Mountain Barber
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High Stakes Cartography
🕑 Added 2025-09-29 21:14:44 +0000 UTCNo vote this month, this is the only story I have ready to go. I, uh... well, had a rough month, mental health-wise (I'm fine, I just had an extra-bad bout of ADHD fun times), and I'm massively behind on literally everything. Whee! I'll try to rebuild my buffer next month, though.
Anyhow, High Stakes Cartography is set a decade before Turoapt's rediscovery.
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Enthen Blue had never met or spoken to his best friend.
This was, of course, because of the close in between them. Due to an amusing planning error, while it was nearly half a mile long, the close was only the width of a couple roads across— and so it had ended up a major thoroughfare between the various more properly shaped closes it intersected.
Cartographers like himself could often be found living by geographical absurdities, for humor's sake if nothing else.
Every morning, Enthen Blue woke up, showered, and then made himself a cup of tea, to the cheerful song of his teakettle goddess, who always knew precisely what tea he should brew that morning, and always heated the water to the precise perfect temperature.
And then every morning Enthen Blue took that cup of tea out on his little balcony at the same time, sat down on the little metal chair, and set his tea on the little metal side table.
It would be a toss-up whether his neighbor was out on his own little balcony across the close before Enthen, after him, or at the same time, but neither of them ever kept the other waiting longer than a minute or so.
Once they were both out on their respective balconies, they’d raise their cups to one another, take their first sips together, and then just quietly enjoy their tea. It wasn’t as though they could speak with one another even if they wanted to, of course— even this early, the noise of the bustling road below would have drowned out any shouting.
And, for twenty minutes each morning, Enthen Blue had no one demanding his attention, no one with an urgent problem for him to solve, just him and his neighbor drinking tea in quiet company.
At the end of the twenty minutes, his neighbor’s kids would usually be getting up, and be visibly rampaging about in his windows, so Enthen and his neighbor would raise their cups to one another, go inside, and start their days.
Judging from how tired his neighbor usually looked, Enthen couldn’t imagine his days were much easier than Enthen’s own.
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This particular morning started with an assassination attempt. Or possibly a kidnapping, or even a mugging, Enthen wasn’t sure— just that there were four men with knives lying in wait for him.
He activated one of his cartography boons, and made himself unmappable.
Well, nearly unmappable.
The four men with knives, who a second ago had straight paths towards their target, found themselves utterly unsure of how to reach the man walking straight towards them, incapable of navigating the sparse crowd in the way.
Enthen dropped the first with an elbow to the face, swept the feet out from beneath the second, drove his extended fingers into the third’s trachea, and broke the knee of the fourth.
Who knew why they’d been targeting him— maybe an angry god had sent them over a negotiation it was unhappy with, or maybe a greedy god was trying to delay his presence at another job. Or maybe they really had been muggers. Enthen didn’t much care.
At least he actually got to use one of his cartography boons for this— most workdays, he just ended up mediating various deific arguments the whole time.
Enthen didn’t even slow down as the goons collapsed behind him. He couldn’t, after all— his day was far too busy to bother with that.
“By every star that is just barely bright enough to be seen through the city’s glare, I’m going to be late,” Enthen muttered.
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Enthen’s first job of the day was a border dispute between a god of the street and a god of the sidewalk, all revolving over a new set of curb cuts.
Enthen hated curb cuts.
Oh, he knew all the arguments in their favor— the little ramps between the road and sidewalk made things much safer for pedestrians, especially older or less healthy ones. They improved drainage, they made it easier for wagon drivers to anticipate where folks would cross streets, all of that. Enthen logically knew they were of great net benefit to the Wall.
But by every combat Saint who had ever skipped leg-enhancement boons in favor of flashier combat boons, he was getting so sick of curb cuts, because half his job these days was settling the border disputes they caused between street and sidewalk gods.
Most theo-cartogrophers of the Wall Guard didn’t have to deal with nearly so much of this nonsense, because most regions of the wall didn’t have sidewalks on their surface streets, and kept most of their wagon traffic to the underways. Oh, they still had to deal with curb cut disputes in the underways, but in Enthen’s experience, underway street and sidewalk gods were much less egotistical and high-maintenance, and were much more focused on their jobs.
It took nearly an hour of his day to settle the dispute, eventually forcing the sidewalk god into a portfolio redefinition and convincing the street god to back down in exchange for slightly deepening the traction grooves in the curb cut.
That done, Enthen sighed, dispatched the construction order for the grooves, and headed off to the next job.
