The bell that rang at the third hour was meant for fires, not maps.
Idris was already awake when it began, hunched over a sketch of the salt road by the light of a single lamp, when the pewter dome above the hall started its slow, embarrassed clang. He counted to seven before he stood, because seven was the count for fire, and by the eighth strike he had decided that whoever was pulling the rope had lost their mind.
Then the apprentice came running, and he saw her face, and he understood that someone had not lost their mind at all.
“They’re all gone, sir,” she said. “Every one.”
He followed her down the spiral. The vault door stood open — not forced, simply open, as though someone inside had walked out and forgotten to close it. The maps were on their racks, exactly where they belonged. The seals were unbroken. The wax was cold.
The parchment was empty.
He pulled out the great chart of the southern provinces, the one that had taken his predecessor eleven years to compile, and held it up to the lamp. Nothing. No coastline. No rivers. Not even the watermark of the cartography guild, which had been pressed into the sheet before any ink ever touched it.
“Sir,” the apprentice said, very quietly, “what does it mean?”
He had no answer. He had, in fact, only a question, and it was not one he wanted to ask aloud.
If the maps no longer remember the empire, he thought, does the empire still remember itself?
Outside, the bell kept ringing.