Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 518: Chapter 513: The Door

Location:The Western Plateau — The Second Dead Field

Date/Time:18–20 Voidmarch, 9942 AZI

Realm:Lower Realm

The cairns were the first thing, and Jayde was off the horse and walking toward them before she had worked out why.

Somebody had been building them for a long time. Not one generation of somebody. The stones at the base of the nearest had gone into the ground far enough that grass had closed over them, and the stones at the top were sharp-edged and pale and had been put there inside the last year, by a person who had walked out here in winter and stacked rock at the edge of a place their whole family had agreed never to enter.

The second site was a day and a half north of the first, and it broke the whole thing.

They had come onto it late in the afternoon with the light going flat and gold across the plateau. Four hundred and eighty paces. Gray, fired, mineral, dead. A shepherd’s wall running straight up to the edge and stopping, and the cairns going round the outside of all of it.

”Between the two,” Eden said, with real satisfaction. ”Right between them. Four eighty, drain at two and a half hours, gradient inside a whisker of where the line put it before we crested the rise. Jayde, it scales.” She swept the pane over the middle. ”And there’s the patch. Two-tenths, a hundred and ten paces off center. That thing is occupied.”

Yinxin did not ask for the chain. She asked for the handheld, and read the columns off it out loud, and got the thermal one wrong once and did not get it wrong again.

”Then find me the throat,” Jayde said.

The head unit found nothing in twenty minutes.

Jayde walked the whole circumference with the structural return running, then quartered the interior on foot, and the pane filled with exactly what it had shown her at both of the others — cavity after cavity, the roof of the thing eaten hollow and standing on very little indeed — and not one of them came within thirty meters of the surface.

”Say it,” Eden said.

”It says there’s no way in.”

”Then we check it.”

They spent the whole of the next day checking it. Reiko went over four hundred and eighty paces nose-down and full size, and came back having found two burrows, a great deal of nothing, and a quantity of gray dust that took him three days to stop shedding. Takara walked the circumference twice, and once turned his head toward the northern ridge for four seconds and looked back at nothing, and Jayde did not ask what was up there, because she never did. Yinxin went up before dawn while the moons were still down and came in low along the flat with the light behind her, which is how you find a depression a person standing in it cannot see, and came down and shook her head once.

Nobody had expected anything different. That was the point. Eden opened a fresh column on the datapad, headed it instrument: negative, and left four rows empty under it for three people who did not trust the instrument — a procedure being born about nine hours after it stopped being necessary.

Three of the four rows came back the same. The fourth did not get filled in at all, because Yinxin would not stop.

She had the handheld. She had asked for it at midday, and nobody had asked what for, and by mid-afternoon she had been out on the gray for five hours with it held at the angle Eden held it at, quartering ground that had already been quartered twice.

”You have the columns,” Eden said when she came in for the third time.

”I have the columns.”

”Then you know what they say.”

”I know what they say.” Yinxin turned the pane around. She had found the warm patch on her own, and the void geometry, and the flat cold value of everything else, and she had found them without help and in the right order. ”And I would like somebody to explain to me why a thing that can weigh a moon cannot find a hole.”

It was not the objection of a woman who distrusted the instrument. Jayde recognized it about a half-second before Eden did, and found she had to look somewhere else for a moment, because there was something appalling about watching a dragon discover disappointment in a machine.

”Because there isn’t one,” Eden said, gently, which was not a register she used often. ”It found what is there. There is no hole. It is not failing you. It is telling you an answer you don’t like, which is the only thing that makes it worth carrying.”

Yinxin looked at the pane for a while longer.

”Yesterday morning I did not believe a word it said,” she said. ”This afternoon I have spent five hours arguing with it. I am aware of how that looks, and I would prefer no observations.”

I have made none, Takara said, from a considerable distance, in the tone of a creature banking them.

The ground under that field was as hollow as Eleven’s had been. It simply had not fallen in yet.

”There’s a column missing,” Jayde said at dusk, standing in the middle of it.

Eden waited.

”Every plan I’ve made since the council assumes a way in, and the whole of it is built on one nest. One.” She turned and looked at four hundred and eighty paces of ground that was not going to let anybody near it. ”In the whole history of this world, nobody has ever surveyed one of these. Not the Academy, not the Temple, not the dragons, not the demons. There is no body of knowledge to have consulted. There is Eleven, and there is what I remember from being fifteen. I have been reasoning from a sample of one, because a sample of one is the entire inheritance of this world.”

”That isn’t a mistake.”

”No. It’s worse, because a mistake can be caught by a careful person and this could not have been caught by anybody alive.” She took the head unit off. ”And it does not matter in the slightest, because that field is occupied and I am not walking away from it.”

***

Ashborn came out that night because she had said he would eat first, and had said it out loud, and had meant it.

There was nothing to eat.

He stood on four hundred and eighty paces of dead plateau in the dark with the sensory pits turning slowly, the nearest holding two ridges south and every approach walked twice before she opened the way for him. Under his feet there was a nest that nobody had counted and nobody could, and ninety meters of unbroken rock between him and any of it.

”There’s no door,” she said. ”Not here. We’ve looked twice, and I’m not going to pretend we’ll find one tomorrow.”

Nothing moved.

”So we’re going to make one. I don’t know how yet. I know that we are.”

He folded down where he was, did not go back inside when she opened the way a second time, and was still out there an hour later when she came past with the fire wanting wood.

The voice arrived in her head without being invited, which was how it arrived now.

He is not sulking, Takara said, from somewhere under her coat. In case that is what you are building.

What is he doing?

