Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 579: Chapter 574: What Is Filling

Location:The Pocket Dimension — Ithyra’s room

Date/Time:24 Blazepeak 9943 AZI, Restday

Realm:None. That is the point of it.

Eight steps, and a pause at the wall, and eight steps back.

Ithyra had been listening to that for a very long time. Not the sound of him — there is no sound of him; the floor between them is a hand’s width of something that was never stone and does not carry — but the shape of him going up and down eight steps directly beneath her, which came up the bond the way weather comes into a room under a door.

He had been walking since she woke. That meant he had not slept either.

She counted her own six and stopped at the chain, as she had stopped at the chain rather more times than there were days in twenty thousand years, and stood there in the middle of a room with no window and no realm and nothing at all wrong with the air.

She is coming, Ithyra said.

I know. I felt you feel it.

It is not the Void Days.

No, said Renvyr. It is not.

***

That was the first thing, and it was not a small thing.

Sharlin keeps a pattern. She has kept it for three thousand years, which in that room is not long but is long enough to be a pattern: she comes on the first Void Day, and she comes when something has broken, and she does not otherwise come at all, because she is a woman with a great deal to do and a prisoner she did not put here. Ithyra was her father’s. So was Renvyr, and the floor between them, and the chain, and the six steps. Sharlin inherited this room the way other women inherit a house with a difficult tenant in it.

It was the twenty-fourth of Blazepeak. Nothing had broken that Ithyra could feel.

Ithyra felt her on the stairs before the footsteps, and stopped where she stood, because it was wrong.

The cold place moving through a warm one was still cold. But it was coming up those stairs fast, and under it was something Ithyra had felt off a great many people in twenty thousand years of being the wrong kind of prisoner, and never once off this one.

Appetite.

Not hunger. Appetite — the particular rising brightness of somebody on their way to tell you a thing they have been holding since yesterday and could not hold any longer.

Ithyra had time to think, quite clearly, oh no, and then the door opened.

***

”You look well,” Sharlin said.

”I look the same.”

”You do, rather.” She came in three steps and stopped, which is the distance she always stops at, and which Ithyra had long ago worked out was the distance at which a demoness on a six-step chain cannot reach. ”I have four hours. I have had four hours free perhaps a handful of times this year, and I have spent every one of them on something useful, and I am going to spend these here, because there is not one person on the other side of that door I can say this to.”

Sharlin did not sit down. She never sits down. Today she did not stand still either.

”The ambient is rising,” Sharlin said.

Ithyra said nothing.

”Everywhere. All three realms. Not a season, not weather, not an instrument fault, because it is not one instrument — it is every instrument that has ever been pointed at the ground, and a great many people who own none at all have noticed it this year and written to somebody.” She turned, and came back. ”The herbalists have it. The mine assessors have it. A man in the western provinces who breeds cattle wrote to a prefect to say his grass is coming up thick and he does not trust it.”

”That sounds like good news.”

”It is the first time in recorded history that the world has got richer,” said Sharlin, ”and I have spent my whole life watching it get poorer, and I know exactly what it means.”

***

Ithyra sat down on the edge of the bed, which is permitted, and which puts her lower than whoever is standing, and which she has been doing to people for a very long time.

”The door is closer.”

And there it was, and it came off her like heat off a stone at the end of a hot day.

”My arithmetic said ten years. I gave you that number in this room on the first Void Day, and I have thought about it every day since, and I have hated every one of those days, because ten years is a very long time to wait for a thing you have been waiting your whole life for.” Sharlin’s hands were not still at all. ”The arithmetic assumed a rate. Everything assumed a rate. A world that is filling is a world that reaches the line sooner — and I have had four people working on what the number is now, and they have given me three answers and the worst of the three is better than the one I have been living on.”

”How much better.”

”I am not going to say it out loud in case it is not true.” She laughed, once, and it was a sound Ithyra had never heard her make. ”Do you know how long it has been since I could not say a number out loud because I wanted it too much?”

”No.”

”Neither do I. That is the point.”

***

Ithyra took the whole of it, because that is what an empath does and there is no putting it down.

