Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 565: Chapter 560: Past the Door

Location:The Settlement, Western Holdings

Date/Time:11 Ashbloom 9943 AZI, Grindday

Realm:Upper Realm

The settlement on a Grindday sounds like a thing being built.

Eight hundred thousand people had come across with nothing four years ago and had spent the whole of that time turning a stretch of western holding into somewhere, badly at first and then well, and the noise of it now was hammers and a saw and somebody’s goats and two men at the end of the row disagreeing about a bracket in the friendliest possible way.

The two men had been disagreeing about that bracket since Temperday. Neither of them had put it up. Neither of them was going to. Lyria had walked past it three mornings running and had begun, privately, to look forward to it.

She walked up the middle of the row most mornings and was greeted by roughly one person in four, which was about right, and had taken her three years to achieve.

”Is it going to rain?”

”I do not know.”

”Right you are,” said the man, entirely satisfied, and went back under his cart.

That happened perhaps twice a week, and she had stopped explaining. In four years the gift had given her a battle, a collapse, two deaths and a thing under a mountain, and had never once told her anything whatsoever about the weather, and she had said so publicly on eleven occasions and had been comprehensively ignored on all of them. The settlement had decided she was being modest. There is no argument against people deciding you are being modest.

Asha was at the long trestle with her sleeves rolled, arguing with a list.

”Four hundred and sixty,” she said, without looking up. ”Same as last week. Same as the week before. I have been through it twice.”

”Then it is four hundred and sixty.”

”It is, because eleven came off and eleven went on, and those are not the same eleven, and nobody has written down why.” She turned the page. ”I hate this.”

”You do not.”

”I hate this specific page.”

Tharek arrived at the other end of the trestle while she was saying it, which is a thing Tharek does — he does not approach anybody; he simply turns out to have been standing there — and put a small wrapped object down on the boards at a distance he had clearly measured.

Eight weeks ago Asha had given him the Kaeth’ara in a wood north of the city, before first light, and what that had bought him was the right to try. Nothing else. He had brought her five things since and she had accepted one, which is permission to keep offering, and he had gone away that evening looking like a man handed a realm.

”It is a weight,” he said, to a point somewhere above Lyria’s head.

”For what?”

”For the page. So that it does not turn while you are counting.”

Asha looked at the wrapped thing for a while.

”That is four,” she said.

”It is five.”

”It is four that I am counting.”

”Then it is four,” Tharek agreed peaceably, and went away, and got about nine paces before his brother said something to him from the roofline that Lyria did not catch, and that made Tharek stop walking entirely.

Asha unwrapped the weight after he had gone, checked that nobody was looking, and put it on the page.

”He is going to do that until one of you dies,” said Mira, from the other side of the trestle, where she had been the entire time.

”Probably.”

”Zharek brought me a rock.”

”Zharek brought you a geode,” said Asha, not looking up, ”and you have had it in your coat for nine days, and I have heard you tell three separate people it is a rock.”

Mira considered this with the composure of a woman who is nineteen years old and elder by about a minute and has never once let her sister forget either fact, and who had frozen the third cistern solid from Voidmarch through Ashwhisper purely to find out whether she could hold it and had then been unable to let go of it without taking the stonework with her.

”It is a rock,” she said, ”that is very good,” and went off along the row.

Lyria watched her go, which took slightly longer than it needed to.

***

The shape had been standing in the road since Frostforge.

It is not a picture. It has never been a picture, and every time Lyria has tried to explain the gift to anybody she has said the same thing and has only once been understood: you know when a room has somebody in it, before you have looked. You come through a door, and the air in there is a different air and you have not seen one thing, and you already know.

That, and not now. A thing that has not happened, standing in the room, being somebody.

This one was a sorting.

Children, being put into two groups, and no cruelty anywhere in it — that was the part that had kept her out of it for four months. There was no violence in the shape at all. There was procedure. The particular flat orderliness of a thing being done by people who have done it before and will do it again next quarter.

And a door at the end of it, and the sorted going through.

She had reported that much to Ren’s people in Voidmarch, in the plainest words she had, and had watched a room of extremely competent demons try to build a fact out of it and fail, because nobody can act on somewhere, some children, an arrangement, and she had not blamed them and had gone home and had been quietly, enormously relieved.

Four separate times since, she had come up to the door and not looked past it.

***

Voresh found her in the old orchard at the tenth hour, which is where she goes.

He did not ask what was wrong, because after four years he does not have to. He put his shoulder against a tree and folded his arms and waited, copper eyes on the middle distance, and the five leaves of his Vor’kesh sat along his forearm doing nothing in particular, with the sixth still budding at the end of them, which after eight weeks Lyria had still not got used to.

”I am going to look past it.”

”Mm.”

”That is all you have?”

”I have a great deal. I have had a great deal since Voidmarch.” He did not move. ”You have been walking round that thing for four months, and you were going to arrive here, or you were not, and I have watched what happens when somebody helps you arrive.”

Lyria let that sit, because it was fair.

”You came up to it four times and walked away four times,” he said, ”and the reason you gave the demons was not the reason.”

”You know the reason.”

”I want it said in a garden instead of carried around.”

She looked at the trees for a bit.

”Because the day I look at a thing on purpose, I stop being a girl who gets told things and start being a girl who can be asked. And there is no coming back from that. You ask a Prophetess a question once and you have an instrument, and an instrument gets used — by people who are right, and then by people who are nearly right, and then by people who only need to be right this once.”

