Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 564: Chapter 559: Marit Aldren

Location:Dalgate, on the eastern road

Date/Time:5 Ashbloom 9943 AZI, Grindday

Realm:Lower Realm

Twenty-three days, and nobody had asked after her.

Cangwei had built the whole of her arithmetic around that one word — until — because a scrivener in a cellar in another world had been honest with her for four ingots, and the honesty had been the thing worth paying for. It holds until somebody asks after you. Not if. She had understood that at the time as a warning and had been walking around inside it since, the way you walk around inside a house you have not finished paying for.

Twenty-three days.

It was a long time to be nobody, and she had not expected the shape of it.

The strain, she had expected. A cover is a performance and performances are tiring, and she had been at one for nine weeks now counting the bronze, and she had braced for the part where you forget which name somebody called you by. That part had never come. Marit Aldren had gone on quite comfortably, being aggrieved about a posting, complaining about the ink, asking the wrong questions in the right tone and getting answered, because a woman with a grievance is furniture in any hall in three realms.

What she had not braced for was that it worked.

Nobody was looking for her. Nobody had ever looked for her. Her house believed she was in seclusion and a dragon in seclusion can be gone a decade. Her king believed she had gone home. The demon king believed the same. Nine weeks had gone into making herself a woman nobody in three realms had any reason to find, and it had worked, absolutely, and it had turned out that succeeding at that feels precisely like being forgotten, because the two things are the same thing looked at from different ends.

***

The body was the other arithmetic, and she did it every morning whether she wanted to or not.

The wing was better. Not right. There is a place high in the shoulder where the leading edge takes the load in a turn, and it had been carrying her weight badly for three weeks and had begun, in the last four days, to carry it merely poorly. It had been given the month it wanted and would be given another if it asked.

The core was not better.

That had been the thing she did not say out loud, even alone in a rented room, because saying a thing out loud commits you to having thought it. Coming down, she had expected a recovery. What she had been given was a floor. Everything above Peak Blazecrowned had gone out of her in thirty steps and had not come partway back, and it was not going to, because the Laws are not an injury. They are a ceiling, and she was living under it, and she would live under it for as long as she stayed on this world.

All of which she had understood in advance.

What she had not understood in advance was that Peak Blazecrowned is fine.

It was the strangest thing about the whole business and she had not found anybody to be strange about it to. There was a full day’s walking in her. There was a cart axle, lifted badly. Any six men in Dalgate could have been taken apart without her unclasping her coat, and there was no one anywhere near her who could have caused her a moment’s trouble, and by every reckoning that has ever operated on this continent she was a formidable and dangerous woman.

By her own reckoning she was an invalid.

Both were true at once and the second one was the one her body kept telling her, every hour, in the flat unignorable way a body has: reach for the fourth refinement. And she would reach, out of forty years of habit, and find the place where it was kept, and find that she could not lift it.

And under that, in the other place, the thing that had torn.

It did not get looked at. Not out of fear — her hand had been on it twice in twenty-three days and both times she had come away knowing less than when she started, and a woman who has spent her life being right about what she looks at does not enjoy looking at something that declines to be anything.

***

What was on Marit Aldren’s list came to four grain sheds, a shrine at a crossroads, two road-warden posts and a cellar at Dalgate with eleven jars in it.

Cangwei had inventoried all of them, properly, in a fair hand, in the ledger she had bought for the purpose, because a cover you do not perform is not a cover. The sheds got walked. The jars got counted. There was a written query about the shrine’s roof that was going to make somebody in an office somewhere very tired.

And in doing it, she had learned the thing.

There is nothing on the list. That was the whole of the finding and it had taken twenty-three days to be certain of. Whatever the Temple is doing on this continent, it is not being done through the estate it hands to an envoy. Four sheds and a roof that leaks, and not one of them garrisoned, and not one of them built inside living memory, and no man in white anywhere near any of it except the two at the road posts, who were bored.

And that is not neglect. Neglect is what happens to a thing somebody wanted once.

That is what an institution leaves lying in the open when the thing it actually came for is somewhere else.

Doors to what, then.

That question had arrived in the shrine at the crossroads, standing under a roof that was going to cost somebody four silver, and she had put it away without an answer, in the manner she had.

***

The other thing she had learned, she had not gone looking for.

You cannot go four days in any direction on that continent without somebody telling you about the corps.

It came up everywhere and it came up sideways. A carter at Dalgate complaining that the eastern road had been remade and that the remaking had cost him a week’s work and he could not in honesty say he was worse off. A woman at a well who had walked three days to the bathhouse at Tiller’s Row with a knee that had been ruined since she was twenty and who had walked home. A boy who could read. Two boys who could read. A village that had had a bad flood and had been dug out by strangers who took nothing, which no one in that village had stopped being suspicious about, and everyone in it had accepted.

And a school. A school that had opened in Emberrise with benches for sixty and had seven hundred children in it and a wall somebody’s fathers had built.

Cangwei had heard about the school four separate times in three towns and had noticed, the fourth time, that she had started asking.

None of them could tell her who ran it.

That was the part. Not one of them was being careful; there was no secrecy anywhere in it, no lowered voices, none of the particular tension of people protecting a name. They simply did not know. It was the corps. The corps had done it. Ask the corps. And when she had pushed, mildly, as an aggrieved envoy pushes, she had got — there’s a woman — and then a shrug that was not evasive but genuinely empty, because nobody in Dalgate had ever seen her and nobody expected to.

The nearest she got was in the taproom at Dalgate, from a drover called Sten who had been on the eastern road thirty years and had opinions about all of it.

