Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 515: Chapter 510: The Clock

Location:Emberholt Province — the Chamber, Nest Eleven

Date/Time:13 Voidmarch, 9942 AZI — Mid-Morning

Realm:Lower Realm

Yinxin stopped moving, and the nest woke up.

It took under two seconds. The low wet noise that had filled the chamber since they came out of the throat went up half a tone, and then it was not a noise at all — it was inside her skull, and it had not traveled to get there.

The scream hit.

Thousands at once, none of it sound, driving at the seam where her mind held itself shut with the exact quality she had spent four years hoping she had exaggerated in memory.

Memory had been generous.

What had changed was what it landed on. The Thunder Core Ward took the first of it, blue-white geometry locked around the foundation of her cultivation, cast on the rim before dawn and self-sustaining since. Over it the Earth Dragon Ward flexed and breathed and dispersed, and the pressure came through like weather through a hedge, and reached her, and hurt.

Blood ran out of her nose. She left it there.

Barriers ninety-four. Both wards at full.

At fifteen she had been at eighty-two inside the first minute.

"They’re on you," Eden said.

"They’re on me." Jayde set her feet at the front edge of the shelf. "Keep working."

***

The wall came apart.

Not the fastened core — that stayed exactly where it fed, wound around the pale rhythm, indifferent to everything in the room. But every loose length of it came away at once, out of the fissures and off the floor and down from under the roof, and started for the shelf.

They were slow. That much she had read right. A granary was not a glade, and what crossed the floor toward her was perhaps four hundred, along an approach the geometry gave them no way to widen.

"Four hundred moving," Eden said, off the handheld. "Twenty-eight hundred still rooted in the face, and not one of them coming. Reiko had it on the way in. They don’t want us."

"Emitter."

Eden hit it. The field came up across the front lip as a faint distortion two feet high, and the first rank went into it and stopped and slid and heaped.

"Four paces," Eden said. "That’s the whole arc it has."

"Then it buys me the middle."

Reiko took the left flank at plow-horse size and did the only thing anything in that chamber could do without essence. He swept. Shouldered a rank off the shelf lip into the drop, turned, did it again, and not one of them died of it.

[I am a broom,] he said.

You’re a broom holding an approach.

[I would like it recorded that I am aware of the difference.]

She shaped the Earth Dragon Strike with her right hand and put it into the thickest part of the mass, and it did what it had done in a glade four years ago. It did not cut them. It did not burn them. Four essences had been tried on this species by people considerably older than anyone standing on that shelf, and every one of them had slid off the same way rain slides off oiled canvas. The Strike went underneath all of that and took hold of what they had stolen, and drove it back down into the rock it had come out of.

Fifty dissolved. Then sixty more.

The pressure spiked, and she rode it.

Barriers ninety-one.

Second Strike. Third.

Zhi was a coil the color of a knife at Eden’s ankles, wings clamped flat. Ashborn held the throat mouth where she had put him, folded down, unmoving.

***

At ninety seconds they turned on their own dead.

Her stomach went over, because she had seen it exactly once before and had spent four years not thinking about it. The survivors broke off the advance, went down onto the ash and the severed lengths of their own, and fed — not on the matter. On what was left in it.

They began to swell.

"They’re taking the dead."

"I have it on thermal." Eden’s voice thinned. "Mass climbing. Individual density — Jayde, they’re doubling."

"They’ll do better than doubling. Last time it was three times inside seconds."

"Then why are you not—"

"Because last time there were eight hundred left to do it with." Jayde put the fourth Strike into the feeding cluster while it was stationary and stupid with it, and four hundred became rather fewer than two hundred. "There are a hundred and sixty. Twice a hundred and sixty is still a hundred and sixty."

What she did not say was the rest of it, which was in her chest and had been since the second Strike.

She had two left. Maybe three, if the third one came out of a place she would rather not open with a dragon queen standing motionless eight paces up a wall behind her. A hundred and sixty doubled worms would take both, and she would spend the remaining thirty-four minutes of the cast standing in front of Yinxin holding a sword that could not kill any of them.

Jayde was choosing which of the two to spend when the slab moved under her boots.

***

Ashborn came off the rope.

It was not a charge. He unfolded out of the throat mouth and went past her at the rolling gait she had ridden through twelve kilometers of tunnel in the dark, and he did not check with her, and he did not slow at the shelf lip.

"Ashborn—"

He went off the edge into a hundred and sixty of them.

Jayde was two full strides after him before she caught herself, and the catching cost her — the pressure got a hand into the gap and her vision went white at the edges and came back.

Barriers eighty-nine.

The blade-arms came up.

In the tunnel under the mountain they had snapped open through a Ravager’s neck in a movement too fast to follow. They came up slowly, and they came down slowly, and they took a doubled two-meter length of wet-slate gray off the chamber floor the way a farmhand lifts a sack.

He put it into the mandible plates and began to work it in.

The worm’s filaments came out on contact. She saw them go into the chitin at the joint of his forelimb, root, and find nothing there worth having — and then get eaten along with the rest of it.

"Eden."

"I see it."

"Tell me you are seeing what I am seeing."

