Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 550: Chapter 545: Five Hundred a Quarter

Location:The Temple seat, Upper Realm — and The Road out of Corran

Date/Time:3–9 Emberrise, 9943 AZI

Realm:Upper Realm, then Lower

The quarter closed on the second day of the year, and Sharlin was three hundred and eleven short.

She read the tally twice, which she did not need to do, and then sat with it in front of her while the light moved across the floor of a room that had been built to be looked at rather than worked in.

Five hundred a quarter. Not a target. Not a range. The number had been set for her and it had been raised once, without discussion, in the manner of a thing informing a person of a change in the weather, and there had never at any point been a version of the arrangement in which she got to say what she thought about it.

Three hundred and eleven short, and eleven weeks to make it up.

***

”You have been standing there a while,” she said.

Lanhua was at the end of the table, where she had been since the tally came in. Cream and pale gold, brown hair dressed simply, hands folded — a woman who had spent ten years down there arranging her face for a hall full of other people’s children and had got very good at it, and whom Sharlin had liked from the first week for the honest reason that she did not pretend to believe anything.

She had come up herself, which she had not been required to do and which Sharlin had noted. A woman whose pipeline has been shut by a no-contact order, whose promotion has been sitting on a shelf for a year, and who has forty-three recruits in two years to set against the loss of both her primary targets, does not send a written report if she can avoid it. She comes up the passages at her own cost, and stands in the room, and lets the room see her standing in it.

”The eastern provinces will not carry it,” Lanhua said.

”That is not your province.”

”No. It is on the table in front of you, and I have read it upside down, which is a thing I could not do before I went down there.” She did not look up. ”They carried it for four years, and they are hollowed. If we take three hundred out of them this quarter, there will be a magistrate somewhere writing to somebody, and then there will be an inspection, and then there will be a year of my time and yours.”

”I am aware of the eastern provinces.”

”Then I will say the other thing, which you already know and which nobody in this house has said out loud in eleven weeks.” She kept her eyes on the folder. ”We had a source that solved this permanently. Eight hundred thousand people that no kingdom claimed and no house protected, and nobody was ever going to come looking for. It was signed. It was lawful. It was going to run for a generation.”

”And it walked into a hole in the eastern Mid Realm.”

”That is what the ground says,” Lanhua answered.

Sharlin looked at the far wall for a while.

The reports had been very clear, and she had read every one of them herself. Wagons left on the eastern roads with the wheels still good. Cooking pots. Children’s toys, which was the detail that had convinced her, because nobody plants a child’s toy in a road as a lie. And the tracks — thousands of them, converging, all pointing the one way.

”How long has the watch been out there now?”

”Four years next month. Ours on the southern approach and the Heihuo on the northern, and they have not spoken to each other once in the whole of it, and both of them are still sitting there.” Lanhua turned a page. ”Nothing has come out. Nothing has gone in. The discharge is exactly what it has been for forty thousand years.”

”And nothing will come out,” Sharlin said, ”because a rift that eats an Apexblight does not give back eight hundred thousand villagers, and every one of them is gone, and I have spent two years keeping men in a field for the sake of the one thing that could still walk out of it.”

”You still believe that.”

”I have not moved off it in four years, and nothing has come along to move me.” Sharlin turned her hand over on the table. ”Ask me the useful question instead.”

”Why the Heihuo are still sitting there?”

”That one.”

Lanhua closed the folder, which she did when she was going to say something she had not been asked for.

”Because a silver queen is not a dragon,” she said. ”She is the thing every dragon on this world answers to, whether it wants to or not, and there has not been one in living memory. A sect that has her hand has every other sect by the throat and never has to say so out loud. They would sit in that field for a hundred years. They have nowhere else to be and no Seal to be anywhere with.”

”That is what they get.” Sharlin let it stand a moment. ”Now tell me what I get.”

”Eight hundred thousand people back.”

”That is the small one, and I want you to understand that I mean it.” She stood and went to the window. ”She walked a nation into a temporal fracture and out the other side of it, which not one living thing has ever done, and she did it without a map. Everything else about her is decoration.”

Lanhua waited.

”In six years there is going to be a door,” Sharlin said, ”and I have spent three centuries dressing a terrace for what comes through it, and I have no idea what is on the other side or how the ground lies once you are in. Nobody does. Nobody has for five hundred thousand years.” She put two fingers on the glass. ”And there is a woman on this world who can walk into a tear in reality and come out knowing where she is.”

”You do not want her for the villagers.”

”I will take the villagers, and I will be glad of them, and they will keep the quota fed for a generation.” Sharlin did not turn round. ”I want the navigator.”

***

And beside all of it, running through the reports for two years and never once resolving into anything she could put a hand on, the other thing.

Sharlin did not believe in coincidence, which is not the same as believing in conspiracy — she had watched enough centuries go past to know that most disasters are four unrelated things arriving in the same season. But she had also spent a very long time learning to notice when the same shape kept turning up in accounts that had no business touching each other, and there was a shape now, and it kept being a girl.

