Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 529: Chapter 524: One More Before the Gate

Location:Obsidian Academy — The Lower Hall

Date/Time:2 Ashwhisper, 9942 AZI — continuous

Realm:Lower Realm

”As a list,” Ryo said. ”I want to write this one down properly.”

”Then write it.” Jayde counted it off. ”One. They come out of the Military Academy and nowhere else. Volunteers who came in at sixteen, who have had four years of drill, medicine, engineering, and formation work, and who have been told in plain words from their first month exactly what is under that mountain and exactly what a third means. They go down at twenty and not a day before.”

”Why twenty?” Bai Shu asked.

”Because four years is what the training takes, and because a body that is still finishing is a body that breaks differently, and Eden will bore you about that for an hour if you let her.” Jayde put her hand flat. ”And twenty is the only limit in the whole of this. Not a year of study. Not a grade. An age and a pass.”

”Two. Grade stops deciding it.”

Zhong’s head came up.

”How do you mean?”

”At the moment, the Academy opens it to Grade 4s and 5s, because they hold the highest cultivation available under the cap, and then it runs a tournament to sort them. That is the entire criterion, twice over — cultivation to qualify, and cultivation to win. Not one thing about whether the person can splint a leg, read a map, carry a load, or take an order at the sixth hour of a bad night.” Jayde said it evenly. ”A cohort selected on cultivation alone is a cohort of two and a half thousand individual fighters, and a third of them died of water and wounds and getting lost. Not of Charlings. Eden will give you the proportions, and you will not enjoy them.”

Eden did not look up. ”Rather more than half,” she said.

”So it goes by syllabus. Pass the thing, and you are in the pool — and the thing is not a cultivation measure; it is a competence one, and Zhong writes it.” Jayde looked at him. ”And it is a hard pass. No exceptions bought, no exceptions inherited, and no exception made for somebody with a beautiful core who cannot dress a wound.”

”And if more than twenty-five hundred pass?” Zhong asked.

”Then you have a selection problem instead of a scraping problem, which is the first time in ten thousand years anybody has had one, and I would like you to build the criteria for it before you ever need them and put them in writing where anybody can read them.” She held his eye. ”Because the day it is oversubscribed is the day somebody’s father offers you money.”

”Three,” Ryo said, writing steadily.

”Composition. And this is the one that actually moves the number.” Jayde put her hand flat. ”I am not sending twenty-five hundred warriors down a hole. I am sending a force. Squads with a leader who is there because he can lead a squad. Medical in every one of them — not one healer per hundred and a prayer. Engineers who can put a bridge over a collapse instead of going around it and losing four days. Logistics, so the food arrives where the people are. Signals of some kind, even if it is a boy with a whistle and a fixed schedule.”

Ruifen had both hands on the edge of the table.

”We built all of that down there,” she said. ”In the fourth month. Out of nothing, while people died, because we had to.”

”You built it in the fourth month. They will go down with it already built, on the first day, written and drilled and rehearsed above ground for a year before the seal opens.” Jayde looked at her. ”That is the single largest thing I can do about a third, and it is not a weapon, and it is not a pill. It is a table of organization.”

”Four,” Ryo said.

”It stops being a school examination and is entered in the charter as a military exercise. That is not a word game.” She counted the difference on two fingers. ”An examination has invigilators. An exercise has a commander, an order of battle, an objective, and an after-action report that somebody signs and somebody else reads.”

”And they are told what it is,” Bai Shu said. ”Beforehand. You said that.”

”They are told the shape of it from their first month and the substance of it on the last day above ground, and neither of those has ever happened to anybody in the history of that mountain.” Jayde met her eyes. ”And there is a second thing, and I want it said in front of Zhong because it is his to fix. Every one of you competed for your place. You won it — in a ring, against other students, in front of judges, on the one measure the Academy has ever been able to think of, which is how well you fight with essence.” She let that sit. ”And then the mountain took a third of you, and most of those did not die fighting anything. You were selected on the single skill that mattered least.”

Bai Shu did not say anything at all.

”That is what I mean by grade stops deciding it,” Jayde said. ”The next cohort still competes. They compete at the whole job.”

”Five,” Ryo said, writing.

”Staff go down as a matter of establishment and not as volunteers with a conscience. Not ten observers. Two hundred, rotating, with a written method and a relief schedule and somebody above ground counting hours.” Jayde looked at Zhong when she said it. ”Nobody keeps four hundred people alive for six months on his own again because there was no one else.”

Zhong did not say anything at all.

”Six. The merit stands.” She said it before anyone asked. ”Every kill registered, every point earned, every one of them spent in the Merit Hall on the way out exactly as it is now. I am not touching that, and I would fight anybody who tried.”

