Chapter 573: Five

Chapter 573 -568: Five

Location: The chamber under Harl’s Bottom

Date/Time: 4 Blazepeak 9943 AZI, Quenchday, the seventh bell

Realm: Lower Realm

The chamber smelled of wet stone now, and nothing else.

That was the first thing Jayde noticed when she could notice anything, and she held on to it because it was simple. An hour ago the air in that room had been blood-warm and faintly sweet and had come into the chest like somebody else’s breath. Now it was a cave. Cool. Damp. The mineral smell of rock that has had water in it for a long time, and under it, very faint, the smell of eight thousand dead things that had never once in nine thousand years been anything but warm.

Yinxin had not moved off her collarbone.

Jayde did not ask her to. She sat on the chamber floor with a silver queen’s weight against her and her own hands gradually coming back from wherever they had gone, the shaking going out of them in stages, and counted the ninth bell of her own heart before she trusted her arms to hold anybody up.

Across the chamber, in the corner where the rock came down low, Ashborn had still not turned.

***

“I will go,” said Eden.

The datapad was down on the step, finally. Her hand was steady again, or steady enough that she had decided to trust it.

“Slowly,” Jayde said.

“I know how to approach something that does not want to be approached. I have done it in a medical bay with a man twice my weight who thought I was going to kill him.” Eden stood. “Hold her. I will tell you what I see.”

Zhi went with her.

Jayde watched the little serpent go and watched the color of it, because she always watched the color of it. It had been warm-bright the whole of the forty minutes, the living-body color, the inside-a-person color. Now it was going down, with the warmth of the room, and she expected it to go to the steel it had been on the dead ground above.

It did not.

Halfway across the chamber floor, picking a way between the heaps of slack wet bodies, Zhi went blue. Not the flat calm blue of an ordinary morning. Something deeper, and softer at the edges, the blue of water under ice with light coming through it.

[It is warm over there,] Zhi said. [A little.]

“Warm how?”

[Not like the wall.] A pause. [Like a small warm.]

Eden did not say anything to that either. Eden went on toward the corner at the pace you use for a frightened animal, which is slower than anybody believes it needs to be, and stopped about four paces off, and crouched down, so that she was lower than the great flat head and was not standing over anything.

Ashborn’s blade-arms came up.

Not fast. They came up off the floor to the height of a man’s chest and stayed there, folded, the chitin along the forward edges catching what little light there was left in the room, and Jayde felt her own body go tight against Yinxin’s weight and made it stop.

Eden did not move.

“I know,” she said, very quietly, to the charling. “I know. I am not going to touch anything. I only want to look.”

Eden stayed crouched there for what Jayde counted as forty breaths.

Then the blade-arms went down. Slowly. One, and then the other, until they lay folded against the floor of the hollow — and the great flat head, which had been turned in toward the stone for the better part of an hour, turned very slightly aside.

Not toward Eden. Away from the thing it had been guarding, by about the width of a hand.

Enough to let her see.

***

Eden looked for a long time.

Jayde could not see what she was looking at. The hollow was low under the rock, and Ashborn’s body filled the mouth of it, and all she could see was Eden crouched at the edge with her head bent and her hands flat on her knees, not reaching, not writing, completely still.

Then Eden said, without turning round:

“Jayde. You are going to want to stop calling Ashborn he.”

***

Jayde did not move.

She could not have, not if the roof had come down. There was the floor of a dead chamber, and Yinxin against her chest, and forty paces of slack gray bodies between her and the dark shape in the corner that she had ridden for seven months, that had carried her into sixty-six nests and out of them, that had stood in front of her at every one — and she turned the word over and found that it did not fit anywhere she had ever put it.

He.

White had said the name in the Pavilion in Frostforge, and the room had gone quiet, and that had been the whole of the ceremony. Nobody had asked. There had been nothing to ask about. A horse-sized mantis with blade-arms and no eyes that had come out of the dark to stand beside her, and everybody on that ground had called it he from the first morning, because that is what you call a thing that fights in front of you, and not one person in seven months had ever had a reason to look any closer.

“How many,” said Jayde.

“Five.”

“Five what?”

“Eggs.” Eden’s voice was entirely level, and Jayde knew exactly what that cost her. “Five eggs, in a hollow she has been making in this floor since the moment the weave landed. They are the size of a man’s head. They are dark, and they are leathery, and they are warm, and one of them has just moved.”

***

Jayde got up.

