Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 604: Chapter 599: Every Twelfth

Location:Kaelport — The Arsenal Yard, then Li Shenwei’s Cutting Shed

Date/Time:10 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Quenchday, first bell to noon

Realm:Lower Realm

Feng Lian’s knuckle went against the casing of the twelfth lance on the third rack, one knock, not hard, and the sound it made was the sound it always made: a short dull note with nothing ringing in it. On down the row, his lips moving. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, in the voice he used for counting, which was not loud and did not need to be, because there was nobody in the long shed at first bell but him and the cold and the lances.

Twenty-four. Knock.

The racks ran the length of the shed under a roof that had been put up in Ashwhisper and extended twice since. Each lance lay in its own cradle, head to the wall, the containment housing wrapped in oiled cloth against the damp that came up off the water every morning from Cinderfall on. The light came in gray through the high shutters. It lay along the casings in one long line and made them look like a single thing, which they were not. Every one of them was one shot.

Thirty-six. Knock.

Every morning he did this. It was not an inspection. Peng Deshi did the inspection, at the second bell, with a sheet and two men and a lamp, and wrote down anything that had shifted in its cradle or sweated through its cloth overnight. Feng Lian only counted. He had found, in his first month with the brief, that he could not begin a day until he knew the number, and that knowing it from Deshi’s sheet was not the same as knowing it with his own hand.

At the end of the last rack he stopped.

”Four hundred and seventy-one,” he said, to nobody.

Two every three days, near enough, because that was what six men and nine days to a containment came to, and there was no arithmetic on this continent that made it come to anything else. Some weeks five, when the seats came off the bench clean. Some weeks three, when Shenwei sent a containment back. Ninety-eight days since Blazepeak, when he had stood in this shed and said four hundred and six and not nine hundred, and here it was the middle of Flamefade and it was four hundred and seventy-one.

The rest of it he did aloud as well, because he always did.

”Four hundred and twenty-nine to nine hundred. At two in three days, six hundred and forty-four days. The fourteenth of Blazepeak, the year after next.” He looked down the length of the shed. ”Spring was the promise. It will be summer. The wrong year.”

The lances lay in their cradles and did not argue.

+++

Peng Deshi came in at the second bell with the sheet, the lamp and the two men, and found him still standing at the end of the last rack.

”One short of what I wanted,” Feng Lian said.

”I know.” Deshi set the lamp on the bench. He was a broad, quiet man with a scorched beard who had stopped, some time in Sparkfall, waiting to be told what to do next and simply done it. ”Seats came off the bench at nine last night. Two. Both clean. They’ll be married to housings by noon.”

”Four hundred and seventy-three by noon.”

”If Shenwei passes the housings.”

”Shenwei will pass the housings,” Feng Lian said. ”Shenwei has never once sent me back a housing that was right.”

Deshi grinned, briefly, into his beard, and took his two men down the first rack with the lamp.

Feng Lian went out into the yard.

It was a good yard, and he was proud of it, though he would not have said so. Four long sheds round a square of packed earth, the cutting shed at the top under the hill, the forge at the bottom by the slip where the water came in. A board road ran down the middle so that nothing heavy ever had to cross mud. There were wheel-ruts in the earth on either side of the boards from the months before the boards, and he had never had them leveled, because they were a figure too. The morning was cold and clear, Flamefade cold, the kind that set the breath hanging. The smoke from the forge went straight up and did not lean.

The Commander was standing at the bottom of the board road.

He stopped walking.

She did not come to the arsenal. In a year she had come to the arsenal four times, and he could name every one of them, and three had been to tell him something he did not want to hear. She stood with her hands at her sides in her plain corps coat, brown-eyed and black-haired, looking up the yard at the racks, and she had evidently been there for some time, because there was no frost on the board where she was standing and there was frost on every board around it.

Feng Lian went down to her.

”Commander.”

”Feng Lian.” She did not look away from the sheds. ”How many?”

”Four hundred and seventy-one at first bell. Four hundred and seventy-three by noon, if the housings pass.”

”Good,” she said.

It was one word, and she meant it. He had heard her say good to other people and knew the difference, and found he did not know what to do with his hands, and put them behind his back.