"I am seeing," Eden said, "the only thing in this room they have no answer for."

***

He worked through them like a man through a woodpile.

Nothing they had was built for it. The shields that turned aside Inferno and Torrent and Terracore and Galebreath sat there doing exactly what they had done for ninety-nine centuries, which was nothing at all against a set of mandibles. They could not run, because they were slow. They could not root into him, because there was nothing in him the nest recognized as worth taking — Eden had said that on the rim at three hundred feet and written it down, and it had read as a curiosity then.

They swarmed him instead. Forty of them came up his forelimbs and over the thorax and onto the head plate, and covered the sensory pits, and he stood in the middle of it and kept eating, and the ones on him began to go into the plates as well because they had put themselves within reach.

Jayde stood on the lip with her hand open and the fifth Strike unshaped in it and did not use it, because there was nothing left down there to use it on that he was not already having.

The smell of the chamber changed. Under the wet and the warm came something scorched and mineral, the smell off a whetstone worked too hard, and it was coming off him.

"Doc."

"Working." Eden had gone down onto one knee with the handheld braced on her thigh. "Respiration up eleven percent. Thoracic temperature up two degrees and climbing on a curve, not a step. Mass unchanged, which is the part I want you to hold on to — he is not getting bigger. He is getting denser, and I have no instrument on this world that can tell me what that means."

"Give me the version you’d write down."

"He’s feeding." Eden did not look up. "Not clearing. Feeding. Those are different words, and I am choosing this one."

At two minutes forty, there were none.

***

The scream did not stop.

That was the part nobody had planned for, and she stood in it a while before she understood what she was hearing. The fastened mass on the northern wall had never joined the advance and was never going to. It had not shifted a fraction. But it was awake — all twenty-eight hundred of it, seven eighths of the nest, still rooted where it fed and still hungry — and the only living things in that chamber it could reach were the ones it could not eat.

The pressure settled at a level she could hold.

Jayde looked at the clock in the corner of her sight. Two minutes and forty seconds of engagement, against a weave that ran forty.

Then she looked at Ashborn, who had begun on the heap the emitter had piled at the shelf lip before it failed.

"Say the thing you’re not saying," she said.

Eden was quiet for a moment.

"He has not changed by any measure I have taken since the day the seal opened." Eden sat back on her heel. "Not one reading. Eleven months of sheets and the line is flat, and I filed it as a healthy adult at rest, and I was wrong, and I want to say out loud how wrong."

"Say it."

"Intake at maintenance. Exactly maintenance, every week, to the point where I stopped charting it because a number that never moves is not data." The handheld came round. "Jayde, he has been living inside the densest concentration of divine essence on this world. He sips it. That is the word for what those sheets show. He has been standing in a lake, taking it a mouthful at a time for eleven months and never once taken a second mouthful."

The cold that went through her had nothing to do with the temperature in that room.

"He could have taken it from me," she said.

"He could have taken it from you, from the wyrmlings, from that seedling, from the walls of the place — every scrap of what’s in there comes out of you, and he has had unrestricted access to all of it since the day he walked in." Eden’s voice had gone very flat. "A thing that size, hungry, in a garden full of it. And what he did instead was work out the smallest amount that would keep him upright and then take that, and only that, for eleven months, in a house where nobody was watching him eat."

Jayde watched a horse-sized mantis draw another severed length up off the slab. In eleven months she had never once thought to ask him whether he had enough.

"He’s not restraining an appetite," Eden said. "He’s rationing himself so as not to cost us anything. Those are not the same animal, and the second one has no business existing."

"And then I brought him down here."

"And then you brought him down here, to the one thing on Doha he can eat that does not come out of somebody’s pocket." Eden looked up at last. "Nobody owns them. Nobody pays for them. He held at the mouth of it for a hundred and sixty seconds because you told him to, and then he went, and he went for the only food in this world that is free."

"He asked me. That’s what that was — he came off the rope and never looked back at me once, and it is the first order he has ever broken."

"He gave you a hundred and sixty seconds first."

"Then that wasn’t disobedience," Jayde said. "That was patience."

She watched him work, and she made the note she was going to act on the moment they were up this shaft and behind wards, and she did not say it out loud, because it was not a thing to say to somebody’s back while they were eating.

She had been feeding everything in that garden for eleven months. She had never fed him.

***

At minute fourteen he finished the heap and went to the border.

Jayde watched him measure it — the line in the dust Reiko had found on the way in, the pace and a half of bare stone the mass had not crossed in ninety-nine centuries. He stopped exactly at it, as he had stopped at the Pavilion threshold, as he had checked his footing on the Academy stair every day for a month.

Then he stepped over.

"Ashborn."

He did not stop.

He went out across the chamber floor toward the fastened mass on the northern wall, and every instinct she had was up at once, because Yinxin was on that wall and the thing between Yinxin and this room was supposed to be her.

The voice in her head was not hers.

He is not going to her, Takara said, thin through three hundred feet of rock. Ask the doctor his heading.

"Eden."

"Ten degrees off her. He’s going to the mass." A beat. "He is going to the mass, Jayde."