It came in as itself, which is the thing nobody understands about her kind. She did not learn that Sharlin was delighted; for as long as the woman stood three paces off, Ithyra was delighted, with the whole of her body, about a thing she would have opened her own wrists to prevent.

Twenty thousand years has not made her better at it. The only mercy in that hour was that Sharlin was too full of herself to look.

”You did not come about the readings,” Ithyra said.

***

”How many records of Shaolin are there in the world?”

Sharlin asked it the way people ask the first question of a story they have told themselves alone for a very long time, and Ithyra understood, with a lurch, that this was the actual reason for the visit. Not the readings. This.

”Thousands.”

”Thousands. Every realm. Going back further than anybody can read.” Sharlin’s eyes had gone very bright. ”Your own archive has more of them than mine does. Half a realm went through that place the last time it was in reach, and every one who came back was written down — the caps, the ages, what a man went in with and what he came out holding. And I have read all of it, and it does not contain one thing. Not one word about the place. Thousands of records and every single one is about the people. Who went. What they brought back. Nobody in the history of three worlds has ever written down what Shaolin is.”

Ithyra sat quite still.

”Somebody told you.”

”When I was a girl,” Sharlin said it almost fondly. ”I did not believe one word of it. I have spent the rest of my life finding out that they were not lying and did not know what they were holding.”

***

”It is a piece of heaven.”

Nothing in the room moved.

”It came off in a war nobody alive remembers. It broke; it did not fall all the way, and it has been going round ever since on whatever road a broken piece of heaven goes round on.” The words were coming faster. ”That is not a story. Four sources. Two of them predate the Sundering, and neither knew about the other.”

Ithyra wanted the rest of it. That was new, and she noticed it, and there was no time to be appalled by it.

”And the path closed,” said Sharlin. ”Ascension. The road up out of this world, which every cultivator on three realms climbs toward their whole life and not one has reached in longer than there are records for. It is simply shut — and it has been shut so long that we stopped treating it as a closed door and started treating it as a wall, and built the whole of what we think a person can become on the assumption that the wall was always there.”

Sharlin was walking again.

”Shaolin came off before it shut. Whatever did it — a piece of that went with the fragment, and it has been going round inside a place thousands of people have walked about in without knowing what they were standing on.” She turned. ”Every time it came in reach that anybody wrote down, every single person who went in was looking for a sword.”

***

”And you are going to take it.”

”I am going to take it, and I am going to open the path,” said Sharlin, ”and I am going to be standing in it when it opens, and I will be the only one alive who knows where the door is or how to shut it again.”

The room was extremely quiet.

And then she did a thing she had not done in three thousand years.

She came forward.

Not far. A single step, and then most of another, carried entirely by what was going on inside her — and she stopped somewhere inside two paces with her hand half up, as people do when a thing they have held alone finally has a face in front of it.

Ithyra sat absolutely still.

She could have reached her. Six steps of chain, two paces of floor, one throat — arithmetic done instantly by a body that had spent twenty thousand years doing nothing else.

And it would change nothing. There is a woman behind that woman, and a Temple behind her, and a man on a chain eight steps below this floor who would be alone in it afterward.

So Ithyra sat still and let the moment go past.

Sharlin never noticed she had moved.

That was the part Ithyra put away to be frightened about later. Not the step. The not noticing.

”You are going to ascend.”

”I am going to be a god,” said Sharlin, and the awful thing, the thing Ithyra would carry for a long time, was that she did not say it grandly. She said it as a woman says the name of a town she has booked passage to. ”And then every argument I have ever had ends. I will not have to hold a realm together with correspondence and arithmetic and things I do not enjoy doing. Your king will kneel because kneeling will be what there is. So will every creature that walks on this world. It will not be a war. It will not even be unpleasant. It will simply be the case.”

***

Ithyra thought about her son.

It took the space of one breath, with a chain on her ankle and a hot bright borrowed joy running through her that was not hers, and she thought about a boy she had hardly held, on his knees, because kneeling was what there was.

Then she put it away, because Sharlin was three paces off and an empath is not the only thing in the room who can read.

And in the same breath, underneath, she caught the other thing.

”There is a price,” Ithyra said.

