Chapter 539 - 538: The Third Batch

Chapter 539: Chapter 538: The Third Batch

Location:Ferrow’s Rest

Date/Time:TC1856.11.26 – TC1856.11.28

She came in on the blade at midday and set down on the flat below the wall, a discourtesy she committed on purpose, because arriving on foot from the road would have been a piece of theater and Emrys Dunmore had earned better than theater.

He was up at the sixth row with Anselm Halloran, and he came down without hurrying, and she saw the arm before she saw anything else — strapped across his chest in a sling that had arrived from Seven Peaks with a note from Mira and no room in it for discussion, because he had split his thumb on a blank last month and had gone on working for an hour without knowing. The fingers showed at the edge of the cloth. They were not doing anything, because he was not asking them to.

"You said come back when I had something I could describe."

"I did."

"I’ve got it. It’ll take an hour, and it isn’t good."

Emrys looked at her for a moment.

"Then you’ll want tea," he said.

***

It took closer to two hours, and she shortened none of it.

She started with the foundation, and what it was made of, and the fact that it went east past the limit of anything they could measure. Then the flattening, and what it had done to his rows, and why. She handed him Elian’s word for it — a stage — and Emrys’s own word from four months earlier, swept, and told him that a nine-year-old boy and a sexton four days apart had produced the same idea in different vocabularies on the same afternoon, and that this was the single most convincing thing anybody had.

Then the made things: what they were, that they were built and not bred, that they were sterile, that every one was hand-made and irreplaceable. That the first batch had been a trial run against his village and the second against Millford and that the difficulty had been raised deliberately between them.

She set out Lin Yue’s three fractions, and told him the third was unidentifiable, and did not tell him where else it had been found, because that was a child’s medical business and not his.

And she told him she had been wrong about co-location and had put it in writing at the time, and that the reason it mattered to him specifically was that she was going to ask him to do something from exactly where he was standing.

Emrys heard her out without asking a single question, which she had not expected.

"That’s the description."

"All of it."

"And the ask?"

"Three anchors, spread. You here, Maren wherever she is, Elian at Seven Peaks. We hold the plane open, and I go down through it." Raven put her hands flat on the table. "I’ll be exact about your part, because the last time I sat in this kitchen I was inexact and it cost you a season of wondering. You don’t fight. You don’t come anywhere. You stand on your slope on a day we agree in advance, and you do the thing you’ve done every day for thirty-one years, and you hold it steady for as long as you can, and when you can’t you stop, and nobody blames you for it."

"And you go into the ground."

"I go into the ground."

"What’s down there?"

"I don’t know. That’s the honest answer, and it’s the whole reason I’m going." She held his eyes. "If I knew, I’d send somebody else."

Emrys turned his cup a quarter turn on the table with his good hand.

"I’d want the night."

***

They came before he got it.

The warning was Maren, not Emrys — she was on the wall at the ninth hour with her tea, and she put the cup down and said, quite calmly, "Dunmore. Ground."

He had his palm on the coping inside two seconds.

"East. Twenty. Thirty. And two heavy." His face changed. "And there’s something wrong with the count."

"Wrong how?"

"There’s more weight coming than there are feet putting it down."

***

Raven had not fought properly in four months, and had not fought anything beyond her understanding in considerably longer, and the first thing she did was the least glamorous thing available, which was to spend six of her fifteen minutes putting people behind stone.

Forty-one villagers into the church. The three masons, who wanted to stay out and were told they were not soldiers and were more useful holding a door than dying in a yard. The two technicians Marcus had sent up to replace Dell — Cressa Iyle, who had arrived three weeks earlier and had not stopped complaining about the cold since, and a slight man named Wilm who wrote his relay logs in a hand nobody could read — into the granary. Maren on the church steps with her stick, because Maren was seventy-one and the single most valuable object in the district and would be defended by the building rather than by her own legs.

Emrys would not go in, and she wasted no breath on it.

"Then get on the slope and hold it. Not the fight. The ground. If they come up the flat again, I want that flat to be exactly as unhelpful to them as you can make it, and if I need something else I’ll shout, and you will not act on anything you have not heard me shout. Clear?"

"Clear."

She went out through the gap in the wall alone and stood in the middle of two hundred years of scattered stone and let the fire come up her arms.

***

They came over the flat in a line, and they came fast, and what she learned in the opening seconds was that Ostrek’s sheets were four weeks old and worth nothing.

Dragon fire took the leading dozen off the ground in a sheet of white that went up the whole eastern approach and turned the frost to steam in a strip forty meters wide. That worked. That would always work; you cannot revise your way out of being burned. Seven were dead before they landed and three more came apart when they hit.

