Chapter 606 - 605: A Thumbnail

Chapter 606: Chapter 605: A Thumbnail

Location:Seven Peaks — The North Camp Path; The North Gate

Date/Time:TC1858.03.11

Feathers of frost stood up along the animal’s back where the steam had frozen in the night, white and fine and a finger long, so that from the gate it looked furred.

Lin Yue had been looking at it from the gate for most of an hour.

It lay where it had died, across the trodden path forty paces out, head to the east and tail to the west, on its side now where the night before it had been on its belly. The snow under it had melted and refrozen into a dish of gray ice. On either side of the path, close enough to touch from the carcass with a long stick, the struck squares lay black and wet in their rows. One of them, on the north side a little past the carcass, was gray instead of black. That was the one Raven had burned.

"I want it on the bench," Lin Yue said.

"No," said Tilda Rudd.

Tilda was beside her at the edge of the paving with her spear grounded. She had been there since first light, and before that she had been out at the tent, and she had walked out over that carcass twice in the dark, once running and once to fetch a mallet. Lin Yue had been told all of this by three different people before she had her coat on.

"I’m not asking you to carry it."

"Nobody’s carrying it. Hanne said. Nobody goes off the stone dragging a weight they can’t drop." Tilda shifted her grip. "You want to look at it, you go and look at it. Out there. We’ll stand around you."

So she went out.

+++

They walked her down the path in a five, Tilda at the front, Lisle Thorley behind, three others Lin Yue did not know at the sides and the back. The fifth walked backward. Lin Yue carried her case against her chest and a long iron probe in her other hand, the one she used for sounding carcasses, a rod as long as she was tall with a handle bent into one end.

Tilda had stopped them at the gate.

"Don’t watch the snow," she said to the five, and to Lin Yue as well, although she wasn’t looking at her. "The snow didn’t move. Last night. Not for him. Watch the squares. Each of you take the ones on your side and watch them, and if one lifts, say so. Don’t say ground. Say which."

"Which?"

"Count them from the path. First on the left. Second on the left. So we know where."

Nobody argued. Lin Yue noticed that nobody argued and filed it, the way she filed most things, under the heading of what people did when they had stopped expecting to be told.

At the carcass, the five stood around it facing out, and Lin Yue set her case down on the path and knelt in the ice dish and took off her gloves.

It was the first one she had touched since the east wall.

She thought that and set it aside. Since the east wall in the seventh month she had read about every one of them. She had read Freya’s hand on the Cold Shoulder carcasses and Bjorn’s on the traverse and the Stonefall sheet and Bett Mowbray’s floor and Naida’s account of the plate. She had read The neck joint is covered, and A spear at the joint from the front slides off, and she had sat with those two lines for most of an evening wanting very badly to have the thing in front of her that they described.

Now she had it, and the part they described was gone.

The second plate had been there. She could see where. Behind the skull, where the neck began and where every sheet for a year had sent people’s points, there was a ridge of chitin burned back to a black stub as wide as two fingers, and the stub rose from the back edge of the skull plate itself, not from the neck. It had grown down from the head. Below it the joint lay open and cooked, and somewhere in there was the line that had killed it.

She took out the calipers and measured the stub. She took out the book and wrote the width, and grown from the rear margin of the skull plate, not from the neck, and remainder burned; length cannot be given.

That last was the line she disliked writing most in all the work she did, and she wrote it often.

+++

The crust was the next thing.

Raven’s line had taken it off the back. Lin Yue knew that before she touched it, because she had read Hanne Lowther’s slate when it came into the Medicine Hall that morning, and because the back of the animal under its frost was bare black plate in staggered courses, the same laminated roof she had cut through by lamplight on the Millford road more than a year ago. Nothing on the back.

The belly was another matter.

