Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 576: Chapter 571: What You Put Inside Yourself

Location:Kaelport, Harl’s Bottom, and the Pavilion

Date/Time:11 Blazepeak 9943 AZI, Grindday

Realm:Lower Realm

The household was in pieces, and Jayde did the round of it before she did anything else, which is what you do.

Takara first, because Takara was the worst.

He was in the long stall behind the cooperage that had been built for a horse and was his now, lying on his side in the straw with the left foreleg stretched out in front of him and a dressing on it the size of a saddle blanket. The mane was down. It goes down when he sleeps and it goes down when he is spending everything he has on something else, and he was not asleep.

”Do not get up.”

I was not going to. It came in behind her eyes, dry as the straw, in the voice she had never once heard with her ears. I want that on the record as a decision and not a condition.

”Noted.”

She crouched by his head and put her hand flat on the side of his face, which is permitted and is not often taken up, and he leaned into it about a finger’s width and then stopped, because there is a limit.

”Eden says a month.”

Eden says a month to a creature who has never been given a month in his life, and she says it in the voice, and I have stopped arguing with the voice. The amber came round. It is not the leg. The leg is meat. You know what it is.

”I know what it is.”

Say it anyway, because I have been lying here for seven days composing it, and I would like to hear whether you arrive at the same place.

Jayde sat down in the straw.

”You are the only one of you who stands at a dip,” she said. ”The others are on the grid, and the grid does not walk itself, and the fields do not care. If a nest opens in Infernorest and you cannot stand at a dip and put a sheet of white-gold across it for forty minutes, then the line is three.”

The line is three.

”And I will do it with three.”

You will do it with three, Takara agreed, and it will cost you something you will not tell me about afterward, and I will find out about it from Reiko in the spring. The mane pulsed, once, slowly. That is what I have been composing.

***

Yinxin was up.

That was the second thing on the round, and Jayde had been braced for it to go badly, and it did not. She was in the workshop with her feet up on a packing case and her hair tied properly for the first time in a week, doing nothing at all, which, from Yinxin, is a treatment.

”Do not ask me.”

”I was not going to ask you.”

”You were going to look at me in the way that is asking.” Yinxin did not open her eyes. ”Four days flat. Two days sitting up and being disagreeable. Today I have walked the length of this room four times, and I am going to do it a fifth before the bell, and then I am going to sleep for nine hours, and by Temperday I will be a person.”

”And after that.”

”After that I will tell you when I can do the next one, and you will say take another week, and I will take four days of it, and we will both pretend that was the arrangement.” She opened one eye. ”Is he awake?”

”He is.”

”Good.” The eye shut again. ”He is worse at this than I am, and he has had less practice.”

***

The eggs had been in the ground for seven days.

Nobody had said the word problem out loud yet, which is how Jayde knew it had become one. Hulong had gone home on the sixth day and had asked, at the shaft head, in the tone of a man raising something he has decided somebody else should raise: ”Is anybody going to do anything about the corner?”

Nobody had.

Harl’s Bottom was a cleared field with a dragon-cut shaft in it and a dead chamber at the bottom, two hundred and thirty paces down, and in the far corner of that chamber were five eggs in a hollow and a charling who had not left them for a week. Ashborn came up for water. She came up in the small hours, alone, and drank, and went back down. She had not eaten since the day of the clearing, which was a thing Jayde had worked out on the fifth day and had not liked at all.

And the field was not going to stay empty. A dead field with a hole in it is a thing people come to look at eventually — herdsmen, a tax man, a boy on a bet — and the ploughing round the rim had kept that ground private for generations on nothing but habit, and habit is not a wall.

So: the corner.

***

Jayde put it to them in the Pavilion workshop at the fourth bell, and it took nine minutes to become the worst argument she had had in a year.

She laid it out plainly. Five eggs in a field she could not guard, under a sky anybody could walk across, with a hole in the middle of it that a boy on a bet would find by harvest. Or five eggs here, behind wards, in the one place on this world where nothing moved that she did not know about. She wanted them where she could put her hand on them. That was the argument, and it was a good one, and she got about two-thirds of the way through it.

”No,” said Isha.

He said it before she had finished, which he had never once done in all the time she had known him, and he was standing when he said it, which he also does not do.

”Hear the whole of it.”

