Chapter 586 - 585: Seventy-One

Chapter 586: Chapter 585: Seventy-One

Location:Wild Confederacy — The Northern Flats, The Bore Site

Date/Time:TC1858.02.13 – TC1858.02.14

The broth tasted of the pan.

Not the slurry. The iron. The pan woman kept a smaller pot hooked over the corner of the fire trench where the heat came up hardest, and whatever went into it came out tasting of smoke and scorched metal and, faintly, of the mix, because nothing on the flats didn’t. Mei drank it anyway, standing on the pit branch with both hands around the cup, and it scalded going down, and she was glad of every bit of the scald.

"You never asked my name," the pan woman said.

Mei looked at her over the cup.

"Ten days. You’ve screened my girl, you’ve held a kettle with me all night, and you’ve called me nothing." She didn’t sound put out. She sounded as if she’d been keeping a tally and had reached the end of it. "It’s Jessa."

"I don’t ask," Mei answered. "At the shed. I don’t ask anything I don’t need for the sheet. It stops me wanting things from them."

"I’m not at the shed."

"No." Mei turned the cup a quarter-turn in her hands. "Jessa."

"There. That didn’t cost anything." Jessa took the cup back, rinsed it in the kettle, and hung it on its nail. "Orrin says it stops at a hundred."

"The hole?"

"He says ground likes a round number. He’s got a lot of opinions for a man who can’t close his right hand."

Orrin was at the rig, on the sample line where he’d been every day since the frost night. The palm had healed shiny and tight, and he worked the line with the heel of that hand and the fingers of the other and had got quick at it. When Mei came back along the branch onto the deck, he held up the sampler without being asked.

"Seventy," he reported. "Still got its edge. I’ll tell you now, it’ll stop at a hundred."

"Jessa told me."

"Jessa thinks I’m wrong." He shook it into the glass she held out. "Jessa thinks it doesn’t stop. Jessa’s a pessimist. You write that down as well, Seven Peaks. Orrin, sample line, says a hundred."

"I only write what comes up."

"Then I’ll wait for it to come up."

She labeled seventy at both ends. The edge sat low in the plug this time, a finger’s width off the bottom, flat and neat as a planed board. She took it down the lane and laid it in the second row, because the cloth had run out at sixty-six and the second trestle had come out from Windbreak on the backs of two crew, and she still minded the second row. She’d stopped saying so.

***

The fives went out at dusk.

She’d watched it enough times to know the order it went in. The deck five first, filing out across the planks to the lane’s head, where the rig stood behind them, and the long board road ran away in front toward the tents. Then the tent five, at the far end, ninety paces off, small in the failing light. Each five with its fifth turned out toward the flats. The two of them looking down the lane at each other along a single strip of doubled plank that was the only thing out here that would hold a person up.

Mei went back to the pit branch. She usually did, after dark. The pan fire was the warmest place on the site that wasn’t a tent, and Jessa talked, and Mei had found, without meaning to, that she liked being talked at.

Her sword was where she’d left it, leaning against the stacked kettles in its sheath. She’d carried it out from Windbreak on the sledge between the tube crates and hadn’t drawn it once. She moved it so the hilt was toward her hand. She didn’t know why. Jessa watched her do it and didn’t say anything.

It was full dark when the planks spoke.

Not a creak. The lane had creaked all day under boots. This was lower than that, a long, slow groan running through the doubled boards, the sound wood made when weight came onto it and stayed and spread itself out.

It came from halfway along the lane.

Mei turned. From the pit branch she could see the whole length of the board road by the lamps at either end, and in the stretch between the deck five and the tent five, where there was nobody, and there’d been nobody, something lay along the planks.

It lay as every sheet described. Lengthwise. Low. Its body filled the lane from edge to edge as though the lane had been cut to its measure, and the long folded limbs were drawn up tight along its flanks, and it did not move.

"Lane," the deck five’s head called. "Lane, middle—"

The tent five came.

They came the way the sheet said they could and the way everybody had read that they should, because one five coming along to the other was the thing that had saved people at Stonefall. Four of them along the planks at a jog, shields up, the fifth staying back at the tent end with her face to the dark. They got within ten paces of the thing on the lane before it unfolded one limb.

