Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 544: Chapter 539: The Naming

Location:Vor Hakkun — A Dwarf Forge-Holding, Eastern Range

Date/Time:The five Void Days, 9942 AZI — first light of the first, to before light on the first working day of 9943

Realm:Upper Realm

Cangwei had been in the air seven days and had spent most of the last two of them being wrong.

She had expected a gate. Something cut and dressed and obvious, with a road going up to it and a bell beside it, because that is what a holding is in every account she had ever read, and every account she had ever read had been written by somebody who had not been inside one.

What was actually there was a mountain with smoke coming out of it in nine places.

No gate. No road worth the name — a track, switching back on itself up the eastern face, worn by feet and not cut for carts. She came down onto the flat ground below it in the gray before the light, in human form, because arriving as a dragon over a people who had not invited you is a sentence and not a greeting.

There was one dwarf sitting on a rock at the foot of the track.

He had been there, she judged, for some hours. He was wrapped to the eyes and had a hammer across his knees that had never once been a weapon and would do perfectly well as one, and he watched her come the whole way in without standing up and without any particular expression.

”Cangwei,” she said. ”Of Heiteng’s house. I have come to speak to whoever speaks for this holding, and I have come alone, and I will keep whatever form you would rather I kept.”

The dwarf looked at her for a while.

”Not today,” he said.

***

Vor Hakkun was six months old, and Vor Hakkun was older than anything Cangwei’s house had ever put a stone on.

She learned both in the first hour, and it rearranged a number of things she had been carrying. The smoke was new. The nine chimneys were new. The halls underneath them were not. Dwarves had cut this mountain out from the inside a long time before the Sundering, and had gone down to the Mid Realm when the world came apart, and had stayed there ever since, and had never once in the whole of it called the Mid Realm anything but the place they were living.

The track was worn because a great many dwarves had walked up it, recently, with everything they owned on their backs.

They had come for the children.

That was the whole of it, and nobody explained any of it to her, because nobody in the mountain thought it wanted explaining. Somewhere within reach of this range there were children carrying dwarven blood and nobody to put a hammer in their hands, and so a clan had come up out of the Mid Realm and let itself back into a house it had left standing.

Cangwei stood in the entry hall of a place that had been shut longer than her whole line had been alive, and was not shut now, and understood that she had walked into the middle of something and did not yet know what.

”You will want to sit,” the dwarf with the hammer said. He had brought her in. He had not given a name. ”It is five days.”

”I know what the Void Days are.”

”Do you keep them?”

”My house keeps them.”

”That is not what I asked.”

Cangwei turned and looked down at him properly for the first time.

”No,” she said. ”I do not keep them. I have not kept them in a very long time and I could not tell you the last year I did.”

The dwarf nodded slowly, as though she had told him something useful, and went away, and did not come back for four hours.

***

They gave her a room, which she had not asked for, and water and bread, which she had not asked for either, and nobody came near her.

That was the first day.

Cangwei sat in a small stone room in a mountain and did the thing she had spent three hundred years telling younger dragons to do, which was to hold what she had without deciding what it meant.

She had a demon king who would not say where Heiteng was, and cloth she had not named out loud, and a realm she had eliminated, and a second realm she had eliminated and a third that was not eliminated at all, and a crossing that would take a tier or two off her on the way down and never give it back.

And she had five days in a mountain with nothing to do in them.

That was the part she had not planned for and could not do anything about, and she noticed, somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, that she had begun to hate the five days personally, which was not a useful way for a person to be.

He is down there, she thought, and every day is a day.

She made herself stop that.

***

On the second day, they let her out of the room, and she found out what a dwarf holding does with the Void Days.

They name their dead.

She had known that. Everyone knows that. What she had not known — what nobody who has not stood in it knows — is that dwarves do it out loud, and they do it all of them, and they do it for five entire days without stopping.

The great hall ran the length of the mountain’s lower floor, and it was full. Not gathered. Full. Every dwarf in Vor Hakkun was in that hall and had been since the light came up, sitting on benches and on the floor and on the steps, and one at a time they stood, and said a name, and sat down.

That was it. That was the whole of the rite. A name, and then the next.

Some of them said one and wept and could not manage a second and were let alone until they could. Some of them stood and said forty without stopping, in a flat voice, flat as a man reading a ledger because the ledger is the only thing holding him up. An old woman in the third row said two names and then sat with her hands over her face for an hour, and nobody moved her, and when she was ready she stood and said the third.

Cangwei stood at the back with her arms folded and did not understand, for a long while, why it went on so long.

Then she began counting, and stopped counting, and understood.

***

”First year we have done it here,” said the voice beside her.

