Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 512: Chapter 507: The Body

Location:The Pavilion — The Workshop, The Medical Room, The Open Air, The Training Ground

Date/Time:10 Frostforge, 9942 AZI — First Light

Realm:Lower Realm

The workshop smelled of ink and wet paper and the scorch of an essence-lamp left burning all night.

Eden had not gone to bed. That was obvious from the doorway — the bench cleared of everything normally on it and covered end to end in trial pages, and her hair tied back twice, which she only did when she had already given up on it once.

”Forty-one attempts at one page,” she said, without looking up. ”They’re all wrong, and I can tell you why in four hours, or you can look at them and work it out in one minute, which is more efficient and also more annoying.”

It took less than a minute.

Every page was beautiful. Every one had been made by a person who could already read, for a person who could already read, and not one of them knew what to do with a child who had never understood that a mark could be a sound.

”Isha was right,” Jayde said. ”Page one isn’t for the child.”

Jayde pulled a blank sheet across and wrote it while it was still forming, which was not how she liked to work and was the only way anything had ever been any good.

Ask the child to say her own name.

Write it down in front of her, slowly, so that she watches the marks being made.

Say each part aloud as you make it.

Then give her the paper.

Eden read it upside down, then came round the bench and read it the right way up, which she did not normally bother to do.

”There’s no letter on it.”

”There’s her name on it. She’ll have heard that sound every day of her life and never once seen it.” Jayde set the pen down. ”First thing she learns is that the marks are hers. Not the Temple’s, not the clan register’s, not a thing a man in a good coat reads out at her while she stands there. Everything after that is more of the same trick.”

Green picked the sheet up and held it, and sat down on the stool the way a person does when their knees have decided something ahead of the rest of them.

”Right,” she said. ”Book Two.”

They got four pages further before Isha said her name from the doorway, in the register he used perhaps twice a year.

***

He took her to the far end of the workshop, past the benches where the four sealed cylinders sat humming in their cradles, and stopped at the flat stone he used for readings, and did not sit down.

”How long,” he said.

”How long what?”

”Do not do that.” His tails had gone entirely still. ”Your Crucible Core has been shut since the first hours of the first day. You came out eight days ago. You have not opened it.”

She opened her mouth. Then she thought about it properly, which she had not once done in eight days, and closed it again.

”I forgot,” she said.

Isha looked at her.

”I shut it in the first hours. Your dump had taken my shields off, and I was overdrawn and being sick in the dark, and the knowledge you put in me said close it, so I closed it.” She turned her palms over on her knees. ”It stayed closed. I fought a war without it. It stopped being a thing I was doing and started being a thing I was, and then I walked out into a forecourt full of caskets, and I have had eight days, and not one of them was quiet.”

”Eight days,” Isha said.

”Isha, I have been human for most of the time I can remember.” She said it flatly, because there was no dressing it. ”The better part of seventy years, one way. Six, this way. I have been a cultivator for six years and a human being for seventy, and when things go badly my hands still reach for the human answer first, and last year every single answer was the human one and every single one of them worked.”

Something in Isha’s face went a very long way back and came forward again.

”That,” he said, ”is the most sensible foolish thing anybody has said to me in a considerable while. Sit down and open it.”

She sat down on the stone and opened it.

The first thing was heat — not fire, the wrong kind of heat entirely, the kind that comes off a wall that has stood in the sun all day and gives it back at night. It went out from under her sternum into her shoulders, down both arms, and kept going.

Then the world got louder.

Not sound. All of it at once. The four cylinders on the bench behind her stopped being a hum and became four separate hums slightly out of phase; two walls away Tianxin was arguing and Jayde could hear the shape of it without the words. And every bond she had came back on together — Reiko close and immediate, the wyrmlings bright and disorderly, Eden steady, Yinxin two rooms away and asleep and thinner than she should have been.

Jayde sat with that a while and did not entirely trust her face.

”Everything is very loud,” she said.

”It will settle inside a day. It always does.” Isha had not moved at all. ”Now the part you are not saying.”

