Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 535: Chapter 530: The Gap

Location:Obsidian Academy — The Old Armory

Date/Time:6 Ashwhisper, 9942 AZI — Later

Realm:Lower Realm

”That is the cap,” Jayde said, ”and now eight of you have seen it instead of reading it.”

Zhong pulled his sleeve down.

”Everybody in this room has just watched me and drawn the wrong conclusion,” he said. ”It was not my cultivation that did that. It was the body. The line is in the body.”

”The line is in the body,” Jayde agreed. ”Which means the thing coming through that gate in seventy years is not dangerous to a bolt because it is a great cultivator. It is dangerous to a bolt because of what it is made of, and we have no idea what that is.”

”Then the whole of it —” Bai Shu had gone white again.

”No. Stop. You were right, and you are still right, and I want you to hear why before you take that back.” Jayde said it fast and hard enough to land. ”What comes over a wall at a village is not one thing at the top of a ladder. It never has been. It is a mass — and mass is by definition the cheap end of whatever sent it, because nothing that has ever invaded anywhere could afford to make every soldier its best one. The bolt answers the mass. The mass is what takes villages.”

”And the rest,” Ruifen said.

”The rest is the problem, and I do not have a good answer, and you are going to get the bad one instead.” Jayde put her hand flat on the bench. ”Feng Lian killed seven Praetorians in that mountain with nineteen lances. Not one of them fell to a bolt, and not one of them fell to a technique. They fell to a thing that took four people to carry and could not be moved once it was set.”

”That is a position’s weapon,” Feng Lian said, ”and not a soldier’s, and it changes everything about where you put the walls.”

”It changes everything about where we put the walls, and that is why the forts and the towers are in the build order in year one and not year forty.” Jayde looked at each of them. ”A farmer with a crossbow holds a wall against the mass. A wall with a lance on it holds against the thing the mass is walking in front of. Neither works without the other, and I have never once said they did.”

”And in between?” Shenwei asked.

”There is nothing in between. That is the gap, and it is the largest one in the entire design.” Jayde did not decorate it. ”Something a soldier can carry, that a farmer can be taught in a month, that hurts a thing a bolt bounces off. It does not exist. Not on Doha, not anywhere I have ever been told of.”

”Then we are building a force around a hole,” Ruifen said.

”We are building a force around a hole that is seventy years wide, and that is not the same sentence.” Jayde put the crossbow down. ”Eden and I have been on it since before we came up that road. We have four approaches written up and three of them are almost certainly wrong, and I am not going to describe any of them tonight, because the moment I do, six of you will start solving the version I described instead of the problem.”

Eden did not look up from her paper.

”Two of them are wrong,” she said. ”And the fourth is a page of arithmetic she did at three in the morning in Voidmarch and has not looked at since, so I would not count it in front of people.”

”Then it is two, and I will look at the fourth.” Jayde did not miss a beat. ”And it is not going to be finished by the two of you, or by me, and I want to say clearly what I intend instead, because it is a thing this force does not yet have a shape for.” She looked around at them. ”There will be an eleventh division, and it will do nothing but this. Not ordnance — ordnance makes what we know how to make. This is the one that finds out what nobody knows. Materials, mechanisms, essence, behavior under load, why a thing that stops a bolt does not stop a lance. It will produce nothing useful for a long time, and it will be funded anyway.”

”When?” Feng Lian asked.

”Ten years. Probably fifteen. And that is a decision, not a shortage, and I want the whole of the reasoning because you are all going to be asked about it by somebody who thinks I am being slow.”

”You are being slow,” Feng Lian said.

”I am being slow on purpose, which is a different crime.” Jayde put two fingers on the bench. ”Take the worst part of it first. Eden and I could start on this tonight. We are the two people on this world best placed to; we have the approaches written, and if we gave it four uninterrupted years, I think there is a fair chance we would have something.”

”Then why in the name of the flames are you not,” Ruifen said.

”Because of what the four years would come out of.”

She let that stand on its own for a moment, and then she took it apart in front of them.

”The gate is seventy years away. The Harrowing is fifty. The beast tide over the northern wall is whenever it likes, and the eastern flat floods every third spring, and the spring after this one is the third.” Jayde counted it flatly. ”Every hour Eden and I spend on a weapon that hurts a thing nobody living has seen is an hour not spent on a levee that holds. On a bridge that takes weight. On a plough that turns heavy ground behind one ox instead of two, which is not a weapon and will keep more people alive in the next decade than anything on this bench.”

”Roads,” Bai Shu said.

