Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 602: Chapter 597: You Sent for Me

Location:Kaelport — The Long Shed, then the rail above the water

Date/Time:9 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Temperday, first bell to mid-morning

Realm:Lower Realm

Paper, folded in four, gone soft at the creases from a month in a coat.

Jayde could find the docket without looking, and had found it that way on the beach, and in the Medical Bay, and once in the sanctuary on the ninth day, when she had reached into a coat she was not wearing and come up with nothing and stood for a moment with her hand flat against her own ribs. It was in the inside pocket now, against the left side, where it had been since 5 Cinderfall.

It stayed there for now.

”Meifen.”

Meifen was at the door with the brazier tongs still in her hand, which she had been going to put down and had forgotten.

”The cooper’s row,” Jayde said. ”You told them you would bring them what you were allowed to.”

”I did.”

”Tell them it was ours. Tell them it is finished. Tell them nobody on that row is in any danger from it, and that if that changes, they will hear it from you before they hear it from anybody.” She considered the rest and found nothing in it she could give. ”That is all of it.”

Meifen turned it over once, the way she turned a fitting before she trusted it. Then she nodded and set the tongs against the wall.

”That’ll hold,” she said, and went.

The door shut behind her. The brazier ticked. In the corner the old man on the stool had not moved, and his cup was where it had been at first bell, on the boards beside his foot, and from the line the tea had dried to on the inside of it he had drunk half and then not touched it again for most of a day and a night.

He had not lain down. The First Company man on the door had said so, and Jayde had looked at the stool and believed it.

”Headmaster. Come and sit at the table.”

Qin rose. He did it without his hands, in one movement, as if a night on a stool were a thing that happened to other people, and crossed the shed and sat on the bench across the trestle from her. He did not look at the board, though it was behind her and full of chalk. He looked at her.

Jayde took the docket out and put it on the trestle between them, still folded.

+++

”You know about Shaolin,” she said.

”I know what everybody knows.” The voice arrived without effort, as it always did, and was exactly loud enough. ”That it was. That it will be again. That the Temple says ten years, and has been saying it long enough that it is six now.”

”Six at the outside.”

”At the outside.” He did not ask how she knew that.

”Since the fifth of last month I have known more than that.” She put two fingers on the docket. ”Not from the Temple. From somebody whose people have been in, and come out, and kept what they found in a room for longer than this continent has had a calendar. I wrote it down the night it reached me. I have read it every day since, and I have not shown it to anybody.”

Qin’s eyes went to the folded paper and back.

”Not Eden?”

”Eden knows it exists. She has not read it.”

That earned her three seconds, and she sat through them. In his study, with the seven wards pressing on the back of her teeth, she had found that the only thing to do with Qin’s three seconds was let him have them, because he was going to take them regardless.

”Go on,” he said.

So she gave it to him in order, the way she would have given it to a staff room, flat and complete. It was not a place. It was a piece of somewhere else that had broken off and drifted, and when it came near enough it had a door. The door let in anybody at Inferno-tempered and nobody past Blazecrowned. The door had a second condition, and the second condition was written for humans: under one hundred years of age. Nobody had ever written down why. Inside there were layers, and doors between the layers, and nobody from this world had ever been through the second one, because anybody strong enough to live on the far side of it was too strong to be let through the first.

”And what is in it,” she said, ”is on the wrong side of every one of those doors from the people who could carry it.”

Qin’s hands were folded on the trestle. They did not move.

”Every power in three realms,” she said, ”is too old or too strong to walk in. Every one. They will all have to send somebody.”

”That includes me.”

”Including you. Ten thousand years and human. The rule bites you literally.”

”It would.” He did not seem disturbed by it. He seemed to be filing it. ”And you.”

”I am nineteen. I stand at Blazecrowned in the body.” She did not soften it. ”The door will take me. There is nobody on this world it will take who stands higher.”

Something happened behind the pale eyes and did not reach the face.

”Unfold it,” Qin said.

+++

She unfolded it.

