Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 542: Chapter 537: The Room

Location:Pocket Dimension — Ithyra’s Room

Date/Time:First Void Day, 9942 AZI — no hour

Realm:None. That is the point of it.

Ithyra felt her coming as she had felt her coming for twenty thousand years: a cold place moving through a warm one.

It arrived before the footsteps. It always had. A demoness feels souls the way other people feel weather, and Sharlin’s soul came down that corridor like a window left open in winter — not a devil’s absence, nothing so total as Salroch had been, but a wrongness with edges. A woman who had made herself into a shape and then forgotten there had been anything before the shape.

Ithyra put her hands in her lap and made them still.

She is coming.

The bond carried it and carried back what she expected: heat, and the sound of a chain going taut somewhere beneath her feet.

How long?

A minute. Less.

Ithyra—

I know.

You do not know. You always say you know. Renvyr’s voice in the bond was the same voice it had been when he was young and beautiful and could not be told anything. All these years and you still walk into that woman like she is a room you have measured.

I have measured it.

You have measured the room.

Ithyra did not answer that, because he was right, and because the footsteps had started.

***

Sharlin never knocked. She came in and stopped just inside the door, head tipped, the way a woman does when she is deciding whether the light in a place suits her.

Green eyes. Auburn hair, dressed simply today, which meant something. White and gold at the shoulders and nothing at the throat.

”You have no idea what day it is.”

”I have a wall and a chain and a bowl. I know exactly what day it is.”

”Do you?” She came further in. ”Go on, then.”

”First Void Day.” Ithyra let a little of it show, because a little was the correct amount. ”The year is over. Nobody works. The roads are empty, and every house in three realms is naming its dead.”

Something crossed Sharlin’s face that was almost real.

”You people kept the Void Days.”

”We are said to have invented them.”

”You did not.”

”We did not,” Ithyra agreed. ”But we kept them longer than anyone, and we kept them properly, and when the borders shut we kept them alone.”

That was the first stone. It went down flat, and she did not look at it.

Sharlin took the chair. She always took the chair. It had been brought in for a purpose a long time ago, and it had never been taken out again, and Ithyra had spent a great deal of her life not looking at it either.

”I am not keeping them. The Void Days.”

Sharlin sat forward. ”Do you know what I did this morning?”

”No.”

”I read a border report.” A hand went over her sleeve, smoothing it. ”It said the same thing the last one said. And the one before that.”

***

Here it was, then.

Ithyra had known it was coming for a season and a half. It had been in the shape of the visits — closer together, shorter, worse tempered — and in the questions, which had stopped being about the bond and started being about the world. A woman who has spent three centuries building a wedding does not begin reading border reports on a holiday unless something in her has started running.

She is frightened, Ithyra said into the bond.

Good.

No. Not good. Ithyra kept her hands in her lap. A frightened woman with a great deal of power does not become careful. She becomes fast.

”The demon realm has been shut for a long time,” Ithyra answered. ”That is not new.”

”It is not the shutting.” Sharlin’s fingers moved once on the arm of the chair. ”It is the silence. I had correspondence out of that realm for nine thousand years. Trade assessments. Grain notes. A prefect in the east who wrote me twice a year about nothing at all and had done so since his grandfather. It stopped. Not slowly. It stopped.”

”Then he died.”

”They all died?”

”Demons do not die often. But we do stop writing.” Ithyra looked at her. ”Have you asked yourself what the letters were for?”

”They were for knowing.”

”Yes. So somebody worked out that they were for knowing.”

Sharlin sat very still.

Then she laughed, once, delighted, and it was the worst sound in the room because it was genuine.

”There,” she said. ”There. Twenty thousand years of you sitting on that bed like a piece of furniture, and I ask about a grain note and you give me that.”

”You asked.”

”I have asked a great many things.”

”You have told a great many things. That is not the same, and you have never once minded the difference.”

***

Renvyr moved through the bond, all of him at once — a wall of heat with nothing to spend itself on. The manacles said what they always said. Somewhere below her, a chain rang against stone and stopped ringing.

Careful.

I am being careful.

You are enjoying it.

I am being careful and enjoying it, Ithyra said. You have never understood that those go together.

Sharlin was watching her face. She always watched the face. Twenty thousand years, and she had never once worked out that a demoness does not read with her eyes.

