliver. “It’s rugged, arid terrain. Nearly impossible to scout on foot. What we’ve learned of it, we learned from the deck of an airship. Thirty, forty leagues south of Durban, there’s nothing but those rocky crags and scrub bushes. Beyond that, it’s rolling hills and wild grasslands. Not so dissimilar to central Enhover, I suppose, but where we are blanketed in constant fog and misting rain, the Southlands are covered in sunshine and dust. The steppe gets hard rain, I’m told, in the form of violent storms, but those tough grasses don’t seem to need much of it.”

  “The traders, they come from the steppe?”

  “We’re not really sure,” admitted Oliver. “Once or twice a moon, the caravans materialize from the rocky foothills. They trade, and then they return the way they came. The Company sent men to follow them on several occasions but we lost them in the rocks or out on the plains. When I was exploring the terrain around the colony, I requested an airship to assist in mapping farther south, but the board denied my request. At the time, as now I suppose, we had more routes to run than airships to run them. Is there a city the traders head to farther south? Are they nomads? We’re not sure.”

  Winchester frowned at the map.

  “There is more to the world than even the Company and Crown know of,” said Oliver. “So much more.”

  A gentle rap sounded on the door. Both Oliver and the valet looked up.

  “Yes?”

  A liveried servant ducked her head in. “A guest, m’lord.”

  Oliver frowned and glanced at the ticking clock on the mantle above the fireplace. “This late? I’m not expecting company. Who is it?”

  “It’s, ah, I don’t know, m’lord,” admitted the servant. “One of the Child baronesses. It could be Isabella, but I’m afraid I have trouble telling them apart.”

  “So late. Why—”

  Oliver was cut off as Winchester squeaked. He turned to his valet and saw the man’s eyes bulging, a hand pressed over his mouth as if he was trying to hold in a giggle.

  Sighing, Oliver turned back to his servant and instructed, “Show her in, but first, please take my valet out with you.”

  The Priestess IV

  “This is going to hurt,” advised Kalbeth, dipping a thin, steel needle into a small pot of ink mixed with her blood.

  “You said that yesterday,” remarked Sam.

  “Yesterday, I was doing touchup work across your arms and chest. Today, I’m doing intensive, detailed work on your back. Sam, this design is going to require me inking nearly a quarter of your skin over here. When I say this is going to hurt, I mean it’s going to hurt a lot.”

  “I’m sure you’ll nurse me to health when it’s over,” replied Sam dryly.

  She didn’t turn to look, but she knew her friend was smiling. Friend. Was Kalbeth a friend, something more, something less? She didn’t know. She had no point of reference with something like this. She’d never been close to anyone except Thotham, but it was different with her mentor. Different because he was the one man she considered her superior, perhaps. Or maybe because they’d never slept together. The man was what she imagined a father and mother to be like— caring, demanding, and proud.

  She shifted, wondering. Was Kalbeth her lover, her friend, someone she used when she needed something and left when she did not? Did it matter?

  “Hold still. I don’t want to hurt you,” demanded Kalbeth.

  “What?”

  “You’re not going to be facing off against deadly sorcerers and saving us all if you keep wiggling and this ends in a mess of squiggly lines instead of proper script and patterns,” said Kalbeth.

  “Sorry, I…”

  “Can’t keep still?” questioned the woman.

  “Just start,” instr
ucted Sam.

  She felt soft lips on her back, and when they moved, a quick prick from a needle jolted her. She clenched her hands together. Another prick, right beside the first, and Kalbeth got to work. Tiny stab after tiny stab, the artist worked the ink and her own blood into Sam’s skin, fashioning intricate designs and shapes bordered in arcane script that no more than a few people in all of Enhover could read, script Kalbeth had learned from her parents over two and a half decades before when she’d lived in the Darklands.

