Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 532: Chapter 527: On the Roll

Location:Obsidian Academy — The Lower Hall

Date/Time:2 Ashwhisper, 9942 AZI — Continuous

Realm:Lower Realm

Shenwei did not say anything for a moment, and then he did, and it was not the question anybody was expecting from him.

”The junior school takes children at six,” he said.

”It does.”

”My sister’s boys will be inside it the year it opens. I will write the letter tomorrow, and I will not be the only person at this table writing one.” He was looking at his hands. ”My sister is thirty-four. She is Ashborn, and she will always be Ashborn, and there is no school in the world that opens for her.”

Nobody moved.

”So I will ask it plainly, because somebody has to, and I would rather it was me than somebody who has to ask you twice.” Shenwei looked up. ”The people in this force. Will they be able to buy any of this for the families they came from?”

”It is already written,” Jayde said.

Shenwei had braced for an argument and did not get one, and it took him a second to put his weight down.

”Since when?”

”Since the beginning. It is in the founding draft with everything else.” She said it the way she said things that had never been in question. ”Ryo has the papers. Clause nine.”

Ryo found it. He did not read it out. He read it twice, and then he sat back in a way none of them had seen him do all evening.

”It is clause nine,” he said.

”Yes.”

”Not an appendix. Not a schedule at the back where a magistrate would never look.” He turned the sheet so Kiran could see the top of it. ”It sits in front of the section on ranks.”

”Yes.”

”You wrote down what happens to our families before you wrote down what we would be called.”

Jayde looked at him as though he had remarked on the weather, and did not answer him, and reached for the paper.

Zhong had not been watching the document at all. He put one hand flat on the table and left it there.

”As a list,” Ryo said, after a moment. ”I want it word for word.”

”Every man and woman who takes the oath registers their family. By name, on the day they swear, in front of a clerk — parents, brothers, sisters, children, and the household they came out of.” Jayde counted it off. ”Those names go on the roll, and the roll does not change afterward except by birth, marriage, or death, and every one of those requires two signatures and a date. That is not sentiment. That is because the first man to work out that a place on my roll is worth money will try to sell one before the end of the second year.”

”And what does being on it get you?”

”Everything the force can buy, at what the force paid for it. Not free — at cost, in daylight, with a price list nailed up where anybody can read it.” She said it evenly. ”Baths. Entry pills. A physician who has actually been trained. And merit — every soldier earns it, and every soldier can spend it on his own people instead of on himself, and a great many of them will, and I want that to be an ordinary thing that nobody remarks on.”

Bai Shu had both hands flat on the table.

”My mother is fifty-one,” she said.

”Your mother is fifty-one, and Entry Ashborn, she has perhaps thirty years.” Jayde did not look away from her. ”If the fields go in this spring and the first halls are standing in four, and if she is willing — and some of them will not be, and that will have to be allowed — she is Sparkforged inside a decade. That is another two hundred years, Bai Shu, and I am not going to promise it to you in this room because I cannot promise the weather. I am telling you it is on the list, and that the list has her on it by name the day you sign.”

Bai Shu did not say anything at all. Meifen put a hand on the back of her chair and left it there.

***

”And if I die,” Ruifen said.

She had asked it the way she asked everything, and the room went cold in a different way.

”Then the roll stands,” Jayde said it immediately, because she had drafted it immediately. ”Your family does not lose one thing on the day you die — not the price, not the physician, not the place. Every child on your roll has a place in the schools, and it is not a favor, and it is not charity, and nobody is ever to describe it that way in my hearing. It is pay. It was earned, and it is owed, and it goes on being owed after you are dead, and if this force ever fails to hand it over, I want the person who failed removed by the council in the same week.”

Ruifen nodded once, slowly.

”That is the first thing anybody has offered me in my whole life,” she said, ”that I did not have to be alive to collect.”

***

Meifen had not spoken since the price list. When she did, she stood up to do it, which nobody at that table had seen her do all evening.

”My father is a smith,” she said. ”He is sixty-one, and he is Ashborn, and he has a hand that stopped working properly when I was nine. He has said one thing about me joining this Academy in six years, which is that it was a great deal of money, and he has never once said the other part.”

”Which is?”