The speaker was very old and came up to somewhere below Cangwei’s ribs, and had a beard braided in a way that meant something Cangwei did not know how to read, and the eyes in the granite face were molten bronze and entirely dry.

”Hilgrund,” she said. ”I hold this place while it is being opened. You are the dragon.”

”I am.”

”First one up the track in a good while.”

”Your people have come a long way back,” Cangwei said.

”We have come home.” Hilgrund did not take her eyes off the hall. ”It is not the same word, and I would rather you used the right one, since you will be standing in my hall some days yet.”

”You left this mountain at the Sundering.”

”We shut this mountain at the Sundering.” The old dwarf’s chin came up a fraction. ”There is a difference in it, and the difference is the whole of my people. You abandon a thing you are finished with. You shut a thing you are coming back to.”

Cangwei had nothing to put against that.

”Nine chimneys are smoking,” she said instead, ”and you have told me nobody works for five days.”

”The fires are not work.”

”They are lit.”

”They have been lit since before that mountain out there had a name on it.” Hilgrund said it as another woman might have given the time. ”We carried them down when we shut the doors. Every holding, every clan, all the way to the Mid Realm, and we kept them there, and not one of us could have told you what we were keeping them for. Other peoples had a word for that. It was not a generous word.”

Hilgrund nodded at the hall without turning her head.

”And here we are standing in it.”

”You have a great many dead for one holding,” Cangwei said.

”We do.”

”They are not from this holding. It has been open six months.”

Hilgrund watched the hall and did not answer for long enough that Cangwei understood she was not going to.

”We had names before,” the old dwarf said eventually. ”Every people has names. We did not have these names. Last year we came into them.” Another dwarf stood, said a name, sat. ”And that is the whole of what I am able to tell you about it, so do not spend the afternoon working out how to ask me again.”

”I was not going to ask you again.”

”You were going to ask me differently,” Hilgrund said. ”It is the same thing, and it takes longer.”

***

Cangwei went back up to the room and sat with that for a while, because it was the first interesting thing anybody in the mountain had said to her.

A people who had lost kin and not known it. Who had found out inside the year. Who had been told enough to put names to it and were bound about the rest tightly enough that a clan-holder would rather sit in silence in front of a guest than shade the truth by one word.

She could have worked at it. There were four or five ways in, and she could see all of them from where she was sitting, and every one of them ended with her having taken something from a people who had given her bread.

She let it go.

That was a newer thing for her than she would have liked to admit, and she noticed herself doing it, and did not examine it any further.

***

Cangwei went back to her room and sat on the edge of the bed and put her hands flat on her knees.

There was a thing she was going to have to look at, and she had been not looking at it since the foot of the track.

What she had come here to do was buy something.

That was the shape of it, stripped. Seven days in the air, to a people she had never once thought about, in order to obtain from them the single item they alone in three realms could make, and she had not asked one question about them on the way, and she had been irritated — personally irritated — that their calendar was in the way of her errand.

Most races want dwarven goods. She had read that somewhere, as one reads a thing about a people one is not going to meet, and had thought it was a complaint about trade.

It was not a complaint about trade.

She sat with it for a long time and did not make it any better, because it was not the kind of thing that gets better, and because a fact does not care whether you would rather have been a different person when you acquired it.

Then she got up and went back down to the hall, and stood at the back, and stayed there for the rest of the second day and all of the third and all of the fourth.

Her house held two things about dwarves, and she had never once examined either of them.

The first was that they were plain. Solid, literal, good hands and nothing much behind the eyes — a people who made what they were asked to make and had never in the whole of their history wanted anything they could not set down on a bench and measure.

Cangwei watched a hall of them weep in front of one another for three days and not one of them was ashamed of it. Grown smiths with arms like anchor stock sat down and cried in the open and were handed water and were not otherwise remarked upon, and when it passed they stood up and said the next name. There was no dignity in the room anywhere, and nobody in it appeared to have noticed that there was supposed to be.

The second was that they were craftsmen and that craft is a kind of obedience — that you are given the drawing and you execute it well.

On the third evening she passed three of them in a side gallery who were not permitted to be working and were therefore not working. They had no tools out. They were arguing, loudly and with enormous pleasure, about a thing that did not exist, drawing it for one another in the air with their hands, and one of them kept undoing what the other two had built and putting it up again a different way, and none of them noticed a dragon go past.

Her people did not do that. Her people had never done that. Dragons refine what dragons already have, and are very good at it, and Cangwei had been calling that depth her whole life.

And she had thought them plain.

She did not say anything. It was not her rite, and they were not her dead.

She listened to every name.

***

On the fourth day a young dwarf stood up in the middle of the hall and said a name and then said, ”That was my mother’s mother, and I never met her, and I do not know what she looked like,” and sat down, and the hall let that stand for a while before anyone else got up.

