Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 534: Chapter 529: A Bolt Does Not Know

Location:Obsidian Academy — The Old Armory

Date/Time:6 Ashwhisper, 9942 AZI — later

Realm:Lower Realm

The four weapons lay at the end of the second bench where Feng Lian had put them, and nobody in the room was looking at anything else.

”Then my problems are not whether,” Feng Lian said, ”and there are four of them.”

She put a hand on the crossbow.

”One. Nobody on this continent has ever built one of these, because until Blazepeak nobody on this continent had ever seen one.” Feng Lian said it without any drama at all, which was the only way anybody in that room could have said it. ”The ones we carried out of that mountain are all identical, down to the nut, and they came from where the coat is coming from, and I am not asking about that. What I am telling you is that there is not a bowyer alive on Doha who could look at this and make me a second one that shoots the same. There is no trade. There are no apprentices. There is no word for it in three of the eleven provinces.” She tapped the lath. ”So I want one drawing. One draw weight, one span, one bolt, and all of it simple enough that a village bowyer who has never held one can build it correctly from the paper on the fourth attempt. If the drawing needs a man like Shenwei to read it, we have not built a weapon; we have built a relic — and when the last one of these breaks in year forty, there will be nothing behind it.”

”Two,” said Jayde.

”Bolts. And it is worse than anybody in this room thinks, including you.” Feng Lian did not soften it. ”A man shoots twenty in a bad hour and does not get half of them back. Seven thousand people, one serious engagement each in a year, and no training at all — that is thousands. Do the training properly and it is millions. Every year. Forever. Each one with an iron head on it and a straight shaft that took somebody an hour.” Ryo had stopped writing. ”The weapon is a purchase. The ammunition is a rent, and we will still be paying it in year sixty.”

”Three.”

”The day we use it in daylight.” Feng Lian looked up. ”The first flood, the first beast tide, the first time a company of ours looses a volley in front of four hundred witnesses — and after that every armory on this continent has one on a bench being taken apart. Six months later the clans have them. Two years later everybody does. There is no version where we keep it, and I want to know now whether that is a disaster, because I have built the whole of my thinking on the assumption that you already know it is not.”

”It is not a disaster. It is the point,” Jayde said. ”I want it copied. I want it copied badly, in villages, by men who got the drawing third-hand, because millions of anything does not happen any other way.”

”The clans get it too.”

”The clans get it too, and it does almost nothing for them.” Jayde put her hand flat. ”Give a crossbow to a Flamewrought, and you have given a rich man a slightly better afternoon. Give one to a farmer, and you have doubled what he is. It is the only weapon I have ever come across that is worth more the less you have — and the great houses will work that out in about year twelve, and by then it will be in more sheds than they could burn in a lifetime, and there will be nothing whatever they can do about it.”

Ryo had stopped writing again.

”They will try,” he said.

”They will try, and it will be with magistrates and tariffs and a tax on iron heads, and that is a fight I would rather have in year twelve, with half a million of them already out there, than in year two with four thousand.” She looked at him. ”Which is your fight, and you should start assembling it now.”

”Four.”

”Drill, and it is Meifen’s and not mine. Rate of fire is the one real weakness of the thing, and it is not a weapon problem; it is a rank problem — one rank looses while two span. That is the entire answer, and it has to be in the common year, in the first month, until it is boring.”

”It will be in the first month,” Meifen said.

***

”Then I will give you the part none of you have,” Jayde said, ”and it is the reason the crossbow is first and not third, and you do not have it because you have only ever seen it done by four hundred people at a time.”

She picked the crossbow up.

”Everything we have argued about tonight assumes seven thousand people. In ten years it is forty thousand. That is still an army and armies can be beaten. But this is not a weapon that needs an army. It needs five weeks.” She turned it over in her hands. ”Five weeks to a bolt in a man-sized target at eighty paces, from somebody who has never held anything. That is the number that changes what this continent is, and it is not a military number at all.”

Ruifen had come forward off the bench.