”I have heard the whole of it. You are proposing to bring five eggs into the inside of your own soul, with something in them that you felt and cannot describe to me.” All nine tails had come up off the floor. ”I would like to say the sentence again with the words in a different order, in case the order is what is stopping you from hearing it. You are proposing to put inside yourself five things that nobody in the history of this world has ever seen, which were laid by a creature that is not supposed to be able to lay, and which carry a trace of whatever it is you came out of that mountain unable to speak of.”

”Yes.”

”Then let me tell you what a charling is, since you seem to have forgotten. A charling is a mouth. It is a mouth that walks toward whatever is richest in the room.” There was no need to raise his voice, and he did not. ”Look about you and tell me what is richest in this room.”

Jayde did not look about her.

”I am,” said Isha. ”I am a working. I am a great many workings folded into a shape that talks, and there is nothing on this world that would make a finer meal for a thing that eats what things are made of. And you would bring five of them into my Pavilion.”

”Your Pavilion.”

”I hold the wards on it. That makes it mine enough to object to what is carried through them.”

”Ashborn has lived in here for seven months,” said Jayde. ”She has not eaten you.”

”Yet.”

It was the most bitter single word she had ever heard out of him, and he was not finished.

”And the seedling is nine paces from where you would put them.”

”Eleven.”

”Do not do that,” said Isha. ”Do not do the thing where you correct the small number because the large one is not answerable.”

Jayde shut her mouth.

***

”What is the risk?” she asked, when she had.

”I cannot.” That stopped her, and he let it. ”That is my answer, and it is the honest one, and I am aware of how it sounds. I do not know what they are. I have been inside artifacts and seals for ninety-eight thousand years, and I have never once been in a room with a thing I could not name, and there are five of them in a hole in the eastern margin, and you want to bring them home.”

”What would you do?”

”I would leave them where they are, and I would put a ward over the field, and I would come back in a year.”

”And Ashborn?”

Isha did not answer that.

”Isha.”

”Ashborn would stay with them,” he said. ”Of course she would. And you would lose her.”

”Yes.”

”And you have twenty-three fields and a caster who needs four days to stand up and a lightning cat with a leg, and Ashborn is the reason the forty minutes is a number instead of a massacre.” The golden eyes did not move. ”I know what I am recommending. I am recommending that you accept a worse war for a year in exchange for not putting five unknown mouths inside your own soul. I think that is the correct recommendation, and I think you are not going to take it, and I would like it written down that I made it.”

”Eden.”

”Write it down,” said Eden, without looking up, and wrote it down.

***

The thing Jayde did not say in that room, because it was not an argument and would not have helped, was that she had already decided on the second day.

Not for control, though that was true. Not because of the line, or the twenty-three, or the arithmetic, all of which were real and all of which she could have laid out on a board and defended to anybody.

She had decided because Ashborn had not eaten in seven days.

That was the whole of it. A creature who had gone out into the middle of eight thousand of them with nothing to guard, and eaten until there was nothing left, and then cut a cradle in the floor with the arms she kills with — that creature had been sitting in a hole in the dark for a week, going up for water at an hour when nobody would see her, because she could not leave and could not feed and had no way of saying so to anybody.

Jayde had ridden her for seven months.

There was no version of this in which she left her down there.

***

”I am going to take them,” she said. ”All five, and Ashborn with them, and I want the objection in the record in Isha’s words and not mine.”

”It is in the record in my words,” said Eden.

”Good.” Jayde put both hands on the workbench. ”Now tell me what I am carrying.”

Eden turned the datapad round.

”Nothing I can date.” She said it flatly, because it was the third time she had had to. ”Charling clutches hatch on corruption, and there are tables for it, and every one of those tables is for a brood-mother, and a brood-mother is a sessile thing the size of a room that lays them by the thousand in a chamber full of it. We have five, from a creature the tables say cannot lay, out of a single feeding, in a chamber that is now the cleanest ground in the eastern margin because a purification weave went through it.”

”So it could be slow.”

”It could be slow. It could be that taking them into the Pavilion — which is clean, and warm, and full of the kind of thing that is the opposite of what a clutch runs on — stops the clock entirely and they sit there for nine years.” Eden set the datapad down. ”Or it could be that whatever is in them does not run on corruption at all, because the thread in them is not a worm’s. I have no instrument that tells me which; I have no text that has ever seen this, and I am not going to give you a number so that you can plan around it. I will tell you the day something changes.”

”That is all I asked for.”

”That is not all you asked for,” said Eden. ”It is all you are getting.”