Not the queen. She had tried to make those two into one thing for a year, and they would not go. The queen was a rumor with a hole in the ground under it. The girl was in the Lower Realm, in an Academy, with a face and a name on a roll, and did nothing whatsoever that a girl of that age should be able to do.

And the demon realm had been shut for two years, and she had not had one line out of it in all that time, which was an irritation and had been an irritation for a while, and which she filed where she filed the weather.

The recruitment had been the correct first move. It had cost her nothing to try. Two people with knowledge nobody on this world had any business having, in an Academy she could not enter, doing things with water and metal and fever that her own physicians could not account for — and the sensible thing, the generous thing, was to offer them a place. Boarding. Books. Every resource the Temple had. Bring the knowledge inside, where it could be read properly.

They had not come.

Then Lanhua had lost the access, through a girl of her own who had done something stupid, and there had been a year of Academy lawyers and a no-contact order, and Sharlin had spent that year being patient, because she is extremely good at being patient and has had a great deal of practice.

She had now been patient for two years, and in that time the two of them had put clean water into four provinces and taken eight hundred thousand souls off her table.

”Lanhua.”

”Yes.”

”I want them.”

Lanhua’s hands did not move.

”The soft approach is finished,” Sharlin said. ”I have made it twice, and it has been refused twice, and I am not going to make it a third time, because a third refusal costs me something and the first two cost me nothing.” She turned her hand over on the table. ”I want the two of them in a room I own, before the passages close. I do not care by what method, and I do not want the method described to me. Bring me a plan by Sparkfall.”

”There is a Charter.”

”One hundred and forty-seven pages of it, and I have read every one of them twice,” Sharlin said. ”Find me the page.”

Lanhua inclined her head and did not say the thing they both knew, which was that she had just been handed it back. Not forgiveness. A second door, considerably narrower than the first, with the same room behind it.

***

The rest of it she did in an afternoon, because the rest of it was not important.

She approved the transfer of a disgraced Grade 1 out of Academy custody under Article 4 §15, which had taken eleven months of lawyering and which she had enjoyed enormously. She initialed the receiving instruction without reading it, because she had read it when it was drafted and there is no sense in reading a thing twice.

Meiling Lushan, of the Lushan who had disowned her. Nineteen. Hazel eyes. Grade 1 Elite by her own examination and nobody’s help, which was in the file and which Sharlin had noted at the time with something close to approval.

To the eastern facility. Breeding roll.

It is not a cruelty, and Sharlin would have been genuinely puzzled to hear it called one. The girl had destroyed an operation two years in the building and had done it out of temper. She was healthy, well bred, and had tested strong. There is a use for that, and it is not a wasteful one, and the alternative was the other column, and Sharlin had put her in the column where she would go on existing.

She signed it, and it went into the roll, and the roll went into the cabinet, and Meiling Lushan stopped being a name and became a quarterly figure that would help slightly with the following year.

***

The last thing was a report she had asked for and had nearly forgotten asking about.

Two pages, well made, which she noted, because a man who counts properly is worth four who believe properly, and she had spent a long time finding out how rare the first sort is.

Enrollment opened 1 Emberrise at the lower yard, Kaelport. No notice was issued in any district that I can find. Attendance at first light approx. 300, with the road full behind. By dark, 683 written down. Provision made for sixty.

”They have opened a school,” Lanhua said.

”Yes.”

”In four provinces where the testing has been running clean for three years.”

”Yes.”

Sharlin read the second page, which was the part that mattered, and which said that the offer included cultivation in every year of attendance, resourced, with a stated floor of peak Sparkforged at fifteen.

”Six hundred and eighty-three,” she said. ”Out of the testing, into a yard, in one morning.”

”They were not all tested children.”

”They will be the same children next year,” Sharlin said. ”That is what a testing program is. It is a list of which ones are worth taking, and somebody has just built a building around the list.”

She put the report down.

She was not angry, which she noticed and set aside. Anger is a young woman’s instrument and she had put it down a long time ago in favor of arithmetic, and the arithmetic said this: five hundred a quarter, forever; a bulk source that walked into a rift and did not come out; a selective source now with a building in front of it; patrons in three Mid Realm houses who had gone from asking about SoulBloom to inquiring about it; and six years, at the outside, to put a force together that could go into Shaolin and come out of it holding something.

Everything in that list was a supply problem, and every supply problem on this world came out of the same place, and the place was a rubbish heap with a girl standing in it.

”They are all dead in sixty years anyway,” Sharlin said, to nobody in particular.

”Ma’am?”

”The Lower Realm. All of it. Sixty years, seventy at the outside, and there will not be a wall left standing on it.” She stood and shook out her sleeve. ”I do not want the mines, I do not want the timber, and the noble houses may have every rare metal in it with my blessing. I want the children while there are still children, and I want those two women before the roads shut, and I want it understood in this house that nothing else down there is worth one hour of my attention.”

***

There was one more sheet, and Lanhua had put it at the bottom on purpose.

