Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 516: Chapter 511: What It Cost

Location:Emberholt Province — The Chamber, The Throat, The Widow’s Field

Date/Time:13 Voidmarch, 9942 AZI — Midday to Dusk

Realm:Lower Realm

Nobody moved for a long time after the screaming stopped, and it took Jayde most of that time to work out why it bothered her.

It was not shock. Eden was already reading, Reiko was already down at the shelf edge with his weight shifted onto his forelegs the way he settled when he had decided nothing further was going to happen, and Yinxin had come down off the north face and got as far as the broken slab and stopped there. Nobody was frightened. Nobody was hurt. There was no triage to do and nothing to carry and no decision that had to be made in the next ninety seconds, and that was precisely the trouble.

She had been down here before. Not this room — a cave under the Dark Forest, four years and one body ago, with ten thousand seven hundred and forty-three of them coming through a containment ward that had already cracked. She had held the front of it for thirty-two minutes, and then her barriers had gone, and she had gone with them, and what she remembered of the end was not the end. It was the ground, and the wet noise, and a silver dragon crying on her.

She had planned for that. Not for it happening again — she was not fifteen, and the plan had been better than the plan had been then — but she had planned for a version of today in which somebody was carried out.

Standing in a warm room with no casualties and nothing to do was not a thing she had rehearsed, and she found she had no idea what to do with her hands.

***

Ashborn stopped eating eleven minutes after the silence.

She saw it happen and did not understand it. He had a length of gray rope half drawn out of the wall and the mandible plates working, and then the plates stopped, and he set the thing down on the stone the way a man sets down a tool, and stepped back, and did not take another.

”Doc.”

”Working on it.” Eden had the pane up and was moving her thumb along a line Jayde could not read from that angle. Then, slower: ”His thermal’s flat. It climbed on a curve from the second minute all the way to nineteen forty, and at nineteen forty it stopped, and it hasn’t moved a tenth of a degree since. He’s been chewing for eleven minutes and getting nothing out of it.”

Jayde looked at the wall. What was left of the braid hung off the pale surface in separate lengths, gray and slack.

”They’re hollow.”

”Whatever they had went back into the rock when the weave cut them loose. Which is what the weave is for.” Eden lowered the handheld, and there was something in her face Jayde had not seen there before, a kind of appalled delight. ”Jayde. He isn’t fussy, and he isn’t finished. There’s nothing left in that wall to eat. He worked out before either of us did that he was wasting his time.”

***

Yinxin had not said anything.

Jayde went and sat down beside her on the broken slab, which was warm, like everything in that room, and neither of them said anything for a while, and the pale surface eight paces up went on rising and settling with the slow enormous regularity it had kept since before the calendar had a first year.

”Nobody was hurt,” Yinxin said.

”No.”

”You will forgive me if I say it more than once.”

”Say it as often as you want.”

Yinxin’s hands were turned palm-up on her knees, and they were not entirely steady, and Jayde had known her for four years and had never once seen that. She looked away from it, because there was a proper way to give a person that, and it was not by watching.

”This time I did not have to watch you die,” Yinxin said.

That was all of it. She did not add to it, and she did not look over, and Jayde did not ask her to do either.

Four years ago, Yinxin had knelt in the grass and bitten through her own paw and forced blood into a mouth that was not swallowing, and she had known what she was doing, because her mother had taught it to her before.

Knowing it and having done it were not the same thing. She had never done it. Nobody she had ever met had done it. What she had was a story told to a child by a woman three thousand years dead, and a friend going gray in the grass, and no second attempt if the story turned out to be a story.

So she had held her, and pushed blood into her, and prayed to nothing in particular that it would work.

It had worked. Jayde had stopped dying somewhere in the middle of it, and Yinxin had felt her stop, and had gone on kneeling there for a long time afterward anyway, because feeling a person stop dying is not the same as believing it.

Today nobody had bled.

That was the whole of it, and it was the largest thing that had happened to Yinxin in a hundred years. Nobody had gone down and not come up. Nobody had been carried. There had been no minute in that chamber in which she had knelt over anybody praying for a thing she had heard about as a child — and she had walked out of a hole on her own legs beside a woman who had walked out of it on hers.

Her hands would stop shaking presently. She was in no particular hurry about it.

Then she walked over to Ashborn, who had folded down at the foot of the north wall and was doing nothing, and stood in front of him.

Yinxin was five feet ten. Folded down, he was still taller than she was.

”Thank you,” she said.

The sensory pits turned toward her. Nothing else happened. She had not expected anything else to happen; she stood there a moment longer anyway, and then came back, and that was the whole of it.

