Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 514: Chapter 509: The Throat

Location:Emberholt Province — The Subsidence Throat, Nest Eleven

Date/Time:13 Voidmarch, 9942 AZI — First Light

Realm:Lower Realm

Yinxin had not said anything about the helmet until Jayde put it on.

They were at the mouth of the throat in the gray before dawn, and the kit had come out of the ring one piece at a time — the frame first, struts and hydraulics and the power cell that Zhi had confirmed cool-dim eleven months ago in a dead room three hundred miles under a mountain; then the laminated chitin over the top of it; then the head unit, which she had not worn since the day the seal opened and had carried up out of that hole anyway.

She seated it, and turned it on, and the world went blue.

Not the world. Four inches in front of her eyes, hanging in the dark, a pane of thin blue light with columns of Federation standard running down the left of it — ambient thermal, structural return, atmospheric composition, four separate power draws, and the small steady cursor at the bottom that had been counting since Day 1 and had never once stopped.

She turned round.

Yinxin was standing perfectly still, and she was three thousand years old, and she had the expression of somebody watching a door open in a wall she had walked past every day of her life.

”What is it saying?”

”Air’s breathable. Rock’s more hollow than it looks. It doesn’t like the drain and can’t name it.” Jayde tilted her head, and the light moved with her, and she watched a dragon queen track it. ”Do you want to see?”

”Can I read it?”

”No.”

”Then yes,” Yinxin said.

Jayde took it off and held it out, and Yinxin put it on, which took some arranging, and stood in the dark at the mouth of a hole in Emberholt with a pane of blue light and a language nobody on this world had ever seen four inches from her face.

She did not say anything for some time.

”There are numbers changing,” she said at last.

”That’s the thermal. It’s reading you.”

”It is reading me.” A pause, and something moved in her voice that Jayde had heard perhaps twice. ”Three thousand years. Four realms. Every court on this world and half the courts above it. And nobody has ever once made a thing that simply looked at me and counted.”

”It counts everything. That’s the whole of what it is. It has no opinion about you at all.”

”I am aware of what it is.” Yinxin took the helmet off carefully, with both hands, and gave it back the way you hand back somebody’s child. ”I am telling you what it is like.”

Eden had the handheld out of its case by then and was walking the mouth of the depression with it held out flat, and had a second pane up off the datapad on her forearm, and the two of them threw enough light between them to see the frost by.

”Right,” she said. ”Now I can actually do my job.”

”Which is?”

”Counting.” Eden did not look up. ”Yesterday I told you I had two measurements and an anecdote with a slope on it, and I meant it. This morning I have a return off solid rock, a thermal gradient, and a mass estimate that updates every four seconds.” She turned the pane toward Jayde and then away again, because there was nobody else there who could read it. ”By tonight I will have a survey of Nest Eleven that could be handed to a stranger. That is the first row of the register. That is the reason I am on this field and not on a mountain teaching four hundred people to write.”

***

The rock was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the season.

Forty feet down and the frost was already behind them, and the cold that replaced it was drier and older and came up out of the stone rather than down out of the sky. Jayde went first because there was no argument to be had about it. The throat took her at an angle a little steeper than a bad staircase, floored with slabs that had not finished settling in ninety-nine centuries and had no intention of finishing while she was standing on them.

The probe rode on a harness at her right shoulder, a matte cylinder the length of her forearm with a lens cap she had taken off at the rim and put in her pocket, because she was not going to be able to find it again in a hole if she dropped it. There were six of those units in existence on this world. Eden had signed one out of the Pavilion store the way a person signs out a thing they expect to be asked about afterward.

The datapad was four feet behind her in Eden’s hands, and everything the probe saw, it saw.

Yesterday Eden had surveyed a dead field with a spade and a wooden slate in front of thirty houses and a headman. Down here there was nobody to be careful in front of.

”Talk to me about depth,” Jayde said.

”Forty-one metres and I have a floor slope of about nineteen degrees. Rope says forty.” A pause, and the small flat chime of somebody entering a correction. ”Rope is wrong. Rope has been wrong since the second turn, because rope does not know the tunnel is bending. Everything you have ever been told about how deep these things go was measured with rope.”

The first turn was tight, and she took it on her hip. The second was worse.

She got through it by taking her pack off and passing it back, and heard Eden do the same behind her, and then heard something that was not a person negotiating the same gap and did not turn round to watch.

Ashborn folded.

There was no other word for it. Horse-sized on open ground, blade-arms and spring legs and a body a full stride long — and in the second turn of that throat he simply reduced, joints going somewhere joints had no business going, until the whole of him poured through a gap that had refused Takara at the shoulder. He came out the far side and reassembled himself without any apparent effort and stood waiting, and the sound of it in the dark was the worst thing Jayde had heard in a month.

[He does that in the galleries,] Reiko said, from somewhere below her feet. [You have watched him do it forty times.]

I’ve watched him do it in daylight.

[Ah.] A pause. [Yes. It is worse in a hole.]

***

The first one came at twenty-eight metres.

