Chapter 636: The Gate of Asking

They saw the Aelstrom Palace on the second evening, and for a long time nobody on the deck could find anything to say about it.

The continent ended in a long grey cape that ran out into the Abyss like a pointing finger. Beyond the tip of it, standing up out of the sea, were seven stacks of black rock, each one taller than the tower at Greywater and some of them taller than the cliff at Korreth. A city had been built across all seven. Its towers were white and very slender, and every one of them carried the same curved glass panes as the ship, so that the whole city held the wind the way the ship did. Bridges of rope and glass ran from stack to stack. Lights were coming on in thousands of windows. And under all of it, too low to hear but not too low to feel, the city hummed, like a great glass that someone was running a finger round.

"It’s singing," said Edda Marsh. She had come up on deck with Mara, the two of them holding hands so tightly their knuckles were white.

"It’s the wind," said Mara, who did not believe in anything singing that could be explained.

"It’s both," Isole said quietly, behind them.

Ashe, who had spent two days sitting in the dead center of the deck, got up for the first time, walked to the rail, looked over, and went back to the middle and sat down again.

"Very nice," she said. "Lovely. Wake me when it stops moving."

"It’s a city," Nyx said. "It doesn’t move."

"Everything up here moves."

The ship came down beside the largest of the seven stacks, onto a broad terrace cut into the rock and paved in pale stone worn smooth by centuries of feet. At the back of the terrace, set into the cliff, was a gate. It was not large. It had no doors at all, only a tall, narrow arch with nothing carved on it, and the wind came through it so steadily that it lifted the hair of everyone who stood in front of it.

"The Gate of Asking," Sarai Vell said. "Anyone may stand here and ask. The Palace has never once turned away a question. It has turned away a great many people." She looked at the crowd coming down off the platform behind her, a hundred and ninety-one children and their parents and a priest, blinking in the wind. "It will give you its answer in three days. Until then, you’re guests."

Clerks came out through the arch. There were six of them, in coats the color of the sky, each carrying a writing board and a small glass disc on a chain. They did not set up a table. They simply walked among the children, and crouched, and asked each one their name, and wrote it down.

Vane watched them do it. Beside each name, every clerk looked through the glass and made a small mark.

"They write the names," Father Cray said softly, at his elbow.

"And then a grade beside them."

"Yes." The old priest watched a clerk smile at a boy of six and write something careful on her board. "I’m trying to decide if that’s better."

"Is it?"

"I think it’s different," said Father Cray. "I’ll tell you which in three days."

It was Valerica who remembered the letter.

She had carried it in the inside pocket of her coat since Holloway without once taking it out, because the outside said For the Palace gate, not before, and Valerica Sol had never in her life opened a thing before she was supposed to. Now she stood in front of the empty arch with the wind in her violet hair and broke the seal.

Vane saw her face change as she read. It was a small change. He had spent four years learning to see it.

"What?" said Ashe.

Valerica did not answer. She read it through a second time, then turned and held it out to Sarai Vell.

"I think this is for you," she said.

The envoy took it. It was two sheets. The first was short, written in a clean, upright hand that Vane recognized from the dispatch case at Holloway. The second was a list, closely written in small neat columns of names, and he recognized that hand too, because he had watched it fill a ledger every night for a year.

He looked down at Mara. She was studying the stones of the terrace with great concentration.

"When did you do that?" he asked.

"The night she came." Mara did not look up. "She asked if I had a copy. I said I had two. She asked if she could have one. I said I’d make her a third." She paused. "It took until four in the morning."

Sarai Vell was reading the first sheet. Vane watched her read it twice, and then a third time, and then lower it very slowly and look at the seal at the bottom. It was a broad seal in dark red wax, pressed with a ring, and even from where he stood Vane could see the shape in it. A crowned sun.

"Do you know what this says?" the envoy asked.

"No," said Valerica. "But I can guess."

Sarai Vell read it aloud. Her voice was very even.

"By the hand of the Throne of Aurelia. Let it be known to the Palaces of the west, and to any who receive the persons listed below: that the Throne makes no claim upon them, now or hereafter, under any statute of the Empire; that they are free persons and may go where they choose; and that the Throne will regard any harm done them as harm done to itself." She looked up. "It’s sealed with the Emperor’s own ring."

There was a short silence on the terrace. The wind went on coming through the arch.

"He’ll have signed it without reading it," Vane said.

"I imagine he did," said Sarai Vell. "It doesn’t matter. The seal is the seal." She looked down at the list of names, every one Father Cray had ever written, and then back at Valerica. "Do you understand what she’s done? For three hundred years, every child the Palaces have taken from the Empire has been a theft. Every one. The Empire has come to collect them more than once. That’s the only reason we take so few." She held up the letter. "These aren’t stolen. They’re free. There’s nobody to come for them."

"She can’t repeal the statute," Valerica said softly. "So she took every one of them out from under it instead."

Isole had come to stand beside her. She looked at the letter in the envoy’s hand, and then at Valerica’s face.

"You’re proud of her," Isole said.

"I’m furious with her," said Valerica. "She didn’t tell me. I had it in my pocket for four days." She was quiet for a moment. "I’m also proud of her."

Sarai Vell folded the letter carefully along its creases.

"The Stewards will want to see this," she said. "Tomorrow. And they’ll want to see you." She looked at Vane. "I should warn you. It makes your argument easier. It doesn’t make it easy. Feeding a hundred and ninety-one children for ten years is still feeding a hundred and ninety-one children."

"I know what it costs."

"I don’t think you do yet," said the envoy, not unkindly. "But you will by tomorrow evening."

She went back through the arch. The wind took her coat and spread it out behind her like a sail, and then she was gone.