Elias died in the spring, and did it, characteristically, without inconveniencing anyone.
He had been unwell through the winter — a cough that never quite resolved, a tiredness he attributed to a survey season that had run too long. Cecily examined him twice and found nothing she could name, which frustrated her considerably, and Elias told her that a failure to identify a thing was itself a datum and should be recorded as such, which frustrated her more.
He kept working. He went up the near tower in February, over Wat's objection, and did a full inspection, and came down and wrote it up in his usual hand.
He was found in March, at the drafting table in his own small house, with a half-finished sheet in front of him and his pen still in his hand.
Cecily's assessment, delivered flatly to a council that did not want to hear it, was that his heart had simply stopped, quickly, and that he had almost certainly not known it was happening.
"That's not a comfort I'm offering," she said. "That's what I actually think occurred, and I'd rather say it plainly than dress it."
Nobody spoke for some time.
It was Thomas who finally went to the house, because someone had to see to the papers, and because he found he could not bear the idea of anyone else doing it.
The drafting table held the last sheet. It was a survey of the northern spur — routine work, half-complete, the linework as precise on the final stroke as on the first. Thomas sat down in Elias's chair and looked at it for a long while.
Beneath it, in a flat wooden case, he found the letter.
Elias, mapmaker. Written at Thomas's request, some years ago, for the Codex.
I have thought for a long time about what to put here and I have concluded that the honest thing is the useful thing, so: I did not want a wife and did not want children and spent most of my life being quietly informed that this was a sadness. It was not. I want that recorded plainly because I suspect there will be others like me in this valley and I would like them to have something to read.
What I wanted was to see clearly and to write down what I saw. I got to do that, here, more completely than I would have anywhere else in this Kingdom, and I am aware of how rare that is.
The sightline work is not finished and will not be finished, because it does not finish, it only extends. Whoever takes it up should know that the northern spur is wrong on the older maps by about four hundred paces and I never corrected it because I kept assuming I would have time. Correct it. It will annoy you. Do it anyway.
Thomas — you asked me once whether I was lonely. I answered you honestly at the time and I want to answer you again more completely, because I have thought about it since. I was not lonely. But I would not have been content anywhere that did not contain you and Victoria and Wat and Aldith. Being solitary and being alone turn out to be entirely different things, and I only learned the difference here. That is the whole of what I have to say and I would ask that nobody make a speech about it.
Nobody made a speech about it.
They buried him above the flume-race, near Joan, and Cecily read the letter aloud in its entirety because Thomas asked her to and could not have managed it himself. Wat, who had climbed no ladder in two years, went up the near tower afterward alone, and was gone a long time, and came down without saying what he had done up there.
The northern spur was corrected within the month. It annoyed everyone involved enormously.
Thomas found, in the weeks after, that Elias's death had done something unexpected to his own private arithmetic. He had spent two years as the person in the room who was ending. He had grown, without noticing it, somewhat proprietary about it.
Elias — who had no falling number, no cascade, no strange machine in his pocket counting him down — had simply finished first, on an ordinary Tuesday, in the middle of a sentence.
"I'd been treating it as a thing that was happening to me specifically," he told Victoria. "It's just the ordinary business. It was always just the ordinary business. Mine only comes with a number attached."
"Does that help?"
"Enormously," Thomas said, and was surprised to find he meant it.