Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 522: Chapter 517: The Strangest Room

Location:The dragon estate — The North Quarry Face

Date/Time:26 Voidmarch, 9942 AZI

Realm:Lower Realm

The others went in ones and twos over the next half hour, in the directions they had come from. Heiteng did not.

He stood looking at Huifu’s hole for some while after everybody else had stopped looking at it.

"It is a pity we have no demons," he said.

Jayde was four paces up the track. She stopped on the fourth one.

"Say that again."

"A Terracore demon of any standing would have given you the whole three hundred feet before noon. True walls. You could have run a cart down it."

"That’s a hundred feet an hour through basalt."

"Nearer two."

"Nearer — " She came back down the track without noticing that she had. "And tired at the end?"

"No."

"Not even a little."

"He would go home, eat a large dinner, and complain about the rock."

Jayde stood there for a moment with her hands in her coat.

"Right," she said. "Sit down."

"I was not going to."

"I know. Sit down anyway, because I have about forty questions, and you have the answers to all of them, and I have never once thought to ask you."

Heiteng sat down on a slab, which she had never seen him do.

***

"Why do you not know any of this?" he asked.

"Because nobody tells me anything, and because I don’t ask." She sat on a slab of her own, facing him. "Every single thing I have about demons comes from a man who won’t write his own title at the bottom of a page, a kitsune who changes the subject, and one afternoon of somebody’s handwriting."

"Isha changes the subject because it is not his to explain."

"That’s what I assumed, and I have never checked it, which is the same sentence twice." She had the notebook out of her coat before she had decided to take it out. "Right. Two hundred feet an hour. Is that strength?"

"No."

"Reserve?"

"No."

"Then they know something."

"They know a great deal." He looked at the quarry face rather than at her. "I will tell you, and it is going to take longer than you think, and you are not going to like all of it."

"Nobody ever likes all of anything."

"You will like this less than you are expecting."

"Noted." Jayde uncapped the pen. "Start further back than you think you need to."

***

"Every demon is born with two essences," Heiteng said. "Most with three."

"And the ones with one?"

"There are none," Heiteng answered.

The pen stopped.

"None recorded."

"None." He turned a hand over. "Not rare. Not hidden. There has never been a demon born with a single essence since anybody was counting, and they have been counting a very long while."

"Hold on." Jayde was up off the slab. "On this continent it’s one. One for nearly everybody, two makes you a prodigy, three makes you a legend — and your people cannot go below two? Ever?"

"On this continent it is one for humans."

Jayde stopped where she was.

"...Say that properly."

"I have four, which is ordinary." He said it the way a man says his own height. "Three or four is what a dragon is. Panthera the same. Kitsune, Dwarves, Giants, the Aetherwing. Every race I have ever stood beside on any of the three worlds carries more than one." Mercury-silver came round to her. "Humans mostly carry a single essence and call the second one a miracle. Humans are the strange ones. You have been standing in the strangest room on this world for four years and taking the measurements off the furniture."

"Four."

"Inferno and Voidshadow, because I am black and every black dragon carries those two. Terracore and Galebreath are mine. My father held neither, and nobody has ever explained that to me either."

"Say that middle part again. Every black dragon."

"Every one," Heiteng answered. "Reds carry Inferno. Greens Verdant. Blues Torrent. Xinglong’s line carries Metallurge and Terracore, both, all five of them — they are what stands between a silver queen and the world, so they were built to make weapons and to hold ground, and it has never once occurred to any of them that this was interesting." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "You put three of them in a quarry this morning and found out that having a thing and being good at it are different questions. Nobody had ever asked the second one."

"Six." Jayde was counting on her fingers before she knew she was doing it. "Inferno, Torrent, Verdant, Terracore, Metallurge, Galebreath — that’s what a human draws from, and you draw one, and if you draw a second, the Academy writes you into a book. Radiance and Voidshadow aren’t on the list at all. They’re two words in a lecture about things that used to exist."

"They are on everybody else’s list," Heiteng answered.

"Everybody’s."

"Dwarves take Inferno and Metallurge. Giants take Terracore and Verdant. Elves take Verdant and are insufferable about it. The Aetherwing take Galebreath, which is why they are shaped as they are and not the other way round." He shrugged. "None of that is secret. It is in books your Academy owns. Nobody reads them because they are books about other people."