”I need Shenwei’s drawings,” the Commander said. ”All of them. The complete lance, as he cuts it now. The containment at one in forty and the old one at one in nine, both, with the reason for the change. The firing seat. Every failure rate you have, and every figure. Your own sheets with them.” She turned her head and looked at him. ”Copied fair, so that somebody who has never stood in this yard could build one from nothing. Crated for the road. They go up with the next consignment.”

Feng Lian stood there.

”Up,” he said.

”Up.”

He knew what was up. Everybody on the hill knew what was up and did not say it. There was a consignment every few weeks, crated and sealed and taken somewhere by people who were not corps, and it came back with things the continent did not make. Nobody he knew had ever asked where it went. He had decided early that it was not ordnance’s business.

It was ordnance’s business now.

”Who are they for?”

”The people who stand where the worst of the fifth lands,” the Commander said.

He waited, in case there was more. There was not.

”What did they pay?”

It came out before he had decided to say it. It was the question he asked everybody, every carter, every man on the bench outside Tiller’s Row, every stranger who had walked twelve days to a bathhouse. He asked it because it was the one thing people told the truth about, and had never once thought to ask it of her.

Her mouth did the small, amused thing, and was still again.

”Metal,” the Commander said. ”Samples from ground this continent has never cut. Their smiths’ notes on what each one does in a forge. Whatever Shenwei finds in it, we send back up. Whatever they find, they send down.”

The word turned over in him, and he did not say it again.

”I do not know what it does. Nobody here does. Their smiths think it might make a different lance.” She looked back at the racks. ”That is a guess, and it is theirs.”

For a while he said nothing.

Bolt stops at Mid Inferno-tempered. Lance kills anything and is gone. Feng Lian had said it in Voidmarch in a room with his name said aloud after it, and he had said it every week since to anybody who would stand still, and in a year nobody had ever brought him a single thing that touched the middle of it. Not a drawing, not a theory, not a man with an idea. Shenwei made the lance better. Shenwei could not make it something else.

And here, on a frosted board at the bottom of his own yard, was a woman telling him the people who stood where the worst of it landed had metal nobody here had cut.

Further than that he would not let himself go. He counted instead.

”Four years of drawings,” he said. ”Shenwei’s shelf. Two hundred and some sheets, and he will want to redraw half of them before they leave. Fair copies at a clerk’s pace, a sheet an hour with checking. Three clerks.” He worked it. ”Nine days. Seven if I give them Restday and they will not thank me for it.”

”Seven,” the Commander said.

He paused. ”And the metal. When it comes, Shenwei will want to cut a containment on it. A new metal under a fine formation, and he will cut it more than once. Three tries if he is lucky. Six if he is not. Nine days a containment, and six men on this continent who can do it, and they are the same six cutting mine.” His own voice had gone flat, the way it did when a number came out wrong. ”Every one of those tries is a lance I do not get. Six lances. Perhaps more.”

”It is.”

”Then the fourteenth of Blazepeak is the twenty-third.”

”Yes,” the Commander said again.

Feng Lian looked at her, and she looked back, and did not say anything to make it better.

Feng Lian found that he liked her for that more than for anything she had said all morning.

”It will be worth six lances,” he said, ”if it works.”

”And if it does not?”

”Then it will be six lances.” He shrugged. ”I have been short of something every week for a year, Commander. I would rather be six short for a reason.”

+++

Li Shenwei’s cutting shed sat at the top of the yard, under the hill, where the ground did not shake when the forge hammers went. It was the quietest building in the arsenal and the warmest, because Shenwei kept a brazier in it that he fed himself and would not let anybody else touch. The smell inside was always the same: hot stone dust, lamp oil, and the faint sharp metallic tang that a formation gave off when it had just been cut and had not yet settled into its housing.

Shenwei was at his bench with a housing in a clamp and a cutter in his hand. He did not look up when Feng Lian came in. He never did until he had finished the line he was on, and Feng Lian had stopped minding years ago.