Ashborn reached the outer margin of the braid where it fastened into the rock, three paces clear of a woman standing with her hands flat against the pale rhythm and her eyes shut and no capacity whatever to know he was there.

He began at the edge and worked inward.

Nothing reacted. Not the braid, which had no way to. Not Yinxin, who could not. The scream in Jayde’s skull did not change by a fraction, and that was the worst detail in the whole of it — twenty-eight hundred of them, awake and howling into her, and not one had any idea it was being eaten.

[He is taking it off her,] Isha said, out of the ring, and there was nothing clinical in it at all. [Nearly nine thousand years of my life I have listened to what that thing does to her, and a beast that cannot speak walked over a line and started taking it off her.]

Can you stop him?

[No. And I would like to be asked again in an hour, because I do not trust my answer today.]

***

The heat came up through her boot soles from a floor that had no business being warm, and she had thirty-odd minutes and nothing whatever to do with them.

She had planned for the fight. She had planned for the fight going badly, and in the small hours on the rim she had planned for it going badly enough that she had to choose which of them she failed. She had not planned for winning in a hundred and sixty seconds and then standing inside a scream with her hands empty.

Barriers eighty-six.

About a point every four minutes. At forty-one, that put her near seventy-six, which was survivable, which she had planned for.

Reiko sat down at the shelf edge and shrank himself to something that could fit there.

[This is obscene.]

Which part?

[I have been in eleven fights that lasted longer than that one, and not one of them made me feel like this.] He resettled his feet. [Also, I have watched you kill two hundred and forty things today and be no further forward than you were this morning, and I have watched him kill hundreds and be considerably further forward than he was this morning, and I find I have an opinion about that and no idea what it is.]

So do I.

Eden was at the handheld with her thumb going back and forth over one control, her face lit blue from underneath.

"Doc."

"I’m fine."

"You’ve taken the same reading four times."

"I have taken the same reading four times because taking readings is a thing I can do." She still did not look up. "There is an unknown number of minutes left, and if I stop having a task I am going to start thinking about the fact that she cannot move, and I would rather not do that at close range."

"Then take a fifth."

"Thermal’s up four now." Eden’s voice changed on it, went careful. "And there is something happening in the abdominal section that I have no baseline for."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning I have no baseline for it; I am not going to guess, and I would like you to hold on to how much I hate saying that."

***

The arithmetic came up out of her chest and stood where she could see it, because there was nothing else left to do with her mind, and the alternative was handing it to the pressure.

Three days to reach this one. Three hundred feet a Sparkforged cannot descend at all. Four Strikes to kill two hundred and forty, and a hundred and sixty more she had not had to pay for. And on the far side of the chamber a thing with no eyes was working inward through the twenty-eight hundred that had never left the wall, which she could not have touched today with everything she owned.

It’s yours and mine.

She had said that at the mouth of this hole, out loud, and heard herself mean it, and watched Yinxin decline to argue.

Twelve nests a year, if nothing ever went wrong. If the weather held. If nobody died, if the caster never took a day, if there was never a second thing happening on this continent that needed either of them. Twelve a year, eighty-eight to do, seventy years to do it in — and every one of those numbers worked right up until the morning Yinxin was slower, or elsewhere, or gone. Then it was zero a year. Not fewer. Zero, and no road back to one.

That was the sum she had been carrying since Frostforge and putting down every time.

Solving it had always been hers to do, eventually, on a slate, in a room, with people who could be told what she needed. What she got was a beast that could not speak, walking off a rope she had tied him to and doing it in front of her without asking.

It cannot be yours and mine.

There was no relief in it. There was the cold of having been wrong out loud in front of somebody who had known, and who had let her walk the whole way to it on her own feet.

Zhi had gone chalk white and was as far behind Eden’s boots as the shelf allowed.

***

Yinxin came off the wall at nineteen minutes and forty seconds.

It happened as a person comes off a wall they have been holding up — hands first, then the shoulders, then the whole of her sagging back a half-step and standing there with her eyes still shut.

The scream in Jayde’s skull stopped between one instant and the next.

It had not occurred to her that silence could arrive as a physical event. The room did not get quieter; the room had never been making any of it. Every source of pressure in it ceased at once, and what was left was her own pulse, and Eden’s boots on the slab, and from the northern wall a slow, enormous rhythm rising and settling against rock.

"Nineteen forty." Eden’s voice cracked on it. "Nineteen minutes and forty seconds."

"Half." Jayde’s mouth was not working properly. "It’s half."

"It is not half of anything. It is what three thousand two hundred cost, less whatever he took off the total while she was casting, and I will be arguing with myself about that figure for a week." Eden was writing so fast the stylus skipped. "And forty is what ten thousand cost, and two points make a line, and a line I can use. I can put a duration against a count. I can tell you before you go down a hole how long you have to stand in it."

Yinxin opened her eyes.

She looked first at the northern wall, where the stone was bare and pale and entirely still. Then along the margin of it, where a horse-sized mantis stood three paces from where she had been standing, working steadily inward through a braid that was no longer anything at all.

"That was fast," she said.

Nobody answered her.

Ashborn did not stop eating.

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