She had been counting depth off the readout in the corner of her eye and by the ache in her thighs, and she nearly walked past it — a fissure in the wall no wider than her hand, and something moving in it that she took for water until it did not behave like water.

She stopped the column with a fist.

”Got it,” Eden said behind her. ”Hold there a moment — it’s the first one the handheld has resolved, and I want a clean return off it while it isn’t moving much.”

It was about the length of her forearm. Wet-slate gray, no head that she could identify as a head, moving through the crack in the rock with a slow searching motion that had nothing directed about it at all. It did not react to the lamp. It did not react to five living creatures standing three feet from it with their essence banked down as low as they could hold it.

”It doesn’t know we’re here,” Eden said quietly.

”No.”

”Jayde, it is three feet away.”

”It doesn’t know we’re here, it doesn’t care that we’re here, and if you put your hand on it, it will root into you, and we will not get it out.” She kept her voice flat and level and moving. ”That’s the whole of it. There’s no malice in that thing. It’s a mouth on a length of rope, and it has been in this rock since before anybody in your medical school was born, and it will do exactly what a mouth does if you feed it.”

Zhi had gone the color of old bone and would not come off Eden’s shoulders.

They went on down.

At forty-three metres there were four in the wall on the left and two on the right. Jayde noticed she had stopped counting individuals and started counting fissures.

At sixty-one there were more fissures than solid rock, and Eden had stopped reading the totals out loud.

***

The drain came on the way Eden’s survey had said it would, which was no comfort at all.

She felt it first as work. Everything she did was suddenly slightly harder than it should have been — the reach for a handhold, the decision about a foot placement, the small constant maintenance of holding a Crucible Core banked and quiet. She checked the level twice, and it had gone down twice, and she had not spent anything.

”Rotate,” she said.

Eden came up past her without complaint. That was the doctrine, and they had drilled it on the mountain, and it was the only reason anybody had walked out of the mountain: the person in front burns fastest, so nobody stays in front. Six minutes each. Eden went ahead with her hand on the wall, and Reiko flowed past on the other side, and Jayde dropped to the middle of the file and felt the difference inside a minute.

Yinxin did not rotate.

She went in the middle of the file with nothing on her back and nothing in her hands and did not take a turn at the front, and had not been asked to, and had not offered. That was doctrine too, and it was the ugliest piece of doctrine Jayde had ever written down: the caster spends nothing on the way in. Not a thread, not a load, not a decision. Everything she has at the bottom is everything she is going to have, and there is no second source.

It sat badly on all of them. It sat worst on Yinxin, who had been carrying things for three thousand years, and who walked down that throat with her hands empty like a woman being escorted somewhere she had not agreed to go.

”You could give me the water,” she said, somewhere around sixty metres.

”No.”

”It weighs almost nothing.”

”Almost nothing for thirty minutes is a real number, and I am not spending it on water.” Jayde did not look back. ”You can be furious about it at the top.”

At the fourth rotation, Eden stopped in front of her and stood a beat too long.

”Doc.”

”Nose,” Eden said, sounding faintly interested. ”That’s — huh.”

The blood was black in the lamplight. She had it pinched off before Jayde had finished turning her around, and she was already doing the thing she did, which was treating her own body as a rather annoying piece of field equipment that had started reporting.

”How long since you spent anything?”

”I haven’t. That’s the point I’m making.” Eden tipped her head back and kept talking through it. ”I have not channelled a thread since we came off the rim. It is taking it anyway, and now I can tell you at what rate, which is the first time anybody has been able to say that sentence.” She got the pad up one-handed. ”Extraction is not flat. It goes up with depth, and it goes up faster than depth — call it a doubling every fifteen metres, and I will tighten that on the way out. This is not a fight, and I am losing, and there are eleven people on my sheets who could not eat that meat, and if any one of them had come down here instead of me they would be on the floor by now.”

”Rotation goes to four minutes.”

”And somebody who is not me writes down that a Sparkforged cannot make this descent at all,” Eden said. ”Not slowly. At all.”

Jayde put that on the pile with everything else she was carrying down that hole and did not look at any of it.

***

The floor went at seventy-nine metres.

There was no warning worth the name — a sound like a jar cracking, somewhere under her left boot, and then the slab she had most of her weight on was not there. Jayde got her hand into a seam and her hip against the opposite wall and stopped falling about four feet down, and the slab went on without her, and she listened to it hit twice and then not hit anything for long enough that she stopped listening.

Nobody moved until she was back up.

”That did not sound like it landed,” Eden said.

”It didn’t.”

”Then what is under the floor of this tunnel?”

”More tunnel. The probe says nine metres of it before anything solid, and I would not trust that either.” She got her breathing flat. ”The whole roof under that field is hollow. Takara said it on the rim, and I wrote it down, and I did not think about what it meant for the part we were standing on.” She put her boot on the next slab and tested it and did not like the answer and stepped on it anyway. ”Test everything. Assume it is all like that. It is all like that.”

They lost eleven minutes on the next thirty feet, and Jayde would have paid double.

***

At ninety-four metres, the walls were moving.