”How do you mean?” she said.

”Every child who comes out of the lower school knows how to use this. Not as soldiers. As a thing you learn alongside reading and levees and why a wound goes bad, in a month, at fourteen.” Jayde set it down. ”And every child who comes out of the lower school can read the drawing.”

”How many?” Ryo said. ”You have gone around that for an hour, and I have noticed.”

”I cannot say the number, and that is the first thing wrong with this continent.” Jayde looked around at them. ”Nobody has ever counted it. There has never been a census on the Lower Realm, not once, not by anybody — because a count takes forty years and an institution, and four times over the institution died with the villages. I have asked the Academy. The Academy has an estimate that is nine hundred years old and was a guess when it was written.”

”Then give me a floor,” Ryo said.

”That I can do.” She held up one hand. ”The Temple tithes and keeps the rolls, because the Temple has never once failed to write down money. The clans register land, because land is what they are. Neither of those tells you how many people there are. Both of them together tell you how many there cannot be fewer than.” Jayde put the hand down. ”Millions. Not one million. Several, and probably a great deal more than that, and the honest answer is that this room does not know whether it is four or fourteen.”

Nobody said anything.

”Now put the other number beside it,” she said. ”Every clan on this continent, every noble house, every family with the money to buy a crossing — all of them, everybody who goes up when the passages start to close. How many is that?”

Ryo did not have to think about it. He had grown up inside the answer.

”Thirty thousand,” he said. ”Forty at the outside, counting retainers, and I am being generous to my own kind.”

The armory had gone very quiet, and Ryo went on looking at his own figure the way a man looks at a sum that has come out wrong twice.

”Forty thousand people leave,” he said. ”And millions stay.”

”Millions stay. And every single account of every single one of those wars was written as though the forty thousand were the continent, and the millions were weather.” Jayde did not raise her voice at all. ”That is not a moral observation. It is an arithmetic one, and it is the largest unexploited fact on this world.”

Meifen had gone absolutely still at the forge.

”They were never the realm,” she said.

”They were never the realm. They were the part of it that could afford to be written down.”

***

”So the crossbow,” Jayde said. ”Not forty thousand of ours. Not four hundred thousand. Every household on this continent that wants one, in seventy years, and I do not know what that number is, and neither does anybody else, and the only thing I am certain of is that it begins with a million.”

She picked it up again.

”And it does not have to be an army to matter, which is the part I want you to carry out of this room. Something crosses open ground toward a village. Eighty paces of ground is about six seconds at a run for a thing that is faster than a man. Three ranks. One looses while two span, and it goes round, and it does not stop.” She looked at each of them in turn. ”It does not matter what tier the thing running at them is. It does not matter what it costs a Flamewrought to throw a technique, because nobody is throwing one. It is a hundred farmers and a wall and six seconds, and the arithmetic of that has never once been done on this world, because on this world the answer to a monster has always been to send for somebody expensive.”

”And they will not have expected it,” Zhong said slowly. ”In seventy years.”

”They allocate by what they measured last time.” Jayde put her hand flat on the bench. ”Last time, the answer to anything coming over a wall was one cultivator on a horse. That is what they have written down about us.”

Shenwei let out a breath that was not quite a laugh.

”That is what the school is for,” he said. ”That is what the school has been for the whole evening, and you let us think it was letters.”

”It is for letters,” Jayde said. ”It is also for this. A continent that can read is a continent that can be handed a drawing, and a drawing is how a million crossbows get built by people I will never meet.”

***

Bai Shu had picked the crossbow up while they were talking, and was holding it the way she had held it for eleven days, which was not the way anybody holds a thing they are thinking about.

”There is one more reason,” she said, ”and it is not tactics.”

Nobody interrupted her.

”A bolt does not know.” She did not look up. ”It does not know if you are Ashborn. It does not care that the thing in front of you had four hundred years of somebody else’s pills. It goes where you pointed it, and it does the same thing every time, for anybody.” She put it down carefully. ”That is the only weapon I have ever held where what my mother is does not matter.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

”That is why it is first,” Jayde said. ”And now I am going to spoil it, and I would rather spoil it in this room than have four hundred instructors find out in a valley.”

