Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 517: Chapter 512: What It Sees

Location:The Western Plateau — The First Dead Field

Date/Time:15–17 Voidmarch, 9942 AZI

Realm:Lower Realm

The first one took two days to reach and eleven minutes to measure, and Yinxin did not believe a word of it.

Eden had walked forty paces onto the gray, set the handheld on a flat stone, and stepped back from it with her arms folded while it did whatever it did. Jayde had the head unit on, and the pane four inches from her eyes drew the edge of the field as a closed curve with a figure against it before either of them finished crossing the rim.

"Six hundred and ninety paces," Eden said. "Six ninety and a bit. Drain radius four hours at a walk. Gradient at the rim a third steeper than Eleven."

"Eleven minutes."

"Eleven minutes, and eight of them were the thermal averaging."

Yinxin looked at the small matte object on the stone. Then at six hundred yards of dead ground behind it, running out to a rim she could not see the far edge of without turning her head.

"No," she said.

It was not hostile. Three thousand years of being told things by people who wanted something had left her with a refusal that came out flat and without heat, the way other people said good morning.

"You have not walked any part of it. Nobody has. That thing has been sitting on a rock for a quarter of an hour, and you propose to put its number in the register and have people ride four hundred miles on it."

"I propose exactly that."

"Then give me the chain."

***

It took her most of the morning, and she did it properly, which Jayde had expected and was still not prepared to watch.

Out to the far rim on a straight bearing with the chain paying out behind her and Reiko running the far end at full size, four feet at the shoulder and taking the slack in his teeth. Then the circumference, both directions. Then across the middle again on a different bearing, because a circle that is not a circle hands you two diameters, and she was not going to be caught by that.

Takara went over the same ground and would not touch the chain. He walked it and counted, which Jayde had watched him do on four years of ground and had never once seen him miss by more than a stride in five hundred.

They came back in the middle of the afternoon. Yinxin’s hem was gray to the knee.

"Six hundred and ninety-one on the long bearing," she said. "Six eighty-eight on the short. Call it six ninety."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"Six ninety," Eden agreed, and did not gloat, which Jayde considered the single most disciplined act she had witnessed that year.

Six hundred and ninety.

The voice in her head was not hers. Takara had come up on her left without any of the noise a thing that size ought to make, midnight-black against the gray, the white-gold running slow through his coat because he was irritated and not bothering to hide it.

I counted. It counted. We arrived at the same place by different roads, and I would like it understood that this is not the same as me trusting it.

Nobody said it was.

Good. A pause. Ask me again at the third one.

***

The drain radius was what turned Reiko, and it turned him hard.

He had gone out along the eastern approach the evening before, low and slow, to where the slackness started — because he could feel it, and had been able to feel it since the first hour of the approach to the Widow’s Field, and had privately regarded this as the one thing in the party that required no instrument at all.

Eden had the same figure off the gradient, taken from the rim, without moving.

Nineteen minutes apart over a four-hour radius.

[That is not possible,] Reiko said.

It’s a curve. It falls off in a shape, and if you know the shape, you can stand at one end and say where the other end is.

[I walked that line. It took most of an evening, and I came back with grit in my nose.]

I know.

[And she did it sitting down.] A long pause. Something went through the bond that was aggrieved and thoughtful at once and did not resolve into either. [I am going to keep walking it.]

Please do.

[Not because I distrust her.] He shifted his weight. [Because if the two ever disagree, I want to be the reason we find out.]

***

There were eighty-nine points on the grid and Jayde had never once stopped to be grateful for how thin a thing a point is.

They had been put there by four Panthera walking a dead world for a year while she was inside a mountain. Twelve hundred and forty-seven listening posts, buried a foot down at spacings Eden had worked out before either of them went in — Canirr eight hundred and forty-seven of them across the eastern subsurface, Prota four hundred more through the north with a metal foreleg that ached in the cold, Suki working the western passes and reporting in the fewest words any of them used.

And every one of those posts said the same thing, which was here. Not how wide. Not how deep. Not how many. Not whether a person could get in.

Eighty-nine pins in a map and four years of planning built on top of them.