Zhi had come out of Eden’s collar somewhere in the last few minutes and gone the deep blue of a thing with no further opinions, which was the first time all day the little serpent had been any color but knife.

Reiko had watched all of it from the shelf edge.

[He is not stupid.]

No.

[I spent an hour today shoving things off a ledge that I could not kill, and he walked past me and ate three hundred of them, and I have decided to be pleased about that instead of the other thing.]

What was the other thing?

[I was not going to say.]

Say it.

[That it should have been me.] A pause, and the bond went a shade warmer under it. [It should not have been me. That is what I have decided. It is a better decision, and I arrived at it on my own, and I would like credit.]

Noted and recorded.

***

The climb out took four hours, and Ashborn led it.

That had not been the plan. The plan had Reiko in front and the mantis on the rope at the back, and it lasted as far as the first turn, where he went past everybody and kept going. Jayde opened her mouth and then closed it again, because there was no sensible objection and because she had spent the previous eleven months telling him where to stand.

At the second turn he folded — joints going where joints have no business going, the whole of him pouring through a gap that would not have taken Takara at fighting weight and reassembling on the far side without any fuss at all. There was nothing to see. Jayde watched all of it from three bodies back and could not have said what was different about it.

”Four seconds,” Eden said behind her.

”And this morning?”

”Thirty-one. I timed it because I time everything.” A pause in the dark. ”I thought I was writing down trivia.”

The fissures were empty on the way up, and that was worse than the descent had been, because an empty fissure looks exactly like a full one until the lamp gets close. Jayde looked into every single one of them anyway. At two hundred and sixty feet the seam where the floor had gone that morning was still open, and Reiko went across it flat and long, and Eden went over on her stomach, and nobody said anything about the eleven minutes.

They came up into a gray afternoon with the wind coming off four hundred and twenty paces of dead barley.

Takara was at the mouth before any of them were properly out of it, kitten-sized, because there was a village two miles up the lane that would be walking back down it before dark.

He came up her arm and put his head under her jaw and stayed there.

She stood in the cold and let him.

Six hours, he said.

I know.

Last time I was on the wrong side of a ward watching you bleed. The small body was rigid against her throat. Today I was on the wrong side of a hole, and you walked out of it, and I would like a moment before anybody requires me to be professional.

Take two.

He took two. Then he lifted his head and looked past her at the mantis coming up out of the throat, and went very still.

Something is different about him.

I know.

I said so without instruments. A beat. He went first.

He did.

Takara considered that with the flat amber attention of a creature who had spent eleven months treating the thing as a large piece of furniture that occasionally moved.

Then he is on the detail, he said, and went down her arm and across the frozen ground and sat himself against Ashborn’s foreleg, which was not something Jayde had ever seen him do, and she did not comment on it.

***

The field had not changed.

That was the first thing every one of them looked for, and it was not there. Four hundred and twenty paces of fired gray, dry and mineral, the fallen tree still lying half in and half out with the inside half still wearing its bark. Ninety-nine centuries had made that circle, and an afternoon was not going to unmake it.

Eden walked out into the middle of it, which nobody had done in ninety-nine centuries, and stood there for a while with the handheld down at her side, and came back.

”Drain’s gone. Ambient normal at eighty paces in, normal at forty, normal standing on the gray. There’s nothing under this field taking anything out of it.”

[Say it again,] Isha said, out of the ring.

It’s off her. All of it. It isn’t coming back on.

He did not answer, which from him was the loudest thing available, and Jayde let him have it.

***

They set up on the frozen barley at the eastern edge with the lamps out and the ward stones still standing, and Eden filled in the first complete row of the register while there was light to do it by, reading each figure aloud as she wrote.

Jayde let her get to the end of it before she started.

Then she pulled her knees up and put her arms round them and did the thing she had been doing since the first time anybody handed her a problem with more variables in it than people to spend on them, which was to stop looking at the win and start looking for where it broke.

”I want to take him down the next one,” she said. ”Talk me out of it.”

”Can’t.” Eden did not put the stylus down. ”Been trying since the chamber.”

”Ala first.”

”Every nest we close is a drain off her permanently. She’s the patient, and she’s been bleeding for ninety-nine centuries, and I’d take a fifty-percent reduction in clearance time over anything else on the sheet.” Eden’s stylus kept moving. ”And it takes the weight off her.” A very small movement of the head, across the lamplight. ”Which is not a medical argument, and I’m making it anyway.”

Yinxin did not say anything to that. She had not said anything for some while. But she had stopped looking at the field.

”Not a large one,” Jayde said.

”No.”