Sharlin waved a hand. Actually waved a hand.

”There is an item. I find it, and I hand it over.” Sharlin waved the hand again. ”That is the whole of it, and it is a small clause, and I have been paying them a great deal more than that since before I had the office. My father dealt with them. I dealt with them at his elbow before I was anything, and I made my own arrangement in my own chambers five thousand years ago, and I knew every line of it, and this is the cheapest thing any of them have ever asked me for.”

”What does it do?”

”I have no idea.”

***

That was the moment, and Ithyra sat on the edge of a bed and did not let one thing show on her face.

Renvyr.

I have it. Eight steps had stopped entirely.

She does not know what it does. She has never asked. She has been told to bring something out of a piece of heaven by somebody whose purpose she cannot state, and she thinks that makes it a small clause.

Yes.

Twenty thousand years in this room putting people back together, Renvyr, and there is one shape I have never once been wrong about. Ithyra kept her hands flat on her knees. A person doing an errand for somebody whose reason she cannot say is not a partner. She is the instrument, and she is so certain she is the buyer that she has never once turned the sentence round.

And whoever set her on it, said Renvyr, very slowly, wants that path open.

Wants it open. Wants it opened by somebody else’s hands. Ithyra could not make her own breathing go quiet. And has sat through a father and a daughter to get there, Renvyr, twenty thousand years of somebody else’s family, waiting for the one of them arrogant enough to think the errand was the small part.

***

And then the other thing came up under it, out of a part of Ithyra that had not been used in a very long time, and it was worse.

Renvyr. The last opening.

I know. His voice had gone somewhere flat. I have been sitting with it since she said every time.

It did not shut. It came apart at the seams, and a very great deal came out of it that was never meant to be on the same side of a door as anything that dies, and our people spent millennia killing what came through and did not write one word of it down.

Not one word. Ithyra kept her hands flat on her knees. It is in mouths. It has only ever been in mouths — thousands of pages about men coming home with swords, and nothing at all about what came after, because the people who did that work were demons, and demons tell and do not write.

She does not know.

She cannot know. There is nothing for her to have read. And Ithyra sat on the edge of a bed and looked at a woman planning to stand in that doorway and hold it open on purpose. Renvyr, she thinks the danger is that somebody else gets there first.

***

”You have gone quiet,” said Sharlin.

”I am a healer,” said Ithyra. ”You have described a person about to change everything about herself, and you have not once mentioned what you will be afterward. That is the part of it I attend to. It is not very interesting to you.”

Every word true.

”It is not,” Sharlin agreed, pleasantly, and Ithyra felt the whole of her slide off it without resistance, because a woman who has decided she is going to be a god has stopped being curious about what she will be.

That was the third thing, and it frightened Ithyra more than the first two.

On the first Void Day Sharlin had come into this room, asked a question, and waited, with her whole weight on the answer. Today she had talked for an hour, asked nothing she did not already like an answer to, and slid off a true answer inside four seconds without noticing.

Her father had never once done that.

That was the measure Ithyra had, and nobody else on three worlds did. She had watched Symkyn work in rooms very like this one for far longer than his daughter had held the key, and the man had been a horror in every direction there is, and he had checked. Every time.

An arrogant woman is not more dangerous than a frightened one, in Ithyra’s long experience. Only differently. A frightened woman checks.

***

”A thing that is filling is not a thing that is opening,” Ithyra said.

Sharlin’s chin came up.

”They are two different shapes, and you have put them in the same sentence because you have been holding the same want since you were a girl and everything new goes into it.” Ithyra kept her voice exactly level, and every word of it was true, and she chose all of them. ”You have decided a change you did not predict means the thing you want is coming sooner. It is the oldest error there is. My people make it too.”

”Then what is it?”

”I do not know. That is the only true answer I have.” Ithyra spread her hands as far as they went. ”But nothing you have told me says a broken piece of heaven cares how full this world is. It has been going round since the war it broke off in. It did not slow down for the famine and it will not hurry for a good harvest.”

”Noted.”

”And one more, and then I have finished.” Ithyra kept her voice exactly where it had been. ”You have read thousands of records of people going in. How many have you read of the last time it left?”