"That’s the part nobody says out loud," Eden said, when Jayde put it to her at the rim. "The grid was a triumph, and it was also the cheapest possible answer to the question. We buried a thousand ears, and every one of them can only hear yes."

***

It was Takara who started the questions, and by the end of it Jayde had stopped pretending to help.

How deep does it see?

"Through this rock, three hundred and fifty meters before the return goes too soft to argue with. Less through wet ground. More through metal."

Can it tell you what the rock is.

"Basalt over a sedimentary layer, and conductive metal in a sheet at about waist depth that I want to come back for." Eden did not look up. "Same sheet as Eleven’s. Same signature."

Can it tell you what I am?

That got her to look up.

"It can tell me you weigh a little over seventeen hundred kilos and run three degrees hotter than anything else on this plateau, that your heart is doing forty-one beats a minute standing still, and that there is a considerable amount of stored charge in you with nowhere to go." She tilted the handheld toward him without offering it. "It can’t tell me what you are. Nothing in its library has ever been a Panthera. It can tell me you are one animal and not two, which is more than I could say about half the things in that mountain."

The lightning stopped moving through his coat.

Seventeen hundred.

"One thousand seven hundred and four."

That is wrong.

"It is not wrong."

I have not eaten since yesterday morning.

"That is a kilo and a half at the outside, and I am not going to —"

Weigh me again. Takara had rearranged himself, which Jayde would not have called a change in posture so much as a very large predator drawing in its stomach on a matter of principle. I was standing badly.

Eden held the handheld up. Waited four seconds. Turned it around.

"One thousand seven hundred and four."

[Ask it mine,] Reiko said.

It is not a game.

[It has been a game for a quarter of an hour and I have been extremely patient.] He came round in front of the stone and sat, and squared his shoulders, and lifted his chin, and held it — four feet of silver-black primordial shadowbeast presenting himself for weighing like a prize bullock at a provincial fair. [Ask it my heart.]

Eden asked it his heart.

"Ninety-four." She let that sit for exactly as long as it needed to. "Two hundred and eighteen kilos."

There was a silence of a very specific texture.

[That is not the same number.]

"No."

[He is eight of me.]

"Seven and a bit."

Eight, Takara said, from a place of enormous peace.

[Then the heart is wrong as well. Ninety-four against forty-one. I am working twice as hard as he is and I am standing still.]

"You’re working twice as hard because you’re a quarter of his size. Small animals run hot and fast and big ones run slow and cold, all the way down to the mouse and all the way up to whatever that is." Eden tipped the pane toward him. "Which is the part that should interest you. Nothing on this instrument knows what either of you are. It got two numbers off two of you, and the relationship between them is exactly what it would be for any two animals on any world I have ever put it on. It isn’t guessing."

[That is because I am faster.]

That is because you are excited.

[I am not excited.]

[You are excited,] Zhi said.

Zhi had come up out of Eden’s collar somewhere in the last minute, deep blue and entirely unhurried, and worked along the outside of Eden’s forearm until the small head was over the pane.

[You went bright when she said the number. You are bright now. You are the brightest thing here that is not the sky.]

There was a pause of a very particular quality.

Say that last part again, Jayde said.

[The sky is louder,] Zhi said. [It has been getting louder since the middle of the afternoon and nobody looked.]

Eden went still. Then she tipped the handheld back thirty degrees, held it there for four seconds, and said a word in Federation standard that Jayde had not heard out loud since another life.

"There is a front coming over the escarpment tonight. Six hours out, and it is going to be a bad one." She lowered it. "She had it before the instrument did. The instrument was pointed where I pointed it."

[I am useful,] Zhi said, to nobody, with enormous satisfaction.

Can it tell —

"Stop." Eden straightened up. She was 5’2" and had to look some distance up to do it properly and did it anyway. "You have all been asking one question since the rim, and it is a very small version of the question. You keep asking what it can do about a hole in the ground."

It is a large hole.