The animal lay on its side, and the side it lay on had been toward the ground when the line came. Lin Yue worked the probe under the lower edge of the belly plate and levered, gently, and the carcass was frozen to the ice and did not move. She tried again with the hooked end. Tilda, without turning around, said, "Lisle," and Lisle Thorley came back from the rear, set the butt of his spear beside her probe and leaned on it with her, and the body came up off the ice a hand’s width with a sound like a pot lid coming unstuck, and the underside was there.

The crust was on it.

Gray, flaking, dry. She knew it. She had described it in a sheet that had gone to every post on the continent. Not armor. Fuel. She broke a flake off with her thumbnail, and it came away cleanly, and she held it up in the light.

Then she took the calipers to it.

She had measured the crust before. Ferrow’s Rest, the fifth month: she had not been there, but she had measured what came west. The east wall: sixty carcasses in the yard after the summit, and she had measured nine of them before the smell made it impossible, and written the figures down, and she had them in the book in her case. About a thumbnail. That was what she had written in the sheet, because a thumbnail was a thing a farmer could hold up and compare.

She measured three places on the belly and one on the inside of a hind leg where the line had not reached. She wrote each figure down. Then she opened the book back to the seventh month and laid her finger beside the east-wall figures and read them, and read the new ones, and read the old ones again.

Twice.

Not everywhere the same. Not exactly twice. But on every place she had measured, the crust on this animal was near enough twice the thickness of the thickest she had measured on the east wall.

She wrote it as figures, two columns, the old and the new, with the dates at the top of each. She did not write twice. Anybody who could read figures could see it, and anybody who could not would be told it by somebody who could, and if she wrote twice then somebody would read it at a crossing as a rule.

Under the figures she wrote: Crust on underside and legs only. Back bare after the line. Thickness on this animal against the east-wall animals, seventh month, above. One animal.

One animal. She underlined that. Then she knelt back in the ice dish with her bare hands going numb, eyes on the squares on either side, black and wet, and found she was listening for somebody on the five to say first on the left.

Nobody did.

+++

The forelimbs were last, and she nearly did not look at them closely, because the forelimbs had been drawn a hundred times and there was nothing in them that anybody had ever been able to use.

She looked anyway, because she had been trained to look at the last thing as carefully as the first, and because the light was good.

The two long limbs that folded against the thorax were folded now, in death, crossed under the head. The inner edge of each, the edge that faced the other when they closed, had always been a hard ridge of chitin, serrated, like the back of a saw. It was not like that now. It had been ground. She ran the side of her thumb along it, and it was smooth and very hard and very nearly sharp, and broad, a flat edge the width of her little finger, and the serrations were gone from it except near the joint at the top, where a few of them stood up still, worn down to stubs.

Packed into the joint itself, in every crease, was earth. Not snow. Earth, fine and gray and frozen solid, and grit in it that caught the light.

She knelt there with her thumb on the edge.

Then she took out the book and drew it. Side and section, with the calipers on the width. Inner edge of forelimb ground flat, serration absent except at proximal joint, where worn to stubs. Earth and grit packed in the joint.

There was a line she wanted to write under that, and she did not write it. The line was a comparison, and the thing she would have compared it with was a thing she had never seen herself: a pale animal in Raven’s report, seen far down beneath the keystone layer, with two broad forelimbs like spades, worn the way a spade wears on stone.

She had not seen that. She could not demonstrate what she had not seen. She closed the book.

"Done?" Tilda said, without turning around.

"Nearly."

+++

The gray square was eight paces past the carcass, on the north side, two squares out from the path.

Lin Yue stood at the edge of the path opposite it with the probe in her hand.

The Medicine Hall had told her about it, half of it at once, in the time it took to wrap her hands for the cold. Raven had walked out after Odo Pask, barefoot, and put her line into the ground where he had gone down. The square had boiled. In the morning it was the only one in the field that had frozen. People had been looking at it from the gate since first light, and Lin Yue had heard what they said to each other at the gate, which was that there was a way to make the squares freeze.

Raven was thinking it too.

