Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 527: Chapter 522: Seventy Years

Location:Obsidian Academy — The Lower Hall

Date/Time:2 Ashwhisper, 9942 AZI — Continuous

Realm:Lower Realm

It was not a sheet. It was ten sewn copies of eleven pages, and Eden went around the table with them one at a time, and put a number on the top corner of each one in ink before she handed it over, and wrote the number and the name in a ledger she did not offer to show anybody.

”Ten copies,” Jayde said. ”Numbered. They come back to this table before anybody leaves this room, and I will count them in front of you. If a page is missing, we do not adjourn.”

Feng Lian looked at hers before she opened it.

”How many exist altogether?”

”Ten, and the one I wrote them from, and the one in my head.”

”And after tonight?”

”One. Mine. Locked somewhere none of you will ever find, and you will each have exactly what you can carry in your own memory.” Jayde let that stand. ”That is not a lack of trust. It is that a document has a location and a person does not, and the location is the thing that gets searched.”

Feng Lian nodded once and opened it.

”Read the whole of it before anybody speaks,” Jayde said. ”It is in five parts. What is known and how it is known. The four wars, in order. What comes through. What happens before. What happens afterward.” She sat down. ”The last two pages are what I do not know, and they are marked as such, and there are more of them than I would like.”

***

Nobody spoke for a long time.

Zhong read it once, straight through, at the pace of a man reading a duty roster, and then set it down squarely in front of him and put both hands flat on either side of it and did not move them again for a considerable while.

Shenwei read with one finger under the line. Halfway down the fourth page, the finger stopped and stayed where it was.

Ryo turned to the last page first, which was a habit from contracts, and read the two pages of admitted ignorance before he read anything else, and only then went back to the beginning.

Bai Shu read slowly. She went back over the same paragraph on page six three times, and on the third pass her mouth moved.

Ruifen stood up to read, which nobody remarked on. She had read standing up since the Harrowing and would for the rest of her life.

Hu Bing read the whole thing fast, leaning on the wall, and then started again from the top at a completely different speed.

Kiran got to page nine, stopped, went back to page one, and started over.

Meifen read three pages and then stopped, and sat with her hand flat on the paper, and looked at nothing at all for the better part of a minute before she went on.

Eden did not read hers. Eden watched the room, because she had written a third of it and because somebody had to.

The lamp guttered, and Hu Bing reached over without looking and trimmed it.

***

Bai Shu put her copy down first.

”It says most of the numbers are unreliable,” she said.

”Most of the numbers are unreliable.”

”Then how do you know it is true?”

”Because the shape is the same four times, and it was written down by people who had never read each other.” Jayde did not dress it up. ”I cannot tell you how many died in the first or second war. Nobody can. The figure in that report is a range, and the range is embarrassing, and I put it in anyway, because a number I invented would have read better and you would all have believed it, and in forty years one of you would have quoted it to somebody who checked.”

Hu Bing said, from the wall, ”Page seven. The passage closures. You have three of the four with dates, and the second one just says before.”

”Because the second one has no calendar; anybody can convert. The province that kept it stopped existing.”

”Then say no calendar,” Hu Bing said. ”Not before. Before reads like you did not look.”

Jayde considered that for a moment.

”That is a fair correction,” she said. ”Page seven, third entry. All of you. Strike before and write no surviving calendar.”

Nobody moved for a second, because nobody in that room had ever been told to write in a document handed to them by the person who wrote it.

Then Zhong took out a pen, and after that they all did.

Ten people struck the same word at the same moment, and Jayde struck it in her own, and for about four seconds the only sound in the hall was eleven nibs on eleven pages. Eden wrote the amendment into her ledger — the page, the entry, the old wording and the new — and read it back aloud, and Jayde said, ”Correct,” and Eden noted that the master copy would carry it before dawn.

It was the first amendment to the founding record of the Doha Defence Force, and it came from the only man in the room who had given his blood an hour ago and still had not agreed to take the post it bought.

Hu Bing did not look particularly pleased about it, which Jayde had already worked out was what he looked like when he was.

Feng Lian put both hands flat on the table.

”What is a Zartonesh?” she asked.