The shelf ran along the back wall. Four years of it. Every drawing Shenwei had ever made that was correct, which was all of them, rolled and tied and labeled in his small hand. Containment. Seat. Housing. Mount. The cart cradle. The rail cradle for a slope. A drawing for a lance that could be fired from a boat, which had never been built because nobody had asked for one. A drawing for a lance twice the length, which had never been built because it would not fit on a road.

It was the eleventh division’s shelf. They will not have to think of one item of it themselves.

Shenwei finished his line, set down the cutter, and looked up.

”The Commander wants the shelf,” Feng Lian said. ”All of it. Fair copies. Crated for the road. It goes up.”

Shenwei looked at him for a long moment, and then past him at the shelf, and then back.

”All of it,” he said.

”Every roll. And metal is coming down. Samples, from ground nobody here has ever cut. You will want to cut a containment on it.”

Shenwei’s hands, which were never still, went still on the bench.

”How much metal?”

”I do not know.”

”What kind?”

”I do not know that either. Their smiths’ notes come with it.”

Shenwei sat with that. Then he got up, without a word, and went to the shelf, and took down the third roll from the left, and untied it, and spread it on the bench beside the clamped housing. It was the containment. The one in forty. Feng Lian knew it by sight; he had watched Shenwei draw it.

Shenwei picked up a pencil, made a small mark beside one of the inner channels, and wrote a figure next to it.

”That was wrong,” he said.

”It was not wrong. It fails one in forty. It has failed one in forty for three months.”

”On our metal,” Shenwei said, without looking up, ”it fails one in forty. If they are going to build it on something else, that channel is a guess. I would rather they knew it was a guess.” He made a second mark. ”Seven days?”

”Her number.”

”I will have redrawn eleven of them by then.” Shenwei rolled the containment again, carefully, and retied it. ”They will not have to think of one item of it themselves.”

Feng Lian heard his own line in somebody else’s mouth and did not say anything.

Feng Lian stood by the brazier while Shenwei went back to the clamp. On the far side of the window, the yard was full of morning now. Deshi’s lamp was going down the third rack. Two seats on the bench at the forge end would be married to housings by noon, and it would be four hundred and seventy-three, and in three days there would be two more, or one, or three.

In Blazepeak he had written that the only reason they had not yet had to choose between the road and the baths and the school wall was that a fourth thing had not asked. What the fourth thing would be he had not known, only that it would come, and that it would want the same six men.

It had asked. It wanted the drawings and weeks of Shenwei, and it had come with metal nobody had ever cut. It was not a thing he could fight for masons against. It was the first thing in a year that had ever come toward the gap instead of away from it.

+++

He wrote the report at noon, at the bench in the long shed, with the count at the top as he always put it.

Four hundred and seventy-three.

The drawings went on page one: the shelf, two hundred and fourteen sheets by Shenwei’s own count, eleven to be redrawn, three clerks, seven days, crated for the consignment. The cost in lances of the test housings when the metal came: six, give or take, depending on what the metal did to the cutting. The new date for nine hundred: the twenty-third of Blazepeak, the year after next.

Page two was where he always broke his brief, and he did it again.

Ardh he did not ask about. Three times he had asked and had his answer, and he had decided some weeks ago that a man who asks a fourth time is not asking any longer; he is complaining. He wrote instead, at the bottom of page two, in a hand he kept deliberately level:

I would like to know who else has been thinking about the gap. I am glad someone has. I had thought for a year that it was only this yard.

Once he read it, and did not change it. Then he signed it and sent it up the hill with the second-bell runner and did not expect an answer.

The crate came over from the joiner’s at the end of the afternoon, empty, pale new wood, unmarked, as every crate that went up the road was. Deshi set it down beside the bench. It would stand there seven days, filling, and then it would be nailed and sealed and taken up the road by people who were not corps to somewhere he had never been and would never see, to men who stood where the worst of it landed.

Feng Lian looked at it for a while.

Then he went back down the first rack, where he had stopped that morning at the end, and started again from the wall, because it was evening and the number had changed.

One. Two. Three.

At twelve, his knuckle went against the casing. Then, without quite deciding to, he turned and reached back across the shed and put it, once, against the side of the empty crate.

The pale wood made a different sound. Hollow, and higher, with something ringing in it.