2.

 

From the window of his room, Zaifyr watched Samuel Orlan make his way down the cobbled street, his lamp a single, swaying beacon.

The old man shared very little in appearance with the Orlan he had known, the Seventy-First. He had been a slender man, olive-skinned and with black hair that had receded and thinned; he was soft spoken and genial. He had come to Asila in the company of his wife after the birth of his first child, wishing to avoid the fame his name provided. It was a time Zaifyr did not remember well, no more than two years before he began the ill-fated walk down the long, winding road from his tower to Asila, and to the destruction he wrought there. But he did remember the arrival of Samuel Orlan and his family.

He had greeted them in the library, a room dense with literature, with books across the walls and floors to such an extent that the dark, polished wood of his desk was in danger of being lost beneath the spines of books. He could still recall the desk clearly: its decay from order to disarray had later become a visual metaphor for his state of being. He remembered the changes in it minutely, his mind replaying images of inkwells once clean and stoppered merging into stained, overflown ones, with quills bent and blackened, and books once ordered left open at pages he could recall no reason for being so. It was with the picking up of one such book with his ink-stained hands that Samuel Orlan had forced him to focus his attention.

“Hello,” he said.

Zaifyr had responded.

“My family and I,” said the Seventy-First Samuel Orlan, “are moving into your city. I thought I would introduce myself.”

He had asked why, his voice hoarse with disuse.

“I was raised to be polite,” he replied. “It is also somewhat of a ritual. Whenever one of the previous Samuel Orlans arrived in a new city, he introduced himself.”

“No, not that,” Zaifyr said, slowly. “Why here?”

The cartographer smiled faintly. “Asila is away from the world. It has always been that. The tribes that lived here would become lost in the mountains and disappear from civilized sight for generations before reappearing again. When they did so, it would often be so by a singular representative, by a man or a woman who emerged from the snow and ice to visit the cities along the coast, or to cross the ocean. When they appeared, they were always adorned by charms made by their family, charms said to keep them safe. I see similar pieces of silver and copper around this library—once worn but no more, I believe.” Behind the cartographer, his wife and child stood silently as he spoke. The daughter resembled her mother greatly, Zaifyr remembered, though her dark hair was longer, and she did not lower her gaze from his in fear, as did the former. “It is for that isolation that my family and I have come. I am not like the men who have come before me. I do not like the fame that follows my name. I do not like the attention it draws to me, or to my family. I only wish to draw the maps that I can, and to ensure that the world is known by them.”

“People will come to find you, even here,” he said. “You will find no sanctuary from your name here.”

“But the kind of people who come here will be different. Here, they will not ask me to change the shape of the world.”

For a moment, Zaifyr did not understand. He would not ask another to shape the world for him, not even one with a legacy as long as Samuel Orlan’s. No, if he wanted to reshape the world, he would do so without permission. “My brothers and sisters would not allow that, either,” he said, finally.

“No,” the cartographer said. “But their kingdoms are larger, and the people in them are less and less beholden to those you call family.”

Zaifyr’s attention drifted to the pages on the table, to the faint, half outlines of hands that pressed the pages flat, that stopped the expensive vellum from rolling. “Settle your family in Asila if you want,” he said, softly. “But you are not my responsibility, Samuel. My responsibilities lie with others.”

He did not hear the three leave. He remembered looking up, some time later, to find that the room was dark, and that snow had begun to drift through the open window. He could not, even now, remember if it had been snowing when they entered. He remembered rising from his seat. He could see a haunt’s faint hands on the glass, looking to close it, but he did, instead. The moment was rare. Of late, he had been giving more and more of his power to the dead, allowing them tactile sensation within the world in the tower. He could feel their desire for more, could hear their whispered words, but he was still, at that stage, resisting.

When the cartographer returned, he did not bring his wife or daughter. He came alone, but, Zaifyr admitted, not unwanted. He found a chair on his third or fourth visit, and placed it in front of the desk, where the two would talk for hours. Samuel Orlan’s conversation was not difficult, but it was not long until Zaifyr began to sense in the cartographer a mind that was relentless in its search for information, a mind that, despite the proclamations of neutrality and a desire to be left alone, was full of politics and agendas; here was a man who kept his own council on what took place in the borders he drew, and who believed he had ownership in what took place in them.

In that way, the Seventy-First was no different from the current Samuel Orlan.

To him, to the Samuel Orlan who had sat beneath his lamp in Mireea, Zaifyr said, “I am not saying that I will help her.” His voice was neither slow nor disused, as it had once been. “It may not be physically possible. I want you to understand that.”

“It is no ordinary time on this mountain,” the old cartographer said. “You know that, yes?”

“It is not my intention to get involved in this war.”

“Of course. I would think nothing else.” Samuel Orlan rose from his chair, and turned to the door. Before opening it, however, he said, “I often wonder how it is that your brothers and sisters define their place in the world. It is hard to walk away from what you once held as your own—hard, I think, to watch it fall to events that you disagree with so vehemently, events conducted by men and women you have little respect for.”

Zaifyr shrugged. “That time is over.”

The cartographer inclined his head. “Of course.”

Yet, after the old man left, his words followed Zaifyr, followed him to the window where he watched the other man disappear into the streets. Once out of his sight, Zaifyr pulled down the blankets of his bed and climbed beneath them and let the implication of Orlan’s words sink in. As he began to fall asleep, he was struck by a sensation that there was a profound revelation in Orlan’s words, a truth that even Zaifyr, old as he was, would be surprised by.

But as he fell asleep, he knew that the thought was but a lie, and that no such truth existed.