"That’s not an education problem, that’s a marketing problem."

"A what?"

"Marketing. Making somebody want a thing before they’ve worked out that they need it." Jayde was already writing again and did not look up. "It’s a profession where I come from. It’s an entire industry, actually, and most of it is vile, and the good tenth of it is arranging true things in an order that makes somebody pick them up."

Heiteng said nothing for a moment.

"Hm," he said.

Jayde sat back down on the slab, which was not a decision.

"I’ve built everything on a human sample," she said.

"Yes."

"Everything. Every ratio. Every assumption about what a normal cultivator is and what talent means and what the Academy’s grades are actually measuring." She put both hands over her face for a second and took them away again. "That is the single worst thing anybody has said to me this year, and I am delighted about it. Right. Right — then the interesting thing isn’t the number."

"No."

"It’s the floor." She had started walking, three paces one way and three back, which she knew she did and had never managed to stop. "Everything has a low tail. Every trait in the universe has a low tail. You said dragons carry at least two — has a dragon ever thrown one?"

"I could not tell you. I have never had cause to count dragons."

"But somebody has counted demons."

"Ren has counted demons for ten thousand years, and Ren does not approximate."

"And in all of it, never once, not one." She stopped walking. "That isn’t inheritance. Inheritance is sloppy; that’s the whole nature of it. Something with a hard floor and no exceptions across millions of births is —"

"Is what."

"Set. Somebody set it, or something did." She looked at the notebook and did not write it down. "Sorry. Go on."

Heiteng did not go on.

"What?" she asked.

"I have known that fact for longer than your Academy will believe," he said, "and no dragon has ever said that sentence to me."

"Because they’re not listening to it as data. It’s a fact about demons, so it goes in the box marked demons." Jayde sat back down. "Everything on this world is in a box marked something. Right — Voidshadow. You said every male."

"Every male has Voidshadow. Not most. All."

"All is a very large word."

"It is the correct one. There is a single male in the whole of our histories recorded without it." Heiteng’s mouth did something complicated. "Ren’s uncle. And the word the histories use for him is aberrant, and I am saying it in the tone it is written in, because that is the tone it is written in."

"That’s not a finding. That’s a verdict."

"It is a verdict. It closed the question, and the question has stayed closed a very long time."

Jayde wrote aberrant down and put two lines under it.

"One exception in millions," she said. "One. That’s not a rule with a leak in it, that’s a rule with a fault in it, and one fault is worth more than a thousand ordinary cases, and somebody called him a name and stopped looking."

"Somebody called him a great many names."

"I’ll bet." She underlined it again. "Go on. Ren."

"Ren has all eight except Radiance."

"Except."

"No male demon can touch Radiance."

"Why?"

"Nobody knows." He said it without embarrassment. "It is not talent. It is a prohibition; it is old, and I have never had it explained to my satisfaction by anybody."

"And the females?"

"Radiance and Verdant, both, every one of them. Four in ten carry a third or a fourth on top of it."

"So the thing no male can touch — "

"Is the thing every female is born holding. Yes." He watched her get there. "I did tell you that you would not like all of it."

"Then turn it over. Voidshadow. How many females?"

"None."

Jayde looked up from the page.

"None as in vanishingly few."

"None as in none. Not one, in any record, in either direction of our history. A female demon cannot hold Voidshadow and a male demon cannot hold Radiance, and I have never in my life heard anybody put those two sentences next to each other."

"Nobody’s ever said them together?"

"Why would they? One is a thing about men, and one is a thing about women, and they are kept in different rooms." He shrugged. "You are going to tell me that is the whole problem."

"That is the entire problem, and I am going to be unbearable about it." She had come forward off the slab again. "Heiteng, that isn’t two prohibitions. That’s one line drawn through a species and read from both ends. Look at the shape of it — every male gets exactly the one every female is denied, and every female gets exactly the one every male is denied, and it holds across millions of births with a single recorded fault in it. Nothing evolves into that. Complementary exclusions are not what inheritance produces; they are what a partition produces."

"A partition."