”Roads. Wells that do not poison a village. A way to dry herb at scale that a farmer’s wife can build. Schools that are actually standing, with people in them who can actually teach.” She looked around at them. ”Those things save somebody this decade. I will know their names in ten years, and so will Ruifen, because she will have carried some of them out of a valley. I do not know the name of one person the weapon saves, and neither does anybody in this room, and I am not going to trade the first for the second because the second is more interesting.”

Shenwei had not said anything for a while.

”And the arithmetic does not cost you much,” he said. ”That is the part you have not said.”

”It costs almost nothing, and I checked it twice before I let myself believe it.” Jayde turned her hand over. ”Give the problem to a proper division in year fifteen. That still leaves fifty-five years for finding it, arguing about it, being wrong about it, building it, making it badly, making it properly, writing the manual, and teaching four thousand people to use it. Fifty-five years is not a tight schedule. Fifty-five years is luxurious. Nobody on this continent has ever had fifty-five years to do anything.”

”And if it takes sixty?”

”Then we are in the same position we are in tonight, which is holding a wall with a crossbow and a lance, and we will have lost nothing except an argument.” She did not soften it. ”I would far rather be wrong about the weapon than wrong about the levee. If I am wrong about the levee, it happens in four years, and I can count it.”

***

”There is a second reason, and it is the one I actually believe,” Jayde went on. ”I cannot staff it. Not from this room and not from this generation.”

Feng Lian’s eyebrows went up.

”It needs forty people who were taught to write down what failed, from the age of six, by us — and the first of those are not born into a school that exists yet.” Jayde met her eyes. ”The eleventh chair stays empty until there is somebody to put in it who thinks in a way none of the ten of us do. I am not the person to solve this. I am the person who makes the people who solve it, and it has taken me a considerable while to be able to say that sentence without minding it.”

Ryo had the ledger open on his knee.

”Eleven,” he said. ”You told the Headmaster nine.”

”I told the Headmaster nine, and I walked into a hall and needed ten before I had finished the sentence, and now I am telling you eleven, and there is a twelfth after that, and I do not yet know what it is for.” Jayde did not look away from him. ”I said twelve was the ceiling. I meant it, and I want somebody in this room to hold me to it, out loud, in writing, on the day I come back with a thirteenth.”

”I will do that,” Ryo said, and wrote it down.

Shenwei had stopped turning the sheet over.

”You are saying the person who solves it,” he said, ”is currently about nine years old.”

”I am saying the person who solves it is nine years old this year, has never held a pen, and lives somewhere Hu Bing has not surveyed yet.” Jayde let that stand. ”Which is why I am not in a hurry about the eleventh chair, and I am in a great hurry about the schools.”

”And in the meantime it is us,” Feng Lian said.

”In the meantime it is the two of you, and you will probably fail, and if you fail I want every failure written down so that whoever comes after does not repeat one of them.” Jayde straightened. ”And do not tell me it is hopeless. This continent has had ten thousand years and has never once put a single person on the question — not a room, not a year, not one man in one shed. Nobody has ever tried. Twenty years of people genuinely trying will produce things none of us can imagine tonight, and we have seventy.” She looked at Shenwei. ”They measured us last time and wrote it down and went away satisfied. They have no reason at all to expect that we have started thinking.”

Feng Lian and Shenwei looked at each other across the bench.

”That is the two of us, then,” Feng Lian said.

”And if there is one afternoon in the next twenty years where you look at each other and know — send for me at whatever hour it is.”

Zhong flexed the arm once, and looked at the place where the mark had been and was not, and said nothing at all.

***

”And the shield is doctrine, and it is mine,” Meifen said. ”Every recruit, in the wall, in the first month, before anybody teaches them anything clever. It is the same argument as the bolt, and I am not going to make it twice.”

”The sword?”

”Short. Not because it is better — because it is what a man has left.” Feng Lian turned it over. ”Nobody wins anything with this. It is for when the wall is gone, and he is in a ditch, and something has hold of his shield arm. The dagger is for when the sword is gone, and it is also a tool, and it will do more digging than killing, and that is fine.”

***

Feng Lian began putting the four weapons away, one at a time, in the order she had laid them out, which took longer than it needed to and which nobody interrupted.

Jayde stood at the head of the bench with the helmet in her hands and turned it over the way Meifen had.

[It is a very ugly hat.] Reiko, from somewhere above the rafters, where he had been for two hours doing nothing at all.

[It is a very good hat.]

[Those are not the same sentence.] A pause. [She was crying about the cap. The one who goes red.]

[I know.]

[You did not say anything.]

[No.]

Jayde set the helmet down at the top of the kit, where a head would have been, and left it there.