Cangwei found that she had put her hand on the stone of the wall beside her.

She had names too. Her house had a hall and a rite and a day, and she had not stood in it for the naming since she could no longer say when, because there is a point at which the list gets long enough that a person begins finding reasons to be elsewhere, and she had been finding them for a very long time.

Nobody in this mountain had found a reason to be elsewhere.

+++

On the fifth day, in the last hour, Hilgrund came and stood beside her again.

”You have been here four days, and you have not asked me for anything.”

”You were busy.”

”We have been busy a long while.” Hilgrund’s mouth did something under the beard. ”Ask.”

So Cangwei asked, and she asked it plainly, because she had spent four days working out that plainly was the only register these people had any respect for.

”I need a Realm Seal. For the Lower Realm. I will pay whatever your people ask, and I will pay it in whatever form you name, and I am not able to tell you what it is for.”

Hilgrund did not react at all.

”No,” she said.

”I have not finished.”

”You have. That was the whole of it.” The old dwarf turned to face her. ”You want the one thing we make that nobody else can. You will not say why. And you would like it quickly, because you have been standing at the back of my hall for three days with your jaw set like a woman waiting for a door to open.”

”That is fair.”

”It is not fair; it is accurate,” Hilgrund said it without heat. ”And I would refuse you anyway, dragon, and not for any of those reasons, so you may as well have the real one.”

”Then I will have it.”

”I cannot issue a Seal. Neither can anyone in this mountain.” Hilgrund spread her hands. ”Vor Hakkun has been open for six months. We are a forge-holding and a school, and we are not properly either of them yet. A Seal is not a thing a holding decides. It goes to the clans, and the clans are in the Mid Realm, and the man who would have to put his name to it is my clan-brother.”

Cangwei felt the shape of it arrive.

”Thorgrund.”

The old dwarf let the name stand where it was and did not add anything to it, and then answered the question Cangwei had not got round to asking.

”I will write to him tomorrow, because tomorrow is a working day, and it will go slowly, and he will take his time over it, because he takes his time over everything that matters and he has never once been hurried by anybody, including me, and I have known him a long while.”

”How long?”

”Longer than you would like.”

***

Cangwei stood in a stone corridor and did the arithmetic and did not let any of it reach her face.

Send tomorrow. Reach the Mid Realm — weeks, at best, and the Mid Realm was closing its roads. Thorgrund considers it. Thorgrund asks what it is for, because of course he does, and receives the answer she would not say, and considers that too.

Months. Perhaps a great many months.

And the other road, which had no months in it anywhere.

A Seal took a tier or sometimes two. That was the whole price of a lawful descent; it was a known price, it was written down somewhere, and she had finished making her peace with it over the Mid Realm on the fourth day out. Going down without one did not take a tier. It took out of the core, and it took whatever it took, and the only people in three realms who could have told her how much were the people in this mountain, and she was never going to be able to ask them.

And under all of it, the fact she had been carrying since Zhū’kethara and had not turned over once, because turning it over in a stone corridor would not change it:

He is down there now.

”You are going to go anyway,” Hilgrund said.

Cangwei looked down at her.

”You have thought about it since I said no,” the old dwarf said, ”and you have not once asked me what it costs to go down with nothing in your hand, which means you already know, which means you worked it out before you ever came up my mountain. So you were never really here for a Seal. You were here to be told you could not have one, so that you could stop arguing with yourself about the other thing.”

There was no answer to that which was not a lie, so Cangwei gave her none.

”I have watched people do it,” Hilgrund said. ”Not dragons. My own. Down and never up again, and what comes back is not what went.” Her jaw moved. ”It is a bad way to lose somebody, and it is a worse way to lose yourself, and I am not going to tell you not to, because I have never once seen that work on anybody who had already decided.”

”I have not decided.”

”No,” Hilgrund agreed. ”You have only stopped considering the alternatives. That is different, and it takes longer, and it ends in the same place.”

***

Cangwei left before the light on the first working day of the year.

Down the track on foot, because it seemed the correct way to leave a mountain she had been given bread in, and she did not shift until she was well clear of the last chimney.

Behind her, in a hall that had emptied out overnight, dwarves were going back to work with five days of names said out loud for the first time and a great many more still to get through next year.

They had let her stand at the back of it. Nobody had asked her to leave. Nobody had asked her anything at all.

She went east and then south, toward a road she had eliminated twice and could not eliminate a third time, and somewhere behind her, in a mountain that had stood empty since the Sundering and did not any more, an old dwarf with molten-bronze eyes sat down and wrote to her clan-brother — and then, because a full and unconditional alliance means what it says and dwarves have never in their history had one to keep, wrote a second letter.

That one went to Zhū’kethara.

It would take a very long time to get there.