Chapter 567 - 566: In Front of Everybody

Chapter 567: Chapter 566: In Front of Everybody

Location:Seven Peaks — The Hall; The East Wall; The Lower Yard

Date/Time:TC1857.07.06 – TC1857.07.07

The cold came up off the Hall floor through boot leather no matter how many people were standing on it, and Raven had stopped noticing that years ago and noticed it again on the third morning because she had been awake since the second hour and had run out of things to do with her hands.

The room smelled of three governments’ breakfasts and somebody’s boot polish.

They were on the publication clause. They had been on the publication clause since the previous afternoon and would have been on it until evening, because the Federation’s second delegate had a series of objections that were each individually reasonable and that together added up to a request that nobody ever have to publish anything they had not already decided to publish, and because Speaker Kael-Ren had worked that out inside five minutes and had spent the morning so far saying so in progressively shorter sentences.

The Assessor had not spoken since the first session.

She sat third from the left of the Federation side, with her small book in front of her and a hand flat on each side of it, and she wrote perhaps twice an hour, and Raven had given up pretending she was not watching for it.

Thorne came in at the door and did not come to the table.

That was the whole of the warning. He stood at the door and waited for Raven to look at him, and she looked at him, and he moved his head very slightly toward the east.

***

She stood up in the middle of a Federation sentence.

"There’s a thing at the east wall," Raven told the room. "I’m going to go and look at it. Nobody in this room is under any obligation to do anything at all, and the safest place on this mountain is the one you are sitting in, and I will come back and tell you what it was."

Kael Xuán was already standing.

"How many?"

"I don’t know yet."

"Then I’ll come and look at it with you." He said it the way a man reads out a decision he made some time ago. "Not to be useful. Because I have signed nothing yet and I would like to have seen it before I do."

Speaker Kael-Ren got up. So did several of his twelve, and both peg-setters were among them, and the one who had never been off Confederacy ground said something short on the way past that Thorne wrote down and that Raven did not hear properly and was quite glad about.

The Federation did not move.

Three of them did not move. The Assessor put her pen down, closed her book, put it in her coat, stood up, and walked out of the Hall behind the rest of them, and did not say anything to anybody.

***

It was the east wall, and it was ninety or a hundred, and it was not the same.

Raven got up onto the wall with Taron and had about a minute and a half to look, and she used it the way she had been taught by a farmer with a notch in her ear who had been dead five months: she did not look at the animals. She looked at the ground they were crossing and where it would slow them and where it would not.

Then she looked at the animals, and the minute and a half turned out to be the most useful thing anybody at Seven Peaks got all day.

"They’re in threes."

Taron did not answer for a second.

"Say it again."

"Look at the spacing. They’re not a line, and they’re not a wave. They’re coming up in groups of three with a gap, and the gap is about the width of a man’s reach, and the one at the back of each three isn’t doing anything." She did not take her eyes off it. "That one’s watching the other two."

"That’s our form."

"That’s our form."

Taron put both hands on the parapet.

"We published it," Taron answered. "In the fifth month. Over your name, with the provenance on it, in the same size, to everybody who could read it."

"Yes."

"Then it’s had two."

***

They came over the lip in threes, and the wall teams took them in threes and for about four minutes it was the most even fight anybody at Seven Peaks had ever had, which was itself the worst thing about it.

Raven worked the north end because that was where the wall was lowest.

She used the line twice at the start and then stopped, because two lines apiece with an ablative crust and a hundred animals is arithmetic she had done on her knees in the open ground at Ferrow’s Rest, and because there were threes standing on either side of her doing it the other way and doing it better.

So she went into the line as a front.

She had not done that since the second year. Taking the arms is the job for somebody who can hold and does not need to be clever, and it turned out she could hold, and there was a woman on her left she had never spoken to and a Millford road man behind her who called the head twice in four minutes and was right both times.

It was on the fourth minute that the thing in front of her stopped.

Not dead. It came up over the lip and stood, with the arms folded, at a distance she could not have closed without leaving the wall — and it stayed there while the two in front of it went past her into the people on her flanks.

She understood it about a second later, and it went through her like cold water.

It was doing the third position.

She did not have time to be frightened about it and was frightened about it anyway, in the back of her head, in the place where things wait. The animal did not come at her. It stood at a distance that was exactly the distance she would have told somebody to stand at, and it did not once look at her, because it had no eyes, and the two it was standing behind killed a man on her left while it was doing it.

She got past it in the fifth minute by going at the two rather than the one and by having a woman from the drill yard put herself where the arms would go.

The third one did not fight when the other two were dead. It turned and went back down over the lip.

It was not damaged. Raven put that in the report herself, in the first column, with her own name against it, because she was the only person who had been close enough to be certain.

***

Kael Xuán fought on the wall from the second minute to the sixteenth with an Imperial guard to each side of him and did not once do anything clever.

Raven saw perhaps half of it and heard about the rest from six separate people afterward, and the accounts agreed, which they usually do not. He went into the second position — the side, the neck, the part where you are under the animal and cannot see the head — and he let the two guards do the front and the watching, and he did it eight or nine times, badly at first and then not badly, and he took a strike across the back of the shoulder in the seventh minute and stayed in the line.

The Confederacy peg-setter who had never been off Confederacy ground died at the sixth minute at the low end of the wall, and the account Thorne eventually wrote said that he had been standing in the third position for a woman from Millford and a Seven Peaks cook, that he had called a head, that both of them lived, and that he had been in the country for three days.

Speaker Kael-Ren was forty paces away and did not get there.

***

Marcus Vale died in the lower yard, and nobody at the wall knew for an hour.