It was not long. It was her hand, small and careful, ink on both sides, the columns ruled with the edge of a slate because she had not had a straight-edge in the Pavilion that night. Qin did not pick it up. He read it where it lay, upside down to him, and she watched him read it the whole way down the first side and turn it over with one finger and read the second.

At the bottom of the second side there were two lines set apart from the rest, written later, in a different pen.

Lances that do not spend.

A door with no road to it from here.

He read those twice. Jayde saw him do it.

”The first is Feng Lian’s,” she said. ”He has had it since Voidmarch, in a room, with his name said out loud. The bolt stops at Mid Inferno-tempered. The lance kills anything and is gone. Between them there is nothing at all, and everything above that line on this continent walks about in it as if it owned the place.” She put a finger beside the first line, not on it. ”He has four hundred and seventy of a thing that is spent the moment it is used, and nine hundred was the number, and he will never get to a number that does not run out. He calls it a ten-year problem. He is being generous.”

”And it is in there.”

”What is in there, by every account I have, is not spent. The records say what came out of the first layer when people still went in. I am not going to repeat the words, because they are somebody else’s words and they sound like a story. But the man who wrote them down did not write stories.”

Qin was quiet.

”The second line,” Jayde said, ”is mine.”

”Yes. I can see it is.”

”The records say what is inside. They do not say where the door is, or they say it in a way nobody living can read.” She kept her voice level. ”So I have a door that will take my people, and nobody else’s. Behind it, the one thing this continent cannot make. And no road to it. Not from here, not from anywhere I can see, and six years at the outside to find one.”

Her hands folded on the trestle, as his were folded.

”That is not why I sent for you.”

”No,” Qin said. ”I did not think it was.”

+++

”The age rule is written for humans,” Jayde said. ”Not for demons. There is a number for demons and nobody alive knows what it is. The human number is plain. Under one hundred.” She looked at him. ”So somebody wrote a rule for humans. Somebody had humans to write it for. Humans went through that door often enough that whoever kept the door bothered to make a rule about them.”

Qin’s cup was on the floor by the stool, twelve paces away. His hands were folded on the trestle. For a moment Jayde had the clear impression that if the cup had been in them, it would have stopped halfway to his mouth.

”Your Academy is eight hundred thousand years old,” she said. ”It is the first human institution on this world. It was old when that door was still a place people went and came back from.”

The question went unasked. It was in the room.

Qin looked past her for the first time, at the board, at the coins in their column, at nothing.

”Ah,” he said.

Then nothing, for long enough that the brazier settled and one of the coals went through and dropped.

”I do not know,” Qin said.

Jayde waited.

”That is the true answer, and it is the whole of it, and you would know if I gave you any other.” He brought his eyes back. ”I have held that chair for a short while, as the building counts. I was given the keys of it by a man who had been given them by a man, and somewhere in that chain a great deal stopped being handed on, because nobody thought to ask for it. There are rooms in the Academy I have never opened. There are rolls in its cellars I have never read past the first page, because the first page was all anybody ever needed.” He paused. ”In ten thousand years, Commander, nobody has asked me whether the school ever sent anybody anywhere.”

”I am asking.”

”You are.”

He looked at the docket again. Not at the two lines. At the column above them, the one that said under one hundred.

”I will find out,” Qin said.

+++

That seemed the end of it. She was already reaching for the docket to fold it.

”Who would you send?”

His hand had not moved, and the voice had not risen, and it stopped her anyway.

”The ones the door will take,” she said. ”The corps came up a full tier on the mountain. There are a good many of the fourteen hundred inside the band, and most of them are under a hundred by a long way. Eden. Meifen’s company, half of it. Some of the second ten.”

”And yourself.”

”Myself as well.”

”First,” Qin said.

No answer came to that. He had not asked it as a question, and they both knew what she would have said.

He let it go. He let it go so completely that she understood he had taken it somewhere and put it down to come back for.

”The school,” he said.

Jayde was still.

