7 · The Archive Beneath Their Feet

four chambers of a single network at once. The instructions forbade informing the neighbourhoods below.

“They wanted to bring someone back,” Teren said.

Ivara moved a tablet aside and put beneath it a copy bearing her old college's seal.

“I helped date this twelve years ago. The storehouse mark was added later. I noticed it then.”

Teren looked at her.

“Did you say so?”

“I wrote that there were reasonable doubts about the correspondence between the piece and its context. My teacher advised me to avoid wording that invalidated the whole catalogue. He had devoted his life to that work. I wanted to be accepted into the central archive.”

Neris stopped searching the boxes.

“Were you accepted?”

“Yes.”

The mage did not ask them to understand the scale of that ambition for a girl of her origins. Nor did she say her teacher had been a good man. In many respects he had. He gave her the first books she could take home. He defended her when another professor refused

to mark her work. Afterwards, he taught her to phrase a doubt so no one would have to answer it.

“I looked for the tablet when I learned about the payments,” she continued. “It had disappeared. Iven saw it in an inventory of the works. If I'd made a clear accusation then, perhaps…”

Teren did not want to comfort her. He was beginning to recognise how much personal convenience there was in quickly absolving those who needed to remain close.

“You can make it now,” he said.

Ivara turned to a blank sheet in her notebook. She wrote her name, the date of that review and her teacher's name. She showed Neris the page before tearing it out and putting it beside the tin fragment.

Then they returned to the accounts.

“Whom did they want to bring back?” Serik asked.

“Many,” the mage replied. “An army lost on the frontier. The first monopoly was military.”

Neris lifted a larger metal sheet. The missing half fitted Teren's piece.

Joined, they made

a complete sentence: “The return shall belong to none, not even to whoever opens the door.”

The oldest tablet bore the name Leth Aram.

Teren knew him from schoolbooks: a general of Dawnrock who kept the passes open during the first war of the Rupture. He was depicted with a sword and a stone arch behind him. His monument stood on the terrace where apprentices swore to defend the city.

In those accounts, he was responsible for withdrawing two squadrons from flood-prone neighbourhoods to protect an ore depot. Ivara found a note in his own hand: the army could not fight without metal. Beneath it, another had written that the miners could not extract it dead either.

It did not disprove his victories. It only showed that a statue could hold real courage and an omission paid for by others on the same base.

Serik knew an oath attributed to the general. He recited it very quietly. “Leave none behind the door.” He stared at the document.

“Perhaps he said

it afterwards,” Neris suggested.

“They teach it as though he'd always known how.”

The gnome found a line on the back. The general acknowledged the loss of the neighbourhoods and asked that their names be preserved in the restoration. That part never reached the monument. His heirs preferred a figure incapable of error to a man who had needed to admit one.

Elyen approached the map. He recognised a pass the Horde used to get families out of sieges. It had also served to bring troops to villages that declared themselves neutral. The same line did not change colour when its purpose changed.

“If we tell everything, no one will want an emblem,” he said.

“Perhaps they'll want one for a less stupid reason,” Serik replied.

The elf looked at him in surprise, then returned to the plan.

Ivara copied the general's name beside that of the person who asked for the losses to be preserved. She was a supply officer, Dema Rell. Ivara found no monument to her in

Dawnrock's catalogues. She had proposed recording the evacuations house by house, and her sheets lay beneath the accounts researchers usually consulted.

Neris picked up one. The paper held a single sentence: “If no one came back to claim this house, that does not mean it was empty.”

She put it away with Madruga's fragment. The history they had come to rescue had just grown larger and less manageable.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor.

Maera appeared without running. The dark elf carried two short knives, a folded bow on her back and a red scarf tied to her forearm. Serik recognised her and raised his sword.

“Horde.”

“Paladin,” she replied. “Introductions done.”

A bolt struck the frame. Maera dropped and pushed Neris under the table. Behind her came men wearing copper tokens.

The fight lasted less time than the descent of the stairs. Ivara extinguished the corridor lights and kept those in the archive burning. Elyen shot towards flashes of steel. Serik held the doorway while Maera attacked from the flank,

putting her body where the shield denied the enemy space.

One reached Teren. He tore the cleric's sleeve and made him drop the metal sheet. Teren struck him with the lamp. Oil set his clothes alight. For a moment he saw the man's uncovered face and knew he would remember it.

Maera smothered the fire with a blanket. The wounded man was still breathing.

“If we're going to question them,” she said, “it helps if they keep their mouths.”