Chapter 589 - 588: Eighty

Chapter 589: Chapter 588: Eighty

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

Date/Time:TC1858.02.20 – TC1858.02.24

From anywhere on the deck, Silas could see how much of the rack was left.

When the rig went up, it had been full, tier on tier of string laid crosswise in its cradles, the iron gone blue-black with the cold. Every morning the frost furred it white, and the winch crew brushed it off with their mittens before they coupled the next length. Now the bottom tier was all there was. Three lengths lay in it, with a gap beside them where yesterday’s had been, and above them the bare cradles held nothing but frost, like shelves in a shop that had sold out and not reordered.

He’d counted them before he was properly awake. He counted them again, standing at the collar with his right arm strapped across his chest and nothing to do with his left except hold his coat closed at the throat.

Three. He’d have known it with his eyes shut.

Out past the pit spur, where the planking stopped and the crust began, the dead thing lay where Mei had put it down, sprawled across the lip of the pit with its hind end in the snow. It had frozen into the shape of its last moment, head twisted back along the body. Jessa’s iron still stood out of it at the same slant. Overnight the frost had grown a white fringe along its upper edge, and from the deck it looked less like a weapon than a fence post somebody had forgotten to pull.

Nobody had taken it out. Silas had thought more than once that somebody would have to, and hadn’t said so to Mei, and she hadn’t said so to him.

The pan fire had gone out in the night. It went out every night now. Speaker Kael-Ren’s order had come out on the sledge with Mei, four lines in his square builder’s hand, and the crew had read it and done what it said: after dark, nobody anywhere on the site outside a five, and if that meant the fire died then it died. Every dawn somebody knelt at the trench and coaxed it back, and every dawn the slurry at the collar had grown its gray skin, and somebody broke it with the short iron, the one that was left.

This morning it had been Silas’s turn to watch them do it. It was always Silas’s turn to watch. He’d tried the short iron himself the morning after Mei came back, one-handed, and got the skin half broken before Mei took the iron off him without a word and finished it, and he’d stood there with his hand still curled around nothing and understood that he was, for the present, good for looking.

Seventy-seven had come up at first light. Fine at the foot, coarse at the head, and between them an edge you could have laid a straightedge along. Mei had labeled it at both ends, carried it along the planks past the canted board, laid it in the second row, and come back. He’d watched all of that too.

***

The sledge came out from Windbreak a little after noon. Silas heard it long before he could find it, a dry scrape and pause on the crust, then scrape again, and when it came over the last low swell there were two of the settlement crew on the rope and a third walking behind with a hand on the load.

Bread. Fuel for the pan. A sack of the mix, which he hadn’t asked for and would have to decide whether to use. And, out of a fold of oilcloth tucked inside the crewman’s coat, two sheets.

"For her," the crewman said, and held out the first one to Mei. "From the mountain."

Silas knew the hand on the outside of the fold before Mei had it all the way out of the man’s fingers. Small and quick, the letters leaning forward as if they had somewhere else to be. It had been correcting the margins of his formation sheets for years. Mei looked at her name on it and didn’t open it. She put it inside her coat, and pulled her glove back on over the hand that had held it, and returned to the trestles.

The second sheet was for Silas. It was in Thorne’s copying hand, which was nothing like Raven’s; everything in it stood up straight and waited its turn.

He read it at the rig leg, where the wind came least. With one arm there was no good way to hold a sheet against the wind, and in the end he pinned the top edge under his chin and read it upside down to himself, which made him feel about nine.

Stonefall. The crossing below the middle ford, dusk, the twenty-fifth, back in the first month.

A five posted on either bank. The man at the near end giving the call, and the five doing what the form said it would, and holding. Three coming at the far side. And then two that walked into the river and stood on the stones and did not attack anybody at all.

He read that part again.

The near five going into the water, because that was what a five did when the other one was pressed. The man at the near end left with his back to them on his own bank, facing the timber. And the one that had been in the timber the whole while, behind the first, and had moved only once there was a single man there to move on.

Two names at the head, where Seven Peaks put its dead now: Kelder Lowry and Edda Sowden, neither of them anybody he’d met. He read the names anyway, slowly, and then he did the arithmetic, because he couldn’t read a date without doing it. Six days to the end of the first month. Thirteen into the second. Nineteen days between their river and this deck. He did it twice. It came out the same both times, which it usually did, and which he never quite trusted until it had.

Then he lifted his chin off the sheet and looked down the board road.

The lane ran away from the deck toward the tents, ninety paces of doubled plank with the flats on either side, and halfway along it one board still stood canted through into the ground where the deck five had killed the thing that lay there. It had lain across the only way through, and it hadn’t fought, and nobody from either end could get past it. He’d worked that out by morning. He hadn’t known it had a name somewhere else.

