Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 537: Chapter 532: What Goes On It

Location:Obsidian Academy — The Old Armory

Date/Time:6 Ashwhisper, 9942 AZI — Later

Realm:Lower Realm

The signed sheet lay on the end of the bench where they had left it, weighted at one corner by the broken badge, and nobody had suggested moving it anywhere safer.

The mantles came off first.

Nobody had to be told. They took them off the way people take off something they have not earned the habit of yet — carefully, at both shoulders, with a hand under the wool so it would not drag — and there was a moment of mild absurdity while ten people looked around an armory for somewhere clean to put them, and settled on the second bench, folded, in a row.

Not one of them put a mantle on the floor. Jayde noticed that and did not remark on it.

Then they went back to work in the coats, which stayed on, and would stay on for the rest of the night, because a coat is a working garment and this was work.

***

Somebody had finally fed the second forge, and the woman who had been arguing about thread count had gone home, and the armory had the particular quiet of a room where everybody had stopped being polite about two hours ago.

Hu Bing had his coat open at the throat and had already put a thumb through one of the pockets to find out how deep it went. Shenwei had not stopped moving his shoulders inside his. Ruifen wore hers as though she had owned it for a decade.

”Then the last of it,” Ryo said, ”and it is the part the moulds do not solve.”

***

”Numbers,” Feng Lian said. ”Ryo. What is the total, now that we have decided it?”

Ryo did the arithmetic on the bench with his finger.

”Name, rank, branch, unit, and the two tags. Six pieces a man, and the rank changes, and the branch does not, and men lose things.” He looked up. ”Seven thousand two hundred people. Call it fifty thousand pieces of cast metal in the first year and twelve thousand a year after that, forever.”

”Fifty thousand,” Shenwei repeated.

”In the first year.”

”Then it is not a mould problem,” Shenwei said. ”It is a fifty thousand problem. She has given us the thing that makes them, and it does not make them for us. Nobody on this continent has ever needed fifty thousand identical anything, so nobody has ever built the trade that produces fifty thousand identical anything — and the moulds do not help with that at all. They only mean we are no longer failing for the wrong reason.”

”Four hundred workshops,” Meifen said. She had the case open in front of her again and had not closed it since Jayde pushed it across. ”That is the answer, and it is not a good one. Four hundred sheds with nothing to do between harvests, one mould apiece cut off this, and every piece slightly different because a hand finished it.”

”Slightly different,” Ryo repeated.

”Slightly different. Every soldier able to tell you which one is his.” She shrugged. ”And it is also Shenwei’s forty flaws, except we are not inventing them. We are buying them from four hundred people who have no idea they are solving anything.”

Ryo stopped writing.

”That is the variation problem,” he said slowly. ”That is the whole of the variation problem, solved by the cheapest available method, by accident.”

”Not by accident,” Feng Lian said. ”Look at her.”

They looked at Jayde, who did not say anything.

”You knew that when you cut six moulds instead of one press,” Feng Lian said.

”I cut six moulds because a mould can be copied by a man with clay, and a press cannot be copied by anybody on this continent.” Jayde did not confirm the rest of it and did not deny it either. ”What it does to the variation is a thing the four of you worked out standing up in a warm room, and I would rather you owned it than that I handed it to you.”

Shenwei looked at the case for a while.

”Then I want the die anyway,” he said. ”Not for this. For the nail and the bolt and the crossbow trigger, which is where it actually matters and where nobody has given me a mould.” He closed the lid. ”Four years. Write it down as mine.”

”Write it down yourself. You have a faculty.”

”I have a faculty,” Shenwei agreed, in the voice of a man who had not until that second entirely believed it.

***

They fought about the coat for an hour after that, and it was a good fight, and it did not resolve, and it was a better fight than it would have been that afternoon because every one of them was arguing from inside one.

Zhong wanted the collar higher. Meifen wanted the cuffs tighter and could tell them exactly why, in forge terms, with her hands. Bai Shu said the pack frame would cripple somebody’s shoulders on a long march and Ryo said it would not, and the two of them went around it four times without either of them being wrong.

”Stop,” Jayde said.

They stopped.

”Every one of you is arguing from what you can picture. I cannot picture it either, and I designed the thing.” She put her hand on the coat. ”Bai Shu. Put it on. Full kit, full pack, the quilted layer under. Then go and stand on the north wall until I come and get you.”

”Stand,” Bai Shu said.

”Stand. Not walk, not drill, not run the stairs. A sentry stands. That is what nine tenths of this coat is going to be doing for the next sixty years, and none of us has ever tested it doing that, because it is boring.” Jayde looked at the leather at the shoulders. ”And take the plates. All of it. If the weight is wrong, I want it wrong tonight and not in a valley.”

Bai Shu put it on. It took her a long time, which Meifen watched without comment and clearly filed.

She went out. The door let in a slab of cold, and both forges shuddered, and every man on the bench side of the room turned his shoulder to it without appearing to.

***

”Then the last thing on my list,” Jayde said, ”since we have two hours.”

”You are not going to like my position,” Zhong said.

”I have not liked four of them tonight.”

”Mark the fighting.” He said it without heat, which was how she knew he had prepared it. ”You want a force that turns up at floods, and I agree with the whole of it. And I taught combat on this mountain for fifteen years to people who were never going to be soldiers, because there was no such thing to be — and then I watched four hundred of them hold a wall for eleven days anyway.”

”Mark it how?”

”I do not have a word for the thing I am asking you for, and that is half my argument.” Zhong turned his hand over. ”On this continent, a man who does something is paid for it. Merit. Points on a bracelet. An artifact he carries out of a mountain and sells or does not sell. It is private, and it is money, and when it is spent it is over. There has never once been a mark — a thing put on a man where other men can see it, by people who were standing beside him when he did it, that says what he did and cannot be turned into coin.”

