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With a final squeeze at Osric’s shoulder, the deofol vanished.

From the waystone at theMoist Oyster, Osric followed the signs to the clinic. He discovered, incidentally, thatPthirus pubiswere pubic lice.

There was no queue at the clinic door.

Osric knocked. Fairhrim opened the door.

“You had something to show me?” asked Osric.

“No,” said Fairhrim. “I invited you here for the sheer pleasure of your company.”

Gods, she could be dry. Osric’s lips chapped on the spot.

Fairhrim led him in. She looked severe, as though she were about to quiz him on his multiplication tables.

“Are you going to lecture me about mass murders?” asked Osric.

Fairhrim disconcertingly replied, “No.”

“No?”

“You are a Calamity—”

“Thank you.”

“—but we’ve got more important things to discuss.”

“More important than me?”

“Have a look at this map,” said Fairhrim, as though, indeed, a bit of paper was more important than Osric.

On the clinic’s examination table lay a crumpled map of the waystone graticule. A forgettable enough item; everyone had two or three of them hanging about at home or forgotten in pockets, consulted when travelling to an unfamiliar place.

“Waystones,” said Osric. “And?”

Fairhrim pointed to the wall over the examination table, on which a regular map was hung, dotted with red pins. “Here are theapproximate locations of fifty of the stories—those that contained enough detail for me to map them with something resembling accuracy, anyway. Do you see it now?”

Osric compared a few of the red spots with waystone locations. “Some are near waystones—no surprises there; we’ve used them—and some aren’t. Am I meant to be drawing some sort of conclusion?”

Fairhrim pulled out a dusty projector and slipped the waystone map onto it. The map was thin enough to project a ghost of itself on the wall. After some adjustments, Fairhrim overlaid the image upon the map pinned above the examination table.

Now Osric could see. The red dots from the fairy stories were clustered not around the waystones themselves but rather where the ley lines connecting waystones intersected.

“The crossing of ley lines,” said Osric.

“Yes. Crossroadshave come up in the tales, of course—a classic in-between—but none mentioned the ley lines themselves.”

“You’re brilliant,” said Osric.

Fairhrim gave him an austere look over her silver-sharp shoulder. “Don’t compliment me. It was an oversight not to have noticed.” She drew her finger across the map. Projected ley lines decorated the back of her hand like new veins. “My first clue was these aggregations at crossroads. Loads of our roads were built parallelling major ley lines. And—coincidentally or not—we have these clusters of data locating stories precisely at those intersections.”

“Where’s the lighthouse?” asked Osric.

Fairhrim reached towards the map’s most northern point. “There.”

Three ley lines intersected at the island.

“What about points where more ley lines cross?” asked Osric. He pointed at star-shaped bursts where four or five ley lines crisscrossed. “Is that even better?”