Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 570: Chapter 565: How Far It Has Gone

Location:Kaelport — The Arsenal Yard and the Tiller’s Row Bathhouse

Date/Time:2 Blazepeak 9943 AZI, Hammerday

Realm:Lower Realm

Four hundred and six.

Feng Lian said it out loud, walking the length of the rack, because he says everything out loud and had given up apologizing for it in the second year, and because four hundred and six was going to be the number he carried into the meeting and he wanted it in his mouth before anybody else put a different one there.

Twenty-four when he took the brief. Four hundred and six now.

It is the only figure on this continent that has gone the right way that fast and it was still not nine hundred, and he had said nine hundred by spring in Ashwhisper, in a room with Li Shenwei in it, and had said it as a target rather than a promise, and had known even while he was saying it that a target said out loud in front of Shenwei becomes a promise by Emberrise and a failure by Blazepeak, and here was Blazepeak.

He went down the rack and touched every twelfth one, which is a habit and not an inspection.

The lances are single-use. That is the whole of the arithmetic, and nobody outside ordnance ever holds it properly in their head: you do not have four hundred and six lances, you have four hundred and six shots, and after the day on which you use them you have an empty rack and a great many crews with nothing in their hands. A siege lance is not a weapon. It is a thing you spend.

”Peng.”

”Four hundred and six,” said Peng Deshi from the far end, who has worked with him for four years and has stopped waiting to be asked.

”Against what?”

”Against a Praetorian, nineteen.” He came down the rack. ”Against whatever is at Ardh, I cannot tell you, because nobody will tell me what is at Ardh. I have asked three times in three months, and what I am given is that it is the largest dead field on the continent and that ordnance is not the division that needs to know.”

”Ordnance is not the division that needs to know.”

”Then why am I building lances?”

”Because whatever it is at Ardh is not the only thing that is ever going to stand in front of this corps, and because the gap has not moved.” Feng Lian reached the end and turned round. ”Bolt stops at Mid Inferno-tempered. Lance kills anything and is gone. Between them, nothing at all, and everything above that line on this continent walks about in it as if it owned the place, which it does.”

”The gap is a ten-year problem.”

”The gap is my problem, and it was given to me in a room in Voidmarch with my name said out loud, and I am not going to be the man caught with an empty rack and no answer because the current trouble happened to be the wrong shape.” He put his hand on the rail. ”And because if I stop building, I will not get the crews back. You can rebuild a rack in a season. You cannot rebuild four hundred people who know what to do with it.”

Li Shenwei came down the yard at the fourth bell with a drawing.

He always has a drawing. Four years and Feng Lian had never once seen him arrive at that door without one, and he had stopped finding it annoying somewhere in the second year and had started finding it annoying again this spring for reasons he had not examined.

”The binding,” Shenwei said, and put it on the rack between them.

Feng Lian looked at it. It was beautiful. That is the trouble with Shenwei and always has been — he does not bring bad work; he has never in four years brought one piece of bad work, and a man cannot simply say no to a thing that is correct.

”How long to cut one.”

”Nine days.”

”How long to cut four hundred.”

”That is not the question.”

”It is the only question on this yard.” Feng Lian put his hand flat on the drawing, which he knew Shenwei disliked, and did it anyway. ”You have taken a containment that fails one time in nine and made it fail one time in forty, and it is genuinely better, and it takes nine days, and I have six men who can cut a formation that fine, and they are the same six men cutting the firing seat, which fails one time in sixty and takes an afternoon.”

”So the lance is worse than it could be.”

”The lance is worse than it could be and there are four hundred and six of them.” He took his hand off. ”That is the whole of my job, Shenwei. You build the right thing. I build enough of the adequate thing that it does not matter which one we have when it starts.”

Shenwei stood there with the yard going on around him.

”One in forty,” he said, ”is eleven fewer crews.”