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His day didn’t get much less contentious from there.
Oh, his first job wasn’t too bad— just a routine monthly check-up on the border between the two neighborhood gods who dominated a Wall segment, and who refused to talk to each other. Their treaty set the border based on population density, to make sure they each had the same population of worshippers on the Wall segment, so Enthen’s job was just to collect updated census data from the segment Wall Guard post, do a few calculations, and then let each god in turn know where the border was for the next month. At this point, he could get the whole job done in twenty minutes.
The next job, though, was a doozy.
Enthen had to go down into one of the smaller neighborhood closes, an uninhabited one that served as a combination park and flood control space, and negotiate a brand new treaty between the god of the park and the storm sewer god over territorial control while the park was flooded. It was an absurd dispute, to Enthen’s mind, since there wouldn’t be any worshippers in the park to pray during a flood event.
He’d never had to negotiate with proper river gods before, and dealing with this less complex version of a proper floodplain negotiation made him deeply happy about that fact.
Enthen was sure he could feel himself aging more quickly, down in the close. At least he didn’t have to deal with any groundlings, the park was strictly for Walltoppers, and didn’t have any direct access to neighboring closes.
The negotiations dragged on long enough that Enthen missed his usual lunch time, and had to grab a vegetable roll from a stand on the way to his next job— a relatively straightforward, if fiery, negotiation between a stove god and a hearth god a local restaurant had requested municipal intervention in.
Literally fiery, it singed Enthen’s uniform. The whole dispute was a serious fire hazard.
He was looking forward to actually stopping by the office, sitting at his desk, and taking care of paperwork when a messenger tracked him down with a new job request.
Enthen opened the scroll— why his department still used scrolls, Enthen would never understand— read the contents, and then sighed heavily.
“By the ten thousand nearest gods to me whose names contain a number of letters that is exactly one larger than a prime number, why me?” he demanded.
Around him, he could hear several gods start muttering calculations to themselves as they figured whether they counted in his curse.
“Why did it have to be a library?” he demanded.
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Libraries atop the Wall faced a very particular problem atop the Wall, one similarly faced by warehouses— geometry.
Which was to say that the overwhelming majority of building plots atop the Wall were long and thin, and the few exceptions tended to become occupied by wealthy temples and the like. And when a library or warehouse was forced to be long and thin, it drastically reduced the efficiency of shelving, moving, or retrieving goods— instead of going across a few aisles of shelves and then a short way down one, you simply had to go a long, long way down a single aisle, shuffling past far greater concentrations of other workers.
That resulted in the majority of the city’s warehouses being down in the closes— which wasn’t really an option for libraries.
So they had to get a bit… creative in their use of space. Almost all libraries towered over their neighborhoods, and numbered among the tallest buildings of the Wall- a few hitting the legal height limits. Some employed legions of shelf-climbing lightweight golems, who could be counted on to be more reliable when given instructions in numbers and precise shelf locations rather than mis-interpretable language. Some used gravity boons to allow shelving and aisles to be placed on the walls or even ceilings. Others still with smaller budgets simply had raised walkways at every level of the library to allow more librarians to move through.
As he rode crawler-back towards the job, Enthen did his best to distract himself with theorizing about how this particular library might solve the problem on his way there, but he failed miserably.
Mostly he was focused on what he was almost sure his job would end up being.
Index reconciliation.
Oh, there were a small number of theo-cartography jobs at libraries that dealt with other issues, but the overwhelming majority of library work was to do with competing index systems. There was no such thing as a universally accepted indexing system— by every hell where the sun was between two and three times larger than Ishveos’, there had been bloody battles fought between library gods over the issue. There wasn’t a librarian or library god out there who didn’t have opinions on indexing they’d fight over.
Finally, Enthen’s crawler stop came, and he exited his compartment on the back of the quarter-mile long carnivorous public transit beast. From there, it was only a ten minute walk to the library.
As it turned out, this library, the Saint Merer Memorial Library, had solved the Walltop warehouse problem in a rather brute force way. The brick building was long and thin, yes, if admittedly a bit wider than the average library, but it was also one of the tallest buildings Enthen had ever seen atop the Wall, at least eighteen, perhaps nineteen stories tall, with very few windows and no visible external supports. It was, in fact, well over the legal height limits for most Wall segments, indicating that it had to have been grandfathered in before the expansion of the semaphore golem network necessitated height regulations.
