A Secret Atlas (6 page)

736th year since the Cataclysm

Anturasikun, Moriande

Nalenyr

His Imperial Highness Prince Cyron patiently awaited Qiro Anturasi’s pleasure. The Prince

had arrived at the cartographer’s tower with only a small retinue of his Keru bodyguard.

They, in accord with a decree handed down by his father, waited inside the base of the

tower but outside the gates that led to the core. Anturasikun was a labyrinth of public and

private spaces, but few were allowed into the private chambers and workshop. Though the

Keru had sworn their lives in Cyron’s service, even they would not be allowed past the

golden gates.

It did not matter that the tower had been fashioned by the nation’s greatest builders and

decorated by the most celebrated artists, or that the halls housed wonders from around

the world. It was a prison. Cyron’s father had explained to him, twenty years earlier, why

Qiro Anturasi could not be allowed out of the tower. His skill at mapmaking and his

knowledge of the world made him more valuable to Nalenyr than all the Nine Principalities’

known treasures. Locked in Qiro’s head were the worldly details that allowed Nalenyr to

prosper, so he, himself, had to be shut away.

To lose him would be to lose everything.
When the Empress had divided the Empire into

the Nine Principalities, she installed the late Emperor’s wives and their families to rule

each one. She made ambition counteract ambition and brought the most ambitious of the

Princes with her on the Turasynd Campaign. While Nalenyr had not begun as the most

powerful or prosperous of the Nine, the reopening of trade with the world filled its coffers.

With that gold Cyron could buy troops to hold the lords of Deseirion at bay.

Qiro has given us everything, and yet we take from him freedom.
It had seemed then to

the Prince as if this were the ultimate cruelty, but he soon grew to understand its

necessity. Qiro Anturasi’s genius lay at the heart of his personality, and with it came an

inability to tolerate stupidity or insubordination. This made Qiro abrupt, abrasive, and

unpredictable.
It even makes him think he can keep a prince waiting.

Cyron laughed, because he knew he would wait. And wait.

Waiting was part of life and Cyron cultivated patience, for it was unlikely to get one killed.

His brother, Crown Prince Araylis, had been impatient to see the Desei forced back out of

Helosunde and had paid for his impatience with his life. Reports had come back that

Prince Pyrust—the man who led the Desei and who had even come south to celebrate the

Festival in Moriande—had been the one who killed his brother. Though that act had won

Cyron the throne, he felt disinclined to thank Pyrust, since Pyrust himself would be more

than happy to kill all the Komyr and take the throne of Nalenyr for himself.

And then Qiro would find himself well matched in temperament and obstinacy.

Qiro had sent a request to the court to be allowed to leave the tower during the

anniversary Festival and his own birthday celebration. The request seemed reasonable

and Cyron would have been happy to grant it, save for the influx of people from the world

over who had come, ostensibly, to rejoice in the dynasty’s longevity. His Master of

Shadows had complained of the influx of spies during Festival, and Cyron could not

chance exposing Qiro to kidnappers or assassins.

Cyron found it highly unlikely that the Desei had traveled south with any intent to kill

Qiro—or anyone else for that matter—but he would not have put it past Pyrust to make

use of an opportunity.
He could have dreamed up any number of plots that he seeks to put

in play.
To limit their ability to cause trouble, he’d made room for Pyrust’s entourage in Shirikun, at the city’s northern edge.

Likewise the people from Erumvirine to the south had been housed in Quunkun, and the

envoys from the Five Princes nations had taken up residence in the towers corresponding

to their patron deity. Kojaikun—the tower of the Dog—served as no one’s official

residence since Helosunde was still subject to Deseirion conquest and Helosunde’s

Council of Ministers had yet to select a prince. Cyron still allowed his Keru warriors to

station an honor guard there. It made the Keru happy and would discomfit Prince Pyrust.

Most of the preparations had been carried out by protocol ministers and their attendants,

with the Prince only nominally overseeing things. The honor guard had been posted by

direct order, since the bureaucrats and astrologers had deemed it improper. They

explained to him about occlusions in the heavens and Kojai’s power waning, but he had

little tolerance for their explanations and overruled them.

The bureaucrats sought to placate heaven, hell, and earth, while the Prince focused far

more on earth. The conflict between Deseirion and Helosunde had less to do with

constellations and gods than Helosunde’s first prince having been born of a woman from

Deseirion. She had urged her son to take her home province as the first step to becoming

the new Emperor, and war had simmered on that border long before Pyrust and his father

had successfully invaded. But for Naleni support of the Helosundian mercenaries, the

Desei consolidation of their conquest would have been completed long since.

Politically it made good sense to placate the Helosundians, since their province served as

a buffer between Deseirion and Nalenyr. But Cyron also just liked annoying Pyrust. He

hoped his northern neighbor’s discomfort would manifest in more of the prophetic dreams

the Desei prince believed in, distracting him from any true deviltry.

A protocol minister could have delivered a refusal of Qiro’s request, but the Prince

overruled that as well. First, Cyron was aware that the minister likely would never make it

to Qiro’s presence, and certainly would wilt beneath the heat of the cartographer’s

reaction. More importantly, however, the Prince felt that, as Qiro’s jailer, it was up to him

to deliver the rejection personally.

The doors in the small rotunda where the Prince waited cracked open, and a small, bent

man shuffled through them. His face lit up with a smile, and he raised his head as much

as his twisted back would allow. “Highness, nine thousand pardons for keeping you

waiting.”

The Prince bowed deeply and respectfully. “You honor me, Ulan, by fetching me yourself.

Your work is far too important for you to be dispatched on such a trivial task.” Cyron

purposely refrained from using the imperial “we,” though his rank all but demanded it. As it

was, Ulan would natter on about how familiar the Prince was with him, and Qiro would see

the deference as befitting his status.