”Your Lower School. The roll your Eden keeps, which the Temple’s young man has been counting since the morning it opened.” Qin’s eyes did not leave her face. ”The intake is six to fifteen. The floor you set for a fifteen-year-old is the top of Sparkforged. In six years the oldest of them will be twenty-one, and you will have spent those six years feeding them and teaching them and lifting them, on purpose, as fast as a body can safely be lifted, because that is what the school is for.” He turned one hand palm up on the trestle, which was the most he had moved since he sat down. ”Commander. How many of them will be inside the band?”

She knew the number, and had worked it the night she wrote the docket and had not written it on the docket, which was its own kind of answer.

”None,” she said. ”Not by schooling. The school takes them to the top of Sparkforged. The corps takes them to Flamewrought. The door’s floor is one crossing above that.” She made herself say the rest of it plainly. ”And the crossing costs. It burns one of four things out of a person and does not give it back. It is in the charter that nobody in this force is ever asked to pay it, or hinted at it, or held a post open for it.”

”I read the charter.”

Across the trestle sat the one man she knew of who had gone all the way to Eternalpyre and had not paid it, and had never said what he paid instead. She did not ask him now.

”Then in six years,” Qin said, ”there will be a door. And on this side of it, some hundreds of young people one crossing short, every one of whom you will have taught to read a contract and count the price of a thing before they sign.” His thumb moved once along the edge of the trestle and was still. ”How many of them, do you suppose, will need to be asked?”

Her hands had gone flat on the trestle. She did not move them.

”None of them,” she said. ”I know.”

Qin inclined his head. ”I can see that you know.”

The brazier ticked.

”You have built the best list on three worlds,” he said, quite gently. ”Of exactly who that door will take, if they are willing to pay for it. And you have taught them to be willing. And you have put walls round it, and a name on the gate, and a man from the Temple at the back of the yard writing it down.” A pause. ”And no roof. I am told the roof is not costed.”

It was not unkind. It was the most precise thing anybody had said to her in a month.

”I did not build it for that,” Jayde said.

”No. You built it so that a potter’s boy could come out at sixty-six with a trade in his hands and four centuries in front of him. I read the charter.” He folded his hands again. ”Nobody will care what you built it for, on the day somebody comes for the list. I have been sending children through doors I cannot follow for ten thousand years. That is the whole of what a headmaster is. I have never once been able to choose who else was standing on the far side.”

Jayde said nothing at all.

”You did not send for me to tell me about a door,” Qin said. ”You sent for me because you cannot go in first, and alone, and come out with it, and spare everybody else the walk. You know that already. You wanted somebody old to tell you so out loud, so that it was not only you who knew it.”

The brazier ticked.

”Yes,” Jayde said.

It was very small. Jayde heard how small it was.

Qin nodded, once, as if she had given him a figure and it had been the correct one.

+++

He did not take the docket. She had half expected him to ask for it; he did not, and watched her fold it back into four along the soft creases and put it inside her coat, against the left side, and he said nothing about it at all.

At the door he stopped. The yard was full of light and noise and carts. Somewhere down it Orun was arguing with a man about a wheel, cheerfully, at length, and nobody had come to the shed for anything, because the order was still pinned to the frame, and nobody had told them it had come down.

”Your captain,” Qin said.

”Yes.”

”She told me to wait. She put a man on the door so that I would want for nothing. And she did not ask me once what I had come about, because it was not hers to ask.” He looked out at the yard. ”She is not on your list, I think. She is twenty-five.”

”Under a hundred.”

”Well under.” The pale eyes came round to her. ”She would go, if you asked. And she would not ask you why, because it would not be hers to ask.”

He went down the step and across the yard, and the carts moved for him without seeming to know they had, and he did not look back.

Jayde went to the rail at the top of the yard, where Heiteng would have been standing with his hands in his belt if he had not been in a garden behind a wall with a woman who was learning everything at once. She put her own hands on the rail. The water below was flat and gray, and the beach at the bottom of the stones was only a beach, with nothing on it.

He would say he did not know, and he would tell her anyway in about a week.

That was the part she could plan around. The rest of it was six years at the outside, a door with no road to it, and a school full of children growing stronger as fast as she knew how to make them, every one of them a little nearer the floor of that door each month, and one crossing short of it, and the crossing the one thing she had sworn nobody would ever be asked to pay.