Ryo’s pen stopped.

”I was going to raise that,” he said.

”I know you were. Raise it anyway, out loud, because half this room has not thought about it and needs to hear a Logistics officer say it.”

Ryo put the pen down.

”Every village on this continent has a house that came up out of that mountain,” he said. ”One artifact, one generation, and a family of eight becomes a minor clan. It is the only ladder that exists down here, and it is the reason the queue forms. Take the merit out, and you have not made it kinder — you have made it a conscription with a mortality rate and nothing at the end of it.”

”Which is exactly why it stands.” Jayde looked around the table. ”And here is the part you have not got to yet. Who gets on that ladder at the moment?”

Ryo opened his mouth and then did not use it.

”Whoever can get an Academy place,” Ryo said slowly. ”Which is whoever can pay for the tutoring, or has the name, or has a house that already came up out of that mountain once.”

”The ladder has been bolted to the top of the wall for ten thousand years,” Jayde said. ”The Military Academy takes volunteers at sixteen from any village on this continent, free, and the first thing they are taught is letters.” She let it land. ”I have not taken the ladder away. I have put the bottom of it on the ground.”

Bai Shu had both hands flat on the paper in front of her and was looking at nothing at all.

”My cousin,” she said. ”He is eleven.”

Jayde had already done that arithmetic, twice, in a corridor, and had not enjoyed it either time.

”He will be sixty-one,” she said. ”He is never going to see the inside of it.”

Bai Shu’s head came up.

”...No,” she said. ”No, he is not.”

”He can volunteer at sixteen, serve his term, and walk back into that pottery still young, with a trade in both hands and a great many years in front of him — and that mountain will open and shut once in the whole of his life, and he will read about it in somebody’s report.”

”A term,” Ryo said. He had the pen up. ”You have not used that word before.”

”Fifty years. One turn of the mountain.” Jayde said it as though she had been waiting for somebody to ask. ”And it is fifty only for a man who comes in as what he leaves as. Every tier this force pays to lift you adds twenty-five more, because the herbs and the halls and the baths are not a gift and I am not going to let anybody in forty years pretend they were.”

Ryo stopped writing.

”So a boy who comes in Ashborn and goes out Flamewrought—”

”Owes a hundred years, and is told so on the day he makes his mark, in writing, in words he can read, by somebody whose job it is to make certain he understood.” Jayde put her hand flat. ”And there is no pension. Not a coin, not a field, not a house.”

”None?” Bai Shu said.

”You cannot pension a Flamewrought. Think about it for a moment and you will see it before I finish the sentence — four hundred years of payments to a man who is stronger than the magistrate signing them, multiplied by four thousand. The first institution on this world that promises that is bankrupt inside a century and turns into a clan the year after.”

”Then what does he leave with?”

”The body we built him, the trade we taught him, and every year of life the two of them bought.” Jayde looked around the table. ”That is the payment, and it is paid out every single day he serves rather than at the end of it, and it is worth more than any coin this force will ever hold. A potter’s boy walks in at sixteen and walks out at sixty-six as a Flamewrought with four centuries in front of him and a craft in his hands. There is not a clan on this continent that would sell that to him for any price he could ever raise.”

Meifen said quietly, ”My father would have signed that with his teeth.”

”Then we will make sure his grandson gets to.”

***

”And it is not only the rankers.” Jayde turned back to Ryo. ”It binds this table. Nobody in this force serves for life, nobody holds the same post twice running, and I want both of those in the instrument in words a magistrate can enforce.”

”Why?” Zhong asked.

”Because of what we are, and a great deal more because of what we are about to be.” Jayde put both hands on the back of her chair. ”Bai Shu is Sparkforged tonight. If I do this properly, she is Flamewrought inside twenty years, and so is her cousin, and so are the children in that village who have not been born yet. You are Inferno-tempered, and you will be walking about in a thousand years if nothing kills you first — and I intend to make the whole of that ordinary rather than remarkable.”

She stopped there for a moment, because the rest of it had only arrived while she was carrying the chairs in, and she had not settled how to say it.

”Which means none of you is going to bury a grandchild,” she said.

Nobody moved at all.

”I am not going to say any more about that tonight. I have not thought it through, and neither have any of you, and it is not a small thing, and I will not have it handled badly in a cold room at the end of a long night.” Jayde straightened. ”What I am telling you is the narrow part of it. An institution where the same ten people hold the same ten chairs for a thousand years is not an institution. It is a family, and after that it is a clan, and after that it is exactly the thing I told the Headmaster I would break this up to prevent.”

