Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 586: Chapter 581: Borrowed

Location:The Herb Farms above Tiller’s Row, and Kaelport

Date/Time:5 Cinderfall 9943 AZI, Grindday

Realm:Lower Realm

The drying sheds smelled like the inside of a teapot left on the hob, green and hot and faintly bitter, and the air in them moved all the time, in at the low vents and up through the boards and out under the eaves, so that walking down the aisle was like walking against a slow warm current.

Bai Shu had gone back down there and had the look of a woman who had slept in her clothes, which she had.

”Don’t touch that rack.”

”I was not going to touch the rack.”

”Everybody says that and then they touch the rack.” Bai Shu came down the aisle wiping her hands. ”Four days at this heat and the lung-leaf’s done. Six and it’s worth half. Last year we lost near a fifth because I had it on slate and slate holds the damp, and a woman at Suhe told me that in my first month and I thought she was being proprietorial.” She jerked her chin at the racks. ”Now it’s raised boards with a draft under, and we’ve lost about a fortieth, and I’ve written down exactly what I got wrong so that whoever’s doing this in thirty years doesn’t have to lose a fifth of a harvest finding out.”

She nodded at a shelf of bound sheets at the end of the shed.

”That’s the whole method. Everything. Including the mold year.”

”Who else has a copy?”

”Three. Kaelport, the Academy, and one going up to Tiller’s Row with the next cart, because the cart might burn.” Bai Shu said it the way other people say good morning. ”And the Academy one goes into the lower school’s reading, because in a few years there’ll be children coming out of that school who can read it, and I would rather they learned it off a page than off a fifth of a harvest.”

***

The infant sachets are made in a separate shed by twelve women, and they will not let anybody else do it.

That is not a rule anybody wrote. The white muslin is a different cut and a different weight and a smaller fist of a gentler mix; it got given to a group who were already doing it well, and now it is theirs, and they are extremely particular about it.

Jayde went in and was told to wash her hands first.

She washed her hands.

”How many?”

”Nine hundred this harvest.” The woman who answered was about sixty and did not stop working while she said it. ”That’s a year for seventy-five babies, at one a month, and we’ll do better next year because we’ve got the cut right. We did two hundred last year, and we spoiled forty of them. And it’s seventy-five whole ones. We don’t do half a course. A child gets twelve or a child gets none, because six does nothing you can see and it teaches the mother that it doesn’t work.” She shook out a square of muslin and squared it on the board. ”We’ve had that argument, and we won it, and nobody’s reopening it.”

Jayde stood in a shed of twelve women making nine hundred small things by hand and could not think of one useful instruction to give.

”What do you want?” she said instead.

The woman looked up for the first time.

”More hands and a bigger shed and the same mix,” she said. ”Not a better mix. The same mix. Somebody from the Academy came in Flamefade and wanted to improve it, and we sent him away, and if he comes back I would like to be able to say that you said no.”

”I said no.”

”Then that’s what I want.”

***

She stood at the top of the track at the end of it, before going down, and Ryo stood with her, and neither of them said anything for a while.

The light was going. The cutting line on the third block had got about two-thirds of the way across and would finish it tomorrow, and somebody had started the ninety-year-old song again at the far end, and it was being picked up raggedly along the row.

”One in five hundred,” said Jayde.

”At the ceiling of this hill.”

”So we need more hills.”

”Yes.” Ryo had his hands behind his back again. ”There are four shoulders like this one between here and the Kessig water that nobody has ever planted, because nobody on this continent has ever had a reason to plant a hillside with something you cannot eat.” A pause. ”That is a four-year argument with eleven landholders, and I started it in Emberwane. I did not put it in a report because it is eleven separate conversations and nine of them have not gone anywhere yet, and I do not bring you a thing until it is a thing.” He turned to go down. ”Two of them have.”

Jayde looked at the side of his face.

”Which two?”

”The ones where I took the landholder’s mother to Tiller’s Row,” said Ryo, ”and said nothing at all about hillsides for a month.”

Jayde thought about that the whole way down to the second bend.

”That is either the best thing anybody has done for this corps this year,” she said, ”or it is the worst, and I cannot work out which, and I have been trying since you said it.”

”Both. It is both, and I have known that since Emberwane.” Ryo did not slow down. ”I did not lie to either of them. I told the son what the water does, and I told him it costs nothing, and I told him his mother’s knee would be better, and all three of those were true, and I did not mention the hillside because I did not want an answer that month.”

”And when you did mention it.”

”He said yes before I had finished the sentence, and I would like it understood that I do not feel good about that, and that I am going to do it nine more times.” He stopped at the bend and waited for her to come level. ”The other way takes four years, and the four years are the thing we have not got. If you want me to stop, say so now, and I will stop tonight, and I will not raise it again.”

Jayde stood on a hillside and did the arithmetic that she does not enjoy doing, which is the one where the right thing and the thing that works are not the same length.

”Do not stop,” she said. ”And write it down. Not the result — the method, and what it cost you to use it, in your own words, as Bai Shu wrote down the mold year.”

”Nobody writes that down.”

”Then we will be the first, and whoever has this job in thirty years can read it and decide for themselves whether to do it.” She started walking again. ”I am not going to hand them the trick without the bill.”

***

Isha was waiting where the track came down onto the road, with a book under his arm, which he does not do.

”How long have you been standing here?”

”About two hours. I did not want to say it on the hill with four hundred people on it.” He fell in beside her. ”Bai Shu told you about the lung-leaf.”

”Three soaks instead of four.”

”Then I will say my part, and I want it understood at the front that I have been wrong about this twice already in my own head and have gone back to the shelf both times.” Isha did not open the book. ”The nests do not explain it.”

