Chapter 608: Nine

Location: Seven Peaks — Thorne’s room; the north gate

Date/Time: TC1858.03.12

Pine tar and something under it that stung the nose, the stuff Mira boiled in the Medicine Hall and soaked into wool, came into Thorne’s room a little before Raven did, and stayed after she sat down.

Raven sat in the chair across the table from him with her hands in her lap. They were still wrapped. The wool was gray and loose and had been changed that morning; it was wet at the fingertips where the salve had come through. Her boots were unlaced. She had walked from the Medicine Hall in them, which Mira had not wanted her to do, and Thorne had heard her on the stair, one step and then a pause and then the next. He had not gone out to help. When she came in she put her shoulder to the door frame for a breath before she let go of it, and he kept his eyes on his blotter until she had.

“I’ll write it,” she said.

Thorne looked at her hands and then at the pen on his blotter and said nothing. Long ago he had learned that the fastest way to have a thing seen was not to point at it.

Raven looked at her hands too.

“You’ll write it,” she said. “I’ll say it.”

Thorne uncapped the ink.

It was the twelfth. The made things had come up through the north camp on the night of the tenth, at the third hour, and taken Odo Pask out of the square beside him, and nothing had gone south about it since. Thorne had a copy of every return the mountain had sent since the Compact was signed, in a box under the window, in order. He knew without opening it that nothing in it had ever been two days late from Seven Peaks. He dated the top of a clean sheet. Then he waited for her.

Raven gave it to him the way she gave everything, in order, without dressing. The camp in the Hall on the eighth, in tent order, asked and not ordered. Odo Pask in the one standing tent by his own choice, two outside it by theirs. The pegs. The third hour. The squares. It came up whole on the path side and lay full length over the path, between the tent and the gate, and stayed there. She did not say the lane at the bore; that had been Hanne’s, and Raven said it had been Hanne’s and told him to write it as Hanne’s.

The pen went. Her voice was steady and quite low, and the only sign in it of anything was that she stopped twice to swallow.

“Three lines,” she said. “The first took the crust off its back. The second went into the back, and it went down. The third went through the neck joint. The second plate burned. It’s dead. It’s on the path.”

Thorne wrote Three lines. He wrote the rest. Then he waited for the next thing, which he already knew, because Hanne Lowther had brought him her slate on the morning of the eleventh and stood in front of his table while he read it, and had not left until he’d read it twice.

“Then Odo,” Raven said. “He was last. He’d turned to look behind them. The square next to him opened. It had him by the knees, and he was gone. Write that the snow under him didn’t move. Hanne said that. Write it as hers.”

Thorne wrote it as Hanne’s.

“Then I went out and put three more into his square, and there was nothing in it.”

That went down too. Then the pen came up.

“That’s it,” Raven said.

Thorne did not put the pen down, and didn’t write anything either. It stayed a finger above the sheet while his eyes went over what was there and stopped at the place under It’s dead. It’s on the path and before Then Odo, where there was nothing.

“Hanne’s slate has a number on it,” he said.

“I know what Hanne’s slate has on it.”

“Nine.”

“I know.”

When he raised his eyes, her face had the stillness it got when she had settled a thing in the night and come down the stair to see whether it would hold in daylight.

“Leave it out,” Raven said.

+++

Thorne had kept this mountain’s record a long time. In that time he had been asked to leave things out perhaps a dozen times, and had done it twice, and both times had written in the margin of the copy he kept what was left out and who had asked. Raven had never been told that. Thorne did not think she knew.

The pen went down crosswise on the blotter, so that it lay across the sheet and not beside it.

“Why?” he said.

“Because whatever goes out, they read. Since the east wall, at least.” Raven’s eyes were on the sheet, upside down to her. “Ostrek wrote nine seconds in her book in the winter, and in the spring they came to Ferrow’s Rest with so many of them I never got the nine. That’s a number about me. I don’t want it on a sheet that goes to four places and gets copied at every one of them.”

“It’s already in Ostrek’s book.”

“Ostrek’s book didn’t go out.”

That was true. Thorne had seen the book, and it had not gone out.

“They know,” Thorne said. “Whoever reads the sheets. They don’t need the sheet for that one.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No.” He didn’t. “Hanne does.”

Raven’s eyes came up from the sheet.

“She told me,” Thorne said, “when she brought the slate. She said something stood on the north slope after, side-on to the gate. She said it was looking at you. She said it looked at you for as long as she could see it, and then it was gone over the slope.” He had written that down too, on his own sheet, the one that did not go anywhere. “She didn’t say it was looking at you to make a point of it. She said it because I asked her where it was looking.”

Raven didn’t answer.

“I’d like to go and ask her,” Thorne said, “whether she wants it on. It’s her number. She counted it.”

Thorne did not say and I would like you to hear her say it. Raven heard it anyway, he thought. She sat with the salve smell coming off her hands until the lamp on the desk guttered and steadied, and then she stood up, carefully, with both hands held a little away from her coat, and went to the door, and waited for him there.

+++

The north gate passage was stone, and the paving outside it ran forty paces out to the edge of the field and stopped. Thorne had walked it every day of his life on the mountain and had never once thought about where the paving ended. He thought about it now.

Hanne Lowther was at the end of it with her slate under her arm and her gray scarf up over her chin. Tilda Rudd was beside her. Behind them, on the field, the squares showed black and wet in their rows, frozen snow in between, and on the path, across it, the carcass, white with frost now on the side that faced the north. A long iron rod stood upright against it, rimed on its windward side. Thorne knew whose that was. Lin Yue had come to his room the evening before with her book held open to the place and laid it on his table without sitting down, and said it was to go as she had written it or not at all, and left before he could answer. He had found nothing in it to answer.

