She passed up the map, and he took it reluctantly, inspecting it almost sideways, as if to give himself an excuse for not resolving the lines and marks.
‘This,’ he began, ‘is not straightforward. There are inlets and promontories, bays and islands. The shape and nature of the land is complicated.’
‘We know,’ she said. ‘But we have no idea what we’re doing here. Dalip’s right: if you want this finished, we need someone who can at least give us a start.’
‘The reason,’ said Simeon, ‘I keep all this knowledge in my head is so the geomancers can never take advantage of it. A drawn map of it all? By God, I hadn’t thought about the implications of this.’
She stood before him. She didn’t know what else to do. It didn’t seem right to bat her eyelids or wheedle. Her pitch had to stand on its own two feet or fall under its own weight. ‘This is the way we break the geomancers, or not. If it doesn’t work, we can have a big bonfire of it all.’
The decision appeared to almost break him. He shuddered and squirmed, turning away and turning back. In the end, he said, ‘Very well.’ He got down on his hands and knees, and silently started to order the fragments to make a seamless whole.
Not quite seamless. As he worked, he pushed pieces of paper this way and that, creating gaps where there was missing coastline, and overlapping some where there was continuity. When he’d done that, he turned whole sections to represent the actual geography of Down.
It was, Mary guessed, the first time this had ever happened, and she was a witness to it.
While Simeon was still working, she looked for her own map, and finally spotted it, right at the centre of what was emerging: a block of land thrust out into the sea. To the east and west, the land retreated◦– to the east, a long, finger-like bay, studded with islands, to the west, the open ocean.
‘Is this what it looks like?’
‘I suppose it does,’ said Simeon. He stepped back and raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘From the sea, you’re presented with a line, cliffs or hills or dunes or estuaries, and you make sense of it that way. You know what’s before you, and what’s to port and starboard, where the safe havens are and where the dangerous coasts lie.’
‘This is where we started,’ she said, and she pointed. ‘Here. We walked inland along the river to about here. Crows’ castle is over here. Bell’s, up here, between the two mountains.’
‘We found you, Singh, just here.’
‘There’s a portal on this island. Opens up during the plague.’
‘And I started over here.’ Simeon dabbed his finger down on the far side of the landmass. ‘My lodgings were in Guildford Street.’
Dalip squeezed in between them. ‘We were in Down Street. That’s only a couple of miles away.’
‘And yet here that is a distance of some hundred miles.’
‘If you controlled the portals, you could cover that in half an hour. You’d not even have to break into a run.’
‘Such is the power offered by this prize.’ He gave the maps one last look. ‘You’ve plenty more work ahead, so I’ll take my leave. When we can source the materials to aid you, I’ll send them along. My first priority is to deal with that damnable rifleman.’
He left them, with Mary squinting at the outline, trying to see a pattern.
‘I don’t get it.’
‘I don’t think we’re meant to yet.’ Dalip looked at the unsorted maps. ‘We have to try and make a record of what we have so far, even if it’s rough.’
‘We’ve got no paper, no cloth, no pens and no pencils.’
‘There’s a pen and ink back on the ship.’
‘Everything we need is back on your ship or mine.’ She pressed her lips together. ‘This is stupid. There’s one rifle in the whole of Down and it’s pointing at us. We have to be able to do something about that. I mean, we’ve done plenty of stupid shit already.’
‘You can’t turn into a giant bird,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to think of something else.’
‘All we need is a fucking pencil and paper. How hard can that be? Anywhere else and we’d nip round the shops. Here, we have to make it our fucking selves.’ Her gaze fell on the bag she’d made for the maps. ‘Open that up. Cut the thread until it goes flat.’ It was her turn to say: ‘I’ll be right back.’
She climbed down the nearest ladder, not particularly caring if anyone was at the bottom. She ran out into the courtyard, where some of the pirates lazed and played dice. It had gone dark again, and she hadn’t even noticed. The sky was a deep, dark blue, while the square yard was lit with lanterns. It looked, for a moment, like one of those classical paintings they’d shown her to try and interest her in something, anything, other than getting into trouble. The light was warm, illuminating the crew’s faces and casting soaring shadows against the pale stone walls.
And she stood in the middle of it, a girl in a red dress.
It wasn’t what she was here for. She oriented herself, and headed for the place where she’d eaten her bowl of food, and the woman had pulled her face away.
When she found it, she saw that the fireplace, far from being cold, was blazing away, flickering bright flames from the pile of wood that was burning.
To the half-dozen people present she said: ‘What did you do with the ashes?’
They hadn’t done anything with the ashes. They’d just knocked them to one side, and built a new fire. She could feel the heat on her face and arms as she approached and crouched down. The logs crackled and spat, and the pops they made startled her, making her jerk back, much to everyone’s amusement.
She wasn’t with them, even though Simeon had extended some sort of protection over her. With the fire in her face, she was intensely aware that she was blind behind her. She ignored the feeling, got out her dagger, and started gingerly fishing around in the white ash. She’d scrape around for as long as she could, then pull her hand back to cool off.
She had retrieved a few small pieces of charcoal, and was in the middle of recovering the mother lode, a piece the length of her finger, when she realised the laughing had stopped and apart from the spitting fire, the room had grown quiet.
‘Whatever you think I’ve done, you’re wrong,’ she said. She didn’t turn around.
‘She is dead,’ said Elena.
‘I know. I was there. If I could’ve stopped it, I would.’
‘You made a deal with Crows.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘You betrayed him like you betrayed Luiza.’
‘I lied to him because I didn’t want him to get away with it. I never lied to you. I’ve never lied to you.’ That was probably a lie, too, but she had her fingers on the precious stick. She dragged it back and let it lie on the hearthstone. She was sweating, and not just because of the heat.
‘You are being protected because of the maps you stole. The maps Luiza died over.’
Mary straightened up, dagger in hand.
‘Elena, have you done something we’re all going to regret?’
Elena, white and pinch-faced, said nothing.
‘Those maps are your ticket out of here. What kind of fucking idiot would destroy that, just to get back at me, over something I haven’t even done?’
Still nothing.
‘Where’s Sebastian?’
The other people in the room had silently travelled from being neutral observers to being actively interested in the outcome of the confrontation playing out in front of them. One of them scraped a chair as he rose, and headed out into the night. Another quickly followed. The rest moved to block the doorway.
‘If anything’s happened to Dalip, I’ll run you through myself,’ she said. She was trembling. But there was nothing she could do.
24
It hadn’t taken him long. Once he’d loosened all the cords and opened the cloak out, there wasn’t much left to do. He’d work a seam loose to the point where he could nick the thread with the edge of his machete, and gradually pull the pieces apart, stopping every so often to cut the thread again. He was left with the long back panel and the sides, which eventually lay flat on the floor like a flayed white skin.