The stall hung with maps

A small red-haired girl is running the stall, and it takes you a moment to see that she is not a child, or not only. The maps hang from pegs like drying fish. Every one of them is of a room, and every room is empty.

“Nobody wants the empty ones,” she says cheerfully. “They want the dragon already in the corner. But then it is the mapmaker's dragon, and you are just visiting.”

She unrolls one. A hall, a grid, a door at each end, and a long clean nothing in between. “This one is yours if you want it. You put the dragon in. Or the tax collector, which is worse. Bring people — it does not work alone, that is not a flaw in it, that is the whole design.”