A river. Two banks. And a deck, with the five gone off it along the lane to help, and two people left behind on it who weren’t in anything.

He looked at the edge of the planking where he’d lain on his face.

He’d been the near fifth. That was the plain arithmetic of it. He’d been the one left facing the wrong way while the rest went off to help, and nobody had posted him, so nobody had given him a word to call, and Orrin had been standing next to him, and whatever came onto the deck had come.

At the bottom of the sheet, where a rule would have gone, it said This is the rule we do not have.

Silas read that last line, and something in his chest that had been clenched for a week let go a quarter-turn. It was the first sheet from the mountain in a long time he’d have signed without reading twice.

He asked the crewman for a nail. The man gave him one and then, seeing the arm, took it back and drove it through the corner of the sheet into the rig leg with a hammer from the crew’s kit. Silas stood and looked at it there, flapping at its free corner.

He couldn’t have written anything under it if he’d wanted to. He found he didn’t want to.

Mei came to read it later in the afternoon. He watched her from the collar. She stood in front of the rig leg with her gloved hands at her sides and read all of it, and at the names she didn’t move, and at the part about the stones she turned her head and looked down the lane at the broken board for a long moment. Then she read the last line.

"Good," she said, to nobody, and went back to her tubes.

***

Seventy-eight. Seventy-nine.

The rack emptied the way a candle burns, too slowly to watch and too fast to believe. Two lengths. One. The winch crew brushed the frost off the last of it on the morning of the twenty-second and stood looking at it a moment before they coupled it, as though it might have something to say for itself.

Silas stood inside the deck five at night because that was the order, and it was a good order. He stood with the cold coming up through his boot soles from the planks and the lamps at both ends of the lane hissing in the dark, and watched the pan fire go down to red and then to nothing. The smell of it stayed a while after the light went, woodsmoke and scorched iron and the flat mineral bite of the mix, and then that went too, and there was only the cold and the breathing of the five around him.

He thought about the holes.

Forty, the first time, out here in the spring, with Ilva Merrit’s road still new under everybody’s boots. Sixty-two by the end of the summer, on a longer string. And this one.

Forty had not been the bottom. It had been the end of the string. Sixty-two had not been the bottom either. Sixty-two had been the end of the next string. Every single time they had stopped, it had been because they’d run out of a thing that was theirs. Iron. Cable. The week the slurry would hold. Never once had it been because the ground ran out of anything.

The first had gone into the record as depth unfinished, and he’d thought that honest at the time. It looked less like honesty from here. It looked like somebody writing the same sentence three times and waiting for it to turn into a different one.

On the morning of the twenty-second, when the last length went down, he sent one of the crew back to Windbreak on foot, in daylight, with a message he made the man say back to him twice.

"The last length’s in the hole, and there’s none on the rack. Tell him that. Tell him it isn’t me stopping. It’s the string."

The man went. He came back the next morning with a scrap of paper folded small inside his mitten, and Silas unfolded it against his knee.

Then it isn’t stopping. Bring it home, all of it, and my people with it. And under that, in the same square hand, the Speaker’s name, so it would be his.

***

Eighty came up a little before midday on the twenty-third.

There was no ceremony. There had never been ceremony. The winch crew let the brake off and took up, and the cable came out of the collar wet and gray, and the sampler came up out of the slurry, and the man on the line, who wasn’t Orrin, shook the plug into the tube Mei held out for it the way Orrin had shown him.

She held it up to the light.

Silas came across the deck to see. He didn’t have to. He did anyway.

It was all there. Flour-fine at the base of the plug. Coarse above, grit you could have counted with a fingernail. And between them the line, clean and flat, a third of the way up. He did the sum out of habit, and it put the line where the last seventy-nine had said it would be. A meter. Still a meter.

"There’s an edge," Mei said.

"I see it."

She kept holding the tube up between them, as if he might want a second look. He didn’t. He’d looked at it long enough to know what it was the moment it came into the light.

"So you don’t have to write anything," she said.

It took him a moment. The rule. His own, from the day she came out with her crate of tubes, back when Orrin still had two good hands: no edge, and she was to bring it to him first, and he’d put his own hand to it under hers, so that neither of them said it alone. He’d told her that, standing about where he was standing now.

There had always been an edge. There was an edge in the last one. The thing he’d built that rule for had never once come up out of the hole.

He made a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh, and his shoulder told him about it.

"What do I put?" Mei asked.

"Eighty. Both ends."

She did that. Her hand was steady today. The eight closed properly at the top.

"And under the row. On the sheet." He had to stop and choose it. He’d been choosing it for three days, and it came out different anyway. "String ended here."

She looked at him.

