Cartographer

The Cartographer is on the Crimson Hand's southern-bureau roll under the work-name Contour (no surname; the intake-clerks have learned not to ask), age twenty-five, joined the bureau at twenty, the youngest it has ever entered on its active operative-roll. Their domain is what the bureau delicately calls document retrieval and what the Empire's surveyors, in three open files, call 'a cartographer who has mapped seven ministries from the street.' They do not open doors. The orb that floats at their shoulder projects a three-dimensional map of everything within four hundred paces, walls included, and Contour knows which wall is thinner than the plans say — the bureau-master's standing instruction to other operatives is to stop relaying their closure-time estimates to clients, on the grounds that the estimates are reliably under by a factor of two and the bureau prefers its clients pleasantly surprised.

Their combat-grant is the same reading applied to a room that is fighting back: the map shows where the wall is thin, and a man is a wall. The orb was a Syndicate research-vault survey instrument until it was, in the bureau's phrase, misplaced in their direction, and they have declined two research grants from the vault on the grounds that a grant has more strings than a bureau contract and the strings are tied where they cannot see them; the orb, they note, shows them every string in four hundred paces, and the grant's were not on the map. Their contract-record over five years is fifty-three floors mapped and closed, with one publicly-known false alarm — a cellar the orb showed and the plans did not, which turned out to be on the plans after all, on a page the ministry had removed. They count it as a false alarm. The bureau does not.

Twice the bureau has sent them in ahead of Facet, its cannoneer, with a map that showed the wall thinner than the plan did, and twice the cannon agreed with the map; the clerks noticed that both closures came in under budget before the bureau-master did. A senior handler has since written to the bureau-master that the Hand should not lean on operatives under thirty for its quiet work and its loud work both. The bureau-master has not answered in writing. Contour has read the note, and says the handler is right and the map does not care. They do not work for the Meroveil Empire under any circumstances. The synthetic leather is Syndicate-made and does not creak, which is the only thing about the Syndicate they have ever said they would pay for.