"So, do you have a map of this area here for sale?" Matner asked, circling the spaces between Eerwayh and Jundra with his finger.
"Not all the way that far, no," Nicholaus replied. "But I do for the more local part of it, yes."
Nicholaus rolled up his big map. "Wait right here," the man said. He took the rolled map and Matner heard his shoes on the stairs as he went up. The upstairs floor creaked.
It was not long at all before he came back down with a smaller rolled up map. This one was painted on a smaller, thinner piece of hide.
"Now, this is a nice map," Nicholaus said, "not some parchment sketchery. I studied to be a cartographer, you see--that's a map maker. I was gonna sail the rivers and the seas, making maps of the far-and-away." The man laughed.
"That was before love, of course, but that's not what you came to hear about, eh? No, of course not."
Nicholaus unrolled the map. It was painted in different colors for the major terrain features. Place names were lettered neatly, and there were frequent marks for distances. Nicholaus explained that some of the local parts he had measured himself, while other areas had been compiled from multiple other sources. Nicholaus suggested a price for the map, which Matner thought slightly high, even for the quality, which was actually considerable. Matner haggled the man down just a little bit, but not much.