”Smallest first, ranked, and the three that are surfacing stay untouched until the model holds.” She was building it as she went, the old shape coming up out of somewhere she had not needed in a while. ”Which means I have to know which ones are small before I commit to one. I’m not going down three hundred feet to find out I picked wrong.”

”Field diameter.”

”Field diameter against count. Four hundred and twenty paces, three thousand two hundred.” Jayde turned it over. ”If it’s the ground they’ve eaten it ought to scale, and if it scales I don’t need a throat, I need a man with a measuring line.”

”One point isn’t a curve.”

”No. So we get more, and we get them without going down.” She looked at the map she had not opened yet and did not need to. ”There are two on the grid we can be over inside a night. We go to both; we don’t engage, we don’t open anything. Drain radius, field diameter, ambient gradient at the rim. If those three come out different for two nests, I’ve got the start of a scale. If they come out the same, the whole idea’s wrong and I’d rather know inside a week than inside a year.”

”Eighty-six more circumferences,” Eden said.

Jayde had already got there. ”The first platform.”

”The first platform gives you every dead circle on this continent inside a month, and it never touches the ground.” Eden had gone very still over the slate. ”It sees surfaces. Isha said so, and he was right, and I filed it as a limitation. It isn’t one. A dead field is a surface.”

”It can’t see a chamber.”

”It can’t see a chamber, it can’t see a throat, it can’t count a single worm. If diameter doesn’t scale with count it gives us nothing at all.” The stylus came up. ”Which is the whole argument for the two sites. Establish it on the ground, by hand, on cases we can walk — and then the platform does the other eighty-six while we’re asleep.”

”And when we can’t ride to a site, we’re not measuring.”

”When we can’t ride to a site, we’re guessing, and I have been guessing for four years, and I would like to stop.”

Jayde turned it over.

The platforms had been on a list for eleven months, behind the wards and the arrays and the medical stations and the eleven quantum cores that were all spoken for, and every single time she had looked at that list, the platforms had been the thing that could wait.

”It moves up,” she said.

”It moves a long way up.”

”Then that’s the sequence. Two sites, no engagement, measured by hand. If it scales, the platform ranks the rest, and we take the smallest, and Ashborn goes into that one.” She looked over. ”Pick the two for different sizes. Not the two nearest.”

”Obviously.” Eden wrote it anyway. ”So nobody chooses them for me next spring while I’m three provinces away.”

***

”And the last thing,” Jayde said, ”is the one I actually care about.”

Eden waited.

”Is it good for him?”

Eden did not answer straight away, and Jayde was grateful for that. There had been a time, a long time ago and on another world, when she had learned to be suspicious of anybody who could answer a medical question at speed.

”I think so,” Eden said at last. ”I think it very strongly. And I want you to hear the difference between that and yes.”

”Go on.”

”Everything I have says he took in something he needed and had not been getting. Thermal up on a curve and holding. Respiration up eleven percent and settling, not spiking. Density up, mass unchanged. Thirty-one seconds down that gap and four coming back up.” She turned the slate over. ”And a flat line for eleven months before any of it, which is the best baseline I will ever have on any patient in my life, and I got it by accident while thinking he was fine.”

”So what do you want?”

”Readings before, during, and after every nest, without exception. A written stop rule — I’ll draft it, and you’ll sign it — that says if any of those numbers moves in a direction I can’t account for, he comes out and we don’t argue about it on the day.” Eden’s voice had gone very level. ”And I want the small nests for the same reason you do. If something is going to go wrong with him, I would like to find out about it in a granary and not in a cathedral.”

”And if a number moves badly and he wants to go anyway?”

”Then we have a completely different problem.” Eden almost smiled. ”And I would very much like to meet it in a granary as well.”

Jayde sat with all of it, and turned it over, and looked for the place where it broke, and did not find one that she was not already planning to watch.

Eighty-eight nests and a caster who existed exactly once. That had been the sum on the way in, and it had not closed, and no amount of being good at it had ever made it close. Now there was a second thing that could touch them, and it did not tire, could not be reached, and got stronger off the work — and there was one of it, and she could not ask it a single question, and everything she was about to do rested on readings taken by a woman who had been wrong about a flat line for eleven months and had come and told her so before being asked.

That was not certainty. She had stopped waiting for certainty somewhere around her fortieth year.

It was a plan with a monitored risk in it, run on the smallest cases first, with a stop rule written by the person best placed to enforce it and a commander who would have to look at her own signature every time she wanted to override it.

She had signed worse. She had signed much worse, with far less, and buried people for it.

”We take him,” she said.

