The Death of Nnanji by Dave Duncan

sword on the table, he said, “Master Endrasti has much to tell us, and I do not believe he has ever seen our grand map. I suggest we move some lights and stools over there, to the Ulk Sector.”
    Wallie had designed the hall himself. It was many times larger than it need be for meetings, but the plain slate walls served as a giant chalkboard, on which he tracked the exploration of the World. That would have been impossible before the coming of the Tryst, for the Goddess was the River, liable to alter its geography whenever She wanted. Wallie, by making the treaty with Rotanxi, had loosed the sorcerers’ literacy on the World and thus ended the Age of Legends. Endrasti must have seen, and even helped to draw, local charts, but he had never viewed the whole sprawling trace of the River that looped across two walls and was soon going to spread onto a third. Wallie walked him through it with the aid of a weighty candelabra.
    “Your reports have helped create this, master, but this is the nearest thing to a complete map of the World that I know of. The sorcerers may have a better, of course; they won’t say and certainly won’t share it if they do. Here is Casr, on the RegiVul Loop. Fourteen cities, and yet how small it looks!
    “The River flows anticlockwise in the Loop, from Ov around to Aus, but south of it lie the Black Lands, where lava flows have made the River unnavigable. We sent an expedition through the upstream rapids, and it found many prosperous settlements. We still have not reached the end of the River in either direction. This green line shows the trail to Quo. You can see the enormous distance you would have to travel to go from Casr to Quo by water.”
    “It is humbling, my lord. I thought I had seen most of the River already. I never realized how much more of it there is.”
    “Only the Goddess herself can ever know it all. We call this area the Vul Sector. West of it lies the Zan Sector, but even the sorcerers themselves seem vague about where the boundary lies.”
    The Zan Coven seemed to be a branch or affiliate of Vul, for it had signed onto the Treaty quite willingly. The Yrt Coven, even farther downstream, had taken little more persuasion. Beyond that, the Tryst had found no more sorcerer cities for several years. If they existed, they kept themselves well hidden, but eventually swordsman missionaries had arrived at Hann, site of the holiest of all the Goddess’s temples, and that possibly explained the absence of sorcerers in the area, for sorcerers worshiped the Fire God.
    Seen like this, pinned to a wall, the River was actually many Rivers, all seemingly much the same size, but tangled as a fishing line tormented by a litter of kittens. Loops were looped on loops in a gigantic snakes and ladders board, except that the ladders were shortcuts between snakes. It could flow in any direction, dividing and rejoining at random. Very few earthly rivers ever behaved like that, except in deltas, but the Goddess’s River never reached a sea or even a major lake. Wallie’s engineer training rejected it as an impossible perpetual motion machine, and he had not quite given up hope that, somewhere yet unseen by the Tryst, the World held a mighty mountain range to source all that water and an ocean to receive it. Even so he could not comprehend a stream that sometimes seemed to flow in circles.
    The River’s major tributaries were branches of itself. It rarely wandered farther north than the RegiVul loop, while Hann lay close to the equator. Lacking chronometers or surveying instruments, Wallie had only a vague idea of longitude, but he suspected that the Tryst now ruled more than half the World. He could not reconcile that with the sorcerers’ claim to have thirteen covens, for he only knew of five.
    Land roads were rare, but every new one offered another reach of the River to explore. By the time the Tryst had “discovered” Hann, ten years ago, other expeditions had pushed into the southern hemisphere