Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 546: Chapter 541: Where Forty Should Have Been

Location:Zhū’kethara

Date/Time:The five Void Days, 9942 AZI

Realm:Upper Realm

It begins at the hour the light comes, and it does not stop for five days, and there is no part of it a king may put down.

Ren had gone up to the high terrace before first light because it was the only place in the city where the wind was loud enough to be worth something, and had stood there with his hands on the parapet and waited for it the way a man waits at a window for weather he has already seen coming up the valley.

Somewhere below him a household woke and named its dead.

Then another. Then eleven, in a street on the western cut, in no order and not together. Then a district. Then the forge quarter, all at once, because the forge quarter does everything all at once and always has.

Then his realm.

The Path takes all of it. That is what the Path is for, and it has never once done anything else. Every name said out loud by every demon alive, in every hall and yard and cellar and roadside in a realm — and the Path does not summarize, and it does not sort, and it has no setting on it marked later.

It came up through him and kept coming.

***

If a man could stand outside the Path and look at it, which no man can, it is a night sky.

Every demon alive is one light in it, and not one of them is a large light. What matters is the threading. A soul is tied to its mother and its father and theirs, to its children, to its brothers and cousins and the aunt it never liked, and those knots make a small bright web of their own; and the small web is knotted into a larger, and that into a larger still, until there is one thing with eight million lights in it and no edges anywhere.

And every last thread of it runs to him.

Truemates sit differently in it. Ren had never been able to unsee that once he had seen it. A pair is not two lights next to each other. The male soul closes over the female one — wraps it, the whole way round, and holds it there, and goes on holding it while he sleeps and while he works and while he dies — and what light comes out of the pair comes out through him and is hers.

And there is one light in the web that has no business being in it.

No vine at the throat. No beast in the chest. Nothing in him for a pair to close over and nothing of him to close over anybody, not ever, not once, not if he outlives the both of them. By every rule Ren was ever taught, Theron is not in the Path and cannot be in the Path.

And he has been in it since he was a child, and in all that time nobody has been able to say why.

***

Maethys had told him, in a full room, in the mild voice of a man raising a small point of order, that no king had ever been meant to do what Ren had just finished describing doing.

Ren had gone very close to unforgivable about it. He had spent a good while afterward unable to decide whether that was because the old man had been insulting or because he had been right, and had settled in the end on both, which is the answer that does nobody any good.

There is a word for it. Ren had not had that word two years ago, and neither had anybody else alive in his realm.

A Pathsinger holds a piece of the web instead of the king — a district, a direction, a few hundred thousand lights — and what comes up out of it goes into him and not into the man on the terrace. A Pathsinger does not do it alone. Whatever runs through a Pathsinger runs through the one he is bonded to as well, and the two of them carry what one cannot.

Twenty of those pairs, once. Forty minds, each with a piece of the country, the whole thing spread out and doubled and survivable.

Then not twenty. Then fewer. Then none — and nobody left standing anywhere in the realm who could have told you what had gone, because the last men who could do it went into the ground and took the word down with them, and after long enough a people stops noticing an absence and starts calling what is left the whole of it.

So the realm had come to a young king with no advice and no word for the thing he was doing, and the young king had done the arithmetic.

A soul has a size. His is not infinite; eight million threads is eight million threads, and there was no widening himself — so he had narrowed them. Every pathway in the realm taken down to the least width that would still carry a signal, because a thin thread that holds is a thread and a wide one that parts is nothing. It took the better part of a century and he never told anybody he was doing it, and it worked, and his people have gone on being one people for ten thousand years, and there is not a demon alive who would call it the wrong choice if any of them had ever known there was one.

And he had assumed, afterward, as a man assumes the shape of the room he was raised in, that a thin Path was simply what a Path was.

There are four now.

The first he had gone down under the mountain and brought up a little over a year ago and had not understood at the time what he was carrying up the stairs. Three more since, because when a man learns that the thing crushing him has a name and the name is asleep under a hill, he goes and gets them, and he keeps going.

Four is not twenty. It is not none either, and this was the first Void Days in ten thousand years that any weight at all came off him, and Ren had spent part of the first morning measuring the size of what had gone and getting quietly furious about it, because four told him exactly what forty would have felt like.