”The corps,” he said, when she complained about the state of the shrine roof in a manner designed to be agreed with. ”You want the corps for that. They’ve got the timber.”

”I am Temple.”

”I know what you are. You’ve a coat.” Sten was not being rude; he was being a drover. ”Doesn’t signify. They’ll do a roof.”

”Who do I write to?”

”Write to?”

”There will be an office.” Cangwei kept the aggrievedness exactly where it had been. ”There is always an office. Somebody signs for the timber.”

Sten thought about that with real effort, which she had not expected, and she watched a man of about fifty work his way across a question he had never had occasion to hold before.

”There’s a woman,” he said at last.

”A woman.”

”That’s what they say. I’ve never seen her. My brother’s at Kaelport, and he’s never seen her neither, and he’s on the ground.” He turned his cup round. ”There’s the big fellow, mind. Runs the grain out of there. He’d know who signs.”

”Who is he.”

”No idea. Foreign.” Sten shrugged, and drank. ”He’s all right. Argues about carts.”

And that was the whole of it: that somewhere four days west there is a large foreign man who runs a grain yard and argues about carts and is, in the considered judgment of a drover, all right.

Cangwei went up to her room afterward and sat on the edge of the bed with her boots still on for a considerable time.

She did not write it down.

That was the discipline, and she made herself hold it, sitting there in the dark with the strap marks still on her shoulder. A foreigner runs grain at a place called Kaelport. Kaelport is west. He is west. Four fifths of everything on the eastern road is going west, and there is not a continent anywhere on any world that does not have a large foreign man in a yard somewhere arguing about carts, and she had watched better dragons than herself take a shape their own wanting had made and call it a fact.

It was not a fact. It was a shrug, from a man who had not been asked about it and did not think he had said anything.

She held it at arm’s length for most of the night and did not put it down either.

He’s all right.

Nobody had said that about anybody in four years. Nobody had been in a position to. And she was aware, lying in a rented room over a taproom in a town she had chosen off a list, that she had just spent three hours refusing to be certain about the only sentence in nine weeks that had made her feel better.

A woman.

Cangwei had written there is a woman in the back of her inventory ledger, on the page where she kept the things that were not Temple business, and had looked at it for a while.

She had come to this world to find a black dragon king who had gone down and not come back. Twenty-three days had gone instead into walking roads that somebody had remade, past baths that somebody had built, through villages that somebody had dug out, hearing about a school she could not get a name for.

None of that had anything to do with Heiteng.

Except that reading rooms had been her living since before most of the houses on her own range were standing, and there is a particular shape that a place takes on when somebody competent has been working on it quietly for four years, and she had been walking through that shape since the day she landed and had taken three weeks to see it because she had been looking for a dragon.

***

He was still west and a long way south of west.

The check happened twice a day, morning and last thing, because a thing you check on a schedule cannot become a thing you check compulsively, and the difference had mattered a great deal to her in the second week.

Steady. Unaware.

The distance was the problem, and the distance was not going to solve itself. A whisper is a whisper; it gave her a direction, and it would not give her anything else, and the country between here and there was three kingdoms wide. On any ordinary morning of her life she would have crossed it before noon.

So she would walk it. That had been worked out in the room at Ashmarch before she ever went down the stair, and had not needed revisiting.

And then, in the fourth week, there had been the other thing.

It had come on her on the road out of Dalgate on a morning like any other, west-facing, four days ago, and she had stopped walking so abruptly that the man behind her on the road had walked straight into the back of her satchel and been apologized to.

Not Heiteng.

Something else, in the same direction and not at the same distance, and she had stood in the middle of a road with her eyes shut, trying to make it be a thing she recognized, and had failed.

It was not a presence. Presence is a black dragon’s own business, and there is one man alive she has it with. This came up from somewhere much older than anything she had personally been given, out of the part of what she is that arrives whole and unexplained and is not taught — the part her caste carries and does not discuss, the way you carry a face you have never seen and would know in a crowd.

It lasted perhaps nine seconds and then it had gone, or she had lost it, and there is no way to tell those apart.

She had stood in the road a while afterward with her heart going.

Because if the thing she had felt was the thing her blood had been shaped to feel, then she had been right on a hillside in the dark with a bolt of cloth in her hands, and everything since — Vor Hakkun, the bronze, the fold, the floor she now lived under — had been the correct response to a correct reading.

And if it was not, then it was the tear.

That was the honest alternative, and she had made herself hold it. A thing had broken in that passage and had not been taken or returned, and she had no idea what it had been doing before it broke or what a broken one does, and a woman who has lost the fourth refinement and cannot lift it has no business trusting a sensation that arrives once and does not repeat.

Four days, and it had not come back.

Cangwei walked west out of Dalgate on the Grindday morning with a satchel and a ledger and a wing that was carrying her poorly, and did not permit herself to name the thing, because naming it would have required her to be certain, and she had made a point for thousands of years of never being certain of anything.

It had also, she noted, been the first time since the fold that any part of her had worked properly.

***

The sky that morning had nothing in it.

She looked at it anyway, out of habit, as she looked at everything — a clean blue washed twice, the sun a hand above the eastern ridge, three thin ribs of cloud coming up out of the south and going nowhere. A hawk. Two days ago there had been a red glow off the southern horizon at the sixth bell that half the taproom had wandered out to look at and had come back in about, unimpressed, because the Scorch does that, and had gone on with their dice.

Nothing else.

It was, she thought, a perfectly unremarkable sky.

There was a great deal in it that morning. Every single thing in it was pointed at the ground, and not one of them had been built to find a woman on a road.

Cangwei adjusted the satchel on her shoulder, because the strap had been wearing at the same place for twenty-three days, and went west.