”That there was nothing in it for him.” Meifen’s voice had not risen at all. ”Not resentment. He does not have that in him. It simply never occurred to any of us that there could be. You are a smith’s daughter, and you go up the mountain, and you come back a person your family cannot follow, and everybody is proud, and nobody says the rest of it.”

She stopped, and started again.

”You have just put my father on a list.”

”I have.”

”Then I want to be the one who tells him.” Meifen looked at her steadily. ”Not a clerk and not a letter with a seal on it. Me, at the forge, before anybody else in that province hears it. And then I want to come back here and build the finest line infantry that has ever stood on this continent, and I want you to understand that those two sentences are the same sentence.”

”I understood it in the mountain,” Jayde said. ”That is why you have First Company.”

***

Zhong had been quiet for a considerable time, and when he spoke, he did not look at any of them.

”I have taught here fifteen years,” he said. ”Every intake, a boy comes up this mountain out of a village, and every intake, in about the fourth year, he stops writing home. Not because he is ashamed. Because there is nothing left to write that they can read.” He turned his hand over. ”I have watched it happen four hundred times, and I have called it growing up.”

Nobody answered him.

”You are proposing to stop it.” He said it as a fact and not a question. ”Not for the boy. For the village.”

”Yes.”

”Then I will write your standards,” Zhong said, ”and I will write them so that nobody can be bought past them, and I will not complain about the workload again.”

***

Feng Lian was the one who broke it, which surprised everybody, including her.

”I would like to say the thing nobody is saying,” she said, ”and then I would like us to go back to arguing, because I am not built for this and neither is anyone else at this table.”

”Go on.”

”Nothing like this has ever been done here.” She had both hands flat on the bench in front of her. ”Not once. Not by the Temple, not by a clan, not by the Academy, not by anybody in ten thousand years — and we have all been sitting in this room for four hours treating it as a set of problems to be solved, because that is easier than looking straight at it.” She looked around at them. ”Somebody in this hall is going to be alive to see whether it worked. All of us, in fact, which is worse.”

”That is not a complaint,” Ruifen said.

”It is not a complaint. It is fright, and I would rather name it than carry it about pretending it is diligence.” Feng Lian turned to Jayde and did not soften it. ”I have followed you for a year because you were right about things when it mattered, and you did not spend us. That is a soldier’s reason, and it was enough this morning. It is not the reason anymore, and I want you to know that it has changed, because you should know what you have got standing behind you.”

Jayde found that she had nothing at all to say to it, which had not happened in some time.

”Then I will earn the second one,” she said eventually.

”You already have. That is the difficulty.”

***

”Then I am going to spoil it,” Eden said.

It was the first thing she had said all night, and the room turned as one, which she appeared not to notice.

”Everything she has told you is achievable, and none of it is safe.” Eden did not stand up and did not put the paper down. ”Pills at scale kill people. Not occasionally. Predictably. A clan child takes one pill under a physician who has watched four hundred children take that pill, and if the child’s meridians start to tear, he is in a bath within the minute. A village boy takes the same pill out of a sack because his sergeant handed it out, and he does not know what tearing feels like, and he does not say anything because he does not want to be the one who could not take it, and in eleven days he is Ashborn forever with scarring nobody can undo.”

Feng Lian put her pen down flat, which she had not done all evening.

”How many,” she said.

”If we do it the way the clans do it and simply do more of it — one in forty. That is the honest number from the only records I have been able to get at, and they are clan records, so it is the flattering version.” Eden turned a page over. ”One in forty of four thousand people is a hundred dead soldiers, and it is not a war; it is a procedure. I am not doing it.”

”Then say what you are doing,” Zhong said.

”Measuring.” Eden looked up at last. ”Every dose written down. Every reaction written down. Who, what, how much, what happened, by whose hand. Nobody advances on a pill without somebody trained standing next to them who has nothing else to do that hour. Baths before pills wherever a bath will do the same work slower, because slow does not scar. And a written stop rule on every single compound, in plain language, that a sergeant can read — if you see this, it stops, and nobody is punished for stopping.”

”That will halve the speed of it,” Meifen said.

