Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 580: Chapter 575: Sixty-Six Fewer

Location:Kaelport — The Long Shed, The Yard, and the Pavilion

Date/Time:4 Infernorest 9943 AZI, Quenchday

Realm:Lower Realm

Isha came and stood beside her at the boards and did not say anything for a while, which, from Isha, means he has decided something and is working out how to put it.

”She is less tired.”

Jayde put the chalk down.

”That is the badly-put version, and I would like it on the record that I am aware of it,” Isha said. ”I have been listening to her since the ship. I listened to her from orbit, and it took the whole of me not to sit down, and I have listened every day since out of a habit I did not decide to form. And some weeks ago she stopped getting worse.” He had his hands folded in front of him. ”I did not tell you, because a thing that stops getting worse for a month is a thing that has had a quiet month. It is now nine weeks. And for the last three of them she has not been stopping. She has been coming back.”

***

Eden had the second reading on the boards by the sixth bell and would not be hurried about any of it.

”I want to say what this is not,” she said, ”before anybody in this room has a feeling. It is not a measurement of Ala. I have no instrument that measures a world’s — whatever she is. Isha has that, and Isha is one person, and one person is an anecdote.” She put her hand flat on the second board. ”What I have is surfaces. I have the same six platforms over the same ground on the same inclinations, forty days apart, and I have run the comparison a dozen times because the first three times I did not believe it.”

Jayde waited her out, which is the only thing that has ever worked.

”Canopy density is up across the eastern country. Not dramatically. Four and a fraction percent against the first set, which is nothing, except that four percent in forty days is not a thing vegetation does.” Eden’s voice had not changed at all, which is how Jayde knew. ”Eleven of the fourteen dead fields we resolved from orbit have edges that have moved. Inward. The dead ground is smaller than it was forty days ago at eleven of fourteen sites, and at three of them it is smaller by an amount I can see without magnification.”

Nobody said anything.

”The northern polar ice on the Mid Realm is still retreating, which I do not like and which is a separate conversation. And the ambient background is up everywhere I have a figure for it, which is everywhere on this continent.”

”How much?”

”I am going to give you the number once,” said Eden, ”and then I am going to explain why it is worthless, and I would like you to hold both.”

***

She gave it. Then she explained why it was worthless — that a forty-day baseline is not a baseline, that she had no reading from before the first nest, that she could not separate what they had done from what a wet spring does, and that she would need three years to say any of it in a voice she trusted.

Jayde let her finish, because Eden needed to say it and because all of it was true.

Then she said: ”Sixty-six.”

”Yes.”

”That is the whole of it, is it not? There are sixty-six fewer things in this ground drinking her, and everything else you have just said is the shape that makes on a chalkboard.”

”That is the hypothesis I cannot test and the one I believe,” said Eden. ”Yes.”

***

Jayde went out and walked to the end of the yard and stood there for a while, which she does not usually do. Heiteng was at the weighbridge.

Four years.

Not the nests. The other thing — and it had not been four years of that either, which was the part that kept catching her as she stood there.

The corps was not a year old. The roads had gone in to move siege lances, every finger’s width of them justified on a sheet with ordnance written at the top, and had turned into something else while nobody was watching them do it. The baths had gone up because the herb farms got ahead of what anybody could use. The school had opened in Emberrise with benches for sixty and had seven hundred children in it by Sparkfall.

None of it had been a plan. All of it had been the nearest thing.

What had taken four years was the arithmetic underneath, and it had never once changed in all that time: whatever I do here, it is going out faster than I am putting it in.

It was not going out faster than she was putting it in.

Jayde stood at the end of a granary yard on a continent that had been drunk from for nine thousand years and found that she did not know what to do with her hands.

Heiteng was still at the weighbridge when she came back up the yard.

He had been there when she went down it, the better part of a quarter of an hour ago, and he had not come over and had not called out and had not gone away.

”Good day or bad day,” he said, as she passed.

”Good.”

”Right.” He went back to the tally.

That was the whole of it, and Jayde went four more steps and then stopped, because there was something wrong with the shape of it, and it took her those four steps to find what.

He had asked. ℴℴ𝗺

Four years of a man who does not ask, in a month of a man who had shut a door in her face twice and known he was doing it, and he had put a question on the ground in front of her and let her step over it or not. Badly, and in five words, and at a weighbridge.

Jayde did not turn round, because turning round would have made it a conversation and he would have stopped.

She filed it instead, in the place where she keeps the things about that man that she is not going to mention to him, which is a large place and getting larger.

***

”You will want to sit down for the other one,” Eden said, when she came back in.

”Is it the eleven percent?”

”It is not the eleven percent, and I want to say plainly that I am four weeks late on that and I know it.” She had the second slate out. ”The inner spindle reached station on time. It has been reporting since, and what it is reporting is not what I expected, and it is not what I feared either, and I have spent four weeks failing to make it be one or the other. I am not going to bring you a half-thing. When I bring it, it will be finished.”

”Understood.”

”This is the Mid Realm mark.”

Jayde sat down.

”Thirty passes,” said Eden. ”Thirty-four, in the end, because two of the early ones were at a bad angle and I threw them out. And I promised you the same face either way, and here is the same face.” She turned the slate round. ”It is a lake bed.”

***

Jayde looked at the slate for a long moment.

”I am not confident,” said Eden. ”I am certain.” She tapped the edge of it. ”A field has no depth profile. It is flat because the ground under it has been drained flat, and the edge of it is a line, and the line does not care about the country. This has a shoreline. It has a shoreline with three old terraces stepped inside it, which is what a lake does when it goes down over a long time and stops at intervals, and there is a river channel entering it from the north that is dry for its last forty paces and wet before that. Thirty-four passes and it did the same thing thirty-four times.”