”I want to ask you something, and I want you to understand what it is.”

”It is a test.”

The green eyes did not blink.

”You are the most gifted truthspeaker of your generation,” Sharlin said. ”Everyone who ever wrote about you said so, and they hated you, which is how I know they meant it. So you will know that I know what you are. And you will know that I know your kind do not lie.”

”We do not.”

”Not can’t. Won’t.”

”There is no difference worth having, and my people would tell you the second one is harder and therefore worth more.”

”So.” Sharlin leaned forward, elbows on knees, a woman at a hearth with a friend. ”A realm shuts its borders and goes silent for years. Not a decade — years. What is that?”

***

It was well made. Ithyra gave her that, silently, and hated her for it.

Refuse, and three years of ground went out from under her — three years of being a creature Sharlin talked to instead of a creature Sharlin visited, and every scrap she had gathered in that time became the last scrap. Answer badly, and Sharlin would know it was badly, because she was not stupid and had never been stupid, and stupidity was not on the long list of things wrong with her.

Answer truly and usefully, and she helped her.

So: truly, usefully, and toward the wrong thing.

”You want me to say it is a sign.”

Sharlin’s face did not move. Everything under it did. Ithyra felt it go through her like a hand closing.

”You think it is one of your instabilities,” Ithyra said. ”The flows changing. Passages behaving oddly. Something coming loose in the world, and a realm sealing itself because it can feel the ground moving. That is what you came here to have confirmed, and you dressed it as a grain note.”

”Answer the question.”

”I am answering it.” Ithyra sat forward, and the chain at her ankle shifted and settled. ”It is not a sign. It is a king.”

Sharlin said nothing.

”Borders shut because somebody decides. That is all a border is — a decision that somebody is willing to enforce.” Ithyra held her eyes. ”A realm does not close because the world is ending. A realm closes because the man who runs it has counted something, and did not like the number, and would rather nobody else counted it. It is arithmetic and pride, and it is the oldest thing my people do. It has nothing to do with your prophecy.”

She let that sit.

”And the letters stop,” she said, ”because the same man worked out that a prefect who writes twice a year about nothing is writing to somebody about something.”

The silence went on a while.

Every word of it had been true. That was the part that would keep her breathing tonight, and the part she would have to live with, and the two were the same part.

***

Sharlin sat back.

It came off her in a wave, and Ithyra took the whole of it, because that is what an empath does whether she wishes to or not — the shoulders coming down, the jaw releasing, a woman who had been holding something for a season and a half setting it on the floor.

Relief. Enormous, undignified, unguarded relief.

She believes it, Ithyra said.

Because it is true.

Because it is true, Ithyra agreed, and because she wanted it, and I have never once been sure which of those does the work.

”Ten years,” Sharlin said to nobody. ”Possibly less. Four of them gone.”

”You have said that before.”

”I have said it to myself before.” She looked up, and the warmth came back over her face the way a cloth goes over a table. ”Do you know what it is like to be the only person who believes something?”

”Yes.”

Sharlin laughed again, and this time it was the other laugh, the one with the floor missing under it.

”Of course you do. You are chained to a wall telling me my prophecy is a customs dispute.” Standing, shaking out a sleeve, she became somebody’s High Priestess again between one movement and the next. ”You have been useful. Repeatedly, now. I have noticed.”

”You have said so.”

”I am going to do something about it.”

Ithyra did not let her hands move.

”Your man,” Sharlin said, ”has been in a cell under this floor for a very long time, and I have kept him breathing, and not one person has ever thanked me for it.” She was watching for it now. She was watching very carefully now. ”The Void Days are five days. Nobody works. I am not going to keep them, and I do not see why my property should not.”

”Plainly.”

”A day. And a night. In this room. He goes back afterward.”

***

There is a thing that happens in a bond when both people understand something in the same instant, and neither of them says it.

Ithyra felt Renvyr arrive at it a half breath after she did, and felt him go absolutely still, which he had never once done, and which was worse than the heat had ever been.

They had both been in that chair’s line of sight before. They knew what this was. They knew every part of what this was, and what it cost, and what came afterward — the guards, the corridor, the bond stretching and stretching and then the decades on the other side of it, which were not grief; grief was something else, grief you could live inside. Withdrawal was not livable. It was simply survived, at length, by two people who could not reach each other.

