Patrol a mountain to my age, and you stop striking the clapper very often.
Not laziness. Understanding. The clapper is for yao to hear — and the things truly worth guarding against have never feared noise. So I changed my trade. Other Drillwinds patrol with their voices. I patrol with a brush.
I draw maps.
All of Flower-Fruit Mountain is on my maps: seventy-two cave-manors, thirty-six ravines, every game trail and every hidden spring. Birch bark for the sheet, charcoal for the base, cinnabar for the vital points: which cliff drops stones, which woods breed miasma, which paths can be walked by night and which must never be. Young Drillwinds collect a map from me before they set out; even Aolai Town's peddlers have quietly sent monkeys up to beg copies of the shortcuts. I give them to everyone. A map exists to be used — a map locked in a cave is no different from blank paper.
All these years of drawing have taught me one law: a mountain is alive, but it changes by rules. A spring flood takes a bridge; an autumn wind re-shapes a stand of trees — matters of months, of years. A good map ought to serve three to five years.
And once, mine did.
Now a map serves seven days.
The first wrongness was the boulder field on the back slope. I had walked it barely ten days before; my map showed the three great anchor-stones — and when I returned, they had moved. Not rolled: rolling leaves scars. The three stones had shifted position cleanly and precisely, like pieces advanced one move on a board. Then the waterways: two ravines that had run their courses for centuries turned around in a single night and bent toward the Eclipse Altar. Strangest of all is the old post-road. The waystones are the same waystones — but the road between them, measured fresh, has come up half a li short.
Half a li of road. Simply gone.
I laid the old map over the new and held them to the sun. The mismatched places joined into one line: one end tied to the Eclipse Altar, the other running out of the mountain, toward the sea. Precisely the bearing of the grooves the Havoc King's gang has been chiseling.
I don't know what the line is. I only know it is the mapmaker's oldest dread — a hand moving beneath the ground, when all a map can draw is the ground.
Our young Little Drillwind has gone west with the herb-boy. Before leaving, it came for a map. I gave it the finest sheet in my chest, then sat up through the night adding strokes: where my map can be trusted; where what's drawn should not be wholly believed.
It asked me: Uncle Vanguard, if the map can't be trusted, what do I trust?
Your feet, I said. Maps are dead; feet are alive. Walk a step, verify a step, and where the map is wrong, correct it on the spot. The true craft our line hands down is not drawing — it is reconciling: the mountain in your eyes against the mountain in your heart, checked once every day. Wherever the two fail to match, that is where trouble is.
After it left, I spread the two layered maps again and studied that mismatched line until dawn.
At first light I took up the brush and added a small note in the map's corner, a word left for whoever collects a map after me:
This mountain now changes every seven days, and every change leans toward the sea. If a day comes when every road on this map has turned — do not come looking for me.
Go and see what it is, on the far side of the water, that is reeling in this mountain inch by inch.