Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 507: Chapter 502: The Nine Hundred

Location:Obsidian Academy — Qin’s private study

Date/Time:9 Frostforge, 9942 AZI

Realm:Lower Realm, Doha

The ward closed behind her in seven layers, one after another, and the last one sealed with a sound like a held breath letting go.

Old copper in the air. Under it the flat ozone smell of formations stacked too close together, the smell of a room built by somebody who did not trust doors. No windows. Shelves of sealed scrolls going up past the reach of the light. One formation lamp on the desk throwing steady amber over a surface that had not been clear of paper in four hundred years, or however long it had actually been. She had stopped guessing about Qin some time ago.

Two chairs.

Both occupied.

Heizan sat cross-legged in the second one with his bare feet tucked under him, iron-gray hair tied back with a strip of cloth that had been a bandage in some earlier life. What was left of his left hand rested on his knee. The casual mask sat on him the way other men wear armor.

Nobody had mentioned he would be here.

Four days of notes had gone up and down that mountain since she walked out of the portal. Times, durations, what she would bring, whether the Academy physicians could sit in. Not one line about a second man in the room.

So. A witness, or a second opinion, or a blade laid on the table where she could see it.

"Ashford," Heizan said. "You look terrible."

"I’ve been busy."

"So I hear. Repeatedly. At length."

Qin poured a second cup without being asked and set it on the far edge of the desk. Pale gray eyes. White-translucent hair catching the lamp, ink on both cuffs, the nose that had been broken twice by somebody who had not cared to set it properly either time.

"Sit," he said. "Before anything else, there is a thing you are owed, and I would rather hand it to you than have you find it in a ledger."

Jayde sat.

"Meiling Lushan."

She had not expected the name, and she did not let that show.

"I arrested her the day you went through," Qin said. "Aggravated assault, involuntary exposure to a lethal environment, two counts. It was a clean charge. More witnesses than I could have fitted in a hall, my own no-contact order in ink, and a criminal jurisdiction I had already fought the Temple for and won." He turned his cup a quarter turn. "Four months later they took her anyway. Custodial transfer. A clause on page seven, written by men who could not imagine a Temple that would need watching. I filed until there was nothing left to file. I lost every time."

"You lost on purpose."

"I did." He said it without any softening at all. "Every filing was a record. The overreach is the grounds. There is no path to removing them from this mountain that does not run through a documented abuse, and they would not hand me one unless there was something in the room worth taking."

"And she was the something."

"She was."

Heizan reached into a pocket, found nothing in it, and took his hand out again.

"She walked out in Temple white," Qin said. "Willingly. Head up. She told the corridor that her people take care of their own, and every student who heard it believed her, and I let them believe it because the alternative was explaining what I actually thought." He set the cup down. "Their ledger has her transferred to service elsewhere. No posting. No station. No name of a receiving house. I have had two people looking since Emberrise and there is no elsewhere that either of them can find."

Jayde sat with that.

She had spent a considerable amount of the fourth month underground composing what she was going to say to Meiling Lushan. She had refined it. She had a version for a courtyard and a version for a corridor and one very short version for the arena, and she had gone over all three in the dark while the pheromone barriers dried, and not one word of any of it applied to a girl who had been fed into something.

"I know what elsewhere is," she said.

Qin’s eyes came up.

"Then tell me."

"No." Jayde met him. "Not because I’m protecting you. Because I’d be spending somebody else’s life to do it, and that person is still alive and still where they are, and I’m not paying with them tonight."

"That is a hard answer."

"It’s the true one. Here’s the rest of it." She picked the cup up off the desk edge, finally, and held it without drinking. "I’m going to get her back."

Heizan’s head turned very slightly.

"She put you in a sealed dimension," Qin said.

"Yes."

"For a year."

"Yes."

Qin looked at her for a long moment, and whatever he was reading, he did not read it out loud.

"Then start at the beginning," he said, "because I have four hundred and six written statements out there and not one of them starts anywhere near it."

***

She talked until her voice went thin, and then Qin poured water instead of tea and she kept going.

They wanted the Harrowing, and they wanted all of it, and she had decided on the walk up the mountain to give it to them straight. The Mid Ring. The three days she could not stand. The dead zone, and what lived in it, and what it did to a compass and a formation and a person.

Qin did not let her run.

"Why did they follow you?"

"They didn’t. Not at first." Jayde kept it level. "There was nobody in that containment below Grade Four, and most of them were Five. Sixteen years on this mountain. Twelve years further along than me, in a place I was not on the roster for and had not been selected to enter." She let that sit a moment. "The ones among them who should have taken hold of it were spread across six positions with no way to reach each other and no reason to believe anybody was coming. I walked into a tunnel where a Grade Five told me to my face that a Grade Two girl did not belong in the Mid Ring."

Another beat.