  Abandoned in Durban, Kalbeth had been pressed onto a ship bound for Enhover as a deck swab and far worse. She’d been tossed onto the docks in Southundon, diseased and on the verge of death from hunger and rough treatment. The Church had taken her in, healed her, and showed her there were more difficult fates than life aboard the ship.

  When Sam had been selected and taken by Thotham from the Church’s orphanage, Kalbeth had snuck out and followed. She’d followed until the old priest had spotted her and stopped her. He had sensed something about the girl standing there on the busy street, though it wasn’t until years later that Sam understood what. Then, she realized the kindness the old man had shown both of them.

  At the time, it seemed he’d sold Kalbeth like chattel, sold her like all that had come before in the devastated girl’s life. He’d taken both girls inside of the Lusty Barnacle and declared the proprietor would watch Kalbeth. Even then, Sam had known the nature of the place. How could she not? Some of the girls working the room weren’t any older than she. For years, she thought her mentor had thrown her friend and first lover into a life of prostitution. Thotham never told her it was another sort of apprenticeship that he’d placed Kalbeth in.

  She had hated Thotham for what he’d done. It was only when she stumbled across Kalbeth accidentally on her own and learned what the years had contained for her old friend that Sam understood. Her friend had been given a chance, but one that carried incredible risk.

  Kalbeth was attuned to the underworld and the spirits that resided there. She could sense them, sense them clinging to those who lived like shadows, sense them flitting on the other side, awaiting a bridge to come back or for the wheel to grind them down to where they could be reborn. Kalbeth sensed those straining to pass through the shroud, and she’d learned to capture them, dragging a portion of them across the barrier and tying them to the world of the living through her art.

  She did not summon the shades fully into the world of the living, but she tethered them to a living soul. Was it sorcery, or was it something else? In the eyes of the Church, it was clear. Kalbeth was what Sam had been trained to hunt and kill. Yes, she had finally understood why Thotham did what he did.

  Sam had met another once, with the same natural ability to hear the wails of the spirits, their constant lamentation, their endless need. He’d visited them on their farm days after Northundon had been attacked. The man had been untrained, Thotham had told her, and was unprepared for when the Church decided they no longer needed him.

  Eventually, in the girl’s home where the Church stabled its livestock, they would have learned what Kalbeth was capable of. She would have been broken down until nothing was left, nothing but her ability and an unassailable sense of worthlessness. Then, they would have used her until she’d been wrung dry, and then they would have killed her.

  If her masters didn’t do it themselves, if they’d thought Kalbeth still had strength, then Thotham or Sam would have been asked to kill her. Instead, thanks to Thotham’s snap decision, Kalbeth had been placed with Goldthwaite and trained as best the dark mistress was capable of. She’d been left there until Sam accidentally found her again.

  They had used her, Sam and Thotham both. Sam had claimed she would never betray her old lover, that she would never let Kalbeth risk her own life.

  She’d lied.

  Every time Kalbeth trailed her fingers across the barrier, collecting the souls that lingered there, she covered herself in that cold darkness. Some of it clung to her, and some of her clung to the shroud, to the underworld. There would be a time when that darkness would catch her. When it did, it would draw her with it to the other side. Sam knew Kalbeth’s life would not be a long one, and every time the woman practiced her art, it grew shorter.

  “Are you feeling any of this?” wondered Kalbeth, tapping her needle confidently along Sam’s flesh.

  Sam grunted.

  “It’s been almost a turn of the clock,” continued the artist. “Let’s take a break.”

  “I can continue,” said Sam.

  “I can’t.”

  Kalbeth ran a damp cloth over Sam’s back, wiping up excess ink and blood. When Sam sat up, she felt her skin tingle as hundreds of tiny needle pricks protested the movement.

  “That does sting a bit,” she hissed.

  Kalbeth smiled wanly. “I hope it is worth it.”

  “So do I,” said Sam. “So do I.”

  The Cartographer VI

  “Any word from Pettigrew?” wondered Oliver, leaning in the doorway.