Meifen had gone very still, because she had come out of that mountain with merit like everybody else.

”On the day the thing is genuinely bad, a man does not hold because of a charter,” Zhong said. ”He holds because of what the men beside him will say about him afterward. I would like that written down somewhere he can carry.” He looked at her. ”Take it out, and you will get a very fine public works service that breaks the first time somebody shoots at it.”

***

Jayde reached under the bench, took out a folded sheaf, and put it on the wood in front of him.

”It has been drafted since Frostforge,” she said.

Zhong did not open it immediately.

”You had already decided.”

”I decided before you did, and I have spent three weeks on the parts of it that go wrong, which is why I have not put it in front of anybody until somebody in this room asked me for it.” Jayde put her hand flat on the sheaf. ”You are not arguing with me. You are arguing with a thing I already believe, and I would rather you knew that before you spent any more of it.”

”Then what is in it?”

”Four kinds. Every force that has ever kept records has arrived at roughly these four, and they arrive at them because they work, and I am not going to be clever in front of a thousand years of other people’s dead.”

She counted them.

”One. Valor. For an act in the face of something that was trying to kill you. Three grades, because two is not enough to separate a man who held a gap from a man who walked into one, and four is more than any board can honestly tell apart.”

”Two. The wound. Given automatically to anybody hurt or killed by enemy action, with no board, no citation, and no judgment attached to it whatsoever. It does not say you were brave. It says it happened to you.” She looked around at them. ”Nobody in this force will ever be congratulated for one. That goes in the manual in those words.”

”Three. Service. For doing the work well over years — a company run properly, a supply line that never failed, an engineer who built forty bridges and lost nobody. Most of this force will only ever hold one of these, and it is the one that keeps four thousand people going in year thirty when nothing has happened.”

”And four. Presence. For having been somewhere. Not skill and not courage — the fact that you were there and could be counted.” She let that land. ”Every force I know of undervalues that one and every soldier in it wears the thing anyway, because at the end of forty years it is the only object he owns that proves where he stood.”

***

Feng Lian had her hands flat on the bench.

”That is a great deal more system than I expected from somebody who has been refusing things all night.”

”I have not been refusing the system. I have been refusing three specific ways it rots, and they are the same three every time, and every one of them has a guard.” Jayde turned the top sheet over.

”It inflates. So: fixed grades, written criteria, no quotas of any kind, and a standing rule that nothing is created after tonight without the council and a public reading of the reason. A force that can invent a new grade will invent eleven.”

”It becomes patronage. So: no award by a commander alone, ever, including me. Two witnesses who were present, a written citation, and the citation is public — nailed up where the man’s own company can read it and argue with it. A thing given in daylight cannot be given as a favor, because everybody who was there will know.”

She stopped on the third one and took slightly longer over it.

”And officers spend people to earn them. So: no valor award may be held by anybody for an action he ordered. If you sent them, you do not get one. You may be given service for it, and you may be given nothing, but you will never wear valor for a thing you told somebody else to walk into.” Jayde looked at Zhong. ”That is the only line in this document I will not negotiate, and I would like the reason written under it: a man who can earn something by spending other men will eventually find a reason to spend them.”

Zhong read that clause twice.

”You have just made it impossible for a general to hold the highest thing this force gives.”

”Yes.”

”Including you.”

”Especially me.” She did not move. ”I will never wear one. Neither will anybody who sits in this chair after me, and in two hundred years that will be so ordinary that nobody will remember it was a decision.”

***

”There is one thing missing,” Kiran said.

He had been going through his own copy the way he went through everything, which was slowly and from the back.

”You have four kinds and three grades of valor, and it is all one column.” He put a finger on the page. ”Where does a man go who pulled eleven people out of a burning relief station? He was not facing an enemy. Nothing was trying to kill him. He goes under service, next to a clerk who kept a good ledger for twenty years.”

Nobody said anything.

”So make it two columns,” Kiran said. ”The same four kinds twice. One for arms, one for the ground — flood, fire, quake, tide, whatever the thing was when it was not a person. Same grades, same criteria, same size of token, worn on the same part of the coat.” He looked up at last. ”And they do not convert. Not upward, not downward, not at all. A ground cross does not rank under an arms cross. It stands beside it, and a board that tries to weigh one against the other has exceeded its authority and can be told so in writing.”

Jayde turned it over for a long moment.

Every version she had ever come across had the same shape: one column, with rescue and relief tucked somewhere near the bottom of it, below the fighting, because the fighting was what the institution was for.

”That is the fourth failure, and I did not have it,” she said. ”I had three.”

”What is the fourth?”

”A single column tells four thousand people which half of their job matters.” Jayde put her hand flat on the sheaf. ”I could have run this force for sixty years and never noticed I had written that down. Two columns.”

Ryo was already copying it out.

”Then what do we call them?” Feng Lian asked. ”All of them. Both columns.”

”Not tonight, and not by me.”

”Why not by you? You have named everything else in this building.”

”Because whatever we decide tonight is what they will still be called in a thousand years, and I am not the person who has to say the word.” Jayde looked at Bai Shu. ”You are. Some evening in year forty you will be standing in the rain in front of a boy who has asked what the thing on your coat is, and you will have to answer him in one breath, and if the name is wrong you will hear that it is wrong every time you say it.”

Bai Shu had gone still.

”You want me to name them.”

”I want you to bring me every name in a month. Argue about it first — with Meifen, with the ranker’s syllabus, with anybody who is going to wear one.” Jayde put the sheaf down in front of her. ”I would rather have your fourth attempt than my first.”