0062104292 (8UP) by Anne Nesbet

Author:Anne Nesbet [Nesbet, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-08-19T21:00:00+00:00

18

LOCKS AND LATCHES

Locks and latches were no match for someone with as many years’ training in pilferage and lourka making as Linny had had. She used the mapmaking kit’s sharp compass to jimmy open the simplest locks and whittled herself a key from a sliver of the door itself to get herself through the last one. It was a comfortable bit of work, almost like being at home and breaking into her father’s workshop for the thousandth time.

But what she found beyond the door and all its latches was not like any workshop she had ever seen. As her eyes grew more accustomed to the dim evening light, she saw that the room, quite large, was filled with blocky cabinets, each holding a number of long, flat drawers, stacked one on top of the next. She slid open one of those drawers, and large sheets of paper lay there. She thought for a moment, running her fingertip over the old paper: this was the room that had belonged to the First Surveyor. It was hard to see anything properly, but these surely must be drawings or diagrams. Or maps.

What to do about the light, though? That was another thing Linny knew well enough. You can’t take your winking candle into a space with windows and not expect someone in the village to notice. All the windows across the courtyard . . . they were sort of the Plain version of a village, Linny figured. Here it wasn’t really question of a winking candle, because light came on when you pushed the round switch by the door, but to hit that switch would be like shouting her presence in this room to all lingering Surveyors who might be looking across that courtyard for some reason.

She scooted over to the outside windows and looked out for a moment at the second skin of more modern glass and all the ripply rectangles across the way. She was beginning to think she might have to carry each of those maps, one at a time, into the other room to look at them, when a string brushed against her cheek and turned out to be attached to thick curtains, rolling down and down. Somehow she had missed them in the dark. So she lowered the blinds, turned on the light, and got to work.

There was some sort of system to these drawers, but she didn’t understand it. She did find that maps of one area or one type of place seemed to be filed together, so a glance at whatever was on top was enough to disqualify a whole drawer at one go.

Faster, she said when she started feeling tired.

There were maps with rivers on them, and maps of farms, and maps of structures she did not understand, but it was not until the twenty-seventh drawer that she finally found drawings of a building with an empty square place in the center. She took that stack over to the floor right under one of the brightest lights and went through it, sheet by sheet, doing her best to stack those sheets in order.

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