"Somebody split it. Or something did, or it was split for a reason nobody wrote down." She stopped, and her hand stopped with her. "And it means a mated pair, between the two of them —"

"Holds all eight," Heiteng said. "Yes. Every mated pair on that world does. It is the least remarked-upon fact in our history, because everybody is busy being moved by the rest of it."

"Nobody’s ever —"

"Nobody has ever thought it was a fact at all. It is a wedding."

"And on the other side of it. Anybody who can touch Radiance who ought not to be able to."

"Half-bloods. With human mothers. Occasionally."

Jayde put the pen down.

"There it is," she said.

"There is what."

"Occasionally is the whole thing. Heiteng, a prohibition doesn’t leak." She had both hands out now. "If somebody laid a rule on demons, half-bloods either fall inside it or outside it, cleanly, depending on how you count them. You’d get always or never. What you’ve got is sometimes, in exactly the group with human inheritance in it — which means it isn’t a rule at all; it’s a mechanism, and human blood interferes with the mechanism, and it has an answer."

"You have decided this in eleven seconds."

"I’ve decided nothing; I’ve noticed the shape of a hole." She picked the pen back up. "Has anybody looked?"

"For what?"

"For the mechanism. Has anyone in ten thousand years sat down with two half-blood boys, one who can and one who can’t, and gone through what’s different about them?"

Heiteng considered that for slightly too long.

"No," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because it is not a question you ask about Radiance."

"Ah." Jayde wrote something down. "That’s a different answer from nobody knows."

***

"You were going to tell me about digging," Heiteng said, "and I notice we are somewhere else."

"We’re exactly where we were; you just haven’t got to it. Three essences from birth, in a realm at six hundred times the ambient — "

"Six hundred and twenty-five."

" — thank you, I’ll take the twenty-five — in bodies built to run it, with ten thousand years and nothing else to do." She looked up. "So what do they build?"

"Cities."

"Everybody builds cities."

"Not like this." And something changed in his voice, which she registered and filed. "Grown out of the bedrock in one piece. A quarter of a mile deep, lit the whole way down, and the water carried up through the stone."

"Up? From the bottom?"

"To the top."

"With what?"

"With the shape of the stone. It is cut so the water carries itself."

Jayde opened her mouth, and shut it, and sat with that.

"Is the deep rock warm?" she said.

"It is warm."

"Then it’s a convective loop and the whole city is a chimney, and they’ve cut the flue into the architecture." She was writing fast. "That’s not a building, that’s a machine somebody lives inside. How long do they take?"

"A century. Two."

"And they hold?"

"They have all held."

"All of them. Every one." She underlined it twice. "Nobody’s ever built anything that all held. Not once, anywhere, ever. Go on, you’re doing the thing where you save the worst part."

Heiteng almost smiled.

"There is a hall," he said, "where the roof is a single span two hundred paces across, and there is not a column under any part of it."

"No."

"I have stood in it."

"I’m not calling you a liar, I’m telling you the numbers don’t close." She was on her feet again. "Stone fails in tension. That’s the whole of it, that’s the one rule, everything anybody has ever built out of rock is an argument with that rule — arches, domes, buttresses, they’re all the same admission. Two hundred paces unsupported —"

"I did not say the roof was flat."

"That helps. That helps a great deal. That doesn’t get you two hundred paces." Jayde stopped in the middle of the quarry floor. "Not out of one piece. Not unless —"

Heiteng waited.

"Unless the stone isn’t behaving like stone." She turned round. "That’s it, isn’t it. He wasn’t shaping it. He changed what it was willing to do."

"I do not know what he did."

"Does it still stand?"

"It has stood since long before this continent had an Academy."

"Then whatever he did outlived him, which means it isn’t a working being held up; it’s a property that got altered and stayed altered." Jayde sat down on the nearest slab, rather harder than she had got off it. "That is not the same discipline as what Xinglong did this morning. It isn’t even next door to it."

"His descendants are still arguing about how he did it."

"Of course they are." She laughed once, and there was nothing polite in it. "That’s what it sounds like when a field loses its founder before anybody wrote it down. I’ve heard that argument in three disciplines, and it’s always the same noise."

***

"And dragons?" she said.

"Dragons dig holes."

She laughed before she could stop herself.

"I am not being modest," Heiteng said, "and I am not being amusing."