***

She found him afterward at the eastern edge, folded down outside the ring, facing away from the throat. She sat on the cold ground in front of him, which put her head well below his.

”You eat first,” she said. ”Before the wyrmlings. Before the seedling, before the wards, before me. Every day, as much as you want, and if what I have isn’t enough I’ll go and get more.”

The sensory pits turned toward her.

”That isn’t a reward. It’s a correction, and it’s eleven months late, and I’d have caught it sooner if you’d been the kind of thing that complains.”

Nothing moved.

Then he lowered his head — not far, four or five inches, the motion he made in the Pavilion doorway when White told him the floor was wet — and unfolded one blade-arm and put the flat of it on the frozen ground beside her, and left it there.

Jayde put her hand on it. It was warm, and not from working: warm the way a stone is warm at the end of a long day, holding on to something it had taken in and had not finished with.

”I’m going to take you down eighty-eight more of those,” she said. ”Small ones first. And every time we come up, she’s going to put an instrument on you, and if the numbers go the wrong way I’m going to stop, and you’re going to hate that, and we’re going to do it anyway.”

He did not move his arm.

She sat with her hand on it until the light went out, and Reiko came and lay down on her other side without being asked, and somewhere behind them Zhi worked its way out to the end of Eden’s boot and stopped there, watching the big folded shape with its wings half open, deciding something.

He was inside the Pavilion before the first cart came over the second rise.

***

The village came down the lane at full dark, thirty households behind the headman with carts and animals and a great many people carrying more than they could manage, because they had packed for never coming back.

He walked out onto the barley to meet her and stopped when he saw the field.

”It looks the same.”

”It is the same. That part takes a generation.” She let him look at it. ”The thing that made it is gone. Nothing under this ground is taking anything out of your province any more.”

He took that the way he had taken everything else, which was without any visible movement at all.

”There’s metal under it,” she said. ”Formation-conductive. Four hundred and twenty paces across, less than a man’s height down.”

The headman looked at the gray for a while.

”Why tell me?”

”Because I want it.” She let that stand where he could see all of it. ”I’m building a ward lattice across this continent, and I don’t have the metal for a third of it. There is more of it under your dead field than I have been able to buy in eleven months. So I need you to hear the next part knowing that.”

”You could have dug it and not said.”

”Yes.”

He did not respond to that immediately, and she let him take as long as he wanted.

”I’ll send people in the spring,” she said. ”Two lots, and they’re not the same lot, and I want you to keep them separate in your head. The first are surveyors, and they’re measuring the circle, and they cost you nothing. The second will make you an offer for what’s under it, and they’ll come with a price already written down, and it will be a fair one, and you will have no way of knowing that.”

”Then how do I know it?”

”You get a second price. Find a smith who works formation plate — not a village smith, one who does lattice work — and ask him what conductive ore fetches by weight. Take a fortnight over it. Take a season.” She turned to go. ”And if somebody arrives before spring with a Temple seal and an interest in bad ground, they will not tell you what’s down there. They’ll tell you it’s spoiled and offer you something for your trouble. That’s the one I’d have you ready for.”

”And if I say no to all of you.”

”Then it stays under your feet, where it’s been the whole time.” She looked back once. ”Fence the field. Don’t graze it, don’t plow it, don’t build on it.”

+++

They went up the road at first light, and the ridge came up behind them, and the Widow’s Field went out of sight.

One nest.

Two nights in the air with the moons down, and then a day on the road at the end of it so that what arrived at a village was a party and not a portent. A day to walk the field. A day to empty thirty households over a rise and put them somewhere they could be fed. A ring of nine stones. Four hours down and four hours up.

And nineteen minutes and forty seconds in which the thing had actually happened.

Eighty-eight left in this realm, and two realms above it that nobody had ever put a sensor into, and a clock on three of them that did not care what she had learned this week.

But the sum had a second term in it now, and Jayde had spent a whole life learning that the difference between a problem that cannot be solved and a problem that can is almost never cleverness. It is almost always one more thing on the board.

Three steps to the left of the world, in an entrance hall built to take him, Ashborn was folded down doing nothing at all, and would go on doing nothing until she found him the next hole. There was a cat asleep against his foreleg who had not been there yesterday.

The road came up over a ridge two hours out and forked, and Jayde stopped at the top of it and let the others go on ahead.

North was low cloud and rain coming in off nothing.

West was a long brown country she had crossed twice and never once looked at, and somewhere out in it were two circles of dead ground with villages that had been plowing around them since before anybody could remember why.

Eden came up beside her with the map still folded.

”Which one?”

Jayde stood a while longer, looking at the far end of it.

Then she told her.