My grandfather’s map room is in a tall tower that overlooks the sea. The map scrolls are held in oiled leather tubes, a wax seal on each set with his sigil. Seven narrow windows admit the light, at least in the months when the storm shutters are not closed against the elements. A scribe is employed to tend the place, and spends his days there from dawn to dusk, ready to open the tubes for anyone authorized to view the contents, and to seal them away again when the work is done.
‘You’ve never thought to suggest a different room?’ I asked the scribe as the wind tried to steal the map for the twentieth time. I had been there an hour, chasing documents across the chamber, and was ready to commit murder. How Redmon hadn’t taken a crossbow and opened up on the folk below through his seven windows I didn’t know. I caught the map before it left the table and replaced the four paperweights it had shrugged off.
‘Good ventilation is essential for preserving the vellum,’ Redmon said. He kept his gaze on his feet, his quill turning over and over in his hand. I think he worried I might damage his charges in my temper. Had he known me he would have worried about his own health. He looked narrow enough to fit through one of the windows.
I located the hills I had seen through the view-ring, and found the general area of the particular hill where the red dot had sat so patiently. I had wondered if there might truly be a red light blazing on that hillside, so bright it could be seen from the dark vaults of heaven, but I reasoned that it had grown no brighter as my view closed in upon it and so it must have been some clever artifice, like a wax mark on a looking glass that seems to override your reflection.
‘And what does this signify?’ I asked, my finger on a symbol that covered the region. I felt pretty sure I knew. There were three similar symbols marked on the maps of Ancrath in my father’s library, covering the regions of Ill Shadow, Eastern Dark, and Kane’s Scar. But perhaps they served a different purpose in the southlands.
Redmon stepped to the desk and leaned in. ‘Promised regions.’
‘Promised?’ I asked.
‘The half-life lands. Not a place to travel.’
The symbols served the same purpose as they did in Ancrath. They warned of taints lingering from the Builders’ war, stains from their poisons, or shadows from the day of a thousand suns.
‘And the promise?’ I asked.
‘Noble Chen’s promise, of course.’ He looked surprised. ‘That when the half-life has spent itself these lands will be returned to man, to till and plough.’ Redmon pushed the wire-framed reading lenses further up his nose and returned to his ledgers at the big desk before the towering shelves of pigeonholes, each crammed with documents.
I rolled the scroll up and took it in my hand like a baton. ‘I’m taking this to show Lord Robert.’
Redmon watched with anguish as I left, as if I’d stolen his only son to use as target practice. ‘I’ll look after it,’ I said.
I found my uncle in the stables. He spent more time there than anywhere else, and since I’d met his shrew of a wife I had come to understand. Horses made her sneeze I heard it told, worse and worse minute by minute, until it seemed she would sneeze the eyes from her head. Robert found his peace amongst the stalls, talking bloodlines with his stable-master and looking over his stock. He had thirty horses in the castle stables, all prime examples of their lines, and his best knights to ride them, cavalrymen billeted away from the house guard and wall guard in far more luxury, as befits men of title.
‘What do you know of the Iberico?’ I called out as I walked toward him between the stalls.
‘And good afternoon to you, young Jorg.’ He shook his head and patted the neck of the black stallion leaning out at him.
‘I need to go there,’ I said.
He shook his head with emphasis this time. ‘The Iberico are dead land. Promised but not given. You don’t want to go there.’
‘That’s true. I don’t want to. But I need to go there. So what can you tell me?’ I asked.
The stallion snorted and rolled an eye as if venting Robert’s frustration for him.
‘I can tell you that men who spend time in such places sicken and die. Some take years before the poison eats them from within, others last weeks or days, losing their hair and teeth, vomiting blood.’
‘I will be quick then.’ Behind the set of my jaw second thoughts tried to wrest control of my tongue.
‘There are places in the Iberico Hills, unmarked save for the barren look of them, where a man’s skin will fall from him as he walks.’ My uncle pushed the horse away and stepped closer to me. ‘What grows in those hills is twisted, what lives there unnatural. I doubt your need exceeds the risks.’
‘You’re right,’ I said. And he was. But when was the world ever so simple as right and wrong? I blinked twice and the red dot watched me from the darkness behind my eyelids. ‘I know you’re right, but often it’s not in me to take the sensible path, Uncle. I’m an explorer. Maybe that itch is in you too?’
He rubbed his beard, a quick grin showing through the worry. ‘Explore somewhere else?’
‘I should take my foolish risks while I’m young, no? Better now than when that little girl you’ve found for me is grown and looking to me to keep her in silks and splendour. If my mistakes prove fatal, find her another husband.’
‘This is nothing to do with Miana. You just shouldn’t do this, Jorg. If I thought it would stop you I would tell you “no” and set a guard to watch you.’
I bowed, turned, and walked away. ‘I’ll take a mule. No sense risking good horseflesh.’
‘On that we’re agreed,’ he called after me. ‘Don’t let it drink from any standing water there.’
I stepped back into the brightness of the day. The wind still raked across the courtyard, cold from the sea, but the sun would burn you even so.
‘Visit Carrod Springs first!’ Robert’s shout reached me as I started for my quarters.
‘Qalasadi and Ibn Fayed.’ The names tasted exotic.
‘A man of power and a powerful man.’ My grandfather rested in the chair where the Earls of Morrow had sat for generations, facing the sea.
A circle of Builder glass, stronger than the walls around it and a full three yards in diameter, showed us the Middle Sea, the curvature of the Earth making it an azure infinity, white-flecked with waves. Out beyond sight across those depths, across the Corsair Isle, no further from us than Crath City, lay Roma and all her dominions.
Caliph Ibn Fayed might keep his court in the heart of a desert but his ships reached out across that sea, Moorish hands seeking to reclaim these lands that had been passed back and forth between Christendom and the Moslems since forever. Ibn Fayed’s mathmagician, Qalasadi, had likely returned to the shadow of the caliph’s throne to calculate the optimal timing for the next strike, and the odds of its success.
Far below us a wave slapped the cliffs, no tremor of it reaching the room but a high spray beading the glass. Twice a day they lowered a stable-boy with bucket and cloth to ensure that nothing but age dimmed Grandfather’s view.
‘Four sails,’ he said.
I had only seen three. The merchant cog, red-hulled, hauling cargo along the coast, and two fishing boats, bobbing further out.
Grandfather saw my frown. ‘Out there, on the horizon.’ A soft-voiced man despite the creaks of age.
A white flash. The sails of some wide-ranging vessel. A warship? A pirate cutter from the Isle? Or some flat-bellied scow out of Ægypt, treasure-laden?
I went closer to the glass, pressed a hand to its coldness. How many centuries ago had