”Nothing’s moved.”

”Say it properly.”

”Not a step. Not a fraction of a step. The Core is exactly the size it was in Emberwane, seal one is where it was, seal two is where it was.” She flexed her hands. ”A year, Isha.”

”A year in a place with nothing in the air.” He said it without a shred of sympathy, which was, she understood, its own kind of comfort. ”What did you cultivate down there? There is no ambient essence in the Harrowing. There has never been any. That is the entire reason for the pill economy — every cultivator who has ever gone below has gone down with a pouch and come back up having spent it, and not one of them in eight hundred thousand years has advanced a single step under that mountain. They come out at the tier they went in at, poorer.”

”Nobody told me that.”

”Nobody has needed to tell anybody that since before there was a road up this mountain. It is the sort of thing everyone knows, and nobody writes down.” A pause. ”Which, I note, is a category of problem you have recently taken an interest in.”

She let out a breath she had been holding for eight days without knowing it.

”So it isn’t a failure.”

”It is not even an event. Fourteen hundred people walked out of there at exactly the tier they walked in at, and every one of them is expecting to be told they have wasted a year.” Isha turned for the door. ”Come along. Three people are waiting for you in the medical room, and two of them are arguing.”

”About what?”

”About your wings,” Isha said. ”They have been untended for a year, and Yinxin has taken the position that this makes them her responsibility, and Eden has taken the position that Yinxin has claws.” He did not look back. ”It is the fourth time this week. They enjoy it enormously, and neither will admit it.”

***

The medical room was bright and cold and smelled of soap.

Green had a comb out. Yinxin was standing on one side of the low bench in the gray robe with her arms folded, and Eden was standing on the other side with the specific expression of a woman who has been arguing since before breakfast and intends to keep going, and both of them stopped when Jayde came in.

”Off,” said Green.

Jayde let the disguise go.

It came off her the way it always did, in one long unwinding, brown eyes to gold and black hair to silver-white and the whole borrowed frame settling back into the one underneath it — and then the wings came out, and every conversation in the room ended at once.

They filled it.

That was the first thing she understood, standing there with her arms half out and nowhere to put them: the medical room had been large enough the last time, and it was not large enough now. The primaries reached the far wall. She had to fold once, and then again, and even folded the arch of them stood higher than Yinxin’s head.

”They’ve grown,” Eden said.

”They’ve doubled.” Green had not moved. ”Jayde. That is not — wings do not do that in a year. Nothing does that in a year.”

The second thing was the color.

She had known them translucent. That was the whole of what they had ever been — membrane and half-sorted feather, thin enough that the light went through and came out the other side broken into faint prismatic bands, with the amber running under the surface where the shafts anchored. Held still, they had been almost impossible to see. Yinxin had oiled them and combed the sheaths out of them since before Jayde could spread them properly.

She had spent a year not looking at them. They had been strapped flat under a frame and armor in a hole in the ground and there had been nothing to look at them for.

They were dark now. Deep and dark all the way through the vane, and along the outer edge of every single feather ran a fine line of something that took the lamplight and threw it back — a hard metallic black, thin as a wire, running the length of every trailing edge in the wing.

Eden reached out.

”Wait—” Jayde said.

Eden’s hand came away with a line of red across two fingertips, a clean, shallow cut, already welling. She stood there and looked at it with an expression of pure scientific delight that Jayde had last seen on her face in a corridor with a dead thing in it.

”Oh, that’s marvelous,” Eden said.

”Give me your hand.”

”In a moment. Do it again.”

”I am absolutely not doing it again.”

Yinxin had come around the bench. She reached out, slowly, and ran one finger along the flat of a covert — with the grain, as you handle a blade you respect — and then took it off and looked at her own fingertip and said something in dragon-tongue that was not for translating.

”Not a feather damaged,” she said. ”A year under a frame, under armor, in a hole full of things with edges on them. Not one broken shaft. Not one split vane.”

”They should be wreckage,” Green said. ”I have re-grown feathers off you after a bad afternoon.”

