Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 521: Chapter 516: What They Are Good At

Location:The dragon estate — the north quarry face

Date/Time:26 Voidmarch, 9942 AZI

Realm:Lower Realm

They came from six directions over the better part of an hour, which told Jayde a great deal about how carefully six dragons who could not be known to exist had learned to move around a continent.

Xinglong arrived first and stood where he could see the approach road. Yinglong came second and put herself where she could see Xingteng. Hulong came up the quarry track with a question already half-built and visibly held it. Huifu took the last twenty feet of the slope in three strides, said nothing to anybody, and sat down on a spoil heap.

Xingteng came last, which Jayde had expected, and came alone, which she had not.

Heiteng had been at the top of the face since before dawn with his back to the drop.

"Eighty-eight fields," Yinxin said, when they had stopped moving. "You have the rest from me already. What you do not have is this."

Jayde stepped forward and put it in four sentences.

"Two of the three we surveyed have a way in. One does not, and the ratio is unknown and might be bad. The ground under a nest is hollow, and the roof comes down on its own eventually, and eventually is not a schedule." She let that sit for exactly as long as it needed. "So we cut our own door. Three hundred feet of basalt, fast, and without one foot of it being felt in the chamber. I need to know who can do what."

"In true form," Huifu said, from the spoil heap, "I would be through three hundred feet of that before you had finished the sentence."

"I know."

"Before noon, and I would not need the week after it."

"I know that as well." Jayde had been waiting for it and was glad it had come from him, because Huifu asked things out loud that the others carried around. "And the answer is no, and it is no every single time, on every field, for as long as this goes on. Six dragons who cannot be known to exist do not take true form on open ground four miles from a holding with a shepherd on it. One sighting and it is not a rumor any more, and then it is not a survey any more either, and then we are doing something else entirely for the rest of our lives."

"Then you are asking me to dig with my hands tied."

"I am asking you to dig in the only shape you are allowed to be seen in." She let it stand. "That is the cost of the secret, and we are all paying it. Yinxin pays more."

Huifu thought about that for a moment, and then made a low noise that was not agreement and was not argument.

"Then ask," Xinglong said.

"I’m not going to ask."

That got their attention rather more effectively than the eighty-eight had.

"If I ask, you’ll tell me what you can do on your best day, because that is what everybody does, including me." She gestured at the face behind her — forty feet of clean gray basalt, quarried out of the hillside a thousand years ago and abandoned. "So you’re going to show me, and Eden is going to measure it, and the numbers go in the register. That’s the morning."

Nobody moved for a moment.

"You want us to dig," Yinglong said.

"I want you to dig in front of each other," Jayde said, "which is the part you’re actually objecting to, and I’d rather we said so."

***

Xinglong went first because nobody else was going to.

He did not change form. Jayde had half expected the whole thing to be conducted at thirty feet, and it was not — he walked to the face, put one hand flat on it, and stood there long enough that Huifu started to say something, and Yinglong put a hand out and stopped him.

Then the hillside moved.

It was not an explosion, and it was not a cut. It was displacement, exactly as the word implies — about the volume of a barn went from being in the hillside to being somewhere else, and the somewhere else was a slope of rubble forty feet long that had not existed four seconds earlier, and the noise of it came off the far wall of the quarry twice.

Jayde felt it come up through her boots and out through her teeth.

Eden was already walking into the hole with the handheld out.

"Eleven meters," she called. "Eleven and a bit. Wall angle is — " a pause " — I am going to call it enthusiastic."

There was a silence from the quarry floor of a particular flavor.

"Doctor," Hulong called into the mouth of the hole. "How much is that in a length anybody standing here has ever used?"

"...Thirty-six feet."

"Then say thirty-six feet."

"I have been saying meters for sixty years, and I am not going to stop this morning." Eden came back out into the light, entirely unbothered. "I will say both. The book gets meters, because the book has to talk to the instruments, and the instruments were built by people who never heard of a foot. You get feet. Everybody is inconvenienced equally, and nothing is written down twice."

Huifu, from the spoil heap: "That is the first thing anybody has said all morning that I understood completely."

"It is not a shaft," Xinglong said. He was breathing hard and did not pretend otherwise. "I have never once cut a shaft. I take a mass, and I put it elsewhere, and the elsewhere is approximate. Give me the day, and I will give you a hundred feet of that, and every foot of it will be the wrong shape."

"Noise?"

"You heard it."