"Then she followed my order anyway. So did the one behind her. Sixteen hundred of them, one at a time, and not one of them was ever asked to vote on it."

"That is not an answer."

"It’s the one I have. They followed me because the alternative was dying in an order I could predict and they could not, and because I happened to be right about the first three things I said out loud." She did not soften it. "Nobody handed me anything. There was nobody left to hand it. Every scrap of standing I had over your students I invented in a hole in the ground, and they let me keep it because it was working."

His hand stopped halfway to the pot.

"What did you feed them?"

"Charling brood, once we worked out which stage would not kill us. Four people found that out for the rest of us, and two of them did not survive finding it." She watched him not react. "It kept eighteen hundred people alive. It also broke about a third of them in a way I could not fix, because there is a difference between knowing a thing is edible and being the person who eats it."

"What was your worst day?"

"There were three inside one week." She did not look away. "A hundred and thirty-one. Then a hundred and fifty-six. Then a hundred and eighty-nine, and by the third one I had run out of things to change. Every adjustment I had was already spent. I stood in a corridor and watched a plan I built work exactly the way I designed it to work, and it was still a hundred and eighty-nine."

"And the last week?"

"Eight." Her voice did not move. "Everything we built worked. Eight was still eight."

Heizan had not moved in an hour.

She gave them the rest. The castes and what each one cost. The fabricator and what it could and could not make. The kill corridors. The shield walls. Ruifen stepping sideways into a buckling line with a siege lance she could not properly lift. Shenwei cutting anchor-stones under fire and saying that as long as he made them faster than the Charlings ate them they were winning, and being wrong about that for eleven days. Deng Hao standing a barrier up and down, up and down, alone, until his hands would not close. Feng Lian holding a lance level until forty meters, because a lance is one shot and there is no second one, and at fifty the shot goes wide, and at thirty you are already dead.

Zhong Huian throwing his first tempered technique of the entire war in the last hour of it, with his sleeves burning off his arms.

Sixty days for the last part.

Three hundred and five for everything before it.

***

"I have the hundred and ninety-seven," Qin said.

He said it into the pause, and it landed like a stone going into deep water.

"There is no record of anybody ever bringing a body out of that portal. Not in my ten thousand years and not in anything that came down to me from before them. The dead stay in and the living come out, and that is the arrangement. Every man who has sat in this chair made his peace with it, because there has never been another arrangement available to make peace with, and I made mine and then made it again every fifty years, which is a thing a man can do more times than you would think." His thumb moved once along the rim of the cup and stopped. "On the second day I had a hundred and ninety-seven alloy caskets standing in my forecourt with ash-snow settling on the lids, and families arriving from four provinces to open them, and no protocol in this Academy for any part of it. I invented one. It took eleven hours. It was the best eleven hours of work I have done in my life, and I did not know what I was doing for a single one of them.

"I cut the names on the fourth day. It is not the headmaster’s work. I have never once let anybody else do it."

Jayde took a folded sheaf out of her ring and set it on the desk.

Qin did not touch it.

"If that is a list of the dead, I have one." There was no unkindness in it. "Two and a half thousand went in against a roster I signed with my own hand. Fourteen hundred and three walked out and gave their names at the gate. The rest is subtraction. A clerk did it in an afternoon, and I have been carrying the result in my coat since before you came up this mountain."

"I know you have."

"Then what is this?"

"It isn’t who," Jayde said. "It’s how."

Qin’s hand stopped where it was.

"A hundred and ninety-seven entries. Every one of them has where they were standing, what they were doing when it happened, who watched it, and what it held." She kept her palm flat on the sheaf. "Not a name and a date. An account."

Nobody said anything.

Then Qin picked it up.

He read the first page with nothing on his face at all. Then the second. Then he stopped somewhere in the middle of the third and read one entry out loud, and his voice did not perform any part of it.

"Sun Yaowen. Grade Five, Baihe Province. Western shield wall, day three hundred and thirty-five. Stepped into the gap when the man beside him went down and held it eleven seconds until the line closed behind him. Killed by a soldier-caste strike to the throat." He stopped. "Witnessed by Hu Bing and four others. The line held. Nothing came through that section for the rest of the day."

He looked up.

"There is a sentence at the end of every one of these."

"There is."

"Saying what it was for."

"Saying what it was for," Jayde said. "Some of them are small. One of them says bought about nine seconds, and we used them. I wrote that one down exactly the way the witness said it, because it was true and because nine seconds was what we needed."

Qin turned a page and did not read it.

"It took four hundred people nine days," she said. "It is wrong in places. Some entries have three witnesses who do not agree with each other, and I put all three versions down rather than pick one. I would rather hand you something with an argument in it than something tidy."

"And the nine hundred?"

Jayde did not soften it.