She had been given this before. It had never once been called a reward.

Ithyra.

I know.

Say no.

No.

Ithyra—

I said no to you, she said. Not to her.

”Well?” Sharlin asked.

Ithyra looked at her.

A woman with three centuries of architects at work on a wedding, for a boy Ithyra had barely been given time to hold. A woman who had killed one soul meant for him and intended to eat the next. Four years into ten and unable to sleep. Standing in a prison, offering a gift she had spent twenty thousand years using as a scourge, and honestly unable to tell the difference.

A monster who thinks she is the hero. Renvyr had said that once, long ago, when he could still be funny about it.

”Yes.”

Sharlin smiled, pleased with herself, pleased with the day, pleased with the shape of a thing well done. ”Tomorrow. They will clean him up first.”

”They always do.”

”Extra portions tonight,” Sharlin said, at the door, and was gone.

***

The cold place went back up the corridor and out of range, and the room was only a room again, and Ithyra sat on the edge of the bed and shook.

She let herself do it. It was permitted. It was permitted for exactly as long as it took the shaking to stop and not one moment past, and it had been that way since the first century.

You gave her nothing, Renvyr said.

I gave her a great deal.

You gave her a true thing that points away from our son. The heat had come back. That was a mercy; she had not liked the stillness. Plainly, then, woman. You are the one who insists on it. What did you buy?

Ithyra closed her eyes.

She has stopped looking at the demon realm, she said. For a season. Perhaps two. She was about to look at it very hard indeed, and now she will not, because a chained creature told her it was politics, and she wanted it to be politics more than she has wanted anything in a year.

And the cost.

Tomorrow.

Ithyra.

Tomorrow, she said, is not a cost.

Ithyra.

A thousand years, Renvyr. She had not meant to give him the number. It went down the bond before she could hold it. I have had your voice. I have had the bond and the sound of you walking those eight steps and the heat of you underneath me every hour of every day, and it has kept me alive, and it is not the same thing, and we have both been very careful for a thousand years never to say so out loud.

The bond went quiet. Not cold. Careful, which was worse.

I do not look like anything you remember.

I know exactly what you look like.

Ithyra—

I have felt every hour of what they have done to you. She had her palm flat on the floor without deciding to put it there. There is nothing you can show me tomorrow that I have not already carried. Do not you dare stand in that doorway and be ashamed at me.

A sound came up the bond that was almost the laugh he used to have.

Then, low: She may take it back.

Yes.

She has before. She will wake tomorrow and the year will have turned badly and there will be a reason, and it will be a good one, and she will believe it.

Yes, Ithyra said. And I would say yes again this minute, knowing it.

I want your touch. It came out of him all at once, which nothing had done in centuries. That is the whole of it. I have not got anything cleverer than that.

Then we are agreed.

The bond carried what neither of them said, which was most of it.

The day after, then, he said.

Yes.

That is the cost.

Yes.

Somewhere below her, a chain moved against stone, softly, the way it did when he shifted his weight and was trying not to let her hear it.

Renvyr.

Here.

The oath holds.

A long pause. Long enough that she felt the pull of it, the whole old argument, the thing he had wanted to do since the day they learned and had sworn on the bond and on their blood he would not.

If they knew, Sharlin would treat them well. That was the truth of it, and it had always been the truth of it. She would treat them extraordinarily well — washed and fed and housed, and the chain would come off, and she would come every day and talk to them about her wedding.

And then, some evening, when a season had gone badly, she would remember she was holding the only thing in three realms that a demon king could not stand to lose.

The oath holds, Renvyr said.

She waited. He had never once been able to leave a silence of hers alone.

You said plainly. His voice went rough. Not today. Not if they break every bone in my body. Not if they break every bone in yours.

Good.

It was a stupid oath, and I have kept it for three years, and I will keep it until I am dead.

Yes.

He is a stinking brat, Renvyr said, and I hardly held him, and I would let them start on my hands before I gave her his name.

Ithyra put her palm flat on the floor beside the bed, which was closer to him than the wall was, and which she had worked out a very long time ago from the direction of a scream.

Eight steps. That was all the room he had, and she had counted those from the sound of him walking them.

Here, she said.

Here, he answered.

And the year ended, and neither of them slept, because tomorrow they were going to be given a day, and because they both knew exactly what it was.