The first departure

The room was not emptied at dawn. She shared.

Some left before the drafts turned, taking the lightest injured and a map marked with two blue dots. Others remained near the reserves, unable to decide whether to risk an unknown road or wait for news from the relay. Most didn't say they were afraid. They asked how long it would take to walk, if the galleries were high enough to carry a child, and how much water was left in the doles.

Zaelyra answered everything she knew. For the rest, she showed the blanks that they had not been able to fill.

A young drow, a cut in her chin, was waiting near the entrance. His mother held his wrist without squeezing it.

"You're going with them? Zaelyra asked.

"I can walk."

"This is not what I asked you."

The girl looked at her mother, then at the gallery. "Yes. But not because she asks me."

The mother let go of her wrist. Zaelyra noted the name of the young woman on the list that Sszindi kept in mind. She did not ask if the decision was final. The group would need everyone, but the need could not become a chain.

Nym checked the lanterns, then the copper wire stretched between two stones. "The current is coming down. We have a four-hour window before it turns."

"Is four hours enough?" asked Rhylor.

"To reach the first shelter. To get out of it, I don't know."

Kethra divided the food into equal piles, then set aside the provisions she had taken from the relay.

"These are mine. The rest comes from Veyr's reserves."

"Do you want us to write each piece?" asked Brakka.

"I especially don't want to find out tomorrow that I sold the last one without realizing it."

Zaelyra let her trace two columns: common reserves and personal property. Kethra noted each quantity, including her own share. She did not try to take back the ropes she had distributed the day before.

The start was in groups of six. The first opened the road; the second carried the water; the third closed the step. The children traveled in the middle with people able to stop without slowing everyone down. The wounded were distributed, so that no fall would leave an isolated family.

"Who decides if we change course?" asked the guard who had volunteered to open.

"The one who sees the danger first reports it. We stop, we check, then we decide, "answered Zaelyra.

"What if we don't have time?"

"So the person in the lead chooses the passage that seems least dangerous to him and then explains why."

"It's a strange rule."

"It's a rule for a bad time."

The guard turned his spear in his palm. Pell offered to accompany him to teach him the marks of Nym. The guard accepted.

Before leaving, Zaelyra checked that no complete map remained within reach. They had torn the old official sheet into three pieces: Nym kept the air measurements, Ithryl the historical annotations, and herself the layout of the galleries. No fragment was useful alone.

"Aren't you afraid of losing one? "Ithryl asked.

"Yes."

"You could copy everything."

"And someone could take it all."

The archivist stored his piece in a lining sewn inside his coat. "A memory is not confiscated so easily."

"She can be wrong."

"She does it often. That's why I note who told me everything."

Zaelyra observed her notes. Ithryl distinguished the facts he had seen, those he had read and those he could only report. She had first taken this caution for a weakness. She was beginning to understand that she was especially preventing stories from posing as evidence.

A mark ran at the bottom of the fragment: three notches gathered in a circle. Zaelyra had already seen it on an old copy. This was the sign that some attributed to Drizzt, the drow who had left the city two decades earlier. The stories rarely agreed on his reasons. Some made him a murderer, others a traitor, some a hero. They agreed even less on what he had found beyond the doors.

"Do you think that's really his sign? She asked.

Ithryl studied the drawing. "It is a sign that has been attributed to him. I have never seen a document signed by his hand."

"But he's gone."

"Witnesses said so. The official version has changed several times."

"We say that he chose another life."

"It is also said that he massacred all those who pursued him. Stories remember blades better than reasons."

Zaelyra folded the fragment. "I don't want to become his story."

"So don't walk in his steps. Find yours."

Drizzt's name had not opened any door. He only recalled that a door could be left, and that those who remained behind did not have the entire story.

The first group engaged in the gallery. Nym opened the walk with a lamp protected by a blue plate. Rhylor followed, then Zaelyra. The others advanced at regular intervals, close enough to get along, spaced enough not to be trapped in the same place.

The rock descended gently. Ancient marks ran on the walls, much higher than the shoulders. Some had been scraped, others covered with limestone. Nym stopped to measure the breath of the galleries with thin silk threads.