"Nothing. You already have their names. You have always had their names — that was never the part that was missing. There is nothing to write beside any of them, and there never will be, because nobody was standing there to see it. Nine hundred people did something in the dark, and it went nowhere, and no one will ever know what it was."

Qin set the sheaf down very carefully.

"The wall is cut for names," he said. "That is all it has ever been. Six characters and a province and the year, because that is all anybody has ever had to put on it." He pressed his palm flat against the pages. "There is not a tenth of the room on that wall for what is written here."

"Then build a longer wall."

"Yes." He did not lift his hand. "Yes. I imagine we shall."

***

The cold came into the room slowly, and she could not have said what changed to let it in.

The rest of it went on the desk between them, because he was going to ask and because he had earned it twice over in the last hour. The ecology. The rings, the castes, the brood mechanics. Why the culls worked, in mechanical terms. Population dynamics. A colony that could not sustain its own soldier caste past a density threshold, and a fifty-year interval reverse-engineered from that threshold by somebody with instruments, a very long time ago, and then handed down until the instruments were forgotten and only the interval was left.

Qin listened to all of it without one interruption.

Then he reached for the pot and his hand was not steady, and he saw that it was not steady, and he set the pot down and left it where it stood.

"I fought at the gate," he said.

"I know."

"I have held this chair since it shut. Ten thousand years, and I do not know what number I am. Not the tenth. Not the hundredth. There is no list, and I have looked." The pale eyes had gone somewhere she had not seen them go. "This place was old before the first invasion, and it was old before the one before that. The histories say it was raised in the age when Pyratheon still walked this world, and that he set it here deliberately, over something that was already ancient when he put stone on top of it."

Jayde said nothing at all.

"I have what came down to me from the ones before. Four sets of papers." He let that number sit where it fell. "Four. Out of all of it. Three of them are fragments, and the fourth is a column of dates with nothing written against a single one." He did not move. "Whoever raised this mountain knew exactly what it was for. That is not a guess. You do not build a thing that precise without understanding it. The understanding existed, and it did not survive the wars, and what reached me was the practice with the reason cut out of it.

"So we have been running a machine by superstition. Sending children into it every fifty years because the ones before us sent children into it and the seal held afterward, so it must have been the children that did it."

"It was the children," Jayde said. "That part isn’t superstition. The mechanism is real."

"That is not the comfort you think it is."

"It isn’t a comfort. It’s a correction, and it’s a better one than you’re hearing." She held his eyes. "You didn’t lose something that never existed. Somebody knew. It was written down once and then it was burned or buried or forgotten in a war, and the difference matters, because a thing that was known once can be known again. I have most of it. In three weeks I’ll have the rest with instruments behind it.

"If it had survived, you would have been running these culls with survey teams and measuring equipment for ten thousand years, and you would still have lost people, because it is a dangerous job. You would not have lost them by the thousand."

She was doing the arithmetic before she decided to. Ten thousand years divided by fifty. Then that answer, two and a half thousand times over.

Then the second thought arrived underneath it, which was that ten thousand years was only the part of it he had personally signed for.

She killed both. There was no version of either number that was any use to anybody in this room.

Qin had gone very still, and she understood that he had done that arithmetic a great deal more than once and had never needed a year underground to do it.

***

Heizan set his bare feet on the floor.

Slowly. Not the slowness of age.

"Now the other conversation," he said.

Jayde had known it was coming since the second hour.

"Go ahead."

"Four hundred and six statements. I have read all of them." He did not look at the desk. "They do not read like students writing about a student. Half of them use words I had to have explained to me. A woman out of Baihe, sixteen years on this mountain, describes herself as belonging to a thing called Third Company as though that were an ordinary way to speak about oneself, and then writes that you corrected the geometry on a firing pocket by eye, in about four seconds, while riding. Another says you told him his supply rotation would fail in eleven days and it failed in twelve, and that you were not pleased about the extra day, because it meant your model was wrong."

"I had good people."

"You had Grade Fives." His voice did not rise at all. "Every one of them older than you and further along than you and carrying more essence than you, and not one of them able to tell me now why they did what you said." He let that sit. "That is not talent. Talent is loud, and it is uneven, and it makes new mistakes. What is in those statements is somebody making old mistakes and correcting them before anyone else has seen them, which means the mistakes were made somewhere else, a long time ago, and paid for.

"I stood at the gate with him. I saw the ones who held the front in that war." He let that sit exactly as long as it needed to. "There is no word on this world for what those men were. We do not teach it. We do not write it down. When the war ended, we went back to producing cultivators and let the thing die with the ones who had it, and I have not seen it in a living person since."

He did not move at all.

"I am looking at it now."

Nobody said anything for a while.

"So my question is not how you did it," Heizan said. "My question is who I am sitting across from. Because I have been calling you a student for the better part of four years."

He turned his ruined hand over on his knee, palm up, and left it there.

"About an hour ago I stopped."

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