  Director Raffles looked up, surprised. “I didn’t know you were coming down to Company House, m’lord.”

  “I was at the airship dock speaking with my captain,” replied Oliver. “I thought I’d pass through on the way back up to the palace.”

  “Ah,” murmured Raffles. “Director Pettigrew informed me he was meeting with the balance of the board in two days. I expect they’ll ratify the change in shares as compensation for use of your airship and your work with your father. How is that progressing, by the way?”

  “It’s going well,” said Oliver. “I’ve passed some messages with the old man. He has no real interest in involving himself deeply in Company affairs and he’s well aware Cardinal Langdon is receiving his information from Governor de Bussy. If there is one thing my father cannot stand, it is foreign interference. No, he’s merely using this recent disruption as a chance to chastise the Company’s board. It’s no secret he feels they’ve grown too confident, and this is his excuse to rattle his sword and put them back into their place. My father has no qualms about Enhover’s merchants becoming very wealthy, but he is king.”

  “Understood,” murmured Raffles.

  “Perhaps if you send that bit of gossip to Southundon, you could phrase it more tactfully?” asked Oliver. “My father doesn’t like merchants thinking they can encroach on Crown business, even if their charter implies they can. He’d like me putting words in his mouth even less.”

  “Of course,” said Raffles. “I will keep the specifics between you and I, but I believe the sentiment will be understandable and reassuring to the directors. I won’t go as far to say that they appreciate your father’s point of view, but they understand he is the king, and there are consequences of pushing the monarchy too far. If they have not yet crossed the line with Edward, I believe the board will be happy to retreat gracefully. It’s the best they can hope for, I think, given what Governor Dalyrimple was involved in. We ought to take this a stern reminder to get our house in order, and then do so!”

  Oliver nodded, glancing at the papers scattered on Raffles’ desk. He pushed aside a small pile and ran his fingers over the map carved into the wood. “This desk has always bothered me, you know?”

  Raffles smirked. “It bothers you because you’ve seen it and mapped it. To me, what is a few hundred leagues? I’ve never been to the Westlands or the Southlands, and I never intend to go. I don’t need the table to navigate by, and it supports my paperwork just fine.”

  Grinning, Oliver looked at the paperwork again. “Imbon?”

  “What?” asked Raffles, gathering up a sheaf and tapping it on the desk to align the papers together.

  “Was that a dispatch from Imbon?” questioned Oliver. “From Jain Towerson? The quarterly isn’t due for another month.”

  “No, ah, another month sounds right,” mumbled Raffles. He stood. “Care to visit the club on your way to the palace? This time of day we might find the membership manager in the office. Perhaps w
e can work on bending that age restriction for you.”

  Oliver leaned forward and pushed a paper aside, revealing a thin parchment embossed with Company letterhead.

  “That’s no—” blurted Raffles.

  Oliver plucked the paper free and frowned as he read it. “A discovery, a trove of artifacts?”

  The director shifted.

  Oliver looked at him. “What is this?”

  “I barely had time to peruse it myself, m’lord.”

  “The pool I located in Imbon,” guessed Oliver. “It was not star-iron at the bottom but a hidden cache of… small figurines and stone tablets carved with symbols and indecipherable writing, this says?”

  “I, ah, I believe it was something of the sort,” muttered Raffles. “Perhaps some record of past kings? Likely worthless junk.”

  “It doesn’t say that here,” remarked Oliver, shaking the paper in his hand.

  “It doesn’t?”

  “Why was I not informed about this?” questioned Oliver. “As a shareholder, I’m entitled to any news relating to the commercial prospects of the colony, and as the man who discovered this location, there may be a finder’s fee involved. If nothing else, it’s simple courtesy.”

  “I didn’t send the report, m’lord. I only received it this morning and haven’t had time to read it in detail,” protested Raffles. “It didn’t occur to me you wouldn’t have gotten a copy as well. I can check into why you didn’t receive it, though…”