"I felt it in the ground four hundred paces off," Eden answered. "Which is the number that matters. That was felt, not heard."

Huifu got off the spoil heap.

"Move," he said.

***

A hundred and seventy feet took him a quarter of an hour, and Jayde spent most of it wanting to look away.

There was no technique in it that she could identify. He went at the rock the way a man goes at a door he intends to be on the other side of, and the rock came apart, and he went further in, and about six minutes into it Yinglong walked round to the mouth and stood there watching the roof with her arms folded and did not say anything.

He came out gray to the shoulders.

"A hundred and sixty-eight feet," Eden called from inside, in a voice working quite hard to stay professional. "In seventeen minutes." A pause. "And there are four places in it where I would not stand."

"It is a hole," Huifu offered.

"It is absolutely a hole."

"He will now be no use for two days," Hulong put in, "which he has not mentioned."

"Two days," Huifu agreed, sitting back down on the spoil heap rather more heavily than he had got up off it. "Worth it."

Hulong went third and took a very long time about thirty feet.

Jayde watched that one properly, because it was the first thing all morning that looked like engineering. He worked the face in sections, and each section came away in a slab, and the slabs went into a stack beside the entrance in the order he had cut them, and when Eden ran the return through the finished bore the walls were inside a hand’s width of true down the whole length of it.

"Thirty feet," he reported. "Thirty, to that tolerance, and then I am finished until tomorrow. I am the last thirty feet of anything and I should not be any of the rest of it."

Eden wrote it down without comment.

"And there is a question I have been holding since the top of the track."

"Hold it for four minutes. Yinglong."

***

"I cannot cut rock," Yinglong said.

She delivered it standing in the middle of the quarry floor with her chin level, and made no apology for any part of it.

"I could tell you I can, and it would be true the way it is true that a hammer opens a door. What I do is hold a line in front of somebody who is doing something that needs both hands, and I have done it for four hundred years, and I am extremely good at it." She looked at Jayde. "I would like that to be the position I am put in. Not the position I am put in after the morning has established that I am no use at the digging."

"You’ve been standing at the mouth of every hole since Huifu went in."

"Somebody has to watch the roof."

"You watched the roof for a man who cannot be hurt by a roof," Eden said, "which I noticed, and put in the book."

Yinglong did not answer that. She did, Jayde observed, stop looking quite so much like a woman braced for something.

***

Hulong’s question, when it came, took the morning apart.

"Why does it have to be one dragon?"

Nobody answered him.

"You have three hundred feet and a requirement for silence." He had both hands out, which meant he had stopped asking and started building. "Silence is not a property of the digging. It is a property of the boundary. If her collar holds, it does not matter in the slightest how ugly the cutting is behind it, because nothing behind it is getting out."

Eden’s head came up.

"So the shaft does not need one dragon who is good at silence," Hulong said. "It needs whoever is cheapest per foot, and then the next hundred by whoever is next, and the collar is carried down the whole way regardless of whose turn it is." He nodded at the three holes in the quarry face. "You are not looking for one dragon who can do three hundred feet. You are looking for three hundred feet of dragon."

"That is two of me," Huifu said, from the spoil heap.

"It is better than that, because nobody has to rest while the shaft stands still." Hulong had gone somewhere behind his own eyes and was reading it off the inside. "You on the first day. A hundred and sixty-eight feet, and then you are finished for two. Xinglong on the second, while you are lying down — a hundred more. Me on the third for the last thirty, to a hand’s width, because the last thirty is the only part where the shape matters. Three days. Two hundred and ninety-eight feet, and the last man takes the difference out of the floor." He looked round at all of them. "Nobody works twice running. Nobody works outside what he is good at. And the shaft never stops."

Jayde looked at Eden and found her already writing, fast, with the stylus skipping.

"It has to hold across a handover," Eden said, to nobody. "One of them comes out, and the next one goes in, and the face is standing open at the moment of the swap. That is the whole of the risk, and I have been carrying it since the plateau." She looked up. "And it is entirely a problem about a piece of equipment and not at all a problem about a dragon, and I would rather have that problem than the other one."

***

Heiteng came down off the face.

"I can hold a bore at depth," he said.

The quarry went quiet in a way it had not gone quiet all morning.

"Put a number on it," Jayde said.

