The Ashen Sea was a lumpy ring, and the world, Baru’s theater of play, was a misshapen cross around that ring. North was Aurdwynn and the Wintercrests and icy mesa beyond; left-which-was-west was the Camou Interval, a great plague-ridden unknown, grasslands and mountains full of scattered people as unknown to Falcrest as Taranoke might once have been. Between those two arms a fan of steppe reached out northwest, into the fallen Maia heartlands.

It struck Baru as very odd that so much of the map was fallen empire, fallow territory, forgotten land. As if the tide of humanity was going out, all across the world.…

“I can’t tell you how the world works,” Apparitor said. “If I knew that, would I be scurrying around on the Throne’s errands? Would I have to put up with you?” And something about Tain Hu, which Baru jerked her attention away from: it vanished into her right-blindness.

“I have a theory,” Baru said. “About the world.”

“Of course you do.”

“The fundamental concern of all our history has been access to the Ashen Sea trade circle—”

“Did I say I wanted to hear it?” he snapped.

Baru still thought she must be right.

On the southern limb of the cross the Oriati Mbo jutted like a long tooth at the bottom of the Ashen Sea, coast and savannah and desert and sahel and jungle, all the way to Zawam Asu where the whales gathered for their fabled quorums. A gristly mass of land connected the Mbo northeast to Falcrest, belted by the strait called the Tide Column, which linked the Ashen Sea to the titanic Mother of Storms.

And north of the Column, on a pudgy potato-shaped subcontinent jutting (Baru had to wave her head to remember the direction) rightward, eastward, was Falcrest. Not central. Not remarkable. Nowhere you would choose as the seat of power if you saw the world like a high hawk.

“We’re so small,” Baru squeaked. She had to swallow to get her voice right. A terrible vindication was in her, and she wanted it out: the notion that any crime could be pardoned for a chance to glimpse these world secrets.

“I take it,” Apparitor said, “that you’re not used to feeling small?”

“No,” she said, and then realized he was calling her an egomaniac.

“You never got high and lay down on your back on a mountainside? And watched the sky until you were afraid you’d fall up into it?”

“No…”

“Tain Hu did,” he said, “she told me about it.”

Her name like a thorn in the tongue. Baru glared at him. He grinned and waved a bottle: The Grand Purifier. “I needed an excuse to be rude,” he hiccupped, “so I stopped by Helbride and raided my vodka stash. Clear as spring melt! Here, for your health—”

“I’m not drinking anything you pour.” Baru took one last guilty, yearning glance at the map.