Persons doing Temple work in the four southern districts who are not on any roll and have never drawn a coin.

Sharlin read four lines of it and stopped.

”Why is this in front of me?”

”You asked for it in Flamefade.”

”I asked for it in Flamefade because in Flamefade I had eight hundred thousand people and a plan.” Sharlin pushed it back across the table without turning the page. ”Burn it or file it; I do not mind which. If there is a man in a village down there arranging flowers for nothing, he may go on arranging them. He is not going to be alive long enough to matter, and neither is the village.”

Lanhua picked it up.

The fourth line on the first page read VUKAN SERED. Corran district. Survivor, the Harrowing. Reads and writes. Has taken over the provisioning ledgers for four Temple houses since Cinderfall without being asked, and refused reimbursement twice in writing.

Lanhua filed it, because she filed everything, and thought no more about it for nine months.

***

Vukan Sered spent the first week of the year doing the Corran provisioning, which took four days, and it took four days because he did it properly.

Vukan was not quick with figures and had never pretended to be. What he was, was patient, and what he had was time, which is a thing a man discovers he owns after he has been somewhere that took everything else.

The mountain he did not think about. He had worked out, in the second year, that thinking about it did not help and that not thinking about it also did not help, and had settled on doing the ledgers instead, which helped.

On the third day he had to walk out to Anseth because the flour figure was wrong.

***

It was not wrong. That was the trouble.

The house at Anseth had received the same flour it had received every year and had used less of it, and Vukan sat in the back room with the steward and went through it twice before either of them said the obvious thing.

”Fewer people are eating here,” Vukan said.

”Fewer people are needing to.”

The steward was not defensive about it. He was a decent man who had been at Anseth for thirty years, and he said it the way a man reports weather.

”They put a bathhouse up in Ashwhisper,” he said. ”The Defense Force. It is a very good bathhouse. And the fever that takes the old ones in Emberrise every year has not taken them, because the fever comes off the water and the water is being done differently, and I could not tell you the mechanism and neither could anybody here.” He turned the ledger round. ”So the ones who came to us in Emberrise for the fever are not coming, because they have not got it.”

Vukan looked at the column.

”That is good,” he said.

”It is very good.”

”I mean it. That is good.”

”I know you do,” said the steward. ”That is why I did not want to be the one to tell you the rest of it.”

***

The rest of it was the road.

He walked back to Corran the long way, which he had not intended, and passed through three villages he had known for two years, and in the second one there was a priest going up the street who nobody was stopping.

That was all. Nobody was rude to him. Nobody turned away or went indoors or made a sign. Two women greeted him warmly, and one of them asked after his sister. He went the whole length of that street and was well liked, and nobody had anything for him.

No sick to be sat with. No dispute for him to hold the middle of. No child to be read. Nothing to bless that had not already been done properly by somebody with a certificate from a yard.

The man was a good priest. Vukan had known him for four years, and he was a genuinely good man, and he was walking up a street where he was very welcome and entirely unnecessary, and he did not appear to have noticed yet, and Vukan stood at the corner and watched him not notice.

***

He sat on the wall outside Corran for a long time that evening with the ledgers on his knees.

Vukan was not a stupid man and did not pretend to himself. He set it out the way he set out a provisioning column, because it was the only way he knew to hold two things at once.

The Defense Force had put clean water into four provinces, and the fever had stopped, and there were children in a yard at Kaelport who would be able to read, and every one of those things was good. Not defensible. Good. He had walked out of a mountain that had taken everything, and he was not going to stand in a road and argue that people should be dirtier and sicker and stupider so that his Temple should have more to do.

And the Temple was the shape of every life in that district and had been for longer than the district had a name, and it was going quiet, not because anybody had attacked it but because the thing it had been doing was being done better by somebody else, and once a thing is being done better nobody comes back to the old way out of loyalty. Nobody ever has.

Both of those were true. He had checked.

So the answer, he decided, sitting on a cold wall with his ledgers, was that both could be carried. He was not required to choose. Nobody had asked him to choose. He would go on doing the four houses and doing them well, and the Force would go on putting in bathhouses, and the villages would have both, and a man who genuinely wanted the best for the people in front of him could serve two things at once as long as neither of them asked him to lie.

He was quite pleased with that, and he wrote a note in the back of the Anseth ledger so he would not lose it.

He read it over once before he shut the book, and then sat for a while with his hand flat on the cover, because there had been a second thought behind the first one and he had not written that one down.

It was this. The people in those villages were not choosing between the Temple and the Force. They were not choosing at all. Nobody had put anything to them, and nobody was going to, and in nine years there would be a generation in four provinces who had never once needed a priest for anything and who would be perfectly friendly about it, and would say so, warmly, in the street, to a good man walking up it. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

And on the day somebody finally did put it to them, they would answer honestly, and the honest answer would be that they could not think what the Temple was for.

That was not an attack. There was nothing in it to be angry at. That was the part he could not get past — that he had gone looking for somebody to be angry with and there was nobody there.

Then he shut the ledger and went in to his supper.

He was right for nine months.