Not the rock. The rock was doing what rock does. But every fissure in it, every crack and every seam and every place where ninety-nine centuries of extraction had opened a line in the stone, had something in it — and the lamps did not show a wall any more, they showed a surface with slow motion all through it, and the motion did not stop when the light hit it and did not begin when the light hit it either.

Eden stopped once and put her light on Ashborn for four or five seconds, and then wrote something, and did not say what.

”Doc.”

”He’s fine.” She did not look up from the slate. ”That is what I am writing. Everything with a Crucible Core in this tunnel is being bled, and I am four minutes off the front, and my hands are shaking, and that thing has walked three hundred feet through a drain field and is exactly as it was on the rim.” A pause. ”The nest cannot take anything off him. There is nothing in him it recognises as worth taking.”

Because he is made of the other thing, Jayde thought, and did not say it, because there were three hundred feet of rock between her and anywhere she could think about it properly.

Nobody said anything for the last thirty feet.

Then the throat gave out into open air, and the temperature changed.

***

It was warm.

That was the thing. Jayde came out of the throat onto a shelf of broken slab and the air that met her was blood-warm and damp, and it should not have been, because they had come down through a hundred metres of dry old cold under a field where nothing had grown since the calendar started, and the only warm thing in all of it was down here.

The chamber was about the size of a granary.

That was the second thing, and she had to stand with it for a moment, because she had built every plan she had against something she remembered being unable to see across.

”Eden.”

”I know.”

”Say the number.”

”Three thousand one hundred and something. It’s still settling.” Eden had the handheld up, and her whole face was lit blue from underneath. ”Call it three thousand two hundred, and I will give you a better one when the thermal finishes averaging, and I want the record to show it is a measurement and not a guess, because it is the first one anybody has ever taken.”

Jayde looked at a room full of it and made herself hold the figure and the memory at the same time, which was the entire problem in one motion.

”Nest Eleven is small. We knew that at noon yesterday, and I did not believe it in my body until this second.” Eden lowered the instrument. ”And the room would fit inside the threshing floor of that village with space around the edges. I want that written exactly like that too.”

The mass filled the floor of it, and most of the walls, and a good deal of the roof.

It was a knot. There was no other honest description — individuals from finger-length to the better part of two metres, wound into and through each other in a continuous braid that had no beginning that Jayde could find, wet-slate gray, moving all over in a slow undirected motion like something simmering just below temperature. It made a sound. She had expected silence and instead there was a low continuous wet noise that was simply the sound of that many bodies moving against each other, and it filled the chamber the way the warmth did.

Reiko went along the near edge of it at a walk, close, with his head low.

[Do not,] Jayde said.

[I am looking at the floor.] He did not stop. [There is a border. It stops in a line about a pace and a half short of this slab, and it does not come past it, and it has not come past it for a very long time, because there is dust on the stone in between and the dust is not disturbed.]

Meaning?

[Meaning it does not want the shelf. It wants the wall it is fastened to.] He came back. [Which is good, and which I mistrust, because it means the only reason we are standing here is that we are not what it came for.]

Nothing in it turned toward the light.

Nothing in it turned toward anything. It had been feeding since before the calendar had a first year, and it did not need to know they were there, and that was worse than being hunted by a considerable margin.

It is not thinking about us, Takara said, far away and thin through a hundred metres of rock. Is it.

No.

Good. Keep it that way as long as you can manage.

***

Yinxin walked past her to the far wall.

She had not spoken since the second turn. She went across the broken floor of that chamber in the gray robe with her hair tied back, past the edge of the mass and along it, close enough that Jayde’s whole body objected — and stopped where the rock changed.

It changed about eight paces up the northern wall.

Where the mass fed, the stone gave out, and what was underneath was pale, and faintly luminous, and moving.

Not moving the way the worms moved. It rose and settled with a rhythm that was slow and enormous and entirely regular, and it had nothing whatever to do with the braid that was fastened all over it, and Jayde had known what she was going to be looking at and had briefed everyone standing behind her about what they were going to be looking at, and it did not help at all.

Behind her, Eden made a small sound and stopped making it.

There was no need to explain it to anybody. Everybody in that chamber understood, without being told, in the first half-second, that they were standing inside something’s body, and that the pale surface eight paces up the northern wall was not a wall, and that it had been being eaten in this room every hour of every day for ninety-nine centuries while the world above it ploughed around a gray circle and told stories about a bell.

Isha’s voice came up out of the ring on her hand, and it was not clinical, and it was not calm.

[Get it off her.]

”Positions,” Jayde said.

Reiko took the left of the shelf where the throat came in. Ashborn went to the right of it and unfolded, and the chamber was suddenly a great deal smaller. Eden set the field emitter down on the slab between them and went onto one knee beside it with the slate on her thigh, and Zhi poured off her shoulders and coiled at her ankles and turned the color of a knife.

Yinxin put both hands flat against the pale rhythm in the wall.

”Ready,” she said.

Jayde drew, and set her feet, and looked at the mass filling a granary-sized room and did the last piece of arithmetic she was going to be allowed to do for a while.

”Mark,” she said.

Yinxin stopped moving.

The clock started.