"Six hundred feet. I went that far in the Upper Realm a long age ago for something that did not concern this continent, and I came out of it able to do it again the same day." Mercury-silver eyes, entirely level. "That is not a boast. It is the only measurement I have, and it is older than anybody here but Yinxin, and if you want it verified, you will have to let me spend a day on a hillside where somebody might see."

"And quietly?"

"I have no idea. Nothing I have ever cut needed to be quiet." Something moved at the corner of his mouth and was not a smile. "Now hear the rest of it, because I would rather say it in front of them than have you find it in the fine print."

"Go on."

"Every hour I spend on a field is an hour I am somewhere that can be observed. I am the only one of the six who is looked for." He said it without any weight at all, which was how she knew what it cost. "There is a house that expects letters from me and has not had one in some while, and the day they come to find out why, they will come to wherever I was last. If I am the bore, then the bore is the thing that brings them."

Jayde had known that. She had known it as a line in a column and had never once heard him say it out loud.

"Then you’re the last resort."

"That is the correct decision, and I want it made now, in front of witnesses, while it is cheap." His hands stayed at his sides. "Not when you are standing on four hundred and eighty paces of dead ground with a schedule and nobody else who can reach the bottom. I have watched a great many people make that decision late."

"Understood."

"You have not agreed."

"I’ve understood. You get the agreement when I have three hundred feet that doesn’t need you, and not before, because I’m not promising a thing I can’t hold."

Heiteng looked at her for a moment.

"That is a better answer," he allowed.

***

Xingteng had not moved from the quarry track.

"I am not going to be asked," she said.

It came out into the middle of the floor in the softest voice on it and stopped everything.

"Nobody was skipping you."

"You were going to come to me last, and gently, and Yinglong was going to speak first." She did not look at her sister. "It is what happens. It is kindly meant. And I am tired this morning, so I am going to answer a question nobody has put to me."

Yinglong’s mouth opened.

"Don’t," Xingteng told her, without heat, and Yinglong shut it.

"I cannot cut rock and I never will." She turned her hands over. "What I can do is read a formation and tell you where it will fail. I have been doing it on paper for a decade for something that has nothing to do with any of this, and I have got good at it the way people get good at things nobody is watching."

Eden had gone very still.

"What kind of formation?"

"Any kind. The one under this estate. The Academy wards, from outside, at distance, badly." Xingteng’s chin came up a fraction. "And the one you are going to build round a bore head. You are carrying a boundary down a shaft cut in stages by four people at four rates through rock that is already hollow underneath. It will fail at the handover. It will fail at the handover every time, and it will fail on the third or fourth one, when everybody has stopped expecting it — and I could have told you that before any of you came up this track."

Eden put the datapad down on a slab, which Jayde had seen her do perhaps four times.

"I want you."

"You have not seen my work."

"I have watched you predict the failure mode of a device that does not exist yet, from a spoken description, in nine seconds." Eden had not blinked. "I will spend a week checking it and I will enjoy the week. But I have been holding that handover on my own since the plateau and all I have been able to do with it is be afraid of it, and you have just given it a shape."

Xingteng did not say anything.

"Is that a yes?" Eden asked.

"I am waiting for somebody to say I should not. It is taking longer than usual."

Yinglong said, from three paces off, in a voice gone somewhere careful: "I was not going to."

"You were."

"I was," Yinglong admitted. "And then I heard the last four minutes."

***

Eden read the register back off the datapad at the end of it, in the quarry, with three holes in the face behind her and the light going. She read the feet out loud and did not once say the other word, and Jayde noticed that and said nothing about it.

Xinglong: a hundred feet a day, coarse, and felt in the ground four hundred paces out. Huifu: a hundred and sixty-eight feet in seventeen minutes, then two days down, and four places in it where Eden would not stand. Hulong: thirty feet a day to a hand’s width. The last thirty of anything. Yinglong: the line at the bore face. Xingteng: the collar, the formations, and the handover. Heiteng: six hundred feet, unverified, and not to be used until nothing else will do.

"Three hundred feet of shaft in three days, in human form, on a rotation none of us has ever run," Hulong said, "and I did not know any of that this morning either."

"None of us did," Xinglong agreed.

"None of us has ever been asked." Yinglong was not looking at Jayde. She was looking at Yinxin. "In four hundred years. Not once."

Yinxin had said nothing since the opening. She stood at the edge of the quarry floor with her hands empty and let the silence run a good deal longer than was comfortable.

"No," she said. "You have not."

Then she went up the track and did not look back, and Jayde let her go.

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