"I know. That’s why it’s funny."

"We are enormous, we fly, and we breathe things that end arguments. That has been sufficient for the whole of our history." He shrugged. "Terracore, for a dragon, is what you use to make somewhere to sleep and somewhere to put your children and somewhere the weather cannot reach. That is the entire tradition. Xinglong moved a barn out of a hillside this morning in four seconds and was proud of it, and he was right to be, and a demon apprentice of two hundred would have been ashamed to show it to his master."

"Because they had to be good at it and you never did."

"A dragon who wants ground takes it. A demon who wants ground has to build on it and hold it against other demons who also have three essences and considerably better manners." He nodded slowly. "Ten thousand years of that and you do not get diggers. You get architects."

"Necessity, not aptitude."

"Is there a difference?"

"There’s the entire difference." Jayde tapped the page. "Aptitude you’re stuck with. Necessity you can manufacture. I watched six people find out what they’re good at this morning because somebody finally stood them in a quarry and made them show each other, and every one of them had been carrying it around for four centuries with nobody asking."

Heiteng said nothing for a moment.

"You are about to say something about my people."

"Your people aren’t bad at Terracore. Your people have never once been in a room where being good at it mattered."

He looked at the three holes in the face for a while.

"That is going to be an unpleasant thing to have been told," he said, "and I am going to be thinking about it for a considerable time, and I would like it minuted that I did not thank you."

***

The light had moved a good way down the quarry wall before either of them noticed.

"Females," Heiteng said.

"What about them?"

"You asked me forty questions. That is number nine and you have not got to it."

"Then you’ve been waiting to say it, which means it’s the part I won’t like."

"Females are stronger."

Jayde waited.

"Not in the way you are already constructing," he said. "They carry the essences the males cannot. They carry the bloodline. What a demon turns out to be is settled before he is born, and nothing on a training ground alters it much."

"That’s not stronger, that’s different." Jayde turned the pen over. "Give me something that’s actually stronger."

Heiteng looked pleased, which she noted and did not comment on.

"They cannot kill," he said.

"...Won’t."

"Cannot." He let it sit where she could walk round it. "There is no female demon in their histories who has taken a life and been alive at the end of the day."

Jayde sat entirely still for a moment.

"...Say that properly. That’s a different sentence from the one you started."

"It is the true one." His hands stayed where they were. "She can raise her hand. She can strike, and strike very hard — they are not weak, and I want you to put that out of your head before it settles. What she cannot do is finish it and remain."

"Why."

"Because she will feel it." Heiteng’s voice did not change at all, which was how Jayde knew what she was being told. "Not afterward. Not at midnight, in a bad year, when it comes back to her. While. Whatever is happening inside the man under her hand happens inside her at the same moment and at his strength, and if what is happening inside him is dying, then she is dying, and there is nothing anybody has ever found to put between the two."

Jayde had gone very still.

"So the empathy is the mechanism."

"The empathy is the mechanism. It is not a prohibition, and it is not a weakness, and nobody laid it on them." He turned his head. "A demon woman can kill anything on this world exactly once."

"...And that’s happened."

"Mothers." He said the one word and let the whole shape of it stand there in the cold. "It is not common, and it is not unheard of, and every account of it that our histories keep ends the same way and takes about four lines to do it. Two dead. One who chose it."

Jayde looked at the page and did not write anything on it for a while.

"And they know this about themselves."

"From the age they know anything at all."

"Heiteng, that’s —" She stopped and started somewhere else. "There is a race on this world where half the people carry the strongest essences in existence, and none of that half can use them to hurt anybody. Do you know what a human philosopher would give for that? Every argument about power anybody has ever had, and one species has just — had the answer built in —"

"Now finish it," Heiteng said.

Jayde had already started to, and could feel her own face change.

"They can defend themselves once."

"Once." Heiteng nodded slowly. "You have it."

"They carry the bloodline; they carry the essences nobody else has; they cannot be replaced by their own men — and not one of them anywhere can raise a hand in her own defense and still be standing afterward." Jayde’s voice had gone flat. "So she doesn’t. So none of them do, except the ones with nothing left to lose. That isn’t a gift. That’s a market."

The quarry was quiet.

"Yes," Heiteng said.

