Note unattributed - the author left no distinquishing markings but it appears to be addressed to the Imperial authorities rather than the Merchant Houses.
I have now spent eleven days doing what I was asked to do, which was determine whether the maps left behind by our former Khuldinai contractors could serve as a foundation for a proper Imperial survey of the northern territories. I regret to inform the Ministry that they cannot, and I would like it noted for the record that I said as much before I ever opened the first crate, to anyone who would listen, which was no one.
The Khuldinai, in their infinite contractual precision, delivered exactly what their agreement specified: engineering services rendered, foundations laid, tunnels bored, the caldera walls assessed and reinforced where necessary. What their agreement did not specify, and what they therefore did not leave behind, was a single coherent map of anything. When I raised this with the Ministry’s own solicitor, he informed me that the phrase “supporting documentation” does not appear in the original contract language, and that Khuldinai counsel anticipated this exact dispute and worded the agreement accordingly. They took their maps home. They left us the buildings and nothing that explains how the buildings relate to the land around them. I am told this was a very favorable contract for the Empire at the time it was signed. I would be curious to know for whom.
What remains in the archive is garbage, and I no longer say that as an assessment. I say it as a description.
I have catalogued thirty-one documents purporting to represent some portion of the northern territories. Four are drawn to a stated scale. The rest are drawn to whatever scale suited the artist’s evident mood that day. Seven depict the same stretch of river with the same tributary entering from three different directions. Two disagree on whether a named lake exists at all. One depicts a mountain range as a single unbroken wall with a note in the margin reading “approximately here, more or less, ask a local.” The document is forty years old. I could not locate the local. I am not certain the local ever existed, and at this point I am not certain the cartographer did either.
It gets worse. Having failed to reconcile these documents against one another, I brought a selection to the Temple, in the hope that some cleric with a stronger stomach for geography than mine might identify which were merely inaccurate and which were something else. Two were confirmed outright forgeries - invented wholesale by someone who had clearly never left the city, working from rumor and the desire to be paid for a commission they had no ability to complete. I do not fault them for their ambition. I fault the Ministry archive for filing their fabrication alongside genuine survey work for forty years without anyone checking.
The remainder, the Temple could not condemn as forgeries, and could not vouch for as accurate either. When I pressed the officiating cleric on how a document could be neither, she offered the opinion that the maps may well have been true when they were drawn, and that the land itself has since been redrawn by the gods for reasons known only to them. I do not know what I am meant to do with that assessment. I did not ask a second question, because I did not want a second answer.
I also consulted the Legion’s mages, on the theory that whatever arts they employ for their scrying and their signal-work might be turned toward resolving a river’s true course. I was informed, politely, that this is not what their arts are for, and less politely, that I was the third cartographer this decade to ask.
I have begun to suspect that most of these documents were never produced by anyone who set foot in the territory they claim to represent. The contradictions are too consistent in their wrongness, the way a rumor stays consistent as it travels - a river becomes a lake becomes a story becomes a line on a page, and no one along that chain ever checked it against the ground. It is almost as if someone drew these based on a tale they heard passed through several ears, rather than walking the land themselves, and I am forced to conclude that in at least two cases, that is precisely what happened, minus even the tale.
I recommend the following, in order of what I expect the Ministry will actually fund:
First, that a proper survey expedition be commissioned, because these documents cannot be reconciled - they were never describing the same reality to begin with, whatever the Temple wishes to believe about the gods’ cartographic habits.
Second, failing that, that I be permitted to produce a single composite document clearly marked as speculative, so that no future officer mistakes our best guess for a verified record, the way I am now fairly certain several of my predecessors did, to the Empire’s lasting inconvenience.
Third, that someone revisit our contract language with the Khuldinai, so that “supporting documentation” is no longer a phrase their counsel can turn against ours a second time.
I remain the Ministry’s servant in this matter, for now.