"It is a hole." She turned the handheld over in her hand. "This came off a transport that crossed between stars. It was not built to count worms. It was built for the first hour on a world nobody had ever stood on — you come down through an atmosphere you have never breathed, and you do not know whether the air will kill you, or the water, or what lives there and what it eats, or whether the ground under the landing gear is going to hold. You have to know all of it before anybody opens a door. That is what this is. It is the thing that says people can live here, or they cannot, get back on the ship."

Nobody said anything.

"So it reads the air to a hundredth of a part in a million. It reads what is in the soil and what used to be in the soil and roughly when that changed. It weighs both moons off nothing but how the ground pulls. It finds the water under a plain you cannot see the end of. It has been doing every one of those things since I set it on that stone, and not one of you has asked it a thing it was built for."

Yinxin held out her hand.

"Give it to me."

***

Eden looked at Jayde for about a quarter of a second, which was a quarter of a second too long, and Jayde took the handheld out of her hand and put it into Yinxin’s before the pause could turn into anything a person could take offense at.

"You’ll want the left face up," Eden said. "The columns run top to bottom. That one is mass, that one is thermal, that one is composition. It updates about every four seconds."

"None of that is writing."

"It’s Federation standard."

"Then you will teach me that as well."

"It’s a language."

"I have four," Yinxin said, and turned the handheld around in her hands the way a person turns a bird’s egg, and pointed it at the dead ground, and then at the ridge, and then — because she was three thousand years old and had never in her life been given a new instrument and not done this — at herself.

Yinxin read it for a while.

"This is broken," she said.

"It isn’t."

"It says one thousand seven hundred and eight kilos."

Nobody breathed.

Yinxin was standing there in the gray robe at five foot ten with silver-white hair pulled back off her face and her hem still gray to the knee, and the thing in her hands had gone straight through all of it and put a number on the pane that belonged to something else entirely.

One thousand seven hundred and eight, Takara said, with a slow and terrible joy. One thousand seven hundred and eight.

"That is not —"

You have been standing on this rim since noon watching that instrument tell me I am fat.

"I did not say —"

Four kilos.

[He is very pleased,] Zhi observed. [He has gone bright as well.]

Jayde got about three seconds of it, and they were the best three seconds she had had since the mountain, and then the cold came up through the floor of it and took the whole thing away.

The laugh went out of her.

Eden had already stopped. She had her hand out for the handheld, and she was not smiling at all.

"May I? I want to see the volume column."

Yinxin gave it back. Eden held it on her for four seconds, and then for four more, and then lowered it and looked at Yinxin the way she looked at a reading that had told her something it should not have been able to tell her.

"It isn’t weighing you," she said. "I want to be exact about this, because the exact thing is worse. It has no scale. There is nothing under your feet but rock. What it does is measure how hard the world is pulling on the object in front of it, and it measures the space that object takes up, and it puts the two together. And it has just told me that the pull on you is one thousand seven hundred and eight kilos of pull, and the space you occupy is a woman of five foot ten."

"Meaning."

"Meaning that number cannot be inside you, and it is inside you anyway." Eden’s voice had gone very flat and very careful. "The instrument has no opinion about dragons. It has never met one. It cannot be fooled by a shape, because it never looked at the shape — it asked the ground a question and the ground answered honestly. Whatever you are wearing works on eyes. It does not work on gravity, because gravity is not looking at you. It is holding you."

"Yinxin," Jayde said. "Point it at me."

Yinxin’s head came up. The golden eyes went from Jayde’s face — Jayde’s brown-eyed, five-foot-seven, black-haired, entirely ordinary borrowed face — down to the pane, and back.

"No," she said quietly.

"Point it at me."

"I will not, and I do not need to, and neither does anybody else." Yinxin lowered the handheld with great care, the way you set down something that has just gone off in your hands. "It does not care what a thing looks like. It asks the world how heavy the thing is, and the world does not lie for anybody."

"The world does not lie for anybody," Eden said.

***

They took it up again after dark, when the front had come over the escarpment and the fire was being difficult about it.

"I want to be clear about what I am not saying," Jayde said. "I am not saying you can’t have it. I put it in your hands. That was not an accident, and it was not a gesture."

"I know what it was."