The third thing was the weight, and Jayde only found that when she flexed, and the whole arch came up, and the air moved in the room and Green’s trial pages went off the side table in a sheet.

Heavier. Denser. And underneath the surprise, in the muscle across her back and down through the anchor of them, there was no strain in it at all.

”What was in that mountain?” Eden said, and it was not a question, and she was already reaching for a slate one-handed with two fingers still bleeding.

***

They took her outside because the Pavilion had nowhere near enough ceiling.

The first pass she did carefully, because she had been on the ground for a year and expected to be clumsy, and she came off the ridge at what should have been a gentle climbing turn and was three hundred yards past it before she had finished the thought.

Green shouted something a long way behind her, already losing ground.

The second pass she stopped being careful.

She was faster — nearly three times over the same line, measured against the ridge Green had always used, and she made Green count it twice to be sure the ridge had not moved. But the shape had changed too. The old wing had been a sail: broad, generous, and it had wanted a wide sky and long committed turns and had punished her every time she asked for something sharp.

This one had an edge on it. The air came off those metallic trailing lines with a sound she had never made before, a thin hard hiss, and the wing bit where it used to slip. She threw a turn at it that had never once worked for her before the Harrowing, and it simply happened, so tightly that she felt the whole arc of it across her shoulders and came out of it climbing.

Jayde stayed up rather longer than the test needed.

When she came down, Green had a slate in her hands and a look on her face like a woman doing arithmetic she did not enjoy, and Yinxin — who had been flying for three thousand years and did not compliment anybody about anything — watched her land and said nothing at all, which from Yinxin was a great deal.

***

White was waiting at the training ground, and he had already been told, because Isha told him everything. Isha was on the rail behind him with nine tails arranged around him and a wax tablet balanced on one of them, and had evidently been there some while.

”Wings off,” he said. ”Core shut. Nothing channelled.”

”Why shut?”

”Because I want what is under it.” He walked out onto the sand. ”Your wings are a change to your wings. Green can measure those. I want to know what is underneath, and I have four years of you to measure it against, which nobody else in this Pavilion has.”

Jayde put the disguise back on and dropped her coat over the rail.

It took him three exchanges.

Not to beat her — to stop. He came in with the same feint-and-elbow he had opened with two hundred times in four years, the one that was not a trick but reach, and reach was arithmetic, and she had always lost the arithmetic. She caught the elbow on her forearm and did not move.

He tried it twice more, harder, and the third time he put his weight behind it properly and her feet still did not move.

White stepped back and lowered his hands.

”Enough.”

”That was three exchanges.”

”Three is enough. I already have it.” He was breathing normally. He was looking at her forearm. ”Four years I have been walking you backward across this sand with that opening. Not once have you held it. You held it standing still with your Core shut, and the third one I did not pull.”

He crossed to the rail and took the water and did not drink it.

”Say a number,” he said.

”You say it. You’re the one with four years of me.”

”Then I will say it, and you will not enjoy it.” He turned around. ”Body alone. No essence, no wings, nothing channelled. I would put you at Peak Blazecrowned — bone, muscle, skin, recovery. Every part of it.” He let that sit for a moment. ”You went into that mountain at Peak Inferno-tempered. I took that reading myself in Emberwane, and I would stake the rest of my life on it.”

Green made a small sound behind her.

”That’s the ceiling of this realm,” Jayde said.

”That is the ceiling of this realm, and you are standing at the top of it with your Core shut and your cultivation exactly where it was a year ago.” White set the cup down. ”I have never seen a body get that far in front of a cultivation. I do not know what it means, and I do not like not knowing.”

”A year of fighting without essence,” Jayde said slowly. ”Every day. And the frame.”

Eden had come up onto the rail without anybody noticing, two fingers wrapped and a slate in her lap. ”Tens of kilos, strapped on, worn for months. Load-bearing conditioning nobody on this world would design on purpose. I’ll give you those two.” She looked up. ”They don’t get you to Peak Blazecrowned in a year. Nothing does.”