Zhong made a sound that was almost amusement.

”You are legislating against us.”

”I am legislating against me, and the rest of you are caught in it, and I would rather be caught in it than trusted.” She did not look away from him. ”A term and then out. A hundred years before the council may take you back at all, and never into the chair you left.”

”A hundred,” Zhong said.

”A hundred. With one exception, and I want it read into the instrument in the same breath as the rule, because an exception nobody wrote down is how every one of these things has ever gone wrong.” Jayde put her hand flat. ”Nobody rotates during the war. Not a chair, not a company, not a courier route. From the day it starts to the day it ends, the only thing that empties a seat is dying in it.”

Ruifen said, ”And who says it has ended?”

”Not me. Not whoever has my job.” Jayde looked round at them. ”The same body that says it has begun, by the same rule, in writing, and I want a date attached — because the emergency that never quite finishes is the oldest instrument there is, and it will be reached for by somebody with my job in about year ninety, and he will have very good reasons.”

”He will have my reasons,” Ryo said, writing.

”He will have my reasons, in my handwriting, which is worse.”

***

”Then say the rest of it, since you have said everything else.” Zhong was not arguing; he had the tone of a man reading a figure off a page. ”A hundred years is half of Bai Shu’s life as she stands tonight. It is a season of mine. You have written one rule, and it will fall on the ten of us in ten different weights, and in two hundred years the people it does not inconvenience will be the people who never leave.”

Jayde was quiet for a moment.

”Yes,” she said. ”That is another thing I cannot solve tonight, and it is the only one so far that I had not already found on my own.”

”I have no answer either.”

”Then write the rule as it stands, and write your objection under it, in your own hand, with the date.” Jayde looked at Ryo. ”Both of them go in. Not the rule with the objection filed somewhere else — under it, on the same page, so that the first person clever enough to fix it does not have to discover the problem first.”

Ryo wrote for a while.

***

”And the other thing you have not said,” Jayde went on to Bai Shu, ”is the one you came to on your own about four sentences ago, and I am going to correct it before it sets, because you have it backwards.”

Bai Shu did not answer.

”You are about to ask me who you are supposed to write the syllabus for, and you have decided the answer is strangers.” Jayde put three fingers on the table, one at a time. ”Fifty years to a term. Twenty-five more for every tier this force lifts you. And nobody rotates during the war.”

Ryo got there first, which she had expected. He put the pen down.

”None of us leaves,” he said.

”None of us leaves.” Jayde did not soften it. ”The gate opens in about seventy years. It stays open — four times, on the record — for roughly a hundred more. Not one chair at this table changes hands between tonight and the end of that, unless the person sitting in it dies in it. You are all here for something on the order of two centuries, and I have known that since Frostforge, and it is the reason I chose the ten of you and not forty.”

The hall was extremely quiet.

”So you are not writing for strangers.” She looked at Bai Shu and did not look away. ”You will stand in front of the cadets who go down in nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-two. You will know their names. You will hand them the book yourself, and you will have rewritten it eleven times by then, and the eleventh version will be the one that works.” Jayde straightened. ”And your cousin will be sixty-one and Flamewrought and running a pottery with four hundred years in front of him, and his granddaughter will very probably be in that cohort, and you will teach her.”

Bai Shu put a hand over her mouth and took it away again.

”Then what are the rules for,” Meifen said. She had not moved. ”The terms. The rotation. The hundred years out. If none of it touches any of us, who did you write it for?”

Jayde was quiet for a moment.

”For the ones after,” she said. ”That is the only honest answer, and I have been putting off saying it all evening, because it is the part that makes the rest of tonight sound small.”

Nobody spoke.

”What killed this realm four times was never the Zartonesh. They came, and they took what they wanted, and they went, and every time this continent was still here afterward — poorer and emptier and burnt, but here.” Jayde said it evenly. ”What killed us was the ten thousand years that came next. Everybody who knew put their tools down. The records went into a cellar. The manual went with the man. And by the time the sky split again there was nobody left who could tell you what the word even meant, and it all had to be paid for a second time, and a third, and a fourth.”

Zhong had both hands flat on the table.

”You are not building this to win the fifth war,” he said.

”I am building it to win the fifth war and then not stop.” She looked round the table at every one of them. ”The rules are for the century after the last one dies. For the officer in year six hundred who has never seen a Zartonesh and is bored and is right to be bored, and who keeps the ledger anyway because the ledger is what his post is. That is what the rotation is for. That is what your objection written under my rule is for.” She put her palm flat. ”When the sky splits for the sixth time, I want it to open over a continent that was expecting it. That is the whole of the design, and everything else in it is arithmetic.”