The other two got up.

Not undamaged — the plating along one flank had gone the color of a cooked shell and was flaking off in sheets — but up, and moving.

That was wrong, and she knew it was wrong, and she did not have time to work out why.

Then the swarm reached her, and she stopped analyzing.

Close work. Nine at once and no room, and she killed four in the first four seconds with fire she could not afford, because at that range dragon fire costs you the air you are standing in and she had to breathe. So she stopped using it and used her hands, and it was ugly and slow, and one opened her forearm from wrist to elbow through the leather before she got a knee into its thorax and broke it.

The fifth one she killed by driving it into a standing stub of the churchyard wall, and the wall came down on both of them, and she came out from under it with a dead thing on her chest and her ears ringing.

She got up. She was bleeding freely and would keep bleeding to the end, and had stopped noticing by the ninth minute.

***

The heavies came at the tenth minute, and one came over the wall.

It did not jump. Jumping would have been survivable and expected, and Raven had watched things jump on more worlds than she cared to count. What it did was rear onto the rearmost pair of legs at the base of the rubble and open — a pair of sheets she had read about in Lin Yue’s report and had filed as an ambition, and they were no longer folded flat under the carapace.

Not wings. Lin Yue had been right about that too: there was no muscle in the world attached to that animal that could have lifted something bigger than an ox.

But the flat below the wall was a graded ramp, and the thing came up it at a dead run, and at the top it spread four square meters of membrane and did not fly so much as refuse to fall for a dozen meters, and it landed inside the churchyard on the fourth row with its whole weight, and the fourth row was where Emrys was standing.

He had a half-second. He used it correctly, and it was still not enough.

The ground under it went soft — Raven saw it happen, saw the turf change the way turf does when a spring line finds it — the same trick from the summer, executed better than he had managed it then. The forelegs went in. The thing’s front end dropped, and its jaw came down twelve inches short of him and buried itself in the earth.

Its shoulder caught him anyway and put him thirty feet across his own graveyard into the low wall.

***

Raven crossed the churchyard in something under two seconds and had no memory of it afterward.

The thing was hauling itself out of the soft ground with its back legs working and its spread membranes shredding on the headstones, and she struck the join between its skull plate and the first thoracic segment with fire concentrated to a line rather than a sheet, the expensive way to do it and the only way anything was going to work on a shell that thick.

Nine seconds. She held the line the whole way, and it cooked through, and the thing stopped.

Then she was on her knees beside it because holding a cutting line for nine seconds at Soul Ascension entry costs precisely what it costs, and there is no arrangement with the world about that.

The second heavy hit the granary wall on the far side of the village at the same moment, and she heard it, and could not get up, and for the whole of that time Anselm Halloran and his sister and a broad quiet man called Tobiah did the thing that put their names in the record.

They had a Refining Hall lettering chisel each and a mason’s mallet and no business whatsoever being where they were, and they went into the gap in the granary wall shoulder to shoulder and held it for the nine or ten seconds it took Raven to get her legs back under her.

Ilsabet Halloran lost her right hand at the wrist.

Tobiah did not lose anything and never worked stone again. The letter from the Medicine Hall that explained why arrived eleven days later; in terms, Emrys did not follow and never asked anybody to repeat.

Raven killed the second one from behind with the same cutting line and less finesse, and it was finished about a minute after that, and the swarm went east in a loose, unhurried line the way they always did.

***

The count was four dead. Odile Trant, who was eighty-one and had been three paces from the church door and had turned back for somebody else’s stick. Hesk Bowen, who had not been where anybody thought he was. And both technicians, who had been safe in the granary and had come out of it when the wall went.

Ilsabet Halloran was alive because her brother got a tourniquet on her inside forty seconds, having been taught it years ago in a Refining Hall safety class that he had complained about at the time.

Emrys had three broken ribs on the left side, two of them the ones the hunter had cracked in the summer and which had never quite let him forget it, a shoulder that would need setting, and no new damage to the arm that mattered, because the arm that mattered had been in a sling.

***

She went to the carcass before she went to Emrys, and knew while she was doing it that she would think badly of herself for it later, and went anyway, because the wrong thing she had seen in the opening seconds was still sitting behind her teeth and would not be put down.

The one she had cooked through was the better specimen. She got the lamp close and made herself be slow about it.

The dorsal plating was half again the thickness of anything in Ostrek’s sheets. Over the spine, over the skull, over the shoulder ridges and the whole upper surface of the thorax — laid down heavy, layered, the seams staggered like courses of brick so that no single line ran clean through it.

