“Capture it in your mind’s eye, Sir Paladin. Wasn’t it a strange shape?”
He nodded, eyes distant and staring at a tapestry on the wall as he agreed. “Like the peel of a fruit flattened on a table.”
“Yes,” I said, “as if someone was trying to make a sphere flat.”
His frown when his gaze found mine was thoughtful. He spun the sphere on its axis, finger tracing what would be a coastline if it were a map.
“But it’s not a map of our world, is it?”
“Part of it could be.”
I rummaged around on the desk, looking. Bound books were piled with parchment and quills. A bottle of ink had been left open and dried up. I still couldn’t believe all this had been preserved for so long and could still be handled without collapsing into dust.
I opened one of the bound books. It was full of sketches and diagrams and scrawled handwriting in the Indul language. I could recognize it, even if I couldn’t read it without the dog.
“Someone stuck a bit of glass in the sphere just here,” Adalbrand said, and I looked up to note where it was on the sphere. “I wonder if that’s significant.”
“Maybe it was the location of a capital city. Or a cathedral of note.” I bit the end of my finger and glared at the diagrams. They didn’t show a cup, that was for certain. They seemed like engineering schematics. Maybe if I brought this book to the Engineers they’d have an idea of what it was for.
If it’s not for your precious cup then why bother? Keep the book to yourself.
Poor advice. Knowledge was always worth pursuing.
Is it, though? Remember that boy in Minsca? The one who tried his grandmother’s recipe for summoning demons? The one who made it work the way she never did?
I shuddered, remembering the carnage in that little town.
He had knowledge. Worth it, do you think?
Fine. Branson had a point. I was still going to ask, though. I shut the book hard enough that dust puffed up from the pages.
“Do you think, Sir Adalbrand,” I asked carefully, “that they thought the earth was a ball?”
He scoffed and then paused. “But how would they account for the ice walls?”
I pointed to the top and bottom of the sphere. “These islands are raised and flat. Could that be their representation of ice walls?”
He frowned and leaned in closer. “But they had to know it wasn’t true. When the walls shifted and revealed more of the earth, where would they put it on the ball?”
I shrugged. It was only a guess.
“And how would they account for the moon reflecting the surface of our land perfectly?”
I shook my head again. I didn’t know, but the more I looked at the sphere, the more I was sure that was exactly what they were trying to depict. That it was a map so strange and foreign as to seem almost primitive.
“Do they think, then, that they are not under the heavenly rule of the God?” He was so horrified that he flinched back, hand drifting to his scabbard, only to realize it was still empty. He huffed and went to retrieve his sword as I pushed the drawers closed.
When he returned, he leaned in, and then with the air of someone a little embarrassed of himself, he pushed his fingernail precisely on the small glass bead.
The sphere opened with a snick.
Inside was a pewter cup that would have fit in my palm perfectly.
“There are a lot of cups in this place,” I said carefully.
He swallowed, turning it over in his hands. “How will we know which is the right one?”
You’ll know.