She let that sit.

”It went dry some very long time ago, and nobody has written it down, because nobody writes down a lake that dried up before there was anybody to mind.” Eden put the slate on the trestle. ”It is the wrong color against the ground because it is salt. It is inside our diameter range because a lake that size is inside our diameter range. And I very nearly told you it was a field in Scorchwind and I did not, and I would like that noted, because the next one I am not sure about I am going to want the same eighteen days.”

”You will get the same eighteen days.”

”I will get the same eighteen days from you,” said Eden. ”I would like it written down for whoever is doing this when neither of us is.”

***

It went round the household by the eighth bell and took the shape those things take.

Shenxin required the canopy figure and then required the error margin on the canopy figure and then went away with both, visibly happier than he had been in a month, because a boy with a docket and a number is a boy with somewhere to put his hands.

Tianxin wanted to know if it meant they had won. Jayde said no, and explained why not, and Tianxin was dissatisfied with that in exactly the way she is dissatisfied with everything, and then asked whether it meant they were winning, which was a much better question, and got a different answer.

Huaxin said nothing and went and lay down by the crate in the afternoon corner, which is where she is most evenings now, and put her chin on the boards.

Takara had it from Reiko before anybody got as far as the stall, because Reiko is quick and enjoys being first with a thing.

Four percent. It was waiting for her behind her eyes before she was through the door. He had not got up. The leg was still off the floor and the dressing had been changed that morning and was already the wrong color at one edge. Eleven edges of fourteen, and four percent of canopy.

”Reiko has been thorough.”

Reiko has been insufferable, and I have let him. The mane came up a little, and stayed up, which it had not done in a fortnight. I have been lying in this straw for a month, being told to be patient by a woman with a voice, and you have just told me the ground outside is four percent less dead than it was in Blazepeak. A pause. I withdraw nothing I said about the line being three. But I am going to lie here differently now.

Yinxin heard it on the steps of the workshop with her hair down and a cup in both hands, and did not say anything for so long that Jayde started to worry.

”Twenty-three left,” Yinxin said at last.

”Twenty-three.”

”And eleven of the fourteen edges have come in.” She turned the cup round. ”I have been the only person who can do that thing since Voidmarch, and I have never once been told what it did. I have been told that it worked. Nobody has ever come back to me with a second measurement.”

”You are being told now.”

”I am being told now, and I have had to sit down on a step about it,” said Yinxin, ”and I would be obliged if nobody mentioned that.”

***

Isha found her again at the end of the day, in the workshop, with the boards still up.

”I have the good version now,” he said. ”She is not mending because we are good. She is mending because she was always going to mend, the moment anything stopped taking from her faster than she could make. That is what a living thing does. It was never waiting for a hero. It was waiting for the bleeding to slow down.”

Jayde turned that over.

”That is better than the badly-put version.”

”It is considerably worse, actually, and you have not got to the end of it.” Isha sat down on the bench with his tails gathered. ”Because it means the whole of the arithmetic is simple. It has always been simple. Sixty-six fewer, and she comes back. Twenty-three more, and she comes back further. There is no cleverness anywhere in it and there never was, and the only reason nobody has done it in nine thousand years is that nobody put a hand up.”

”Somebody must have tried.”

”Somebody tried,” said Isha. ”I am nearly certain of it, and I cannot prove one word. And whatever happened to them, it is not written down either.”

***

She went back out at the last bell, and the boards were behind her, and the yard was going quiet.

It is the first good thing. That was the sentence she had been declining to think all day, and it arrived anyway, standing at the rail in the dark, and she let it stay.

Not the first success — Ruifen had that and had written it in a fair hand on a board across a saddle, and Jayde had read the report twice. Not the first thing that worked. The first thing that worked at the size it needed to be. Four years of small good done in the only place she could reach, and eleven edges on a chalkboard had just told her that the small good had added up to something a world could feel.

Eden came out and stood beside her and did not say anything for a while, which is also a thing that happens in that yard.

”There is a thing I have to put in front of you,” Eden said, ”and I have been choosing when.”

”Now is fine.”

”If I can measure it, other people can measure it.”

Jayde did not move.

”Every ambient figure I have is from this continent. I have surfaces for the Mid Realm and nothing else, and I have nothing at all through the veil.” Eden had her arms folded. ”But she is one world, and the passages are her holding the pieces of it together. If she is coming back here, I cannot see why she would be coming back only here. And if it is up over there as well, then every herbalist over there with a good nose knows something has changed this year, and every assessor with an instrument has a figure, and both of those people write to somebody. I wanted precision, so I used six platforms in orbit. Nobody over there needs them. A man watching his grass come up thick would know it this spring.”

”And a man watching his grass come up thick tells his prefect.”

”Yes.”

They stood there.

”Four years of nobody looking at this continent,” said Jayde, slowly, ”because there has never once been anything here worth the journey.”

”Yes.”

”And if it is the whole world, we cannot take it back, and we cannot make it quieter, and every single person on three realms who owns an instrument has spent this year writing to somebody about it.”

”That is the thing I have been choosing when to put in front of you,” said Eden. ”And I cannot tell you whether it is, because I cannot see.”

Jayde could not see either. But there was a man on the far side of that veil who would know to the week when his own ground had started to change, because he was a king who had shut his borders and watched what lay inside them more closely than any man alive.

She would write to Da’Ren tonight. It would go through Heiteng, the way the last one had, and it would ask one question and would not say why she was asking.

Jayde stood at the rail with a very great deal of good news behind her on four chalked boards, and looked east at nothing, and understood that she had spent four years being safe because she was not worth finding.

That had very probably stopped being true some time in the last twelve months, and nobody had told her, and there had been no way for anybody to.