He couldn’t help his surveyor’s boons automatically calculating the height at nineteen point two average sized stories, and then begin attempting to calculate how expensive the godgifts that had to be in use to keep this place aloft were.
Enthen was used to that, though, and simply strode inside the front door, ignoring the calculations his cognitive boons were performing.
A librarian of indeterminate age and gender— largely due to being mummified in torn-out pages of books, with no visible holes even for their eyes or nose— quickly approached him.
“I’m sorry sir, but we’re closed for the day. We’ve had a bit of a problem with the book retrieval systems, but we have a specialist coming in this evening, and we expect to be reopened by tomorrow.”
“I’m the specialist,” Enthen told them, staring up above him.
There were no floors in this library— if not for the shelves, he could probably have seen all the way up to the ceiling, though he could see most of the way up regardless.
The shelves were not floating or hovering, as Enthen had heard of in some particularly wealthy library temples— rather, they wound and twisted like a maze horizontally and vertically through the library, branching and merging, rising and falling. They had walkways along their sides, but the tops of their shelves were major thoroughfares, and whenever one of the shelves rose or fell to a new level, they did so as staircases. Even with the thinness of the library, there was room for at least a half-dozen of the shelves to wind by each other at once.
It was frankly delightful, and Enthen felt a surge of joy at the sight that only a cartographer, architect, or child could feel.
“We are delighted to see you, sir,” the librarian said. “If you could come with me?”
Enthen nodded, and allowed himself to be escorted over to another cluster of librarians, all wearing the same form-concealing wraps of old book pages.
He didn’t spend too much time wondering how they saw— or breathed, for that matter.
He was much too busy mapping out the twists and turns of the shelf maze above him.
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“So the feud is due to a fork in indexing standards between these too goddesses— Golleg and Cafla?” Enthen asked, as he followed a pair of anonymous, text-wrapped librarians up into the shelf-maze.
“Colleg and Gafla,” one of the librarians corrected.
“And yes,” the other said. “Gafla believed she had come up with a better-optimized way to index the library, which in turn provoked Colleg to come up with her own optimization method.”
“And what are they the gods of?” Enthen asked.
“Colleg is a mapping god who offers cognitive godgifts that enhance short term memory for directions taken, while Gafla is a book-cleaning god who just happens to have an unusual talent for math,” the first librarian said. “Colleg is a bit territorial about mapping concerns within the library, and got a bit… irritated at the idea of a simple janitorial god getting above their place.”
“They’ve both taken a work stoppage, which is more concerning than their gifts might indicate. Their primary value to the library is as guides, and watching for misshelved books, beyond any other gods in the library. They refuse to resume their duties until one of their index systems is chosen. Both index systems are genuinely quite good, though,” the second librarian said.
“Are there any other library gods we need to concern ourselves with?” Enthen asked.
Both librarians shook their head, as they led him up a shelf-top staircase that forked several times as it rose. “The rest of the library gods are either waiting for those two to resolve their arguments, or believe that our current system is adequate and that upgrading would be too expensive. Running the Merer is hardly cheap, after all.”
“By every book in this place that has an average of at least fifteen footnotes per chapter but no more than twenty-one, I can imagine so,” Enthen said.
Both librarians paused on the stair to look back at him.
Enthen shook his head. “Anyhow, tell me about your index system. I take it that it’s not simply by topic or author?”
The librarians shook their heads in unison, then led him up the right-most fork in the staircase. “Those sorts of indexes only work in more linearly constructed libraries. No, our index is… a map, as it were.”
That piqued Enthen’s interest. “A map?”
The librarians nodded. “We can show you,” they said in unison, and then made a turn onto a nearby path, where the shelf-top walkway they were on ran up below another suspended shelf, and became one of the two walkways running along its base.
The librarians stopped a short way in, and pulled out a book— a history of exploration attempts of the northern polar regions. On the back cover was pasted a piece of paper with two complex series of letters and numbers.
“The serial code is an instruction manual for navigating the shelf-maze,” the mummified librarians said in unison.
“The L’s indicate to turn left,” one of the librarians said.
“The R’s indicate to turn right,” the other said.
“The U’s to climb a ladder."
“The D’s to descend a ladder.”
“The A’s to ascend a staircase."
“The S’s to descend a staircase."
They spent the next twenty minutes listing out more letter codes, then painstakingly explaining how to navigate by the complex codes, how numbers modified directions, and how the final section of the code detailed where on a specific shelf the book would go.
“Of course, the directions are only readable this way from the front entrance,” one of the librarians finally said.