And that is why the argument never ends and never will, and why Feng Lian takes the drawings and files them and has a shelf of them going back four years, and why he had put in for Shenwei to have two men of his own in Cinderfall and had got it, and had not said that it came out of his own establishment.

”Leave it with me.”

”You will file it.”

”I will file it,” said Feng Lian, ”and when the eleventh division opens its door there will be a shelf waiting for it, and every single thing on that shelf will be right, and they will not have to think of one item of it themselves. That is not nothing, and I am not going to pretend it is nothing to make you feel worse.”

He took that better than Feng Lian expected, which he usually does, which is the other reason the argument never ends.

***

The meeting was about baths.

He had known that going in and had spent the walk being irritated about it in a way he recognized as unproductive, because ordnance does not build baths and he had said so in three separate meetings and had been correct every time and had lost every time, which is what happens when you are correct about the wrong question.

Nine bathhouses. That was the number in Ashwhisper, when they built the first four and then the next five, and every one of them had gone up because the medicinal stock and the herb farms had got ahead of what anybody could use and somebody had pointed out that a hot mineral bath and a course of the right dried leaf will do more for a district’s working days than anything else the corps can put in a wagon.

They were right. That was the difficulty. The baths work.

”Tiller’s Row,” said Bai Shu, who had the sheet. ”Eleven months open. Sick days in that district down by a figure I have stopped quoting out loud because nobody believes it and then they think I have made the rest up.”

”I will believe it.”

”Thirty-one in a hundred.”

Feng Lian wrote it down, which he does when a number is going to matter later.

”And the queue?”

”That is why we are here.”

***

They went out to Tiller’s Row in the afternoon and Feng Lian counted on the way in, because he counts.

Seventy-one people on the bench and along the wall and sitting in the road with their backs to the stone. The bathhouse takes twenty-two at a time and runs four cycles, and there had been seventy-one waiting at the second bell, and he wrote that down as well.

Eleven old men on the bench who had not been in the water since Emberrise and were there for the bench, which was the joke on that ground and had stopped being a joke about a month ago when somebody worked out that those eleven men had been in eleven separate houses being unwell and were now in one place being cheerful, and that this was not a smaller thing than the water.

And then the rest.

Feng Lian walked the queue and did the thing he does, which is to ask people what they paid for something. It is the only question he has ever needed. You cannot get a straight answer out of anybody about how far they have come or how long it took, because people round and people boast and people are embarrassed, but ask a man what he gave for a night’s lodging on the road and he will tell you exactly, to the coin, because that part actually hurt.

He asked nineteen of them.

Then he went and sat on the end of the bench with the old men for a while and did the arithmetic with his eyes shut.

***

”How far,” said Bai Shu, afterward.

”Twelve days.”

Bai Shu stopped walking.

”There is a man in that queue who came twelve days,” said Feng Lian. ”Not twelve days from a village we have a road to. Twelve days from the far side of the Kessig watershed, where we have never been, where nobody has ever seen a corps uniform, and he did not come on a rumor. He came because his wife’s brother came last year and went home walking.”

”Twelve days is—”

”Twelve days is further than our despatch riders go.” He had the sheet out and was writing on it as he walked, which he can do. ”Our post runs eight days out, and then it hands off, and it hands off because past eight days we do not have relay houses and past eight days the roads are not ours. Word about that bathhouse has gone four days further than anything the corps has ever deliberately sent, and it has gone there by itself, and it did not cost us one coin or one rider.” 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

”That is good.”

”That is enormous, and it is also the problem, and I would like about an hour before anybody decides which one it is.”

***

The problem is a road.

Feng Lian had it laid out on the arsenal table by the sixth bell with four things on it and nothing else, because he had learned in the second year that if you put six things in front of people they will discuss the two they understand.