Sharlin stopped.

”Nobody writes down a door closing.”

”No,” said Ithyra. ”Nobody does.”

***

Ithyra watched her take it, and watched it fail.

It did not land as a correction. Sharlin turned it over with the pleased, unhurried care of a woman handed a second present, and Ithyra felt the exact moment the brightness stopped dimming and started to go somewhere else.

”Then the rate does not signify,” Sharlin said slowly.

”I said you do not know that it does.”

”No — this is better.” Sharlin had begun to walk again. ”If the world is not filling toward Shaolin, then the world is simply filling, and nothing on three realms fills on its own. Nothing gets better on its own. Somebody is doing it.”

Ithyra said nothing at all, because there was nothing true to say that did not point somewhere.

”Something has been putting a world back together for about a year, and it is working, and I do not know what it is.” Sharlin turned round. ”I am going to be a god in a few years, and there is a thing on my own worlds I cannot account for. I would like it accounted for first.”

”You have told me there is a second prize.”

”You have told me there is a second problem,” said Sharlin, ”and I have not had one of those in about nine hundred years, and I find I have missed it.”

***

Sharlin stayed the four hours.

Talking, mostly — which Ithyra had learned was the actual transaction long before the woman did: a person with nobody to exult in front of will eventually find one and will not admit that is what they are doing. The western provinces. A registrar somewhere that Sharlin plainly did not know she was still thinking about. Nothing more about the door, because the door had been said in the first hour and the other three were the real visit.

By the third hour Ithyra’s hands had started.

An empath at three paces does not choose. A body that has been happy for three hours on somebody else’s account is as spent as one that has been frightened for three, and gets nothing at the end of it. Long ago she had learned, in the first century, to keep her hands under the edge of the blanket.

Below, the eight steps went on.

He knew. He always knows, and he had stopped offering to do anything about it a very long time ago, because there is nothing to do about it, and because she had asked him once to stop offering and he had never made her ask twice.

***

At the door Sharlin stopped and said what she says.

”Extra portions tonight.”

And then, with her hand on the frame, not turning round:

”If somebody is putting the world back, they are somewhere nobody has looked. That is how it always is.” A pause. ”Where would you look?”

Ithyra had perhaps two seconds.

Everything she knew went past at once — the Lower Realm, unthought-of since the Sundering; the Mid Realm, full and counted and watched; her own, shut and silent and safe for one more season.

Every direction was true. Only one of them was empty.

”Somewhere that has nothing worth taking,” she said. ”You do not build a thing in a place people are already looking at.”

Sharlin considered that.

”That is good,” she said, and went out, and the door did the thing it does.

***

The eight steps started again below.

Here, said Renvyr.

Here.

How bad.

Renvyr. We have to get it out.

The eight steps did not start again.

We have never had to get anything out, he said at last. Twenty thousand years, and the whole of the work has been keeping one thing in. I am not sure I know how to want the other.

It is not the same thing, and you know it is not. Ithyra had her hands pressed flat into the blanket. His name kills him. This kills everybody. She is going to put her hands on a piece of heaven with a shopping list from something she cannot describe, and there is not one person on three worlds who knows to stop her, and the only two who do are on chains eight steps apart.

He would need it before it opens.

He would need it years before it opens.

Then we have years, said Renvyr, and it was not comfort, and neither of them pretended it was. And no mouth, and no paper, and no visitor but her.

She is the only thing that leaves this room.

Yes, he said. I have been thinking about that since she said the word heaven.

Ithyra lay down on the bed she had lain down on since before there was a Temple and put her arm across her eyes, and did the thing she does afterward, every time, which is to take the whole of what she had said and lay it out and look at it and find it all true.

All of it was true.

Ithyra had taken a woman who was counting down to a door and had turned her, with three true sentences, toward a person. And she had told her that person would be somewhere poor and disregarded, which was the truest thing she said all afternoon and the only one she wished she had not.

And in a room in a mountain in a place with no realm, a demoness who had not seen grass in twenty thousand years lay in the dark and hoped — with everything she had, which was not much and was entirely unusable — that whoever was putting the world back was better at hiding than she had just been at pointing.