They came round the shoulder of the hill on the south side where nobody had ever had to put a team because nothing had ever come from the south, and the first two went into the lower yard where the technical stores were, and there were eleven people in there, and none of them were a three.

He got them out. That is not a thing anybody had to reconstruct; there were the same eleven standing in the yard afterward who said the same thing, which was that he put them through the door and shut it and did not come through it himself, and that the reason he did not come through it himself was that the door only shut properly if somebody held the bar on the wrong side.

Aldis Stell was one of them.

He came out of that door and went up the hill against the traffic, because Tianlei’s room was on the second level of the east side and the east side was where the wall was, and he had a rule about being where he was supposed to be.

He got there. The child was where he was supposed to be, with the door shut, and Aldis Stell went in and shut it behind him and put a chair under the handle, which was the correct thing, and then went back out into the corridor because he had heard something at the stair end, and that was the last decision he made.

Tianlei was found afterward under the window with the chair still under the handle, unhurt, sitting on the floor, with the night book open on his knees.

He had been holding the pen.

***

It broke at the eighteenth minute, and it broke the way the others had, which was that it stopped.

Fifty-one carcasses on the east ground and nine more in the lower yard, and the rest went back down the slope at the same pace they had come up it, and this time there were four governments standing on a wall to watch them do it.

Raven got down off the wall and stood in the yard with her hands on her knees for about as long as she was going to allow herself, and when she straightened up the Assessor was six paces away with her book out.

They looked at each other.

"You’ll want the numbers," Raven offered. "Thorne will have them by tonight, and you’ll have the same page everybody else has."

"Thank you." It was the first time Raven had heard her speak. Her voice was ordinary. "I want to say one thing, and then I will go back to not saying anything, because I am here to report and not to talk, and I would rather be accurate about which I am doing."

"Say it."

"You used your own published doctrine against you." She had not opened the book. "The animals arrived in the formation you distributed in the fifth month. I would like to know whether you would publish it again."

Raven did not answer immediately, and the reason she did not was that about a dozen people were within hearing and every one of them was going to remember it.

"Yes."

"Why."

"Because between the fifth month and this morning that sheet kept people alive in six settlements I can name and probably more that I can’t, and because the alternative is that I hold doctrine at Seven Peaks and post it when it’s safe, which means posting it when it’s no longer useful." She straightened up the rest of the way. "And because whatever is doing this has been watching us fight for a year and did not need the sheet. It needed about six engagements. The sheet saved farmers two months of dying to find it out."

The Assessor wrote for a few seconds.

"That is a complete answer," the Assessor allowed, "and I will write it as you said it and not shorter."

Then she went back up to the Hall.

***

The count came together by dark, because Thorne had a dozen people on it and because two governments had sent their own observers to stand next to his, which he had allowed without being asked to and had then written down that he had allowed.

Sixty carcasses. Fifty-one on the east ground and nine in the lower yard. Somewhere between thirty and forty went back down the slope.

Nineteen dead at Seven Peaks. One Confederacy. Two of the Empire’s nine, both guards, both on the wall with Kael Xuán. Sixteen of theirs.

Raven took the page up to Elian herself, which took her about ten minutes she did not have, and stood in the doorway while he read it twice.

He did not say anything about the dead. He would, later, and she knew roughly when, and it was not now.

"They came in threes," he said.

"They did."

"Is that in the first column?"

"It’s the first line of it."

"Then put the date the sheet went out next to it." He had the rule across the board already. "Fifth month. And the date today. So whoever reads it can see how long it took, and they won’t have to take anybody’s word for the number, because both dates are things that happened."

***

They sat again at the second hour after noon on the following day, which Raven had not expected and had not asked for.

It was Speaker Kael-Ren who called it, standing in the doorway of the Hall with somebody else’s blood on his coat, and what he said was that his man had been in this country for three days and had died holding a position for two people he had never met, and that he was not going to explain to a settlement of twelve hundred people that he had come home early.

The Northern sheet was still on the table in front of the empty chair.

The stones were still on it.

Kael Xuán sat down in the chair opposite it with his shoulder strapped under his coat and said, before anything else and before anybody had called the room to order:

"I withdraw four of my six refusals."

Thorne’s pen stopped.

"Not the noun. The noun stays out, and I will argue that until I lose." His hands were on the table, and they were not entirely steady, and he did not appear to be doing anything about that. "The four I withdraw are the four where I told her that a duty to assist could not be drafted in a way that three governments would sign. I was correct about that on the page and I have now stood on a wall, and I find that being correct on the page has stopped being interesting to me."

Nobody said anything at all.

"I do not know what to put in their place," Kael Xuán admitted. "I have no draft. I am telling this room that I was wrong in front of the people I was wrong in front of, which is the only version of it that costs anything, and I would like the rest of the afternoon to work out what to write."

Speaker Kael-Ren sat down.

"You’ll have it," Speaker Kael-Ren answered. "And I’ll tell you the shape of what I want in it, and you can do what you like with that, because I’ve had it in my head since about the sixth minute."

"Go on."

"Nobody sends. Everybody comes." He wiped his hands on his coat without looking at them. "Not a duty to answer a call. There’s no time for calls. A duty to go toward it. You see it, you go, and you tell the other three afterward what you did and what it cost, and if you didn’t go you write down why."

"That is an enormous thing to ask of four governments."

"It is." Speaker Kael-Ren put his elbows on the table. "And two hours ago I watched a man from the Empire stand in the second position under an animal and let a Seven Peaks farmer watch his head, and I would like to find out whether that was the week or whether that was the arrangement, and the only way I know to find out is to write it down and see who signs it."