"You get all of it. Every reading. The methods, the mathematics, the language, why the numbers are what they are and what makes them wrong. Eden teaches you, and you teach whoever you want — your house, your daughters, whoever’s left of the quintet who can sit still long enough."

That is nobody, Takara said.

"What I am not going to do," Jayde said, "is teach anyone on this world how to make one."

Yinxin did not answer at once. The firelight was doing complicated things to the gray robe and to the golden eyes and to none of her expression at all.

"Because of what it did to me this afternoon."

"Because of what it would do to everybody." Jayde put a piece of wood on. "There are perhaps nine hundred things on this world that are hiding what they are, and about six of them are hiding for good reasons. I am one. You are one. Takara has spent five thousand years being a housecat in front of company. Reiko is registered as a shadowbeast with a self-dimmed rune. And every single one of those disguises is a disguise against eyes, because eyes are the only thing anybody has ever had to hide from."

"And that weighs."

"That weighs. And if a hundred of those existed, the Temple would have eleven of them inside a year, and they would not need to accuse anybody of anything ever again. They would just walk down a line of people with a box." She looked into the fire. "The forge stays in the Pavilion. Everything that comes out of it, you can have."

"That is a rule I would have written myself," Yinxin said, "and I would have written it worse. So." She held the handheld up. "Teach me the columns."

"Now?"

"I have three thousand years of not knowing, and I would prefer to start on that this evening."

Eden sat down next to her with the slate on her knees and started at the beginning, which was not the columns at all but the fact that everything on that face was a number and every number was a number of something, and Yinxin listened to about four minutes of it and stopped her.

"Say that again about the parts in a million."

"Which part?"

"All of it. And slower. And I am going to want to know why anybody chose a million."

Jayde got up and walked out to the rim and left them to it, and behind her she could hear Eden trying to explain a decimal to a woman who had been doing perfectly well without one since before there were roads.

[The blade is inclined to observe,] Kazren said from the soul space, formal and unhurried, [that in forty thousand years I have watched a great many people fall in love with a tool. It is not the worst thing they do. But I would prefer you remember which of you is the instrument and which of you is the hand.]

I’ll keep that.

[See that you do. The dragon is going to be insufferable by Ashwhisper.]

***

The warm patch was Eden’s, and she found it on the second morning, and Jayde did not understand what she was looking at for the better part of a minute.

The pane had overlaid the field with the thermal average and taken out the sun angle and the wind, and almost all of it was one flat cold value, because gray mineral ground under a winter sky is the most boring object in the world. Away from the center, off the true middle by a hundred paces or so, there was a patch about the size of a stockyard that was not.

"Two-tenths of a degree," Eden said. "That’s all. Two-tenths of a degree warmer than everything around it, and it does not move with the sun, and it was there at first light, and it is still there now."

"That’s the chamber."

"That is a granary-sized mass of living animal at blood temperature, sitting under a hollowed roof and pushing heat up through a hundred meters of rock for ninety-nine centuries." She turned the pane toward Jayde. "I’m not seeing through the rock. Nothing sees through rock. I am seeing the shadow it leaves on the top of the world, and the only reason I can see it at all is that a dead field has nothing else in it that makes heat."

"Cross it against the return."

"Already did. The void geometry and the warm patch put the chamber in the same place inside forty meters." Eden’s voice had changed. "Jayde. It’s not the depth that matters. Look at what it means that it’s warm."

And Jayde got there a half-second behind her and felt the floor of a week’s thinking move.

"It’s warm because they’re in it."

"It’s warm because they are in it right now." Eden had both hands on the handheld. "Two tells, and they are independent, and they cost nothing. A nest with worms in it drains — you can feel it four hours out, Reiko can feel it, Zhi can taste it, and it puts a gradient on this thing you could steer a ship by. And a nest with worms in it is warm. Eight thousand animals at blood heat in a closed chamber."

"And one they’ve left."

"Is a dead circle of ground at the same temperature as everything else on the plateau, with no gradient at the rim and nothing on the thermal at all. It’s a scar. It looks exactly the same from a horse." Eden was almost laughing. "We have been talking about eighty-nine nests all winter and we have never once had a way to ask which of them still has anything in it."

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