Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 603: Chapter 598: Owed

Location:The Pavilion — The Sanctuary, The Workshop, The Garden Wall · Kaelport — the rail above the water

Date/Time:9 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Temperday, midday to dusk (outside) — the thirtieth day of Yinxin’s grounding (inside)

Realm:Lower Realm

Silver, on the slope above the pond, moving.

Jayde stopped at the top of the sanctuary path and watched it go. Yinxin came off the grass in two beats, low, the left wing a little short of the right on the downstroke, and crossed the pond no higher than a tall man could have reached, and came down on the far bank in a long untidy skid that left a furrow in the reeds Tianxin had not yet burned. For a moment she stood there with her wings half open. Then she turned round and did it again the other way.

The dressing on the shoulder was a third the size it had been. Green had cut it down twice. It was strapped across the chest now instead of round it, so that the wing could lift, and the wing was lifting.

Around her the sanctuary had gone on without anybody’s leave. The burned stand at the far end of the pond was already green again at the waterline, new reeds coming up through the black in a fringe a hand high, and the willow had let down so far over the bank that its tips trailed in the water and drew lines across it when the air moved. Under the willow, in the deepest of the shade, lay a great length of midnight-black with the lightning running quietly along its back and a pale curl of pearl asleep against one foreleg.

She is showing off. She has done it four times since noon. I have been asked not to mention it, and I am not mentioning it.

Takara’s voice had the flat patience of a sergeant reading out an incident log, and it arrived without his lifting his head. Huaxin was asleep against his foreleg with a seedpod in both claws, and he had evidently decided that a head of the elite guard did not move while on duty under a sleeping wyrmling, whatever was crossing the pond.

You are mentioning it.

I am reporting it. It is a different thing. His mane gave one small crackle and settled. Four times. The landing has improved by half.

A month, by the inside count. It had been the afternoon of the sixth when Jayde asked, and it was the afternoon of the ninth, and three days out there was thirty in here, to the hour. Thirty days of grass and sun that was not a sun and ground that gave her something when she lay on it. Jayde had been outside since first bell, and in the days that had passed in here since she last stood on this path, the queen had gone from short hops to this.

Behind Jayde, the wings had come half up off her back while she watched. She did not know they had.

Yinxin landed the second time without the skid, folded her wings, and lay down where she was, chin on her forelegs, as if she had never been anywhere else.

Jayde went down the slope. The grass was warm through her boots and smelled of something green being crushed, and she sat on it a pace from the great silver head, which was as close as the arrangement allowed.

”Sit down, please,” Yinxin said, without opening her eyes. ”You are early. Green is not due for an hour, and you are not due at all. You have a face on.” The great golden eye came open. ”You have been talking to somebody old.”

”Qin.”

”Ah.” She did not ask, and considered Jayde for a while with the one eye. ”It is in the coat.”

Jayde had not moved her hand. She looked down and found it flat against her left side, over the pocket.

”It is in the coat,” she agreed, and took the hand away, and did not say anything else, and Yinxin let her not say it, which was the arrangement.

”Twice across,” Yinxin said instead. ”I counted on purpose. Twice across and back without sitting down.”

”I saw.”

”You did. I heard you stop at the top of the path.” The eye closed again. ”Green says I am a fifth through. I said I felt more than a fifth through. Green said that feeling it was the first part of being a fifth through, and that she would let me know when I was half.”

+++

Eden was in the workshop with the platform log open and the slate beside it, face down, which was an improvement on the first morning. Her hair had come half out of its tie again, and she had not noticed. Zhi lay along her left forearm in a loose coil, blue and steady, and as Jayde came through the door the blue cooled a shade and dimmed, and he slid round to the underside of Eden’s wrist, away from her, without lifting his head.

Reiko was across the threshold at dog size with his chin on his paws, which meant he had been listening to something and was not going to say what.

[Old man,] he said, as she stepped over him. [Ink. Cold tea.] He sniffed again. [Worried.]

[Not worried.]

[You’re worried,] Reiko said comfortably, and shut his eyes.

”She flew,” Jayde said.

”Hopped,” Eden corrected. ”Twice across. Green told me.” She did not look up. ”Before you ask, I’m not going to give you a number. Not one I’d stand behind.”

”Then give me one you would not.”

That got her looked at.

”It isn’t a decline, and it isn’t stalled,” Eden said, caveat first, as she always did. ”Green said five months at the start. She’s a fifth through in a month, which is on Green’s line or slightly ahead of it, and Green has never once been optimistic in her life. The ground in here is doing most of it. Whatever’s under the sanctuary is carrying her the way the Lower Realm couldn’t.” She turned the stylus over. ”And you want to know what it’d do if she had more under her than that.”

