The rivalry

The Weight of Ink

Cora lowered her brass stereoscope and rubbed the bridge of her nose, where a permanent red indent had formed from years of analyzing aerial plates. Below her workshop window, the sprawling avenues of Oakhaven floated on a bed of pressurized silver vapor, suspended three thousand feet above the dark, forgotten surface of the Old Earth.

The city did not stay still. Oakhaven drifted on predictable thermal currents, but the atmospheric shifts beneath it the thermal pockets, the cloud walls, the sudden updrafts of toxic sulphur from the lowlands were entirely volatile. A mapmaker in Oakhaven did not merely draw lines; they predicted where the ground would be tomorrow.

Across the courtyard of the Guild of Cartographers stood the north wing. It was a mirror image of her own workspace, save for one distinct difference: it was perfectly, infuriatingly organized. Through the glass, she could see the silhouette of Julian Vance. He stood straight-backed over a massive drafting table, his silver hair neatly tied at the nape of his neck, his hands moving with the rhythmic regularity of a metronome.

Cora despised him.

She despised his perfectly calibrated German ink pens. She despised his reliance on the Theorems of Rigid Architecture. Most of all, she despised that he was currently leading the public poll for the title of Grand Surveyor a lifetime appointment to the High Council that would grant absolute control over the city’s expansion routes.

A sharp rap on her door broke her focus. Her apprentice, a scruffy boy named Pip, hurried in holding a damp broadsheet.

"He did it again, Miss Cora," Pip said, out of breath. "He published a rebuttal to your paper on the Western Slipstreams."

Cora snatched the paper. There, on page three, was Julian’s elegant, blocky typeface: 'To assume the cloud strata behave as living organisms, as suggested by certain contemporary mapmakers, is an insult to the foundational laws of gravity. Fluid dynamics require mathematics, not mysticism.'

"Mysticism?" Cora breathed, her vision narrowing. She grabbed her leather coat, slinging a canvas satchel over her shoulder. "I'll show him fluid dynamics."