Lin Yue knew that because Raven had said it, at the stove, to Mira, in the low even voice she used when she had decided something and was saying it aloud to find out whether anybody would stop her. If I do one a day, there’s three hundred of them. I’ll do two.

Mira had said, With what hands?

Raven had not answered.

"Tilda," Lin Yue said. "I’m going to reach."

Tilda turned her head then, for the first time, and took in the probe, and the gray square, and the black square between it and the path.

"From here," Lin Yue said. "I’m not stepping off."

Tilda considered that. Then she said, "Lisle. Left side. Second and third," and Lisle Thorley moved to the edge of the path beside Lin Yue and fixed his eyes on the two squares on that side, the black one and the gray one, and didn’t move them.

Lin Yue reached.

The probe was long enough. Just. She leaned out over the black square with her weight back on her heels and set the point of the rod on the gray crust of the burned one, and pushed.

It held. It was hard. Baked mud, fused, frozen on top, ash in it. She leaned on the rod and it held, and she leaned harder, and felt the crust take her weight and then, quite suddenly, not.

The probe went through.

It went through a hand’s depth of hard, and then it went on down into soft as if into porridge, and she let it go a little further, and further, until she had a forearm’s length of rod in the ground and was leaning out over the black square farther than she wanted to be.

She drew it back slowly. It came up black and wet for most of its length. Steam came off it in the cold, faintly.

"Warm," Lisle said. He hadn’t meant to say it aloud; she could tell.

Lin Yue held the rod up to the light and found the mark on the iron where the hard crust had ended, a hand’s width down from the tip.

A hand deep. Raven had boiled it, and it had frozen on top to a hand’s depth, and below that it was warmer than the squares that had never been touched. She had heated the earth beneath the lid and left it.

She stood the probe upright in the path, the wet end down, against the carcass, and took out the book one last time and wrote it standing, with the five at her back and Lisle’s eyes on the square.

Square burned by the line on the night of the tenth. Frozen hard on top to a hand’s depth. Below that, soft. Below that, warmer than the unburned squares to either side. One square.

She didn’t write it will not work. She didn’t write with what hands. She wrote what the rod had done.

+++

Raven was at the gate when they came in.

She stood on the paving where Hanne Lowther had stood the night before, in boots now, with her hands still wrapped in the gray wool and pushed into the front of her coat. She had watched all of it. Lin Yue could tell by the set of her shoulders, which were the shoulders of somebody who had been standing still in the cold a long time and had not let herself come out.

Her eyes went to the probe in Lin Yue’s hand and the black wet on the iron.

"Lisle said warm," Raven said. "I heard him from here."

"Yes."

"Under the crust."

"Under a hand of crust, it’s softer than the others, and it’s warm."

Raven didn’t answer. Lin Yue watched her face.

"I was going to do two a day," Raven said.

"I heard."

"It would have made it worse."

"Different," Lin Yue said. "I don’t know that it’s worse. I know what the rod did in one square."

Raven’s mouth moved, very slightly. It was not a smile, but it was close to the place a smile would have been on another day.

"You won’t let me have even that."

"No," Lin Yue said. "I can’t demonstrate it."

Raven took one wrapped hand out of her coat and held it out, and at first Lin Yue did not understand what she wanted. Then she did. She gave her the book, open at the page, and Raven read it standing in the gate passage with the wool on her fingers making her clumsy: the stub of the second plate, grown from the rear margin; the two columns of figures, old and new; the forelimb, ground flat, earth and grit packed in the joint; the square, a hand’s depth, warmer.

She read the crust figures twice. Then she shut her eyes for the space of one breath, standing in the gate passage with the book open in her wrapped hands, and opened them again.

Then Raven gave the book back without a word, and pushed her hand back into her coat, and turned and went in.

Lin Yue stayed at the gate with the five standing around her on the stone, nobody yet quite willing to say they were done. Out on the path, the probe stood upright against the carcass where she’d left it, wet black for most of its length and clean iron at the top, and as they watched, the cold began to whiten it, from the ground up.