”You will not,” said Isha.

Eden looked up.

”You will not tell her the day something changes, because you will not see it.” He had sat down at some point in the last minute, which Jayde took for a surrender of sorts and was careful not to say so. ”Your instrument reads what comes off a thing. I would be reading what goes into one. If they begin to draw, on anything, from anywhere, I am the only thing in this Pavilion that will feel it happen.” A breath went out through his nose, long and slow. ”I will watch them. I want it understood that I am watching them because nobody else can, and not because I have changed my mind.”

”Understood,” said Jayde.

”Write that down as well.”

Eden wrote that down as well.

***

They went down that afternoon, and it took until the light was going, and the part everybody remembered afterward was how simple it turned out to be.

Ashborn let her.

That was all. Jayde came down the shaft alone, because there was no version where anybody else did this, and crossed a dead chamber that smelled of wet stone, and crouched at the corner and said, ”We are going home, and they are coming with us,” and Ashborn looked at her for a long moment with the sensory pits open — and then shifted her body off the mouth of the hollow, and folded the blade-arms down, and waited.

Jayde carried them up one at a time.

Two hundred and thirty paces of spiral, five times, with an egg the size of a man’s head held against her chest in both arms like something she had been handed at a door, and every single time she came back down Ashborn was exactly where she had left her, and had not touched the remaining ones, and had not moved.

The fifth one moved against her ribs at the ninetieth pace.

Jayde stopped on the step and stood there in the dark of a dragon’s shaft with a warm thing shifting in her arms, and did not put it down, and did not go faster, and got to the top and out into the light and laid it in the crate with the other four.

Then Ashborn came up the shaft behind her, unhurried, into the last of the daylight for the first time in seven days.

***

They put them in the corner of the workshop that gets the afternoon, because Huaxin went and lay down in it first and nobody argued.

The wyrmlings were unbearable about it for two hours. Tianxin wanted to know whether they were dragon eggs and was extremely dissatisfied with the answer. Shenxin asked a dozen questions, of which four were good, of which one was how long, and Jayde gave him Eden’s answer, and he sat down with the docket in his claws and did the only thing left to do with an unanswerable question, which was to write it down.

Huaxin did not ask anything. She lay against the crate with her chin on the boards, pearl-cream and amber-eyed, and stayed there.

Ashborn ate at the sixth bell.

Jayde watched her do it from the other side of the workshop, and did not go over, and did not say anything to anybody about how long she had been waiting to see it.

And then Ashborn went to the crate, and looked at it, and then turned round and went out to the Pavilion’s edge where the light stops and lay down there in the old place with her blade-arms folded — thirty paces off, facing the other way, in a soul-space with wards over it and a seedling in it and the whole of a household between her and that corner.

She could leave them now.

That was the whole of what Jayde had bought, and she stood in her own workshop and totted it up honestly. One charling back on the line. Twenty-three fields. A caster who would be a person by Temperday.

And five unnamed things in a crate in the afternoon corner of her own soul, eleven paces from a silver-white seedling that is part of a sleeping world, with a thread of something enormous running under all of them and no clock she could read.

Isha had come to the crate the moment it was set down and had not left it since. He was sitting beside it with his tails folded round him and his eyes half shut, the posture of somebody listening at a wall, and he had been there through the sixth bell and past it.

At the seventh he said, without turning his head, ”They are drawing.”

Jayde crossed the workshop.

”Not corruption. There is none in here to draw.” He was frowning at nothing. ”They are taking from the air. What the grass takes. What the wyrmlings take. A thread of it, no more.” A pause. ”An egg of any honest creature on this world would do the same, and these are not eggs of any honest creature, and I do not know what it means.”

”Is it bad?”

”I do not know what it means,” said Isha again, and went back to listening.

Jayde stayed beside the crate until the bell after that, and then a while longer.

”Isha.”

”I am still against it.”

”I know. I wanted you to know that I know.”

He was quiet a moment.

”There is a thing I would like said as well, and then I will stop,” he said. ”You did not do it for control. You did it because she had not eaten in seven days, and you would have done it if there were no fields left standing at all, and you are going to tell the record it was the wards.” A pause. ”I am not objecting to that part. I would have done the same, and I would have lied about it worse. But in a year somebody is going to ask you why, and I would like you to have the true answer somewhere you can find it.”

Jayde stood with that.

”That is not the same as it being all right,” said Isha.

”No,” said Jayde. ”It is not.”