”The last one they asked.”

”Is a thousand years dead. They asked her for forty years and not once in those forty years did anybody ask her what she thought. They asked her what was going to happen, and she told them, and they did what they were going to do anyway, and it killed her a very long time before she died.” Lyria’s hands had gone together in front of her. ”And my great-grandmother had a necklace made. Eighty-seven years ago, by a mastersmith, to a commission, and she wore it every day until she died, and what it was built to do was stop her hearing any of it.”

Voresh’s head came round about a finger’s width.

”You have not said that before.”

”No.” She looked at him. ”My family has had this before, and what my family did about it was pay a man to take it away, and nobody in that house has ever said her name to me without looking at the floor first, and nobody has ever once said she was wrong.”

Nothing from the tree.

”So no, I have not looked past the door. I have had four months of not looking past the door, and I have been very pleased with myself about it.”

”And today?”

”Asha is four hundred and sixty.”

Voresh turned his head properly.

”Eleven came off that list, and eleven went on, and nobody wrote down why, and she has counted it every week since Cinderfall because she does not trust a number she has not counted herself, and I stood there this morning and thought: somebody is counting somewhere else.” Lyria’s voice did not change at all. ”The sorting is a quarter, Voresh. It is quarterly. That is the flat, orderly thing I have been feeling for four months and declining to name. Somebody has a number and a date, and they are short.”

***

Looking is not the same as being shown, and she had forgotten how much worse it is.

She sat down between two trees because standing was not going to be available, and put her back against one of them, and Voresh went down on his heels in front of her with his forearms on his knees and his hands loose — close enough to catch and not close enough to touch.

”Do not pull me out.”

”I will pull you out.”

”Voresh.”

”I will pull you out when I decide to and not when you tell me to, and you knew that before you sat down, and you sat down anyway.” The copper did not move. ”Go.”

The rune on her forehead came up silver.

Down the slope three people stopped what they were doing at the same instant, and one of them put a hand on the shoulder of the man beside him and turned him around. At the end of the row the two men went on arguing about the bracket, because they were facing the other way, and neither of them ever found out.

So she went.

It is not like walking toward a thing. Nothing in it moves, and nothing in it is anywhere. What she did was the mental equivalent of leaning — putting her weight against a shape that had always been permitted to lean on her, and shifting, for the first time, which way the pressure ran.

Her weight went against the door.

And the door did not open, and did not resist, and did not do anything at all, because a door is a thing with a room behind it and this had no room behind it.

That was the first finding, and she had a moment to be astonished by it. There was no second place. No destination, no arrival, nothing continuing — the children go through, and the shape simply stops, and she had spent four months assuming the gift could not reach far enough and had been wrong about the reason.

It does not continue because there is nothing there to continue into.

They are not being taken somewhere.

They are being spent.

The second finding came up under the first with the flat orderliness she had been feeling all along, and from the inside of it rather than beside it she could feel the whole apparatus working — the regularity, the counting, the being-short-and-making-it-up, the entire clerkly rhythm of somebody meeting an obligation on a schedule.

Somebody is paying.

And the third came last, and it was not a shape, and it was the reason she ended up on the ground.

Something is being paid to.

It had no size. That was what broke her grip — she has held the shape of an army, and the shape of a mountain, and the shape of her own sister four miles into the trees at the fifth hour with her boots off and her feet flat on the ground, and she held all three of those and did not let go of one. This had no edge anywhere on it. It was not interested in her. It was not interested in the children either, and the children were not children to it in any sense she could find.

It was simply owed.

***

Lyria came back about nine feet from where she had gone in, on her side, with grass in her mouth and Voresh’s hand flat between her shoulder blades and no memory at all of having moved.

”There is no room,” she said, when she could.

”I have that.”

”You do not have—”

”I have all of it. You said the whole of it out loud, twice, and the second time was tidier.” Voresh got an arm under her and brought her up to sitting against the tree. ”They are being spent; it is quarterly, and whoever is doing it is behind.”

Lyria wiped her mouth and sat with that.

”I do not remember saying any of it.”

”No.”

”Was I upsetting?”

”You were extremely calm,” said Voresh, ”which was the upsetting part.”

***

Down the slope somebody had started the saw again, and the goats were making their opinion known, and four hundred and sixty adolescents with nothing to do were being counted, once a week, by a girl with a weight on her page.

”You will have to tell the demon king.”

”And he will believe me entirely, which is the problem.” Lyria pulled her knees up. ”A shape is not evidence. He cannot put men on the ground on it, and he cannot open a road on it, and he cannot walk into the Temple and announce that his Prophetess feels somebody is behind on a payment. He will believe me, and then he will have to explain to a great many careful people why he is acting on a feeling, and he will do it, because he is that, and it will cost him something and I will not be able to tell him how much in advance.”

”So?”

”So he needs one hard thing. One. A name, a place, a paper, a body, a number — something a person can put on a table. And then the shape is worth exactly what it is worth, which is that it tells you where to point.”

Voresh stood, and put a hand down, and brought her off the ground with no ceremony whatsoever.

”Then that is the ask,” he said. ”Find it.”

”I do not have it.”

”No.”

”But whoever is doing this is behind.” Lyria got her balance and stayed where she was a moment, because the orchard was still deciding whether to hold still. ”Being behind makes people hurry. And I have never once in my life watched anybody hurry without leaving something on the floor.”