Sending a sylph straight up for five minutes carrying someone with Farsee made a lot of this much clearer.
Some people are arguing that it is heretical to use a sylph this way. Why? Is it also heretical to use one for the other things I've used them for: crossing chasms, throwing people up in the air in a fight, or a fast way to get over a guarded wall?
Jeff Richard also argued that Orlanthi are the only flying people. While I'm sure most Orlanthi believe that, the hawk riders of Dykene, the wyvern and moon boat riders of the lunar empire, the sorcerers of the west, the imminent masters of the east would all disagree (well, maybe not the imminent masters, they would claim that they are not people, they are dragons).
Don't forget that there are many other sapient races, If you can offer enough of what they want you could probably get a ride from a troll controlled fly, a griffin, a wyrm, or a dream dragon. You could ask wind children, harpies, gargoyles, pixies, and dragonewts to draw you maps, and for enough magic, you could probably even get Gonn Orta to throw you a mile or two into the air (although the last three are of very questionable use).
The Dwarves, and the Krarshti, probably have excellent maps of most of the world, although I don't know how you would get them.
So it comes down to how useful are maps. If in your world no one ever goes more than 20 miles from home, or knowing the terrain of an area surrounding a battlefield won't affect the battle, and being able to run a trade route 4 rather than 3 times a year won't help the merchants, and there is never a case of two orlanthi groups racing each other to find a wind sword, at the top of a mountain, somewhere in 60,000 square miles of wilderness, then no one will work to make good maps.
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