In the nearest squares, the ones flanking the path for ten or twelve paces out, somebody had driven tent pegs. One to a square, in the middle, the wooden heads standing a finger clear of the mud.

“Tilda’s,” Hanne said, before he could ask. “From the struck tents. We’ve a thousand of them and nothing to drive them into.” She looked at Raven’s hands and then away. “If a peg comes up, something’s under that one. We call which one, counting out from the path. We’ve had them in since the morning of the eleventh.”

“Have any come up?”

“Three. Twice in the night and once at noon yesterday. A finger each, and back down.” Hanne held up the slate. There was a line on it for each, with the hour and which square. Under them, in the same small hand, the morning of the eleventh: North-east corner. Driven at the second hour. A finger out by the third.

Raven read the slate. Thorne watched her read it. Her mouth moved once on noon.

“Hanne,” Thorne said. “The nine.”

Hanne’s eyes went from him to Raven, and Thorne saw her understand what he was asking and who was standing there while he asked it. Her face stayed as it was. Thorne doubted she had ever learned another way to hold it.

“I counted it,” Hanne said. “I didn’t mean to. Raven went down on one knee on the paving here, and I was counting before I knew it. Nine, and she got up.” She shifted the slate under her arm. “Odo went in it. Before I’d got to the end.”

“I’m thinking of leaving it off the sheet,” Raven said.

Hanne didn’t say anything for a breath.

“Why?”

“Because it’s a number about me, and they read what we send.”

“It’s a number about Odo,” Hanne said.

Tilda, beside her, turned her head toward the field, the near squares, the pegs.

Hanne went on, level. “If you put the line out there again, I’ve got everybody at this gate to think about. I need to know how long I’ve got without you before I’ve got you back. Everybody at Halbrook needs to know it, and at Ferrow’s Rest, if you ever go there. Stonefall. Anybody standing next to you when you do it. They need it more than they need anything else on that sheet. That’s not about you. You’re not the one standing there for it.”

“They’ll build for it.”

“They watched it,” Hanne said it without any weight. “It sat up on the slope and watched you sitting against that wall, after. I told the clerk. It didn’t need to read anything. And we’ve got three hundred people in that Hall who didn’t see it, who’ll be out here with you next time, and they’ve only got what’s on the sheet.”

Raven looked out past her at the field. The wind came across it from the north and moved the loose ends of the wool on her hands, and she did not seem to feel it.

Thorne had worked for her for years. In that time he had seen her told she was wrong by Sera Vahn and by Lin Yue, more than once, and he had seen her say you’re right in a flat voice, quickly, the way you pull a splinter. She didn’t say it now. She stood on the last of the paving with her wrapped hands held away from her coat and looked at the pegs in the squares, one to a square, standing a finger clear of the mud.

“Nine,” she said. “Write nine.”

+++

It went down at the table in the gate passage, on the clean sheet, which Thorne had brought with him in its folder, the way he brought everything. Tilda held the inkstand in both hands against the wind, the way she might have held a lamp. Hanne stood at his shoulder and read each line as it went down and said nothing, which was how he knew they were right.

After the third line she went down on one knee on the paving and could not stand. Nine seconds by Hanne Lowther’s count, not timed. Odo Pask was taken inside the nine.

Under it, the rest, as Raven had given it: the three lines into the square, the nothing, the square at her heels that lifted a hand’s width while she stood there. The watcher on the slope, side-on to the gate. Then Lin Yue’s page. Thorne copied it as she had written it. The burned plate, in her words: grown from the rear margin of the skull plate. The two columns of figures with their dates, the old above the new. The forelimbs, ground flat, earth in the joint. The square Raven had burned, a hand’s depth of crust and warm beneath. One animal. One square.

Then the pegs, in Hanne’s words, with the three risings and their hours.

At the head of the sheet, alone on its line: Odo Pask.

Raven read it on her feet, twice, and did not ask for anything to come off.

At the foot, under the last of it, Thorne wrote: Written the twelfth. Two days after.

Raven read that too. Thorne waited for her to ask for it off, and she didn’t, and he understood that she wasn’t going to.

“It was late,” she said. “It’s right.”

“It was late because you wanted to write it yourself.”

“I know why it was late.”

Four copies, before the light went, at the table in the gate passage, with Hanne reading each one against the first. Halbrook. Ferrow’s Rest. Windbreak. Stonefall. Four riders took them out of the north gate in the last of the afternoon, one to each road.

+++

Raven did not go in.

She stood on the paving at the end of the passage with her back to the gate, and Thorne stood a little behind her because he had not been told to go, and Hanne went back to the field’s edge with her slate, and Tilda with her.

The light went blue and then gray over the north slope. The squares darkened until Thorne could only tell them from the snow between by the sheen on the wet ones. The pegs were short black strokes in the middle of each, one to a square, standing up out of the mud.

Thorne counted them. Eleven on the left of the path. Twelve on the right. Then counted them again, because it was something to do with his eyes that was not looking at the back of her neck, where her collar had come loose.

On the left of the path, three squares out, a peg stood a little taller than the others.

Thorne kept his eyes on it, and then on the one beside it, to be sure the light wasn’t playing him, and then on it again. It was taller. Not much. About the width of a finger.

Out at the field’s edge, Tilda Rudd lifted her arm and pointed, and said it in an ordinary voice that carried all the way back down the paving.

“Third on the left.”