Ulan blew a long wisp of white hair from his face. “The pleasure is mine, Highness. My

brother said whichever of us produced the cleanest chart of Tirat would have this honor,

and I was not outdone.”

“You could only have been outdone, Ulan, had your brother set pen to paper, and he still

would have been hard-pressed to win.”

“You mustn’t say that, Highness.” The old man shook his head. “But here I am telling you

what you can and cannot do.”

“In the House of the Anturasi, many take orders.”

“They do, they do.”

The old man turned and waved the Prince through the doors, then closed them and

shuffled along the corridor, which led around and up to the fifth-floor workshop. The Prince

walked ahead of Ulan, letting his right hand trail along a wrought-iron railing as he

mounted the ramp and moved into the workshop’s light. Though he had visited the

Anturasi workshop many times, the sight never failed to impress him.

The ramp emerged in the center of a circular room a hundred feet in diameter. Aside from

a curtained wedge chopped out of the northern point, copy desks and drafting tables,

cabinets with large flat drawers and shelves packed with scrolled charts dominated the

room. Pillars supported the vaulted ceiling and, around the walls, high windows allowed

illumination. For fear of fire, the Principality provided magical lighting for evening work,

and ghostly blue light had often been seen glowing from the tower after sunset.

Dozens of Anturasi worked at the desks. The youngest—grandchildren and great-

grandchildren, all of them sprung from Ulan’s loins—fetched paper and refilled inkwells,

sharpened nibs and carefully powdered finished maps. Those a bit older copied city maps

or diagrams of fortifications—anything that would help them develop the skills they needed

to draft the truly important work. The adults, led by Ulan, worked at the largest tables,

making nautical charts of incredible accuracy. As travelers returned from voyages and

provided details, maps were revised so the next purchaser would have the most up-to-

date information possible.

This controlled chaos was filled with the scrape of pen on paper, the click of knife on quill,

the occasional crash of an inkwell smashing, and the even less frequent oath. The

Anturasi worked quickly, precisely, and as quietly as possible—as all three traits were the

only way to insulate themselves from Qiro’s wrath.

Qiro’s domain, in contrast to the rest of the workshop, lay out of sight beyond the blue

curtains hung from ceiling to floor. Prince Cyron made for the opening and, slipping

through, smiled. A second curtain—white—ten feet distant, guaranteed that the secrets

within would not be seen by accident. He made certain the curtains behind him were

drawn tightly shut before he opened the others.

He could not suppress a gasp. A segment of the curved wall had been whitewashed and

on it a map of the known world had been drawn twenty feet high and forty wide. The Nine

Principalities lay at the heart of the thing, as befitting their place in the world. The Turca

Wastes capped them to the north, and the vast Eastern Sea formed the eastern boundary.

The provinces and wastelands were drawn in to the west, with the eastern coast of far

Aefret forming the western boundary. Above it, sketched in with the faintest of detail, lay

the mythical lands of Etrusia.

Before the Time of Black Ice, the Empire had traded with the peoples of Etrusia via a land

route, but the Cataclysm that had broken the world had closed that path. Qiro’s expedition

fifty years earlier had gotten further than any other, but still showed the way was closed.

Cyron and he had discussed the possibility of trying the land route again, but the

successes at ocean exploration had made doing so a low priority.

So much of the ocean remained unknown, for most of the ships had gone south and then

west, along well-known routes. Cyron felt certain that great discoveries would be found to

the east, and toward that end the greatest ship of his fleet, the
Stormwolf,
had been

created and was preparing to sail.

The Prince found the map at once remarkable and tragic. All of the details of the world

that had been confirmed by the Anturasi had been painted in strongly. They had filled in

much, but still more lay blank. Even areas within the Dark Sea went uncharted, and it was

from there the pirates that preyed upon provincial shipping sailed. Qiro’s ages-old desire

to fill in these blank areas had caused him to send his son Ryn on an ill-fated voyage. But

even the pain of his son’s death had not blunted his hunger to explore, and just five years

previously Cyron had been forced to refuse another of Qiro’s requests to undertake a

grand survey himself.

The Prince tore his gaze from the map and received a surprise. Qiro’s grandsons, Keles

and Jorim, stood with their grandfather, but a fourth man had joined them. The Prince

found this remarkable because not only had he never seen anyone outside the Anturasi

clan—save himself or his kin—in the workshop; Naleni decree had made it a capital crime

to enter the workshop without express state permission. That the man was present

bespoke his great importance, and the fact that he was wearing a blindfold indicated Qiro

had not wholly lost his mind.

Qiro smiled and crossed quickly to the Prince. Tall and lean, he possessed a full shock of

white hair, moustache, and goatee. His pale eyes seemed almost devoid of color, save for

the pupil, giving him an inhuman look. Though he was celebrating his eighty-first birthday

within the week, he moved with the strength of a man half his age. The rich timbre of his

voice, however, clearly had benefited from his longevity.

“Highness, you honor the House of Anturasi with your presence. You have met my

grandsons, Keles and Jorim?”

The Prince shook and released Qiro’s hand, then greeted the brothers. “I do know them,

and treasure them as much as I treasure you,
dicaikyr
Anturasi. Jorim, I think you would like to know that the pair of spotted cats you brought back from Ummummorar last year

have mated and produced nine kittens. They are the pride of my sanctuary.”

Jorim smiled. Shorter than his brother and stockier, he wore his side locks in braids and

had grown a full beard after the fashion of the Ummummori. Though he wore fine and

proper clothing, his hair and beard did give him a barbaric air that had caused a bit of a

stir amid the Naleni nobility. A blacked eye, split lip, and abrasions on his knuckles