At the first elbow, the air smelled of wet earth. In the second, he had a taste for metal.

Nym raised his fist. The line froze.

Three passages were in front of them. The widest one went down to an old commercial road. The one in the center tightened under an overhang. The last one was just a dark slit behind a stone column.

"The air should come out of this crack," says Nym. "He comes in."

Zaelyra illuminated the wall. A stream of dust rose towards them, but drops flowed in the other direction on the ground.

"Two currents," she says.

Nym fixed a strand of silk at the top of the wall, then another near the ground. "At two heights. The wide passage sucks. The one in the center should reject the air, but it is blocked."

"And the slit?"

"She breathes from below. I don't know where she's leading."

A child sneezed behind them. The rumor went back to the leading group: they asked if we should move forward, if the road was collapsed, if the mercenaries were approaching.

Zaelyra saw a line of dried clay on the ground. It marked an old water level, almost at hip height.

"When?" asked Rhylor.

"I don't know. But not long enough to consider that the danger has passed."

They chose the wide path, despite the aspiration. Nym passed a pebble on a rope and listened to his friction against the stone. Further on, the road was divided into two: a paved tunnel on the left, a slope below the old water level on the right.

At the bifurcation, someone had drawn an incomplete circle.

Rhylor touched the edge of the symbol. "Dhal."

"You're sure?"

"No. He used several brands. This one looks like the ones he left when he couldn't check the rest."

They separated into two reconnaissance teams, connected by a rope. Zaelyra left with Nym and Pell. Rhylor went down to the right with Sszindi and two guides. After a few minutes, the agreed signal was heard: two pulls, one pause.

The right passage was practicable, but tightened under a cracked slab. On the left, a stone plate almost completely obstructed the road. Pell spotted a rope under the dust, stretched to a piton in the wall. It was not a trap: someone had set it to guide travelers in the dark.

They followed her to an alcove. The wall bore marks of height, lines counted by floods or by seasons. In a crack, a small copper box contained a lamp wick, a piece of green chalk and a piece of gray fabric, woven like a caravan canvas.

A sign was embroidered on it: three lines that moved away from an open circle.

"Dhal? Zaelyra asked.

Rhylor shook his head. "I don't know."

He did not claim that his son had passed recently. They could only say that a traveler had wanted to leave an indication to the one who would follow. They copied the sign into a separate notebook from the plan and put the box back in its place.

The old svirfneblin who kept the four names asked if this meant that she would find hers.

"No," Zaelyra replied. "Only that a passage was taken."

The woman tightened the leather in her sleeve. "It's less than I expected."

"Yes."

"But more than anything."

They reached the first shelter before the draft turned. It was an old caravan stop, carved into stone, whose ceiling rested on pillars carved from the rock. Almost erased engravings represented carts and travelers carrying lanterns.

The door had been walled from the inside.

Nym ran his fingers over the joints. "It's not a collapse. Someone closed it."

"To prevent people from entering?" asked Pell.

"Or something to go out," says Brakka.

A low opening, hidden behind a limestone plate, made it possible to reach a side chamber. There were empty lamps, hooks and stone bowls. The soot on the ceiling indicated that people had slept here for a long time. Lines of different sizes marked a wall, including four child-high notches.

The old svirfneblin approached it. "Could it be them?"

"It could be anyone," says Rhylor.

She nodded. "I don't want their names to be written here."

"Okay," Zaelyra replied.

They made the stop for a few hours. Before leaving, Zaelyra discovered behind the walled door a sentence engraved in an ancient form of the common:

The road remains open as long as someone agrees to describe it.

"A motto? Nym asked.

"Or the warning of someone who saw a road disappear from the maps," Ithryl replied.

Zaelyra wrote down the sentence in her notebook, with the name of the stop and the approximate date of their passage. She did not place it on the routes.

The road to the west had not come closer. But it was no longer just a line drawn by Dhal, nor the dream of a young cartographer who wanted to flee the House. It was made of the choices of all those who had walked until then.