”It will not halve it. It will make it about a third slower and roughly forty times less lethal, and in nine years it will be faster than the clan method, because the clan method is four hundred children of accumulated guesswork in one physician’s head and mine will be four thousand entries anybody can read.” Eden said it without heat at all. ”They have ten thousand years of technique and no records. We will have eleven years of records and no technique. I would rather have the records.”

Shenwei made a small sound of recognition and did not explain it.

***

”There is a bottleneck, and it is not the herbs,” Ryo said. ”It is the refiners.”

”Go on.”

”You can put a valley under herbs. Herbs grow.” He had the ledger open again. ”You cannot put a valley under alchemists. There are perhaps three hundred refiners on this continent who can produce anything above the third grade, and the Temple trained most of them, and the great houses employ nearly all of the rest, and every one of them was taught in a lineage that does not write things down on purpose.” He looked up. ”You are proposing to feed four thousand people and then a continent. With what hands?”

”With hands we make,” Jayde said. ”Refining is the fourth-year Engineering elective, and it is compulsory, and it is taught the way Shenwei is going to teach formation work — written, marked, and repeatable by somebody with no master and no lineage and no gift. The first four cohorts will be poor. The fifth will be adequate. The tenth will be better than the Temple’s, because the Temple’s best man cannot tell you why the thing works, and ours will have read three thousand pages about why.”

”That is thirty years,” Ryo said.

”That is thirty years, and it is why we start on the day the amendment passes and not the day somebody feels ready.” She turned to Zhong. ”And it is why I want Daishan approached before Restday, quietly, by you and not by me.”

Zhong’s eyebrows went up a fraction.

”Daishan will not leave the Academy.”

”Daishan does not have to leave the Academy. Daishan has to be persuaded to write down what is in his head before he dies, and he was born in a village, and he has spent forty years watching clan sons be handed things he had to steal.” Jayde said it evenly. ”Ask him. If he says no, ask him again in a year with something to show him.”

***

Ruifen was still standing.

”Then the last question, and it is the only one I have,” she said. ”Herb fields are ground. Ground can be bought, taxed, condemned, flooded, or burned, and everything you have described sits in the open where anybody with a horse can reach it. You are about to end the single most profitable monopoly on this continent. What happens when they work that out?”

”They fight us.” Jayde did not hesitate. ”Not in the first ten years — in the first ten years we are a school growing vegetables, and it is beneath their notice, and I intend to be very boring for as long as I can manage it. Somewhere around the twentieth, the price of a third-grade pill in the eastern provinces is going to move for no reason anybody can explain, and somebody in a counting house is going to find out why, and after that it is a war fought with magistrates, fires, water rights and dead stewards.”

”And we win that how?”

”By being spread out, by being popular, and by owning nothing that cannot be replaced in a season.” She put her hand flat. ”Never one valley. Never one hall. Never anything they can burn once and finish. And by then every province that has us in it has a hundred families whose children came home upright from something that used to kill a third of them, and those families vote in the only way that matters on this continent, which is by deciding who they will not sell to.”

Ruifen sat down at last.

”That is a sixty-year answer,” she said.

”Everything I have said tonight is a sixty-year answer. That is the whole job. If you want a five-year answer, there are four hundred and eleven teaching posts and every one of them is honorable.”

Nobody moved toward the door.

Then Kiran picked his satchel up off the floor, and put it on his knees, and opened it.

***

”First light,” Jayde said. ”Meifen, Bai Shu, Shenwei — back in here, and bring paper. Zhong, I want an hour before that. Ryo, Kiran, you are both already late for something and have been all evening.”

They went out in ones and twos.

Meifen was last through the door, and stopped in it.

”You put the potter’s daughter above two instructors tonight,” she said.

”I put her where she is useful.”

”I know.” Meifen looked back into the room for a moment. ”I am telling you that all every one of the fourteen hundred will know it by tomorrow evening, and that after that you will not have to explain the rest of it to anybody.”

Then she went, and the door swung and did not quite shut, and Jayde stood alone in a hall with eleven chairs in it and ten sewn copies of eleven pages stacked in front of her, counted, exactly as she had said they would be.

Takara opened one eye.

You have nobody.

”I have a hall full of people.”

You have a hall full of people who work for you. He put his chin back down on his paws. That is a different thing, and you were about to write until second bell rather than notice it.

She sat down and wrote until second bell.