He staggered and started to fold. She could have caught him and helped him to the floor, but she was too busy wrestling with the lock. It was stiff, but she managed it. Then all she had to do was turn the huge door knob, which took both hands and even then she could barely manage it with palms already slick with sweat.
Before she bolted, she checked behind her. The guard had fallen awkwardly, and was groggily flailing around, trying to right himself again. He’d have done better shouting an alarm, but it’d only take a moment before he worked that out for himself.
She was outside, running up the slope to the road. Still no pursuit, but no reason to let up, either. Her feet kicked up the dust, and if anyone was looking, she’d be easy to spot. On the road now, arms and legs pumping, dress rising around her thighs. She was between the compounds now, high walls rising on both sides of her. She slowed down and picked a door more or less at random. It happened to be the third on the left: it could have been any of them.
‘Open this fucking door. We need to deal right now, or you’ll lose the maps for ever.’
Worryingly, the door opened almost immediately, to reveal a drab man and, behind him, a white-masked figure in scarlet. She stepped through, and the door was closed at her back.
‘Right,’ she gasped. ‘No pissing around. We tell each other the truth, or we both go home empty-handed.’
The man at the door deferred to his master.
The mask dipped. ‘The truth? Are you certain you’re ready for that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very well, then. Follow me.’
26
He heard shouting. He was still befuddled by both sleep and Mary’s words. He dragged his hands across his face and sat back on his haunches. What was he going to do?
Apparently, the first thing was be interrogated by the captain.
‘Singh. Answer me plainly. Has she taken anything physical with her?’
Dalip looked around him. It appeared everything was still almost exactly where he’d left it. He had the maps, the sailcloth, even the charcoal, though much reduced.
‘No. I…’
‘And before she left—’
‘She’s gone? Gone where?’
‘She blackjacked the fellow I posted on the door and fled, last seen heading for the buildings north of here.’
‘Not back towards the entrance, or up the cliff?’
‘I can only conclude that she has gone over to the Lords of the White City. And even if she’s not made off with any actual booty, she knows what she knows. What did she tell you before she ran?’
‘Only,’ he said, and shrugged helplessly, ‘only that I had to work on the map. Work out what it all means. Is it true we’re leaving?’
‘Yes. And sooner now, if we can.’
‘And that Mary can’t come with us?’
‘Those are the rules of the ship. They’re older than my tenure, and if I broke them, I’d have a mutiny on my hands. Sometimes, Singh, it is that simple.’ Simeon nudged his hat higher. ‘By rights, I should sequester all of this and determine your part in this endeavour before letting you anywhere near the maps again.’
‘But I’m as close as anyone ever has been to cracking this.’ If Simeon took the maps away now, whatever Mary was doing would be wasted. ‘Let me keep working. It’ll take moments to collect it all together◦– just say the word and I’ll be ready to move out.’
‘You’ll come with us?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Are you sure your loyalties don’t lie elsewhere?’
‘No. I mean, yes. I’m sure.’
What he’d told Simeon wasn’t a lie, in as far as it went. He was acting in the crew’s best interests◦– and the interests of everyone on Down. He had to stay with the maps, wherever they went. Mary knew that. Of course she knew that.
‘If you two have hatched any kind of plot,’ he began, then stopped himself.
‘If there’s a plot, I don’t know what it is.’
‘I find two betrayals in one day a little hard to stomach. The person who makes that three will suffer my wrath.’ The captain narrowed his eyes. ‘Whoever that might be.’
‘I understand,’ said Dalip. He did. If he was to make the most of whatever time he might have, he had to start now. ‘I’ll just… crack on, shall I?’
‘No one realises how hard this job is,’ said Simeon, and stalked off, leaving Dalip with no doubt that if he put so much as a toe in the wrong place, he’d be in mortal danger.
He bent low over the cloth map, looking at the dots and lines Mary had made. ‘No pressure, then,’ he told himself. ‘None whatsoever.’
What did he have to remember? Lines went from portal to portal. No more than three portals in one line. Villages lay on the lines. Castles lay where lines crossed.
Was there enough information to arrive at a unique solution, or was he going to find multiple ways of joining the portals together, any one of which was as likely as the next? Could he, in fact, predict the pattern before he started?
If he was going to design a system from scratch, he’d want it to be simple and elegant. Something involving geometry. Triangles or hexagons. That was a possibility. The alternative was a hideous spider web of criss-crossing lines that made no sense.
He had stubs of charcoal, but he knew there’d be more rubbing out than actual lines. Something impermanent, then. He narrowed his eyes and thought about that, until he laid sight on the unpicked threads that had held Mary’s bag together. He collected the longer sections, and placed them on the floor next to him.
He held up the first thread, and laid it down from the Down Street portal, through the village they’d found, and up to Bell’s castle. But he could keep going: the line went just west of north, and through two more portals. That filled the complement of three portals. Another line crossed the coast where they’d waited for the boat to be built. If that lined up with the portal on the island that Mary had drawn in, then that would cross the first at Bell’s. But the two portals to the north-east didn’t make it a triplet.
The two to the east lined up exactly with Down Street. Down Street was already part of a different three. So if a portal could be a member of two different triplets, the number of possible matches had at least doubled. He could eliminate some of those by looking at the positions of villages. In fact, it wasn’t the portals he needed to be looking at at all. If there were dozens of ways to join them together in threes, he needed to ignore them until the very last moment. It was the villages and castles that revealed where the lines of power flowed and crossed.
He took away the second line. His confidence was high for the first: there was a direct path between the portal, the village and the castle. But there were two castles some twenty or so miles apart. Two crossing points on two separate lines: linking them also fitted the two north-east portals, but not the one on the island. If that was the case, then the island portal was on an entirely different line.
He could live with that.
Then he made the connection that when a village was close to a portal, it was likely that they were part of the same line. Villages in the middle of nowhere were more difficult to associate with a portal, and easier to fit to a castle.
Lines danced in front of his eyes. He could almost see it, yet every time he laid down what he thought was the correct track, he’d see that there was a better choice if only he used those markers rather than these. On adjusting it to lie along the new direction, there was an even better way.
No matter how many lines he laid down, no matter how often he changed them, nothing would come. There was no elegant solution waiting to jump out of the map and show itself. It was, in and of itself, the single most frustrating problem Dalip had ever tried to solve. He was so, so close, yet so, so far.