”Yes.”

”I don’t know,” Eden said it flatly. ”I’ve never put a queen on a ring of spirit stones. Nobody has. I can see the threads going into the clutch from the ones under it. If the stones were good enough, and that’s high-grade, not anything this continent cuts, I’d guess it shortens it. I’d guess by a good deal.” She held up one finger. ”That’s a guess with my name on it. You can have it, but it’s a guess.”

”Five months to four.”

”Four, perhaps. Maybe three. Maybe nothing, and she lies on them and is exactly as comfortable as she was before.” Eden’s mouth quirked. ”I’d want to see it twice.”

Jayde put her hands flat on the bench. The wood was warm from the lamp and scarred with a year of other people’s work. She looked out through the workshop door at the long hall and the low warm corner where the clutch lay on its ring. The stones under it were the best the Pavilion had, and they were what this continent could cut, and Eden had just told her they were not good enough for a queen.

”Then I will find better,” Jayde said.

”Where?”

”I will ask.”

Eden looked at her a moment longer, and then turned the slate face up again and went back to the log, which from Eden, meant the conversation had reached a sound conclusion and did not need her.

+++

The garden lay in its long afternoon, Green’s beds in their rows with the paths swept between them, the low silver plants at the near end giving off the faint cold smell they had whenever the light was on them. Heiteng was on the low wall at the end of the beds, where he had been on and off for the better part of a month, and Cangwei was beside him, with a ledger on the stones by her knee, shut, a pencil laid across it square to the edge. Her live hand was in his. The dead one lay in its sling against her ribs, and there was a little more color in her than there had been, and she did not move away from him when Jayde came along the path.

He stood up before Jayde reached them.

”I was coming to find you,” he said quietly. ”I need your leave for something.”

Jayde waited.

”Ren.” Heiteng’s mercury eyes went once to the woman on the wall and back. ”In Blazepeak, he came to the stone with a dwarf’s letter. The clan signatory had granted her a Seal, six days after she had already crossed without one. Ren told me she had come down.” He did not lower his voice. ”I told him no. I told him I would have felt her land. He has not raised it since, because he is my brother, and he let me be wrong.”

Cangwei had gone still. She looked at neither of them, only at the bed of something low and silver in front of her, as if it needed watching.

”What would you tell him?” Jayde asked.

”That he was right, and I would not hear it. That she is here. That she is staying.”

Jayde turned it over the way she turned anything that would be read by somebody else. It held. Nothing in it was a door.

”Tell him,” she said. ”Tonight, if he will take the stone tonight.”

Heiteng inclined his head. He did not sit down again. He stood with his hands in his belt and looked at her in the way he had when there was a second thing, and he was deciding whether it was his to bring.

”There is something else,” he said. ”Not about her. About the fifth.”

”The invasion.”

”His realm takes the heaviest of it. Every time, all four times. They send their worst where the resistance is, and his people are the resistance.” He did not say it with any pride. It was a load, set down for her to look at. ”He asks me, at the end of most calls, what the Lower Realm is doing about it. I have told him roads. I have told him a corps. I have not told him about the lances.”

”And you think he should know.”

”I think the lances would be worth a great deal to the men standing where he stands.” Heiteng’s voice did not change. ”And I think something else, and I have not said it to anybody. The metal up there is not the metal down here. Ren’s ground gives things this continent has never seen cut. A lance built from it might be a different weapon from the one Feng Lian racks.”

Jayde was quiet for a moment.

Four hundred and seventy lances. Single use. A bolt that stopped at Mid Inferno-tempered and a lance that killed anything and was gone, and nothing at all between them, and Feng Lian saying ten years and being generous. And a man at the other end of a stone whose realm took the worst of the fifth invasion every time, with eight million people behind him, who had asked, every call, what she was doing about it.

”Does he have spirit stones?” she asked. ”High-grade. The grade his ground gives.”

Heiteng looked at her.

”He has them. A great many. He sends them to the Pathsingers and the newly woken, and I do not know how many he holds back.” He considered. ”Whether he can spare them is his to say.”

”Then ask him that. Only that. If he can spare any.” She set it out the way she would have set out a requisition to the arsenal, because that was what it was. ”In exchange, the drawings for the siege lance, complete, as Li Shenwei cuts it. Feng Lian’s figures with them, every failure rate. Everything he needs to build one himself.”

”And the metal.”

”Samples. Whatever his smiths think is worth trying. I will put them in front of Shenwei and see what the formation does with a better metal under it.” She paused. ”He works it from his side and we work it from ours, and we send each other what we find.”

