Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 568: Chapter 563: We Choose Where the Door Is

Location:Kaelport — the long shed

Date/Time:15 Scorchwind 9943 AZI, Temperday

Realm:Lower Realm

Eden put the map on the trestle at the second bell, and it took up the whole of it.

Four boards laid edge to edge, chalked, the joins numbered. Forty days of passes, six platforms, three inclinations, the eastern continent crossed something over eleven hundred times.

Twenty-four pale coins, ranked, largest at the top.

”Diameters are good to about a pace and a half at the worst of them,” she said. ”Better on nineteen.”

Jayde stood at the end of the boards with her hands behind her back and did not say anything for a while, because a map was supposed to change the work, and this did not change the work. It changed six months of it, retrospectively, all at once, which is a different thing and considerably worse.

”How many are out of order?”

”All of them.” Eden put the chalk down. ”Eleven are inside three places, and I would not lose sleep. Six are out by more than ten. Turlow was nineteenth, and we had it eleventh. Hessen Bar was thirty-first, and it is fourth.”

”And the first four.”

”The top four were never in the top ten of anything we wrote down. Hessen Bar. The one on the Ruvin flats that has no name because nobody lives there. North Kessig.” She did not move her hand. ”And the bad one at Ardh.”

”Ardh was eighty-first.”

”Ardh is the largest thing on this continent by a margin that is not close.”

***

What went out of that shed and along the yard was that the order was wrong.

Not why. Not what is in them.

The people who know what is under a dead field would sit round one table with room at it and leave chairs empty, and knowing is not the same as going — not one of those names has ever stood in a chamber. Ordnance has asked three times and been told that ordnance is not the division that needs to know, and ordnance has taken it, and that is the shape of the whole arrangement. Everybody else in the corps finds dead ground. That is the whole of what they have been told and the whole of what they do, and the corps is putting it right is an answer people take, because it comes with a road and a bathhouse attached.

Meifen came to the office door at the fourth bell with her slate down at her side, held the way you hold a thing you have decided not to throw.

”Three weeks at Suhe. I put four people on it, and we walked that whole river valley, and it was a drainage fault, and there is a field on those boards half a day north of where I turned round.”

”There is.”

”And I did not walk half a day north because there was nobody living there to have told us anything.” Her hazel eyes came up. ”That is the whole of it, isn’t it? We have only ever been able to ask people where there are people.”

”Yes.” ℴ

”Sixty-five are dead, and every one of them was somewhere a person lived. I put the pins in for nine of those, and not one of the nine came off anything but a mouth.” She did not raise her voice at any point. ”How many are not?”

”Nine of the twenty-four. Four have never been on any list we have made.”

”Then why has the grid not got them?” Meifen came off the doorframe. ”Four Panthera spent a year putting twelve hundred ears in the ground. Canirr did eight hundred and forty-seven on his own, and he did them while you were under the mountain and he did not stop.”

Eden answered that, because the grid is hers.

”A post can only say here. Not width, not depth, not count, not access — and it cannot say nothing.” She had the chalk in her hand and was not using it. ”We have four years of map built out of yeses. There is not one place on this continent we know is clear. A post that never fired and ground where nobody ever buried a post make the same silence, and there has never been a way to tell them apart from inside.”

”And the four.”

”Two are inside the Forest margin, where nobody buried anything. Two are in gaps.” Eden put the chalk down. ”I chose the spacings. Emberwane of the first year, off nine fields we had all walked on, and every one of those nine was somewhere a person lived, because those were the only ones anybody could show us. So I built a grid that was extremely good at finding more of what we had already found.”

Nobody said anything.

”Canirr walked within half a day of the Ruvin flats field and put ears in on both sides of it and none between, because the spacing I gave him said none between.” She looked up. ”I would like it written down that it is not a fault in him. He will hear about this in a month, and he will decide it is.”

***

Meifen brought the slate back at the fifth bell with the twenty-four in the new order and nothing against them but ground and distance, which is the whole of what she is given, and she has never once asked for more.

”Four are more than nine days out. The Ruvin flats one is eleven, and there is no water after the fifth day, and it is fourth.” She kept her eyes on the slate. ”I can put a survey on it. I would want Bai Shu and a month.”

”You will not need it.”

Meifen did not look up and did not say why not, which is the thing about her that Jayde had noticed in the first month and had never once taken for granted.

The corps finds. The corps does not go. Everybody in First Company has worked out that the dragons are in it, because you cannot hide a dragon from a person looking at the sky — and what nobody has, and nobody is ever going to have, is a woman with golden eyes who has not been seen by a single human being on this continent in four years, because the people who would know what she is are the people who put her in a collar.

”Nine days out does not signify,” Jayde said. ”Not for what happens after you hand it to me. It signifies for you, and I am not sending you eleven days into the Ruvin flats to survey a road to a place that does not need one.”

”Then what do you want?”

”The country. Not the field — I know where the field is now, to a pace and a half, which is more than I have ever had.” She turned the slate round. ”Four of these are in ground nobody has written down. I want to know what is on the road to it, and what is living out there, and whether there is anybody at all.”

”There is nobody out there. That is why they are on the list.”

”There is nobody recorded out there,” said Jayde, ”which is a different sentence, and this morning has been about nothing else.”

Meifen looked at the boards a moment.

”Four parties, six each. No further than a day inside any margin and out before dark. I will have it by Infernorest.” She tucked the slate under her arm. ”And I will write down what I find and not what I was expecting to find.”