She asked it the way a person says a word they have only ever seen written. Nobody laughed. Jayde looked around the table and found four faces that were waiting for the answer and three that were not, and filed which was which.

”Zhong,” she said. ”You first. I want them to hear that it is not new before they hear it from me.”

Zhong took his time.

”It is a word in the old combat texts,” he said. ”Not a description. A date. There are sword forms in the Academy library dated before the Zartonesh and after, and there is a whole class of them nobody teaches because the commentary is missing, and in fifteen years of asking I have had four different explanations from four different instructors and none of them agreed on anything except that it was very bad and very long ago.” He looked at Jayde. ”I assumed for most of my life that it meant a plague.”

”Formation work is worse,” Shenwei said. He had gone strange around the mouth. ”There is a ward class in every foundational text on this continent. It is taught to every second-year. It has no referent. It is described entirely by what it does — it does not stop essence, it does not stop force, it does not stop cold or fire or poison, and every master I ever studied under taught it exactly as written and told me it was ceremonial.” He turned his hands over on the table and looked at them. ”I have been teaching that ward for eleven years. It is not ceremonial, is it?”

”No,” Jayde said.

”Then say what it stops.”

”People,” Jayde said. ”Not beasts. Not a plague. Not a demon and not anything that has ever lived on this world. A people — as organized as we are, better armed than we have ever been, and from somewhere that is not Doha.”

Bai Shu’s copy slid an inch on the table under her hand, and she did not notice it.

”From where?” Feng Lian asked.

”I do not know,” Jayde said it plainly and did not decorate it. ”Nobody on this world knows. Not the Academy, not the Temple, not the oldest thing walking on this continent. I have asked the four people best placed to answer, and every one of them gave me the same three words. Four wars, ten thousand years apiece, and not one single person on Doha has ever been able to say where they come from or what they want beyond what they take.”

”Then what does the record say,” Zhong said.

”That the sky splits.” She let the phrase sit as it was, because it was not hers and it was in every account she had read. ”Not a passage opening. A gate, in the air, where there was no gate. And then roughly a hundred years.”

”A hundred years,” said Bai Shu.

”That is the length of the thing, four times over. Not a raid and not a season. A hundred years of them working through this continent taking whatever they can carry — ore, timber, water, stone, essence-bearing land, anything that can be stripped and moved — and destroying whatever they cannot.” Jayde kept her voice absolutely flat, because there was no way to say the next part that was not worse if it had feeling in it. ”They do not take prisoners. Not in one account out of four. They do not enslave, they do not ransom, they do not garrison, and they do not negotiate, and there is no record anywhere of anybody on this world ever having anything they wanted except the ground and what was under it. They kill everything, they take what is worth taking, and when there is nothing left worth the effort they stop, and they go, and the gate shuts.”

Nobody said anything at all for some time.

”And in ten thousand years,” Ruifen said, ”we never once found out what they are.”

”We never found out what they are, what they look like, whether they are one people or six, how they fight, what they are afraid of, or whether they can be killed by anything more complicated than sufficient violence.” Jayde put her hand on her own copy. ”That is pages ten and eleven. That is what those two pages are.”

***

”Then here is my question,” Zhong said, ”and I have been holding it since page three. If everything we ever knew got buried with the people who knew it — how do you know even this much?”

”Because the other two realms are still standing at the end of it, and we are not.”

She let that go where it wanted before she explained it, and watched it land differently on different faces.

”Understand the first thing, because I think several of you have the wrong picture, and it is the wrong picture that everybody on this continent has.” Jayde leaned forward. ”The sky does not split over the Lower Realm. It splits over Doha. All three realms. Every time, all four times, on the same wind. The Mid Realm is attacked. The Upper Realm is attacked. Nobody sits above us watching this happen to somebody else.”

Feng Lian had already drawn breath to say something. She let it out again without using it.

”Then they hold,” Ruifen said.