Bai Shu looked up.

”It has a ceiling. Every weapon does, and I have known where this one sits since well before we came up that road, because it is the first thing I do with anything that kills.” Jayde put the crossbow flat on the bench. ”I have put bolts into everything I could get in front of one. Chitin at eleven hardnesses. Boiled leather over oak. A Praetorian plate that took Feng Lian’s people two days to cut free. And every Charling class that came at us, in order, until the day they stopped going in.”

”They stopped going in,” Ruifen repeated.

”They stopped going in, and the line was the same every time, and it was not about the target’s size.” Jayde looked around at them. ”Eden’s matrix let me put a name to it four days ago, and I have not enjoyed the name. Mid Inferno-tempered — in the physique, not the core. Below that line, this is the most useful object on the bench. At that line and above, it is a stick, and it does not matter in the slightest what the man holding it can do with essence.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Zhong rolled up his sleeve.

”You do not have to —” Feng Lian started.

”I am aware of what I do not have to do.” He said it without any heat at all. ”Commander. A number in a book will not survive one afternoon with four hundred instructors, and it should not. They will want to know who saw it. So will every cadet they teach for the next sixty years.” He put his bare forearm flat on the end of the bench, the inside up, and laid two fingers beside it to hold it still. ”Somebody has to be the man who saw it. I am the only person in this building it can be done to safely, and I have wanted an answer about my own body since that hall four days ago, and I would rather have it now than wonder for another month.”

”You do not know that it is safe,” Jayde said. ”Neither do I. That is what a test is.”

”Then it will be a better demonstration.” Zhong did not move the arm. ”Short range. Do not be careful. If she is careful, it proves nothing, and I will have taken my shirt off for a lie.”

Jayde looked at him for a moment longer than she needed to.

”Feng Lian,” she said. ”Six feet. Full span.”

Feng Lian spanned it, and set the bolt, and shot him.

The sound was wrong.

Not a strike and not a thud — a flat, hard rap, like a stone dropped on a flagstone, and the bolt came off his arm and went end over end across the floor and hit the wall by the quench trough. Zhong’s forearm did not move. There was a white mark on the skin about the length of a thumbnail, and it went pink while they were all looking at it, and then it was nothing at all.

It was a long moment before anybody found anything to put in it.

”Do it again,” Zhong said. His voice had not changed. ”Closer.”

Feng Lian did it again from four feet, and the same thing happened, and the second bolt went under the bench.

He turned his arm over and looked at it, and then he looked at Eden.

”The number,” he said.

”You volunteered on the night, so I did you first, on Quenchday, and it took six hours, and I have not given you the result because I wanted to run the method twice before I said it to anybody.” Eden did not hesitate over it either. ”So you are getting it in front of nine people instead, which is not how I would have chosen to do it. Against the matrix: your cultivation is Entry Inferno-tempered, and it has not moved a hair. Your physique reads at Entry Blazecrowned.”

Bai Shu made a small sound.

”That is not possible,” Zhong said.

”It is not precedented. Those are different words, and the difference is the whole of my profession.” Eden closed her hands on the paper. ”And you are the only one of the fourteen hundred I have done properly, so nobody take a number home tonight. What I will say is that I have started on three more of you and none of them are where they should be either, and Bai Shu is Mid Sparkforged and is not going to like her result at all, which is why she could hold that wall and has never been able to explain to any of you how.”

Bai Shu had gone completely white.

”I thought I was lucky,” she said.

”You were not lucky. You were harder than the thing that hit you, and you did not know it, and that is exactly why I am shouting about this in a warm room instead of writing a careful paper about it in nine years.” Eden looked around at all of them. ”Every one of you has been walking around for a month inside a body you do not have the measure of. That is how people die doing something they were sure they could not do and something else they were sure they could.”