The rest of it still arrived in one place, and the one place was a man standing on a terrace in the cold with his hands on a wall, and there was no version of the five days in which he was permitted to close that — because the whole point of the Path is that it is open, and a king who shuts it on the one week of the year his people are grieving out loud is not a king, he is a large man in a good coat.

So he stood there and let it come.

Somebody in the eastern district said a name and then said she made bread badly and would not be told, and laughed, and then stopped laughing.

Ren held that one for a while.

***

Dovan got up on the second morning and walked the length of the healing wing, which was thirty paces, and did it in one go.

Dovan was insufferable about it.

”Thirty.” He was at the far end, holding the rail with one hand and pretending he was not. ”Two days ago that was eleven and then a wall.”

”It was nine.” Ilvaren did not look up from the bench. ”I was counting.”

”It was eleven.”

”Nine, and then Sarvhek caught you, and you told him you were resting.”

”I was resting.”

Ren stood in the doorway with his arms folded and let it go on, because it was the only room in the city that sounded like this and he had come for that specifically. Down every other corridor in Zhū’kethara there were people saying the names of the dead they had lost inside a programme nobody had told them about, and here were two Kael’thoren arguing about a number of paces.

That was worth standing in for a few minutes.

”Da’Ren.” Dovan straightened, which cost him, and did it anyway. ”Thirty paces.”

”I heard. Twice.”

”It is going to be forty by Restday.”

”It is going to be thirty by Restday, and you are going to sit down, and that is not the king talking, that is the healer, and she has already written it down.”

Dovan sat down.

***

Theron was in the next room and had not moved out of it since they came up off the margin.

He was awake — often awake now, which Maelith said was progress and which did not look like progress from a doorway, because a man who is awake and cannot lift his own arm has a particular quality of stillness about him that has nothing restful in it at all.

”You are hovering.” Theron did not open his eyes.

”I am standing.”

”You are hovering, standing up. It is worse.” One eye opened. Pale gold, and tired all the way down. ”How many days?”

”It is the second.”

”Ah.” The eye closed again. ”I have been listening to it.”

Ren did not say anything.

”They are naming out on the western holdings. The resettlement. They started before dawn, and they have not stopped, and there are eight hundred thousand of them out there, and I am lying in a bed in a fortress being fed with a spoon.”

Ren did not say the obvious thing, which was that Theron had spent thousands of years being the only one of himself anybody had ever met, and that eight hundred thousand people had walked into this realm inside the year and made him ordinary, and that he had not stopped being quietly, ferociously pleased about it for a single day since.

A man does not need that said back to him. He needs somebody in the doorway while he says the other part.

”You have a year of it in you.”

”I have four months of it in me, and Maelith says six, and she says six because she has decided that six sounds survivable when a man hears it. But I do not need to be told what I spent. I was the one spending it.”

There was nothing to put against that either.

Ren had found him as a child, dying, and had been told by people who knew exactly what they were talking about that there was no point, and had done it anyway. Since then Theron has put himself between his king and things that should have finished them both more times than either of them ever counted out loud, and gone down into holes for demons who would not once have crossed a street for him, and done all of it without a vine at his throat or a beast in his chest or one soul in three realms shaped to be his. And he is the only male alive who can hold Radiance.

There is no word for what Theron is.

His people have a word for everything. For the mated and the unmated, for a vine and for what its leaves are doing, for every gift a demoness is born holding, for the precise shade of fading a man has reached. They have never had one for Theron, in any hall, in any age.

So they use his name. It took a few thousand years, and a considerable amount of his blood, and Ren counts it among the better things his people have managed in his reign.

Ren had known it in a hole under the eastern margin, at the moment he watched Theron go down on his knees beside a Kael’thoren and start pouring, and he had let it happen, because the alternative was a dead man on a floor and there had not been a third thing.

That is what a ledger is. It is not the entries. It is the fact that both columns are true at once and you carry them anyway.

”Was he worth it?” Theron asked.

”He walked thirty paces this morning.”

”Then yes.” Theron’s mouth moved, very slightly. ”Do not look like that, Da’Ren. I would have gone down that hole if you had told me not to. You know that, and I know that, and we are neither of us going to say it out loud in a healing wing.”

***

On the third day Ren went down into the great hall and stood at the back of it like anybody else, and his people named their dead where they could see him doing it.