She did not ask the next question, because she could see the shape of the answer in how still he had gone, and because she had read the summary and did not need him to say it out loud on a slab in the cold.

"That’s what happened to them," she said.

"For a very long time. By others first." A pause she could have driven a cart through. "And then not only by others."

"You don’t want to tell me this part."

"Not today." He said it without apology. "You will have it. You will have all of it, and you will not enjoy a single page. But you have been sitting on a rock since noon, being delighted about a people nobody on this continent has said one civil word about in thousands of years, and I find I would rather not be the man who ends that before supper."

"That’s sentimental of you."

"It is efficient of me. You retain things better when you are enjoying yourself. I have been watching you do it all afternoon." He looked at the spoil heap for a moment. "I will tell you the one part that belongs here. Ren has read the whole of that arithmetic. All of it, every ledger, ten thousand years of it, and he is the only man in that realm who has, and he has never once put a page of it in front of anybody else, because he does not consider it to belong to anybody but him."

Jayde turned the pen over and did not write that down.

"That’s a great deal to carry by yourself."

"Yes," Heiteng agreed. "It is."

She looked down and discovered she had written kills her to kill and put a box around it, and that her pen was resting on the line beneath, waiting to begin a question about how a trait like that gets into a bloodline and stays there.

She shut the notebook on her own hand.

"I was about to ask you something," she said.

"I noticed."

"It was a good question. That’s the trouble with it." She left the notebook shut on her knee. "Ask a good enough question about how a person is made and you’ve started doing the arithmetic that got them bred. There’s a version of me who’d have been extremely useful to whoever ran that program. I’ve met her. She had my face."

Heiteng did not answer for a while.

"Ren would have liked that answer," he said.

***

Jayde turned a chip of basalt over in her fingers.

"There’s a bond," she said. "Between them."

"Truemating."

"He won’t name it. Isha won’t explain it. I stopped asking about a year before I went into the mountain."

"I will tell you, because Ren is my brother and I have watched him not have it for ten thousand years, and because you are going to be dealing with demons for the rest of a very long life."

"Go."

"It is not chosen. It cannot be arranged. Nine in ten of them die without it." He looked out at the face. "When it takes, the two of them are joined in a manner I have found no equivalent of anywhere. They feel each other. Not sentiment — presence. Where the other one is. What state they are in."

"At what range?"

"Any."

"Define any."

"Any."

The notebook came back open.

"Across a passage?"

"Yes."

"With the passage shut?"

"Yes."

"How fast?"

Heiteng blinked, which was rare enough that she registered it.

"There is no how fast," he said. "It is not a message. It simply is so."

"There’s always a how fast."

"Not with this."

"Heiteng." She had gone very quiet, which was what she did instead of raising her voice. "Listen to what you have just handed me. Two bodies. Two realms. A boundary that people can only cross at three places and cannot cross at all when it’s closed. And state goes across it, both directions, with no carrier and no delay." She put the pen down. "Do you understand what that is?"

"Tell me what it is."

"It’s either the most valuable thing on this world, or it’s a story people have been telling each other for thousands of years. And there is a way to find out."

"Of course there is."

"Two people and a clock." She was already building it and could hear herself doing it. "Take a mated pair. Put them in different realms. One of them does something at an agreed moment — cold water, a burn, anything with an edge on it. Somebody stands next to the other one with an instrument. Twice, once in each direction. If the two records lie on top of each other, then it’s instantaneous, and I throw away a physics I have carried through two lives. If there’s a lag, then the size of the lag tells me what the passages actually are."

"You are proposing to experiment on a mated pair."

"I’m proposing to ask a mated pair. They’ll say no." She wrote it down anyway. "They’ll be right to."

"Then why write it?"

"Because somebody will be able to answer it in fifty years, and they’ll need to know the question existed." Jayde looked up. "And because if a bond carries state through a shut passage with no delay, then the three realms aren’t three places. They’re one place, folded, and the passages are only where the fold’s thin enough to walk through."

Heiteng was quiet for long enough that she looked at him properly.

"What?"

"Nothing." He turned his hand over. "Say the small reason as well. You had one."

"...I could talk to a man in the Upper Realm without waiting six days for paper."

"Yes," Heiteng said. "You could."

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