Chapter 20: The Waypoint at Grevath Hollow

The secondary pass opened onto Grevath Hollow in the early afternoon of the following day, and I will say this for Rook: he had described it accurately.

He had described it, in fact, with the ease of a man consulting a memory rather than a map — a distinction I had been trained to recognise, since cartographers who have visited a place and cartographers who have studied a drawing of it produce subtly different accounts. The former reach instinctively for sensory detail. The latter reach for proportions. Rook had told us about the smell of the hollow first: sulphur-mineral, with an underlayer of something cooler, spring-fed from beneath the rock shelf to the east. Then the shape of it, a rough oval with one high wall and one low. Then, almost incidentally, the overhang on the north face that would shelter a fire from the mountain wind.

I had written all three details down and compared them, the following morning, against Aldrath's original survey notes, which mentioned the hollow as a possible waypoint but offered no sensory description whatsoever. Aldrath had been working from accounts. Rook had been working from something else.