”They hold. Every time. And we do not — every time — and the difference is not courage, and I will not have anybody in this force ever say that it is.” Jayde put two fingers on the table. ”They have twenty times the people. They have standing armies that exist in peacetime and are paid in peacetime and drill in peacetime. They have cultivators at tiers that do not exist on this rock and have not since the Sundering. They have granaries, foundries, roads that were already built, and institutions that have never once had to start again from a burnt village.” She let that sit. ”So their libraries are continuous. Their genealogies are continuous. Four times now they have been hit, and hurt, and have buried a great many people — and at the end of it there was still somebody up there with a shelf to put the account on.”

”And here there was not,” Zhong said.

”And here there was not. That is the whole answer to your question. It is not that we did not write anything down. It is that four times running there was nobody left holding the paper.”

***

”There is a second thing on page five,” Jayde said, ”and it is the one I want every single one of you to carry out of this room, because it is the part that changes what we build.”

Nobody moved.

”They do not divide their force evenly. They never have. Every account that survives up there says the same thing in different words — the heaviest of them go where the resistance is. The Upper Realm gets the worst of it. The Mid Realm gets the next worst.” She let them get there on their own. ”What comes down onto this continent is the least of what they brought.”

The hall was extremely quiet.

”How do you mean?” Meifen said.

”We get their weakest.”

Bai Shu made a small sound and stopped herself making it.

”And it ends us,” Jayde went on. ”Four times. Whatever they consider the least worth spending has been enough to take this realm apart, root and branch, on every single occasion.” She looked around the table and made herself say the rest of it in the same voice. ”That is not an insult, and I am not going to let any of you take it as one. It is a measurement, and it is theirs, not mine. The smallest thing they are willing to send here is worth more than almost anybody walking on this continent, and they have known that about us for forty thousand years.”

Zhong had not moved since she started the sentence.

”They choose,” he said.

”They choose. Which means they look first, or they remember, or both, and either one is worse than a swarm. A swarm arrives. This allocates.”

Shenwei’s hand had stopped on the page.

”Then say the thing you have not said,” he said.

”You got there first. It should come from you.”

”If they allocate by resistance.” He spoke slowly, working it out in the open in front of everybody, which was how he did everything. ”And we spend sixty years raising what it costs to take this realm. Then in seventy years they look at Doha, and this continent is not what it was, and they send us more.”

”Yes,” Jayde said.

It was some time before anybody had anything to add to it.

”You knew that before you wrote a word of this,” Feng Lian said.

”I have known it since the second night I understood the pattern, and I have turned it over every way there is, and it does not come apart.” Jayde’s voice did not change. ”Here is the arithmetic, and it is ugly. If we build nothing, they send the least, and the least is sufficient, and we end — that is not a risk; it is the record, four times. If we build, they may send heavier, and heavier is survivable only if we built. There is no third column. The only version where the weight they send does not matter is the version where we are not here to be weighed.”

”And if we build and they send heavier,” Ruifen said, ”and the heavy that would have gone to the Mid Realm comes here instead.”

”Then some of it comes off them and onto us.” Jayde met her eyes. ”That is a real thing, and it will be somebody’s problem, and it will not be a problem I can solve at this table tonight, and I am not going to pretend it is a happy accident. I will only say this. It has been coming off us and onto nobody for forty thousand years, and every time, the people who paid were the ones who could not buy a crossing.”

Kiran spoke for the first time since the reading.

”You have a line up,” he said. It was not an accusation. It was a man confirming something in front of witnesses so that nobody could later say he had hidden it. ”I do not know to whom, and I have never asked. I know there is one, because I keep the ledgers and there are entries in them that do not go anywhere on this continent.”

”There is a line up,” Jayde agreed. ”I am not going to tell you whose it is, tonight or in a month, and that is not the same withholding as the other one — that one is somebody else’s life, and it is not mine to spend.” She looked around the table. ”What I will tell you is that the substance of that report has been confirmed by somebody in the Upper Realm who had no reason to lie to me and every reason not to answer at all. The cycle. The hundred years. The gate. The passages. All of it.”

”Then the Mid Realm knows,” Ryo said.

He had turned around from the window.

”The Mid Realm knows,” Jayde said.

”And?”

”You already have it. You got there four seconds ahead of everybody else, and I would rather you said it than me.”

Ryo did not say it. He stood there with his copy in his hand.

Meifen said it.