It didn’t get up. It didn’t have to. The limb went out sideways over the edge of the boards, low, and swept back in, and the front of the tent five was off his feet and off the planks and into the snow beside the lane before anybody could reach him. He went in to the thigh. Then to the hip. The flats took him the way they took everything, without hurry, and he was shouting and grabbing at the plank edge, and the side dropped flat on the boards and got both hands in his coat and hauled.

The animal lay there and let them.

They got him out. He came free gray to the waist and one leg wrong at the knee, and they dragged him back along the lane toward the tents, and the animal on the planks settled a little lower and waited.

Nobody was getting past it. Not from either end.

Mei understood that the way you understand you’ve missed a step in the dark, all at once and in the stomach. The tent five couldn’t come to the deck. The deck five couldn’t come to the tents. And she was standing on the pit branch with Jessa, who wasn’t in any five at all, at the end of a single plank spur that went nowhere but here.

"Jessa—"

The branch groaned.

It came from the flats end, the far end of the spur, where it met the pit. Low along the planks, the way the one on the lane had, but moving. Coming.

Mei had the sword out before she’d thought about it. The sheath went somewhere behind her. The branch was one plank-width narrower than the lane, and the thing coming along it filled it, and there was no room on either side for anybody to stand, and she was one person with nobody behind her to watch the head.

"Get back," she said. "Jessa, get back to the pit."

"I’ll call it."

"You’re not—"

"I’ve read the sheet the same as you. Front, side, head. You’re front and side. I’ll call it." Jessa was already behind her, hard up against the stacked kettles, close enough that Mei could smell the smoke in her clothes. "Go on, then."

It reached her.

It came up the last of the branch in a rush, low, the folded limbs coming out forward, and Mei met the first one with the flat of the blade and felt it all the way up into her shoulder. The limb was hard as a beam and heavier than a beam. She gave a pace. The planks bucked under her boots. She had nowhere else to give to.

"Head!"

Mei couldn’t see it. She was under the reach of the limbs, and the head was somewhere above and behind them, folding back along the flank like a hinge with no stop in it, and she didn’t look, because the front doesn’t look.

"Head, right, right—it’s going right—"

She went left.

Low and forward under the arm that was reaching for where she’d been, and the edge tipped down, and the joint behind the plate was exactly where every sheet had ever said it was. The blade went in. It went in a hand’s width and stopped against something, and she put her whole weight behind the hilt, and it went on.

The thing on the branch shuddered through its length and folded down onto the boards, and the planks sagged under it and held.

Mei got her boot on the plate and dragged the sword free. Her arms were shaking. There was something warm running down the inside of her left sleeve where the second limb had gone across her forearm on its way to nothing.

"Jessa, it’s—"

Jessa wasn’t behind her.

Jessa was at the fire trench, on her knees, with the long iron in both hands.

The iron had been lying in the trench for the skin on the pan, the way it always did, and the last hand’s length of it was dull red. Beyond her, on the far side of the pit where there wasn’t any planking at all, where there was only crust and what lay beneath it, something had risen out of the snow. It stood half-sunk, the flats holding it no better than they’d have held anyone, and it didn’t care. It was coming across the soft ground at Mei’s back, where Mei had been standing with her face to the branch.

Mei hadn’t heard it. Jessa had been facing the pit.

Jessa put the red end of the iron into it where the head met the body, straight in, with her shoulder behind it and a sound coming out of her that wasn’t a word. Steam went up. The thing reared, and the head came around, the whole way around, and took her.

Mei crossed the pit branch in two strides and went in over the kettles. She didn’t remember doing it. She remembered the smell, afterward, scorched iron and hot chitin and something under it she would not be able to name for the rest of her life. She remembered the plate at the base of the skull lifting as the head came back to find her, and the gap under it opening for one breath, and her edge going into the gap.

It went down half in the pit and half in the snow, and the iron stood up out of it at an angle, still smoking.

Jessa lay beside the fire trench on her back, one arm across the embers. Mei pulled the arm out of the fire. She knew as she did it that it made no difference.

***

It was the deck five that ended it.