”Then what does?”

Eden did not answer straight away, which was unlike her. She set the slate down on the rail, got off it, and walked out onto the sand with her arms held away from her sides.

”Green. Take a reading off me.”

Green — who had spent a career taking readings off students and did not need to be asked twice — came out and put both hands on her and went quiet.

The quiet went on a good deal too long.

”Green,” said Eden.

”Mid Inferno-tempered,” Green said. ”Physically. Bone, muscle, skin.” She took her hands away as if the reading had gone hot. ”Eden. You went into that mountain at Mid Flamewrought.”

Nobody said anything at all.

Eden sat back down on the rail and put the slate across her knees and did not write anything on it, which from Eden was the equivalent of somebody else putting their head in their hands.

”Right,” she said. ”Then it isn’t the frame and it isn’t the fighting, because I have those and they are not sufficient, and it isn’t the two of us being unusual, because whatever this is has happened to both of us and we are not unusual in the same directions.” She looked up. ”And it isn’t the Harrowing.”

”It happened in the Harrowing,” Green said.

”Which has been running every fifty years since before there was a road up that mountain. Two hundred culls. Say a thousand survivors a time, and it is still an enormous number of people who have come out of that hole across eight hundred thousand years.” Eden’s hands had gone flat on the slate. ”If going down there gave you a tier, somebody would have noticed. It would not be a secret; it would be the point. Every clan on this continent would be buying places in the cull and the Temple would have a liturgy about it.”

”So it is not the place,” Jayde said.

”It cannot be the place. It has to be something about us that was not true of any of them.” Eden turned on the rail. ”You spent yesterday across a desk from the only man alive who has the returns. So what did we do that they didn’t?”

”Nothing,” Jayde said. ”That’s what’s been bothering me since the forecourt.”

”Explain that.”

”A third don’t come back. That’s the number, and it’s been the number since the gate shut, and Qin writes it at the top of every cohort’s return before they go down because the supply schedules are built on it.” She heard how flat it came out and let it stay flat. ”We lost a third. There is nothing in my casualty figures that any headmaster in eight hundred thousand years would look at twice.”

White set the cup down.

”Then it is an ordinary cull,” he said, ”and I have just put my back into that sand twice.”

”It isn’t an ordinary cull. The fraction is ordinary.” She had been carrying that arithmetic since the forecourt without once turning it over. ”It isn’t the same third.”

Green’s head came up.

”A cull meets a fraction of the population. Outer Ring castes, in the shallow galleries, in numbers the schedule assumes.” She said it the way she had said it to Qin’s face yesterday, and had not enjoyed it either time. ”We were pushed into the Mid Ring on day one, and by month four we were not fighting a fraction of anything. We fought nearly all of it. Outer Ring, Mid Ring, and in the last three months castes that come up out of the Inner Ring, which is not in any record because nobody who met one has ever come home to write it down.”

”You lost a third against that,” White said.

”We lost a third against that.”

He looked at the cup on the rail and did not pick it up again.

”And five hundred we never found,” Jayde said. ”No bodies. Not a scrap of kit, not a bolt, not a bracelet. Five hundred people went into the dark and stopped, and I have not slept properly since.”

Nobody touched that one. It sat on the sand with the rest of it.

”All right,” Eden said, and her voice had changed. ”Then the difference isn’t how many of us lived. It’s what we lived through, and how long we did it on nothing.” She turned the slate over. ”Because the other thing nobody has ever done is starve down there.”

”Your rations,” Green said.

”Students carry a month. Two, if their ring is good, and most of theirs were not — small pouches, cheap capacity, the sort of thing a family scrapes for.” Eden was writing again. ”The Academy supplies the rest out of the warehouse at the landing ground, and the warehouse was gone inside the first three weeks. It was one of the first things they took.”

”Nobody has ever lost the warehouse,” Jayde said. ”Qin put that in front of me yesterday, and I did not understand at the time why he bothered.”