”The clans.” She had gone very quiet. ”The great houses on this continent are Mid Realm families. All of them. That is not a secret; it is a boast — half of them put it on the gate. My father used to say it to explain why our prices were what they were.”

”Yes.”

”Then they know.” Meifen’s voice did not rise. ”Every one of them. They have always known. They have sat on this rock for ten thousand years knowing exactly what is coming and exactly what they will do about it, and they have said nothing — not to a magistrate, not to a village, not to anybody who was going to be here when it happened.”

”I cannot prove that of any particular house,” Jayde said, ”and I believe it of most of them, and I have built everything I am doing on the assumption that it is true.”

Zhong’s head came up.

”That is why nobody funds us.”

”Now you have it.” She held his eye. ”Not the Temple, not the clans, not a single noble house, and you have all heard me say it, and some of you thought it was pride. It is not pride. The moment one of them puts a coin in this, they own a company, and in forty years somebody will find out the hard way which realm that company answers to.”

***

Ryo sat down.

He did it slowly, and put the report on his knees, and looked at it rather than at anyone.

”My father has never said one word to me about any of this,” he said. ”Not once. Not a hint, not a joke, not a bad night with wine in him.” He turned a page over and turned it back. ”And I do not know whether that means he does not know, or whether it means I have not been told yet, and I am not going to find out by asking, because if I ask I have told him what I know.”

”No,” Jayde agreed. ”You have not.”

”I would like that written down somewhere as well.” Ryo looked up. ”That I said it in this room, on this night, before anybody asked me to choose. Because in about six years somebody is going to want to know when I found out and what I did about it, and I would prefer it were on paper and not in my mouth.”

Eden was already writing.

***

”Then page nine,” Ruifen said. She was still standing. ”Because page nine is not about them at all.”

”No,” Jayde agreed. ”Page nine is about us.”

”Say it out loud.” Meifen had not looked up from the paper. ”I have read it twice, and I would like to hear somebody say it in a voice.”

Jayde said it in a voice.

”Before they come, the passages between the realms close. Not all at once — slowly, over years, and by the time anybody names it out loud, the people who benefit from it have already gone.” She kept it absolutely level. ”The great houses go up. Everyone who can buy a crossing buys one. Not to safety — there is no safety; it is coming for all three — but to a realm that has held every time it was hit. What is left down here fights with whatever nobody thought worth carrying. And afterward — a long time afterward, when everybody who watched them leave is dead — the ones who left come back down and buy the land off the widows.”

”They go where it can be survived,” Zhong said.

”They go where it has been survived. Four times. They are not cowards, and I want that said, because it is worse than cowardice.” Jayde’s hand stayed flat on the paper. ”A coward runs. These people looked at the same three columns I looked at, and did the same arithmetic I did, and picked correctly — and then said nothing to the province they were standing in while they packed.”

The hall was very quiet.

”Four times,” Ryo said. It was not a question.

”Four times. That is the only part of the whole report where the sources agree, and they agree because it is the part that got written down by the people who came back and had no reason to be ashamed of it.”

Zhong took his hands off the paper for the first time.

”Deeds,” he said.

”Deeds. Ledgers. Marriage records. The single best-preserved category of document on this continent is the transfer of land from a woman with a dead husband to a man with a passage.” Jayde’s voice did not change. ”We do not know how many died in the second war. We know exactly what a field in the eastern flat sold for in the year after it.”

***

”There is one more thing in mine,” Ryo said, ”and I would rather put it on the table myself than have somebody find it.”

”Go on.”

”My house has a founding story. Every house has one. Ours is four lines, recited at the winter table by whichever child can be made to stand still.” He said it the way a man reads out a figure he has just checked. ”I could say it before I could read. I said it myself perhaps a dozen times, until I was old enough to be embarrassed by it, and I have heard my father say it every winter of my life. It begins when we came back.”

Nobody spoke.

”I have never once asked from where. It never occurred to me that it was a question — I thought it was a phrase, the way a thing is said.” He looked at the paper on his knees. ”It is not a phrase.”

Ruifen looked at him then. She did not say anything at all, which was considerably worse.

”And the land,” Meifen said.

”I imagine so,” said Ryo.