Waiting. He is extremely good at it and he has had a great deal of practice, and I would not read anything encouraging into how good he is at it. A pause. He waited eleven months for you to notice he was hungry.

***

”Say what it costs us,” Jayde said when it was full dark, and the fire was small.

”Depends entirely on the ratio, and I do not have the ratio.” Eden had her knees up and the datapad flat on them. ”One in two? One in five? And a nest we can’t get into goes on eating for as long as it takes the roof to fall in, which could be next spring or a thousand years, and there is nothing under that field tonight that cares which.”

”Then we stop waiting for the roof.” Jayde put a piece of wood on. ”The whole point is speed. Every year one of these keeps feeding is a year of Ala going quieter, and I am not putting a field on a list marked later because the ground has not obliged us yet. If it has no door, we cut one.”

Yinxin’s head came round.

”You are talking about Terracore.”

”I’m talking about a hundred meters of basalt and a family of dragons who move rock for a living.”

”Name them,” Yinxin said.

Jayde opened her mouth and then did not use it, because the list was six long and she had known that for six weeks and had somehow gone on thinking of it as the dragons.

”Xinglong. Huifu. Hulong. Yinglong. Xingteng. Heiteng.”

”Six.” Yinxin let it sit in the firelight. ”Not a house. Not a flight. Six, and every one of them is standing where they are standing because I exist and cannot be known to exist. There is no sixth cousin in the north I can send for. There is no lending an heir from another line for a season. The instant one more dragon on this world is told why we are digging holes in dead ground, I stop being a rumor and start being a war.” She turned her cup slowly. ”And I do not know how many of the six can hold a Terracore bore a hundred meters down, because in three thousand years I have never once had cause to ask a dragon what he is good at.”

”Then that’s the first thing we find out.”

”It is.” A pause. ”And you should hear the number before you build a plan on it, because it will not be six. It may be two.”

Jayde looked at the fire and did the arithmetic she did not want to do — one caster, an unknown number of borers, eighty-eight fields, and a list of people who could be told that would fit around a table with room left over.

”It is not the digging that concerns me,” Yinxin went on. It is that a nest lives in the ground, and has done for longer than anybody can tell you. Everything it knows about the world above it arrives through stone, and you propose to spend a day and a night driving a shaft toward it and expect it not to notice.”

”That’s exactly what I expect it to notice.”

”Then say the rest.”

”Two things happen if it notices.” Jayde drew it in the ash with a stick, because she had to see it laid out. ”First, it comes up the shaft to us instead of us going down it, which is a fight in a tunnel a dragon has just made, under a hollowed roof, with the caster somewhere behind us in the dark. That’s a bad day, not a lost one.”

”And the second.”

”The second is that it does not come up the shaft. It leaves.” She looked up. ”It goes sideways into all the fissure that hollowing made, and it disperses under the plateau, and now there’s no chamber to cast at, and eight thousand of them are in the ground under four villages, and the Widow’s Field becomes twelve of them in a generation.”

Nobody said anything at all for a while. The fire cracked, and the wind came off the escarpment.

”A tunnel is a door in both directions,” Eden said at last. ”That is the actual cost, and it isn’t small. Every shaft we cut is a way out we have handed them, and it stays a way out for the whole forty minutes she is standing there not moving.”

”So the shaft has to be silent,” Jayde said. ”Not quiet. Silent. They can’t be allowed to feel any part of it until the moment we come through the last meter, and then they get about four heartbeats and a great deal of light.”

”You are describing a ward,” Yinxin said.

”I’m describing a ward that has to be cast into solid rock, ahead of the dig face, carried forward as the face advances, and holding a boundary that stops a signature getting out through stone.” Jayde looked across the fire. ”Eden.”

”I know,” Eden said. ”You want the shield field.”

”I want the shield field pointed the other way round.”

Eden had gone very quiet, and it was the specific quiet that meant she had already started and would be no use for conversation in about ninety more seconds.

”It’s the same physics,” she said. ”It is genuinely the same physics. The field I proposed to the council was a boundary that stops a thing coming in — psionic pressure, drain, contact. Nobody at that table asked whether it also stops a thing going out, because nobody at that table had a reason to want that. It does. A boundary is a boundary. It does not care which side you are standing on.” She looked up. ”Federation emitter, Isha’s formation interface, and instead of one bubble round a line of soldiers you want a moving collar round a bore head. That is harder. That is considerably harder. That is also not a different project, and I have been staring at the first half of it since Frostforge.”

”How long?”

”Don’t ask me that tonight.”

”I’m not asking you tonight.”

”Good, because tonight the answer is a number I would be ashamed of in a month.” Eden was writing, fast, the datapad propped against her knee. ”But say it works. Say we get a collar. Then the whole shape changes, because then a field with no throat isn’t a field we can’t clear. It’s a field that costs a dragon a day of digging and takes four heartbeats longer to open, and that is not a worse nest. In some ways that is a better one, because we choose where the door is and they don’t.”

And a throat, Takara said, is a hole somebody else chose.

The three of them looked at him.

I have been holding a line at the bottom of one, he said. Nobody consulted me about the geometry.

[The blade is inclined to observe,] Kazren said, from the soul space, unhurried and entirely without warmth, [that a besieger who cuts his own breach has made two decisions, and only ever remembers making one. The wall he opens does not close behind him. I have watched four armies learn that, and only one of them survived the lesson, and it survived because somebody stood in the gap.]

I know.

[I did not say you did not. I said the gap will need somebody standing in it, and I know exactly which of you it will be, and so do you.]