“The second serial code is for navigating from the back entrance to the library,” the other librarian said.
“Though front and back are a bit arbitrary here, I suppose,” the first librarian said. “They’re both equally accessible to the public.”
Enthen sighed. “Well, I can see why you don’t allow non-librarians to enter the maze itself.”
“Well, we do offer tours on special occasions,” one librarian said.
“Children love them,” the other added.
Enthen grinned, then reshelved the book.
“Right then. If you could take me to someplace where I can speak with both gods?” Enthen said.
The mummified librarians nodded, then led him up a nearby ladder.
He tried not to look as glum as he felt— he was pretty sure he knew exactly what the point of contention between the goddesses was.
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It was easy enough to tell when they were approaching the meeting point, from all the yelling.
The two librarians led him nervously up to a large junction suspended in the heights of the library, where two clusters of librarians— all dressed in the same full-body wraps made of old book pages— yelled at one another, with the voices of the two goddesses shouting over them in the Firmament.
Enthen sighed heavily, then strode out into the middle of the two shouting crowds, then simply stood there until the librarians noticed he was there and stopped yelling.
“I’m the official theo-cartographer,” he said, once it was quiet. “Colleg, Gafla, you each have ten minutes to explain your proposed classification system to me. Any interruptions will allow the interrupted god twice as much time as is lost. Gafla came up with her system first, so she goes first.”
He pulled out his theo-cartographer’s pocketwatch— actually two pocketwatches bound together, one driven by clockwork and the other by godgift, redundancy to ensure precision was important in his line of work— and checked the time.
“And… begin.”
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There were, of course, plenty of interruptions by the two goddesses, so it took over half an hour to hear the explanations, to Enthen’s exhausted exasperation.
<So you see, designing the location codes to distribute the paths as widely as possible through the building, to prevent traffic jams, is clearly the best option, rather than Gafla’s statistical distribution of paths.> Colleg concluded.
<It also doubles or even triples average trip time,> Gafla rebutted.
“So you’ve said at least a dozen times,” Enthen said, snapping his pocketwatch closed and tucking it into his pocket. “You’re both running off of conjecture, though, not actual proof.”
<I assure you, I’ve…> Gafla started, but Enthen interrupted her.
“This is a traveling salesman problem, and you both know it,” Enthen said.
There was an awkward silence from both goddesses.
“Traveling salesman problem?” one of the gathered librarians finally asked.
“By the weird little hairs that keep growing on the top of my left ear, have these two not told you all this yet?” Enthen demanded.
He got a few shrugs and shakes of the head, so he sighed and explained.
“Say a salesman has a dozen different houses he needs to visit, but they’re not in any sort of straight line, and there are Wall segments leading between almost all of them. He can visit them in nearly any order, and has to figure out what the route with the best travel time is to take him to every one and then back home.”
“Doesn’t seem too hard,” one of the librarians commented.
Enthen snorted. “For a small number of destinations, it’s not hard at all. By the time you hit around 20 destinations, though, it’s practically impossible to do— at least without incredibly powerful calculating boons or relics. To brute force it, you have to try every single combination.”
“We’re not generally getting that many books in a trip, though,” one of the librarians said. “Usually no more than five or six before we head back.”
A question occurred to Enthen. “I’m guessing you’ve just memorized enough of the library that you don’t have to follow the directions from the start for every book?”
There was general nodding at that.
“Honestly impressed at that,” Enthen said. “But you’re not really the ones the salesman problem is the big issue for— that would be Colleg and Gafla. They’re the ones who have to try and design new, optimal routes— and performing the calculations for those would cost more in prayer to math gods than this whole library is worth, because you have tens of thousands of books in here at the least.”
“Six hundred and eight thousand, approximately,” a particularly tall librarian said.
Enthen nodded. “Right. You don’t need to calculate a route for all those books, because no one’s ever checking out all the library’s books at once, but the sheer number of calculations that need to be done to establish even a few branching optimal paths would be prohibitive, at least without more sophisticated mathematics than are publicly available. I know that the Wall Guard has more advanced solutions for traveling salesman problems, they’re essential for moving troops and supplies throughout the Wall segments, but all of that math is a closely kept strategic secret, they’re not loaning it to a random library. Really, I’m curious how this system got established in the first place.”
“Saint Merer’s boons were almost entirely cognitive in nature, she was a mathematician of the finest order,” a librarian said proudly. “She designed our library indexing system from the ground up. There aren’t many mathematicians alive today anywhere near as powerful as she was.”
