Chapter 8: The Cartographer's Name, Which Aeron Gives Him

The rain had not stopped.

Aeron had ceased noting this as a specific fact somewhere around the second day. Now it was simply the condition of Edinburgh — the city's resting state, its particular grammar, the way some places expressed themselves in heat or in dust and this one expressed itself in water that fell from a white sky as though the sky had made a decision and intended to see it through.

He had spread nothing on the table because he had nothing physical to spread. What he had instead was memory, organized the way he had learned to organize things across seventeen ages: not by category but by shape, the way a sculptor reads stone for the fault lines that tell you where it wants to break.