”Nobody has ever been swarmed at the landing ground either.” Eden looked up. ”We were on half from month five. We ran dry in seven. And there is nothing down there that grows and nothing that migrates.”

”So we ate the Charlings,” Jayde said.

Green came up off the rail.

”You ate bugs.”

”Yes.”

”Insects. The size of a horse.” Her hands had come open at her sides, and she did not appear to know it. ”The things that were killing you. You cut them apart and cooked them and handed it round, and everybody ate.”

”Every day. Five months. All fourteen hundred of us, until the seal opened.”

”How.”

”The first time, most of us were sick,” Jayde said it flatly, because there was no other way to say it. ”The second time, fewer. By the third week nobody was sick, and nobody made a face, and nobody said one word about it, and that is the part I would like to stop thinking about.” She heard herself add the rest before she had decided to. ”It helped that I’d had worse.”

Green stopped.

”You have had what?”

”Not here. The other life.”

”Worse than a horse-sized insect.”

”Considerably worse.”

”Worse how?” Green’s voice had gone up. ”What in the burning hells is worse than eating a bug the size of a cart horse?”

”You don’t want to know.”

Green opened her mouth. Then she gave the question what appeared to be a full and honest moment’s consideration, and her face did something complicated, and she closed it again.

”No,” she agreed. ”I find that I don’t.”

”It was a very long war,” Jayde said, ”and it was a very long way from anywhere.”

”Stop talking.”

”You asked.”

”I am aware of what I did, and I regret it.” Green sat back down on the rail with the deliberate care of a woman whose stomach had opinions. ”Isha. Are you writing this down?”

”Every word,” said Isha, who had not stopped since the medical room.

For a moment it was almost all right.

Then Green turned her head and looked down the length of the training ground, past the rail, toward the archway that led back into the hall — where a horse-sized mantis was at this moment sitting in a corner with a crown of stolen blue flowers balanced between his sensory pits, because a three-year-old had put it there and he had not moved since.

”He hears everything,” Green said.

”Yes.”

”Does he know?”

”He was there,” Jayde said. ”For all of it. Every day.”

Nobody said anything for a while. Somewhere behind the wall Tianxin was shrieking about something, and it came through very faint and entirely wrong.

”Four of them worked out which castes wouldn’t kill you,” Eden said it evenly, in the register she used for reading a chart aloud. ”Two are on the casket list for finding out. After that everybody ate, because the alternative was fourteen hundred people starving to death in the dark eight weeks before the door opened.” She did not look away from Green. ”I signed off on it. I would sign off on it again this morning.”

”Green.” Jayde did not raise her voice. ”There was nothing else. Not less of something else. Nothing.” She let it sit. ”And nobody has ever done it before, because nobody has ever had to. Every part of this only happens if the parts before it happen first.”

”I checked them for everything,” Eden said, and now she did start writing, fast and one-handed. ”Poisoning. Corruption load. Parasites. Organ failure. Every week, all of them, and I have the sheets. I never once checked for improvement, because it did not occur to me that eating a thing that lives on corrupted energy could put anything into a human being except a problem.”

”Then it is a guess,” Green said.

”It’s a hypothesis; it’s the only one standing, and that is not the same as being right.” Eden’s pen did not stop. ”Green — readings on everyone still on this mountain. Before and after, off your own records, and I want the ones who ate least as badly as the ones who ate most. If it tracks with how much they took, that is close to an answer. If it doesn’t, I’m wrong and we start again.”

”And if you’re right?” Jayde said.

Eden stopped writing.

”Then it’s fourteen hundred and three people,” she said. ”And not one of them knows, and every one of them has spent eight days believing they gave a year of their lives for nothing.”

”A whole tier,” White said. ”Physically. Fourteen hundred of them.”

”If I’m right.”

”There is no such thing as fourteen hundred people gaining a tier quietly, and there is no such thing as testing for it quietly either.” He picked the coiled whip up off the rail and put it over his shoulder, and for the first time in four years Jayde could not read his face at all. ”They are going home. A hundred and twenty-seven villages, four provinces. Starting this month.”