<Which is why we need to judge the algorithms based on the soundness of the base methods!> Colleg insisted. <Merer’s solutions are old-fashioned, using far cruder methods than are available today— even if we can’t afford to compare their results, we can compare the methods themselves.>
Enthen grimaced. “Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to judge my math by testing it.”
<This is a waste of time,> Gafla said. <We aren’t going to settle this problem through debate, or any mere mediator.>
<Agreed,> Colleg said. <Librarians, do your duty!>
Enthen wanted to object to being called a mere mediator, but he had more pressing concerns.
Notably, the fact that the two groups of librarians were charging straight towards each other, with him in the middle.
Enthen grimaced, rolled his neck, and began activating cartography boons.
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The next few minutes were a carefully orchestrated display of violence by a cartographer who wanted to get it over with as soon as possible, so he could go home for the evening.
Not particularly terrifying or effective violence— so far as Enthen could tell, none of the librarians were Saints, had any sort of combat boons, or even knew how to fight very well. He had absolutely no need to utilize his full combat capabilities.
Still, there were an awful lot of them— too many for his cartography boons to confuse and disorient all at once.
At any given time, Enthen had a half-dozen or so page-wrapped librarians staggering about in confusion, as he waded through the brawl, punching and elbowing apart combatants. He was careful to avoid any serious harm, unlike with the anonymous goons earlier that day, which made the whole thing drag on longer than it should, and led to Enthen taking a handful of blows as well, though none serious.
Eventually, it was just Enthen standing at the big intersection.
Well, Enthen and the two librarians who had led him here, who had wisely stayed well away from the brawl.
Every time one of the librarians on the ground tried to stand, they suddenly found themselves genuinely struggling to find a path to their feet again, and most got the message and stayed down quickly.
Which was the completely wrong move on their part— the way to beat Enthen’s primary combat cartography boon was just to keep trying. Once you’d staggered through it for long enough, the boon was no longer effective against you. Enthen wasn’t going to tell the librarians that, though.
“I have had absolutely enough of this,” Enthen declared. “I should have been home already relaxing for the night. We’re not going to pick just one of your systems. Calleg, your new system will operate from the front door of the library, Gafla, yours from the back. Any objections, or do I need to order this library shut down as a cartographic hazard?”
There was a long sullen silence, until Calleg finally spoke. <I want the back door.>
Enthen rolled his eyes. “I don’t care which one of you gets which door, so long as you’ve made your decision by the end of the week. Am I understood?”
<Fine,> Gafla snapped.
<Understood,> Calleg muttered.
“Excellent,” Enthen said, and turned to head back down the stairs.
“We can guide you back out,” one of his guides offered quickly.
“No need,” Enthen said. “I’m a cartographer.”
As he descended through the maze, using his own internal map, he couldn’t help but gloat just a little.
He hadn’t bothered to mention how difficult and time-consuming retraining all the librarians on two whole new systems would be. He was sure they expected it to be a challenge, but… oh, they were going to lose so much efficiency for months. And technically Enthen could have suggested some more approximate methods to solve traveling salesman problems that would give a decent, if not great, answer to the problem, but…
Maximizing library efficiency wasn’t his job. Resolving deific disputes was. And proving one of the gods right here would only increase bad feelings down the road.
Well, at least today wasn’t as bad as tomorrow would be— he had to negotiate the routes for a festival parade, a wedding procession, and a funeral procession all on the same day, and convincing the various street and neighborhood gods to allow all three through, while keeping their routes from intersecting, was probably going to last him late into the night.
Ah, well. There was always morning tea with to look forward to.
As he was preparing to leave the library, one of the librarians ran up to him panting.
“Eighty-four thousand, six-hundred and ninety-two!” the page-wrapped librarian said.
“I beg your pardon?” Enthen asked.
“That’s the number of books in the library that have an average of fifteen footnotes per chapter but no more than twenty-one, like you asked,” the librarian said.
Enthen sighed. “I wasn’t asking, that was… that was a curse, for emotional emphasis. I… just, nevermind, alright?”
He turned, and strode off grumbling about librarians.
Morning tea. There was always morning tea.
Comments
John Bierce
He's fine, just tired
John Bierce
Thank you!
Lucian von Brevern
I think this is one of my favourites! A true delight to read! But the monastery of useless gods stays my absolute favourite. Hope you are getting rest and relaxation.
Conrad Wong
This is great but I'm wondering if something happened to Enthen's best friend or not. ^.^;;