The corps built roads to move ordnance. That is the only reason any of them exist. You cannot put a siege lance on a cart track and arrive with a siege lance; you arrive with a broken axle and eleven hundred weight of very expensive firewood, and so there are something over four hundred thousand paces of properly cut road out of Kaelport in three directions and more of it going in every month, and every finger’s width of it was justified on a sheet with ordnance written at the top.

A road works in both directions. Feng Lian had put that in a report in Cinderfall, and nobody had read past the second page.

What is on those roads now is people. Carts of people, walking parties of people, a woman with a child on a hip who has come three days because her mother’s neighbour said. The roads are doing exactly what roads do, and there is not one thing wrong with any of it, and the corps is feeding, watering, and sheltering a population it did not plan for, out of nine bathhouses it built for districts that are no longer the only districts using them.

”So we build more baths,” said Peng Deshi.

”With what?”

”With the herb farms, which are ahead. With the masons, who are—”

”The masons are on the school wall, and the school wall has a roof coming, and the roof is not costed.” Feng Lian put two fingers on the table. ”And every mason on the school wall is a mason not cutting road, and every length of road not cut is eleven hundred weight of lance that goes by river instead, and the river freezes in Frostforge.”

Nobody said anything.

”I am not arguing against the baths.” He said it flatly, because it needed to be on the record and because he had heard himself for the last ten minutes. ”I want that written. The baths are the best thing this corps has done, and they are the reason a man walked twelve days to us instead of away from us, and I would give them the whole arsenal if the arsenal were mine to give. What I am saying is that we have three things that all want the same four hundred masons, and the only reason we have not had to choose yet is that the fourth thing has not asked.”

”What fourth thing?”

”I do not know,” said Feng Lian. ”That is what frightens me about it.”

***

He wrote it up that evening, and it ran to two pages, which for him is long.

Page one was the arithmetic. Four hundred and six lances against twenty-four a year ago. Nine bathhouses at four cycles. Seventy-one in a queue at the second bell against a capacity of eighty-eight a day. Four hundred masons, three claims on them, and the road costed against the river in Frostforge.

Page two was the other thing, and he sat with it for a while before he put it down, because it was not ordnance and it was not his and he had a rule about staying inside his own brief that he had broken perhaps four times in four years.

He broke it.

Word about the bathhouse at Tiller’s Row has travelled twelve days from Kaelport, unassisted, in under a year. That is four days further than our own post reaches. I have confirmed it off nineteen people by asking what they paid on the road, which is the only question anybody answers honestly.

I would like somebody to think about what else has travelled twelve days.

We have not sent anything. We have not needed to. A district with a bathhouse in it talks about the bathhouse, and a district with a road through it talks about the road, and a district where a corps dug out a flood and took nothing talks about that for a generation. None of that is a despatch and none of it can be recalled, and none of it goes only where we would like it to go.

I do not know who is at the twelve-day mark. I know that we are not, and that something of ours is, and that it arrived before we did.

He read it back and did not soften it.

Then he added, at the bottom, because he is who he is:

Four hundred and six. Not nine hundred. I will have that conversation whenever you want it, and I would rather have it before spring than after.

***

The eleven old men were still on the bench when he went past at dusk, which they should not have been, because the bathhouse shuts at the ninth hour and the water goes cold.

He stopped.

One of them lifted a hand about two fingers’ width off his knee, which on a man of that age in that district is a greeting with a great deal in it, and Feng Lian gave him a nod back and did not go over, because he had nothing to say to him and had learned some years ago that going over when you have nothing to say is a thing you do for yourself.

Somebody was talking. He could not hear about what.

Twelve days, he thought, walking on.

It had cost them nine bathhouses and a quantity of dried leaf and a season of cut road, and it had bought a reputation that ran further than the corps could ride, in a country where nobody had ever once had a reason to say anything good about anybody in a uniform.

That is a very large asset, and Feng Lian had spent the whole afternoon failing to put a price on it, which almost never happens to him.

It is also the only asset he had ever held that could not be kept in a rack, counted, or defended.