Jayde kept walking, which is how she listens.

”Sixty-six nests on one continent. Every one of them was drinking Ala, and every one of them has stopped, and the ground above them is coming back, and that is real, and it is ours, and I am not taking one word of it away from anybody.” His tails were quite still as he walked, which is a thing they do when he is being careful. ”But this continent is not three worlds. We have not killed one worm on the Mid Realm. We have not set foot in the Upper Realm. And the Mid Realm is coming up too. Eden cannot read its ambient, but she can see the ice going back and the north going green from four hundred miles out. I have no instrument at all for the Upper Realm, and I would wager a great deal that it is coming up there as well, and I have come down this hill to tell you what I would be wagering on.”

***

He stopped at the edge of the road and opened the book, which was not a book at all but a bound set of sheets, very old, in a hand Jayde could not read.

”These are not mine. They were your father’s.” He said it quietly, though there was nobody on the road. ”He left them in my keeping when he made me, and I carried them through the cessation without opening them, because there was never any reason to. I have been through them twice since Blazepeak.” He turned two leaves. ”He kept records of the world the way other people keep records of a field. And there is a thing in here he wrote down and did not connect, and I did not connect it either the first time through. Four separate times in his records, the ambient rose across the whole world for the better part of a decade, and then stopped, and then fell back to about where it had been.” He shut the book. ”And every one of those four times, a place he calls Shaolin came into reach within the span.”

Jayde had stopped walking at your father. She did not start again.

”I do not know that word.”

”No. There is no reason you would.” Isha held the book against his chest. ”It is not on this world. It comes within reach of it, a very long way apart, tens of thousands of years at the least, and stays a few years, and then it goes again. While it is in reach, people can go in. They come out holding things nobody on this world could make: weapons, workings, arts. Your father wrote down who went in and what they brought back, and he wrote it down every time, and not once in all those sheets does he say what the place actually is.” He was quiet a moment. ”The last time it came was a hundred thousand years ago, before I was made, and the sheets say less about it than about any of the others.” His tails did not move. ”I would not build anything on that silence, and I would not ignore it either.”

He gave her the rest of it in order, because he had plainly worked out on the way down that she would want it twice.

”The ambient rises first. It rises everywhere, and it goes on rising for years ahead of it, never fewer than six or seven — and then the place is in reach, and people go in, and the rise goes away again afterward. Your father did not write down that the two things were connected. I do not have a mechanism, and I will not pretend to one. What I have is four instances and four coincidences in a dead man’s hand, and a thing that has been happening now for about a year. If your father’s sheets are any guide, we are at the front of it, not the end.”

He looked up the hill, toward the sheds.

”And lung-leaf stronger on the same ground out of the same seed, which is what you would expect of every growing thing on three worlds if there were simply more for it to take up. I think your sixty-six nests are the reason this continent is mending. I do not think they are the reason the world is filling. I think the world is filling because that place is coming back, and nobody on Doha has connected the two because nobody alive has ever had a reason to measure both.”

***

Jayde stood on the road below the farms for a long time with the light going.

”I wrote to Da’Ren a month ago,” she said at last.

”I know. You told Heiteng it was one question and that you would not say why.”

”One question. Is your ground up as well.” She heard how thin it sounded now. ”I asked it because Eden could not see through the veil and because Ren is the only man on three worlds who would know to the week what his own country was doing. I thought I was checking whether our arithmetic held past our own coastline.”

”You asked exactly the right question,” said Isha, ”and you did not know what you were asking, and the answer is going to come back yes.”

***

She thought about it the whole way back to Kaelport and most of the evening, and she did it properly, because the decision was not small.

Asking a king whether his ground is up is one letter. Telling him why she is asking is a different letter entirely. It says she has an instrument. It says she has a theory with four instances behind it and a set of records under it that she cannot explain without explaining whose they were. And it puts in front of a man who has ruled for thousands of years a word she had not heard until that afternoon, and which he might know a great deal better than she did.

Ren had asked her a question in Sparkfall and waited forty-seven days for nine lines back, because she had gone and checked before she answered, and he had noticed that she had checked.

She wrote it after the last bell and did not make it long.

Da’Ren. The question I sent in Infernorest was better than I knew when I sent it, and you are owed the reason.

Our ambient is rising. We have instruments and half a year of figures. I had been crediting our own work, and I am now told that our own work cannot account for more than one continent of it.

I have been shown records older than the Sundering. They are not mine, and I will not say whose. Four times in them the ambient rose across the whole world, and on every one of those four occasions, some years after the rise began, a place the records call Shaolin came into reach. The records do not claim a mechanism, and neither do I. Beyond the name and that people went into it, I do not know what Shaolin is.

I am not asking you for a prophecy, and I am not asking you what the Temple thinks. I am asking a man who shut his own borders and has watched what is inside them more closely than anybody alive: is your ground up, how long has it been up, and does anything in your archive know that name?

You asked me a plain question once, and I went and checked before I answered it. I have done the same here. The checking is why this is a month late.

She read it back, did not soften it, and sealed it for Heiteng.

***

Then she stood in the yard a while, because there was a thing underneath all of it that she had been declining to look at since the road and that would not go away by being ignored.

Down at the far end of the yard, the school’s last lamp was going out. Up on the shoulder, if she turned round, there would be a light in the drying sheds, where Bai Shu was not going to bed, and another in the shed where twelve women had made nine hundred small white things by hand that day for seventy-five children who were going to be born into a different world than their mothers.

If the world was filling because something was coming, then every good thing on Eden’s boards was partly borrowed. The canopy. The edges coming in. A slope of lung-leaf at three soaks instead of four. A cutter’s sister-in-law at forty-four with two hundred years in front of her.

And borrowed things go back.