The flanks were thin. Thinner than batch one. Where the plate turned under the body it went from armor to little more than hide inside a hand’s width, and there were places along the belly where she could have put a knife in with no strength at all.

She sat back on her heels.

Nothing had ever burned one of these. Not one, not once. The first batch had died on this hillside to lamps and a mattock and two meters of wet clay; the second had died at Millford to a rune-forged pike and a grain store dropped on its back and a bone saw through the neck joint. Iron and masonry and mud. Every countermeasure in the record was something a frightened person could pick up, and not one of them came at an animal from above.

You did not build that shell against Ferrow’s Rest. You did not build it against Millford. You built it against a sheet of fire coming down onto the top of a thing.

There was one person on this continent who fought that way.

Raven took her hand off the carapace and wiped it slowly on her thigh, twice, longer than the black on it warranted, and stayed where she was with the lamp burning down beside her.

Maren had come up the row without being heard, which at seventy-one and on that knee was its own small feat.

"You’ve gone a color," she said.

"It was made for me." Raven did not look up. "Not for the village. The village is where I happened to be standing."

Maren considered the thing on the ground for a long moment.

"Then it knew you were coming."

"Or it stopped caring where I’d be, and built for me anyway, and sent forty of them out to find me." Raven got up, and it took her two tries. "I can’t tell those apart from here, and I’m not going to guess in front of you."

She did not say the other thing. The other thing was that she knew the hand this had been drawn by — knew the particular quality of attention that looks at an enemy for a long time and then builds a shape around the shape of them — and there has never been a person she could say that to.

***

Maren found him where he had come to rest and sat down on the ground next to him rather than trying to get him up, and they were still there when Raven came up from the carcass and stood over them both with blood down one side of her and her hand pressed into her own forearm.

"It flew." He put it the way a man puts a thing he needs somebody else to confirm.

"It didn’t fly. It fell slowly, and it chose where." Raven crouched, which took her longer than it should have. "Lin Yue told a room three weeks ago that the wing structure was the only item she could see that wasn’t a fix. She said it was an ambition. She was right, and nine people heard her, and I still didn’t build a plan around it."

"Could you have?"

"I could have put spearmen on that ramp." She looked at the churned ground where the thing had come down. "It’s not a fair thing to hold against myself, and I’m going to hold it against myself anyway, and Kairos will tell me not to, and he’ll be right, and it won’t make any difference."

Emrys breathed carefully around the ribs for a moment.

"The ask," he said.

"Not now. You’ve got three ribs, and I’ve got a hole in my arm, and neither of us should be deciding anything."

"The ask," Emrys said again.

So Raven waited.

"I stood on my ground, and I did the thing, and it worked, and it put its face in the dirt a foot short of me, and it still knocked me across my own graveyard. That’s what my whole self is worth against a single one of them. One." He turned his head to look at her. "And you want me to stand on the same slope on a day we agree in advance and hold a hole open in the world while you climb down it."

"Yes."

"And there’s a hundred and six rows up there, and I can hold fourteen properly or the lot of them badly, and I’ve been arguing with that old woman about it for a fortnight."

"I know."

"Then you’d better be quick when you get down there," Emrys said, "because I’ll not hold it long."

Maren Harren put her hand over her eyes for a second, which nobody except Raven saw, and Raven never remarked on it, then or afterward.

***

He would not be moved that night, and there was nothing in his house he needed, so they put him where he wanted to be, which was in the churchyard with his back against the wall and a lamp beside him and the fourteen stones in a row in front of him, eleven of them finished.

Raven sat with him for a while because there was nobody else to do it and because sitting down was, at that point, the only thing she was genuinely qualified for.

"Two of yours are down there," Emrys said, nodding at the row. "The technicians. I don’t know either of their names, and I’ll be cutting them into stone by the turn of the year — or having them cut," he corrected himself, without much bitterness. "You’ll send me the spellings. Properly. Not off a list. From somebody who knew them."

"You’ll have them in four days."

"And the woman with the hand. Halloran."

"She’ll live. She’ll not cut."

"No." Emrys considered the eleven finished stones. "Then she’ll want the letter I never got, and nobody wrote it for me either, so somebody had better." He shifted, and stopped, and breathed. "That’s the thing about all of this that nobody says out loud. It isn’t the dying. There’s a great deal of not-dying in it and every bit of that has to be lived in afterward, and there’s no procedure for it and no sheet from your Ostrek."

Raven sat in a cold graveyard with a slit forearm and the whole of the next four days already assembling itself in her head, and found that she had nothing to add that would not have been an insult.

"No," she said. "There isn’t."