Meifen stood up.

She did it without any noise, which was somehow worse than if she had put the chair over, and she stood there with her hands at her sides and her jaw working and did not say anything for four or five seconds.

”My family has had the same forge for six generations,” she said. ”Six. That is as far back as anybody can name, and we are proud of it, and I have heard my father say the number the way other men say a title.” Her voice had gone very flat and very quiet. ”Six generations is nothing. Six generations is a blink. And it is all there is, because every single time it got bad on this rock, everybody with the money to go went, and everybody who had a forge and a field and nowhere else on this world to be stayed here and died, and their grandchildren could not tell you what killed them.”

”Meifen,” Zhong said.

”No.” She did not raise her voice even then. ”You asked me two months ago why the province I come from does not have records past a certain year. I said fire. Everybody says fire.” She looked at Jayde. ”It was not fire, was it?”

”Some of it was fire,” Jayde said. ”Most of it was that a record needs somebody alive to carry it, and four times the people carrying it were the ones who could not afford a crossing.”

”Meaning what?”

”Everything this continent knows, it knows because a commoner survived long enough to tell a child.” Jayde did not soften a word of it. ”Every time the sky opened, the houses went up, and the villages stayed, and the villages are where the knowledge lived. It did not get destroyed. It got buried with the people who knew it, four times over, while everybody who could read and write and afford a passage was somewhere else.” She met Meifen’s eyes. ”That is why there is no manual for the mountain. That is why Shenwei has been teaching a ward for eleven years without knowing what it stops. It is not that nobody knew. It is that the ones who knew were poor.”

Bai Shu had gone very white and very still.

”Who goes up this time?” she asked.

”The same people.”

”Can you stop them?”

”No.” Jayde did not look away from her. ”I have thought about it for three weeks, and there is no version where I can and no version where I should try. If I spend the next sixty years fighting the great houses over crossings, I will not build one road. They will go. Some of them will go early and quietly and think themselves clever.” She put her hand flat on the sheet. ”What I can do is make sure that this time, when they come back down, there is something already standing here that did not need them.”

Meifen sat down.

”That is not enough,” she said.

”No,” Jayde agreed. ”It is not. And I am not going to tell you to stop being angry about it, because you are correct, and because in about forty years I am going to need somebody in this force who is still angry about it, and everyone in this room who was not born in a village is going to have stopped by then.”

Meifen looked at her for a long moment.

”Then I will keep it,” she said.

***

”Then tell us what you are doing about the two pages you cannot fill,” Shenwei said.

”I have already done the first part of it, and I should have told you before you read the report rather than after.” Jayde put her hand flat on her own copy. ”Nine days ago I sent a request up. Not a question — a list. What they look like. Whether they are one people or several. How they organize. What they carry and how it is made. What they do in the first month as against the tenth year. Every engagement anybody up there has a written account of, whether or not it was fought in this realm. And whether anything has ever killed one of them in a way somebody bothered to write down.”

”Nine days,” Zhong repeated.

”Nine days. I do not know how long it takes to come back, and I do not know how much of it will be answered, and it is entirely possible that the answer is a polite letter explaining why the question is impertinent.” She did not look away from him. ”Eden holds the standing list. Everything that comes back gets read by her first, written up, and given to the five of you it touches. Shenwei gets anything about how they build. Feng Lian gets anything about what they carry. Meifen gets anything about how they fight. Ruifen anything about how they move. Hu Bing gets anything about ground.”

”And the rest of us,” Kiran said.

”You get to keep the ledger that tells me when the answers stopped coming,” Jayde said, ”which is a different kind of information, and I would not trade it.”

Feng Lian was turning her copy over in her hands.

”Ten thousand years,” she said. ”Four wars. And you are the first person to write the list.”

”No,” Jayde said it hard, because it mattered. ”I am the first person in a very long time to write the list and still be alive on this continent to read the answer. Somebody wrote it before. Somebody always writes it. Page one of that report exists because a man in the third war put two dates side by side and did the subtraction, and I have his number and I do not have his name.” She looked around the table. ”That is the whole of what I am asking the ten of you for. Not courage. Continuity. Be the ones who are still here when the answer comes back.”