Mei didn’t see how. By the time she was standing again, the deck five were out on the lane in a tight knot, all five together, shields up and the fifth walking backward in the middle of them with his eyes on the dark, and the animal on the planks had stood up at last to meet them. It had stopped being a wall. That was all that mattered. They went into it along the only footing there was, and it went down on the boards halfway to the tents, and the planks cracked under the weight of it and one of the doubled boards went through into the ground and stayed there.

Then the shout from the deck.

Silas’s voice. She’d never heard him shout. It went up high and broke.

She ran. The lane was blocked by the dead thing and the deck five picking their way around it, and she took the pit branch instead, back the way the first one had come, and around to the edge of the deck. The rig stood at the center of the planking with its lamp swinging. Nothing had touched it. The sample line hung down into the collar untouched, and the pan beyond it was still steaming.

At the deck’s far side, Silas was flat on his stomach with both arms over the side, and he was holding on to Orrin.

Orrin was in the ground to the chest.

There was no animal. Mei looked for it and couldn’t find it. Whatever had come up onto the deck from the flats side while the deck five were out on the lane had gone again, or was somewhere she couldn’t see, and it had left Orrin in the soft ground past the edge of the planks with his good hand locked in Silas’s sleeve and his bad one scrabbling at the board edge with nothing to grip.

"Pull," Silas said. "Mei. Pull."

She dropped beside him and got her hands in Orrin’s collar and pulled.

The ground held him. It didn’t grip. It didn’t suck. It simply took the space around him and didn’t give it back, the way it had taken her boot on the second morning, and every time they hauled him an inch up he settled half an inch down, and Silas was making a thin noise through his teeth, and his right shoulder did something she heard.

"Leave it," Orrin said. He was very calm. "Silas. You’ll go in. Leave it."

"No."

"You’ll go in after me, and then she’ll go in after you. I’ve watched this ground since before the snow." He looked at Mei, over Silas’s shoulder. "Write it down. Orrin, sample line. It’s past seventy. I was wrong about the hundred, probably."

"Orrin—"

"Probably," he repeated, and let go of Silas’s sleeve.

Silas didn’t let go of his. He held on until the ground was at Orrin’s chin, and past it, and until there was nothing to hold but cloth, and then there wasn’t that either. Mei had her hands on Silas’s belt by then, dragging him back from the edge with everything she had, and his arm came up empty out of the snow, and he lay on the deck on his face and didn’t move.

Beyond the lamplight, well out on the flats where no one could go, something stood side-on and still. Mei watched it. It stood there a while. Then it turned north and went away across the crust as if the crust were a road.

***

Two. One dead beside the fire trench and one gone into the flats.

Four animals that anybody saw. Three killed.

Jessa. Orrin.

The tent five’s front with his knee, which the crew splinted with two lengths of plank. Silas’s shoulder, out of its socket, which the deck five’s head put back in against the rig leg while Silas held the iron crossbar and didn’t make a sound. Mei’s forearm, opened along the outside, not deep.

The rig was untouched. The collar was untouched. The slurry in the hole stood at the level it had stood at dusk, with its gray skin across it, and the pan steamed, and nobody had fed the fire since Jessa.

Mei fed the fire.

She did it because it needed doing and because she didn’t know what else to do with her hands. She dragged the embers together along the trench the way she’d seen Jessa do it a hundred times, and put the fuel on, and waited until it drew. The iron was still standing out of the thing in the pit. She left it there. Somebody would have to take it out in the morning, and it wasn’t going to be her tonight.

Toward dawn the sampler came up.

The winch crew had kept the string going down through all of it. No one had given an order either way. One of them brought the sampler along the pit branch to her, because Orrin wasn’t there to do it, and held it out, and she took the plug in her tube and held it to the firelight.

Fine, then coarse. An edge.

Seventy-one.

Both ends. She watched her hand label them and saw what it was doing. The seven leaned. The one had a hook on it that none of the others had. Somebody reading the labels in a year would get to seventy-one and see the letters change and wonder what had happened at seventy-one, and look at the handwriting instead of at the glass.

She thought about writing it again.

Then she put the pencil down, and took seventy-one down the lane past the broken board and the dead thing lying across the planks, and laid it in the second row beside seventy, crooked label and all. Let them wonder. Something had.