"Not bottom," he explained. "We didn’t find a bottom. Not no bottom, either, because we didn’t look where there might be one. We ran out of string. That’s what happened. Write what happened."

She wrote it. Then she held the pencil out toward him, point first, the way you’d hold it for somebody who was going to sign.

He looked at it. His left hand made letters like a drunk man walking home.

"Put my name under it," he said. "In yours. Silas, then by Mei’s hand. So it’s both of us."

She did that too, and didn’t say anything about it, and carried eighty off along the planks to lie at the end of the second row.

Orrin had said a hundred. Silas had heard him say it, on this deck, loud enough for the tents, because Orrin had never said anything he didn’t want the tents to hear. Ground likes a number with a zero on it, he’d said. Eighty had a zero on it. It was the string’s number, though, not the ground’s, and Orrin would have been the first to point that out and the last to stop.

***

They began bringing the string up that afternoon.

It came slower than it had gone down. Every length had to be broken at the coupling with the big wrench, two of the crew on the handle, and swung out on the winch, and walked across the deck on shoulders, and laid in its cradle. The bottom tier filled. Then the one above it. The frost that had lain on the empty cradles for a week melted under the wet iron and ran down and froze again in beads.

Mei went out along the pit spur while there was still light.

Silas watched her stop at the end of the planks, where the dead thing lay. She crouched and looked at the iron a while. Then she put both gloved hands on it and pulled, and it didn’t move, and she changed her grip and pulled again.

He went out after her. He couldn’t have said what use he’d be. At the end of the spur he put his boot on the plate at the back of the thing’s skull and leaned his weight into it, and the chitin was so cold he felt it through the sole, and it smelled of nothing now, which was worse than when it had smelled of something. Mei braced and hauled. The iron came free all at once with a crack of frozen stuff breaking around it, and she sat down hard on the planks with it across her knees.

She wrapped it in a length of sacking from the pit and tied it with twine.

"It’s Jessa’s," she said.

That was all. He nodded and went back along the spur ahead of her so she wouldn’t have to walk behind him.

They had half the string up by dusk. The deck five’s head looked at the sky and then at Silas, and Silas nodded, and the crew set the wrench down and walked in off the rig, and the fives formed. Deck and tents. Silas stood inside the deck five with his back to the empty rack and his face to the flats.

The deck five’s head saw it first, and didn’t call a bank or a lane, only said "There," not loudly, with a nod toward the north.

It was out where the lamplight gave up, well past the pit, on crust nobody could have stood on. Pale. Long. Still. It didn’t come any nearer, and none of them went any nearer to it. Silas couldn’t make out a head at that distance. As far as he could tell, it was pointed at the rig.

It stayed while the lamps were trimmed. It stayed while the last of the day went. Then, without anything happening that he could point to, it wasn’t there, and there was only the crust going on into the dark.

Nobody said anything. The deck five’s head wrote one line in the post book by the lamp and closed it.

Silas stood the night out where he was, and was glad of the order, and was glad of the five, and did not sleep, and in the morning the rest of the string came up.

***

The last length came out of the collar a little after sunrise on the twenty-fourth, trailing slurry, and went across the deck on three shoulders to lie at the top of the rack. Every cradle was full again. The iron sweated and steamed in the cold air and began, as Silas watched, to grow its frost.

Nobody had lit the pan fire.

One of the crew went to do it without thinking, knelt at the trench and reached for the kindling, and then stopped with his hand out and looked across at Silas. Silas shook his head. The man put the kindling back where he’d found it and stood up and brushed off his knees.

The collar stood open in the middle of the deck with nothing going into it. Overnight the slurry had grown its skin, dull and gray and whole from rim to rim, and nobody had broken it. By tomorrow it would be thick enough to take a pebble. In a week, if Alek Voss was right, and he usually was about anything you could weigh, the column would stop holding, and the hole would begin to close from the bottom up, and by the thaw there would be nothing here but a stain on the crust and a deck nobody needed.

Mei came and stood beside him with the wrapped iron under her arm.

"Is it gone?" she asked.

"It’s going." He looked at the skin. "It’ll take a while to finish. We just won’t be here for it."

They loaded the tubes last. Eighty of them, in two rows, packed in straw in the crates they’d come out in, with the labels facing up so whoever opened them could read down the rows without lifting anything. Seventy-one with its hooked one. Eighty with its closed eight. And at the bottom of the sheet that went with them, in Mei’s hand, the line he’d chosen, with his name under it in hers.

Silas stood on the edge of the deck while the crew took up the sledge ropes, and looked back once at the collar.

The ground hadn’t stopped. It had gone on doing whatever it was doing, one meter at a time, as far down as anybody had ever reached and as far again, very likely, as nobody had. They had stopped. And they’d written down where.

He turned his back on it, and followed the sledges toward Windbreak across the crust.