Elian sealed the map case only after the clerk had read the receiving address back to him.
Caldrin’s water-route office. The named receiving keeper. Copies for the heat union’s service committee and the public survey room. The maps inside were marked as older records to be checked, not permission to enter every place they depicted.
He tied the case himself.
On the five hundred and eleventh day, the paid light post left Stonewake with his survey packet. The current through turn allowed twenty-one days to Caldrin. Elian’s own booked light party would leave on the sixteenth and expected twenty days. If both journeys held their present stages, the papers would arrive before the man who could answer the questions they raised.
That was the intention.
His commission covered the southern water routes and two outpost approaches shown inconsistently in the existing charts. The new council had accepted the bounded survey fee from its posted route-work allocation. The cartographers’ subscription fund paid the agreed printing and extra-copy costs. There was no authority to seize a private archive, compel a guide or mark an unvisited village as consenting because a line crossed it on a map.
Kesh came to the post yard before the case was loaded.