Heiteng was quiet for the length of a breath.

”That is a fair trade,” he said.

”It is meant to be.”

”He will ask what the stones are for.”

”Then let him ask. It is a trade.”

Heiteng looked at her a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, the way he conceded to a carter who had the better count.

Beside him, Cangwei took her live hand out of her lap and put it flat on the wall, and left it there. Jayde watched her take in all of it, as she took in everything, from one edge to the other: the brother at the far end of a world, the queen on the slope who would never be named to him, the trade that had been built so that she would not need to be. Cangwei did not say anything.

The hand flat on the stone was Jayde’s own gesture. Jayde did not think Cangwei knew that.

After a moment Cangwei opened the ledger with the same hand, wrote one line in it without looking down, and closed it again. Jayde did not see what the line said. She did not think it was a conclusion. Cangwei did not write those.

”I will come out with you,” Jayde said. ”I will not listen. I will be at the rail.”

+++

Outside it was dusk, and it was the same Temperday, and the yard was emptying. The last carts were going out through the gate at the bottom with their lamps already lit, and the smell of hot tar came up from somewhere along the slip where a man was sealing a hull before the cold set in. Across the water the far shore had gone to a low dark line, and above it the sky was the color of an old bruise, going yellow at the western edge.

Jayde stood at the top of the rail where she had stood that morning, with the water flat and dark below and the beach only a beach. Heiteng went to the far end of it, forty paces off, and took the stone out of his coat, and turned his back to her. His voice came to her low and level, and not one word of it. She did not try to.

The air at the rail had a faint taste to it, metal and rain, though there was no rain coming and the sky was clear to the west. She noticed it, and noticed that it was not new, and let it go.

Below her a gull came down on the empty beach and walked the tideline, past the stones where three mornings ago a woman had lain bleeding, and found nothing there worth stopping for, and went up again.

It took a long time. There was Cangwei first, and she could tell from the shape of it when that part ended, because Heiteng stopped speaking and stood very still with the stone at his ear for a while. Then he spoke again, and it went on longer, and there were silences in it she guessed were Ren doing arithmetic. Then a last few words, and the stone went back into his coat.

Behind him, along the front of the long shed, somebody was lighting the lamps.

[Your weight is on your left foot,] Kazren observed, from wherever he was. [It has been on your left foot since the old man said first. You will want to fix that before anybody else notices it.]

She moved her weight. Kazren said nothing further, which from Kazren was approval.

Heiteng came back along the rail at the pace of a man who had a thing to carry and meant to set it down exactly where he had been told to.

”Cangwei first,” he said. ”I told him he had been right in Blazepeak, and that I had not let him be.” He looked at the water. ”He did not say anything for a while. Then he asked one thing about her.”

Jayde said nothing.

”He asked if she was whole.” Heiteng’s eyes stayed on the water. ”I said no. I said she was here. He did not ask anything more.”

”And the rest.”

”He can spare them. He will send them with the dwarves, and the samples with them, and his smiths’ notes on what each one does in a forge.” Heiteng paused. ”He wants the drawings. He said his people have stood where the worst of it lands four times with nothing better than their own hands, and that he had not known anybody on this continent had been thinking about it at all.”

”Then it is agreed.”

”It is agreed.” Heiteng was quiet a moment. ”He did not ask what the stones were for.”

”Good.”

”And he said one more thing, and told me to give it to you as he said it, and not add anything.” Heiteng took a slip of paper out of his coat, torn from the bottom of something, with a few words on it in his own square hand.

Jayde took it. It was very short.

You owe nothing for the stones. The drawings I will take because my people need them.

She read it twice.

”That is not a trade,” she said.

”No,” Heiteng said. ”He does not think it is one. I do not think he has ever thought it was.” He looked at her, briefly, and away. ”He paid for four months of his own archive on your account and would not hear of being repaid, and you have been sending him drawings and figures and the survey method. I do not believe either of you has once written down who owes whom. I think you are the only one who has been counting.”

He went back down the yard toward the shed, where the Pavilion door was, and a woman waiting on a wall with her hand flat beside her.

Jayde stayed at the rail.

She had a docket in her coat that said six years and a door with no road to it, and she knew exactly where that weight went. She had a school full of children one crossing short, and a man who had looked at her across a trestle and said first. Four hundred and seventy lances and nine hundred owed. Two thousand and nine paces to the mile. Every one of those could be counted and carried and set down somewhere.

The slip went into the coat beside the docket, folded once.

It did not weigh anything. She stood at the rail until it was dark, and could not find where it went.