That mattered. He had learned it a long time ago from a man he no longer had.

There was no order. Somebody stood, said a name, sat. Kael’thoren came in off shift and said theirs still in armor. An old Shan’kara four rows from the front said eleven and then stood there a while with his mouth working, and nobody hurried him, because his leaves had been down to a handful for two centuries and the room understood exactly what it was watching and let him have it.

Kaelen said four.

Ren had not known one of them, and made a note of that, and did not ask.

***

And underneath the whole of it, in every hall in the realm, the new ones.

His people had learned inside the year what had been done in the facilities and how long it had gone on, and this was the first naming since. It changed the shape of the days. A rite that has run unaltered since before the Sundering had suddenly acquired an enormous number of entries, and nobody had any idea how to do them, because for thousands of years the missing had not been dead. They had been missing, which is a different word, and you go on setting a place for a missing person, and you do not say his name on the fifth day.

So they improvised, badly, in public, all week.

Some of them said the names flatly and got through a great many. Some of them said one and could not go on. A woman in the third row of his own hall stood up and said, ”I do not have a name. She was my sister’s second, and she was born in Emberwane and I never once saw her,” and sat down, and Ren felt what that did to eight million people at the same instant, because he is the place where it goes.

He kept his hands on the rail, and he did not close the channel.

He was not certain, afterward, that he had done anything else worth counting that week.

***

He had his own.

He had a great many of his own — ten thousand years of them, and every one of the ten thousand years had come through him at the time and gone on coming through him afterward, and a king who says all of his would be standing in that hall until the year turned again.

So he did what everybody does, which is choose.

He said Suzarin’s.

That one he had said every year for a long time. It came out easily now, which had been the thing he had not expected about grief when he was young — that it does not get lighter, it gets smooth, and one day you notice you can lift it without looking and are appalled at yourself.

There is a thing that happens to a name when you have said it aloud in a hall for long enough. It stops being a woman and becomes a word you are good at, and Ren had noticed that happening perhaps four hundred years ago and had not been able to stop it, and had eventually understood that this was not disloyalty and was in fact the only reason anybody survives being very old.

He said three of the Kael’thoren who had gone into the sea gate.

He said his grandfather’s name, which nobody in that hall but Kaelen was old enough to have heard spoken.

And then he stopped, because the two that were left were not available to him.

***

His mother and his father are set in the wall of the Hall of Remembrance, set in the d’Aar hall, inside the mountain, with every other d’Aar who ever lived, and for the whole of his life until three years ago they were not there at all.

Three layers of masterwork, laid over his uncle’s stone by a man who was very good at his work, and Ren had spent a night lifting them off one at a time and then tested his own blood against what was under them three times, because twice is not enough for a thing like that.

Renvyr d’Aar. Every time, Renvyr d’Aar. And then the crystal had taken him sideways to a woman, and he had stood in an empty hall with her name in both hands for a long while before he said it out loud, badly, to nobody.

They are alive. That is not a hope, and he has never once let anybody hand it to him as one. A connection to a dead demon is not a connection; it is a record, and he has had both kinds under his palm, and there is no mistaking one for the other.

What the two of them will not do is say where. A bondseer will tell you — carefully, having been asked, having considered how much the answer is going to cost — that there are things which block, and that a barrier is one of them, and a great deal else besides.

And on the second day of this one, one of them moved.

Ren had gone into the Hall in the afternoon, as he does on these days, with a realm naming its dead through him, and put his hand flat across the pair of them. And one of them moved.

Once. So faint that a man who had not spent three years learning exactly how still they are would have missed it.

Ren stayed there until the light went. It did not happen again. And he could not afterward say which of the two it had been, because his hand had been across both.

A man who says a name at the naming has finished. That is what the rite is. That is what the five days are for — you put the person down where everybody can see you doing it, and afterward the ground holds them instead of you.

Ren stood at the back of his own great hall with eight million voices coming through a channel built for forty, holding two names the rite had nowhere to put.

His mother and his father are alive. There is no day in the year for that, and there is never going to be one, because a people does not build a rite for a thing that has happened to one man.

He did not say them.

He had not said them last year either, and he had a strong suspicion about next year, and he stood there and understood that it would go on being true until somebody put a direction in his hand.