”That is why you have the slate.”

***

Xinglong came in the evening and stood in the yard in front of the boards for the better part of an hour with his arms folded, and asked four questions, all of them about distance.

”You can see the shape of the ground,” he said.

”To about a pace and a half.”

”That is flat for eighteen thousand paces in every direction.” He had a finger on the Ruvin flats coin. ”You know that without anybody having stood on it.”

”Yes.”

”Then I have been out here an hour working out whether you understand what you have got, and I would like to be wrong about which of us is slow.”

Jayde looked at him.

”You do not have to find the throat.”

”No.”

”The field closes a hole wherever you put one, and it closes it just as fast, and it has never made any difference whether you went in at the throat or the edge.” She put her hand flat on a coin nobody had ever walked on. ”We have been going in at the throat since Voidmarch because the throat was the only door we could find.”

”I have never needed a door,” said Xinglong. ”I have needed to know where to put one, and for four years I have been told somewhere near the middle of a field nobody has surveyed, which is not a direction.” He tapped the board twice. ”A dragon opens a field in a day and a bit of an afternoon. That has never been the difficult part. The difficult part is being nine hundred paces down with my head in a hole while somebody on the surface shouts me a correction they got off a man who saw a dead sheep there in Cinderfall.”

Hulong made a sound from the wall.

”There is another part,” said Xinglong, without turning round.

”I am not going to say it in front of her.”

”You will say it to me tonight, and I will tell her anyway.”

Hulong pushed off the wall.

”We have gone in at the wrong place eleven times,” he said. ”We knew. We did not say, because you were already carrying the forty minutes and there was no version of that conversation that ended anywhere useful. Open a field away from the throat, and the roof comes down in the first hundred feet, and you go through it and lose the shaft behind you, and then you are in there with a queen and no way to walk back up.”

The yard was quiet.

”Eleven,” Jayde said.

”Eleven, and survivable every time, and survivable because it was me or Xinglong or Huifu and we can move ground faster than ground arrives.” Hulong shrugged one shoulder, which on Hulong is an apology. ”Now we choose where the door is. I want it on the record that this is the first thing since Voidmarch that has made the work smaller instead of larger.”

***

She got to the last of it at the eleventh hour, alone, with one lamp.

Being wrong about an order for six months is a thing you can correct on a Temperday with four boards and a piece of chalk. A field killed out of order is still a field killed.

It was the note in the corner, in the small hand Eden uses for things she does not want in the middle of a board.

Three of the top four have a rise. Measurable pass to pass. Not weather. Not settlement.

Hessen Bar. North Kessig. Ardh.

Jayde stood at the boards and ran it all the way out, because she had been refusing to since the second bell. Four more years at the old order. Everybody working exactly as hard. The queue coming down one at a time in the order a herdsman’s memory had given it — and Ardh at the bottom of that queue the entire time, with a roof coming up a hand’s width a season.

She did not know what a surface breach looks like. Nobody does. That was one of eleven things she had written out in Voidmarch under a heading she had labelled things I will not find out until it is too late to have wanted to know them, and she had gone up in a machine so that fewer of them would stay on it.

There were ten on it now.

She took the chalk and wrote 1 against Ardh, and stood back, and looked at the four boards for a long time with her arms folded.

Then she blew the lamp out.

***

Eden had come in at the ninth hour with the second slate, the one from the Mid Realm pair, and had put it down with no preamble at all.

”Two passes. That is not enough, and I want it said before I say the rest.”

”Noted.”

”There is something on the northern continent of the Mid Realm that reads like a field. One. Diameter inside our range. Albedo inside our range. Wrong color against the ground around it in the same way and by the same amount.”

”Could it be a lake bed?”

”It could be a lake bed, a salt pan, a burn scar, or a quarry, and all four are in the margin, and they are not coming out until I have thirty passes instead of two.” Eden held the slate against her chest. ”And it could be a field, and there are five billion people on that world, and I am not going to be the person who saw it in Scorchwind and mentioned it in Emberwane.”

”Thirty passes is how long.”

”Eighteen days.”

”Then eighteen days. And if it is a lake bed, I want to be told that with exactly the same face.”

”You will get the same face.”

She got as far as the door and stopped there with her hand on the frame.

”One more and it is not about the field.”

”The eleven percent.”

”The eleven percent.” Eden did not turn round. ”I have had forty days and eleven hundred passes, and I have taken four things off that list. It is not the frame. It is not the cells. It is not the profile arithmetic. And it is not the air, which is the one I wanted, because air is measurable and if it had been air I could have stopped.”

”What is left.”

”Something is left.”

Jayde waited, and got nothing, which from Eden is an answer.

”You are not going to say it.”

”I am not going to say it in a shed at the ninth hour on the strength of one ascent.” She did turn round then. ”I will tell you what I want instead, which is the deep set. The inner spindle reaches station in nine days. When it starts reporting, I will know whether the thing I am not saying gets bigger the further out you go, and if it does then I am right and I will say it, and if it does not then I was wrong in an interesting direction and you will never hear about it.”

”And if you are right.”

”Then it is not an anomaly in a drive profile,” said Eden, ”and I will want you sitting down.”

Eden went out.

Jayde stood in a shed on a continent that had been drunk from for nine thousand years, with twenty-four coins behind her in the right order at last, and thought about one pale mark on a different world — five billion people on it, no corps, no Yinxin, no forty minutes, and nobody at all who had ever heard the word.