It was done carefully, as you get up with somebody’s weight on you, and she did not have to decide who to hand Yinxin to, because Reiko was already there. He had come across the chamber at some point in the last minute without anybody seeing him move and he was standing at her shoulder, at full size, and he put his head down, and Jayde laid Yinxin against the great black side of him and Yinxin put one hand into the fur and held on and did not open her eyes.

[I have her,] said Reiko.

“I know.”

Then she crossed the chamber.

Forty paces between the dead. They had not stopped being strange to walk among, and they never would, not in a hundred nests — how they lay, slack and wet and entirely unremarkable, eight thousand small ends of a thing that had been drinking a world, and not one of them the slightest bit frightening now that nothing in them was trying to reach her.

Beside Eden, she crouched.

Ashborn did not lift the blade-arms for her.

The great flat head turned — all the way this time, round from the stone and toward Jayde — and the sensory pits were open, and whatever was going in through them was going in, and Jayde had stood with her hand on that head a thousand times and had never once been looked at by it like this.

“Hello,” she said, and heard her voice come out wrong again, and let it.

Then she looked into the hollow.

***

Five.

Laid in a rough ring in a shallow bowl that had not been there an hour ago — Jayde could see the marks of it now, the long scraped grooves in the rock where the blade-arms had worked the floor into a cradle while the rest of them were sitting in the dark getting their breath back. The eggs were the color of old bronze in that light, and not quite round, and the surface of them was not shell but something softer, leathery and faintly ridged, and they were warm. She could feel it from where she crouched. A small warm, Zhi had said, and that was exactly right, and Jayde would never have found better words for it.

The one nearest the wall moved as she looked at it. Not much. A slow shift under the leathery surface, as a sleeper turns over.

“She laid them after the weave,” Eden said quietly. “Not before. I watched the whole of the forty minutes, and she never stopped moving. She ate until there was nothing left alive in this room, and then she came here, and she laid.”

“The corruption.”

“Every egg clutch in the charling canon hatches on corruption. Higher corruption, faster hatching, bigger clutch.” Eden’s hands had not moved off her knees. “She has just eaten a siege engine. Whatever was put into the ground in the last war to drink this world dry — or as much of it as would fit. I do not think there is anything on this world more corrupt than what she has had for dinner.”

Jayde said nothing.

“And that is not the part I cannot get past.”

Jayde waited.

“Scythlings do not lay.” Eden turned her head at last and looked at her. “Mantis caste. Every one of them is a worker. It is in every text at the Academy, it is in the brood tables, it is in the thing we both learned in the dark in Voidmarch whether we wanted to or not. Only brood-mothers produce eggs. There is no mantis on record anywhere that has ever laid a clutch.” She looked back at the great flat head. “And every Scythling in those tables is the size of a cat, and she is the size of a horse, and nobody has ever written down why that is either. It is not a thing that happens, Jayde. It is not a thing her body is for.”

“Then what is her body for?”

“I do not know,” said Eden. “I think it has just changed its mind.”

***

Jayde reached out and put her hand flat on the nearest egg.

It happened without deciding to, and she felt Ashborn not stop her, which was its own kind of thing. The egg was warm under her palm and very faintly yielding and there was something moving inside it, slow, as a heart moves under a hand laid on a chest.

And under the warmth, very far down, something she knew.

Once before, she had felt it. In Frostforge, in the dark, in the containment, with her hand on the chitin of a creature that had just come out of the black to stand beside her, and behind the creature — down the road it was, through the sensory pits and out the other side of whatever lay beyond them — something enormous, and old, and alone, and asleep in a way that was not quite sleep. A heartbeat that set the rhythm of a thing too large to see the edges of.

It was here. Not all of it. Not a hundredth of it. A thread, a trace, a single faint note of a very large chord — the same rhythm, the same slow deep pulse, running under the warmth of an egg the size of a man’s head in a hollow in a dead field on the northern margin.

Jayde took her hand away.

Jayde knelt there with it held against her own chest and did not say anything for so long that Eden turned and looked at her properly.

“What.”

“It is in them,” said Jayde.

“What is.”

“Her. The one I promised.” She heard how quiet her voice had gone. “The one down the road. It is in them. Not much. A thread of it. But it is the same, Eden; it is the same thing I felt in Frostforge with my hand on that chitin in the dark, and she is under all of it, and it is in these.”

Eden looked at the eggs.

Then at Ashborn, whose head had not moved from Jayde’s face.

“A brood-mother makes workers,” Eden said slowly. “The Queen makes whatever she likes.”

“Yes.”

“And a Scythling who has never laid in the history of her caste has just eaten more corruption than anything alive, and laid five, and there is a thread of the Queen in every one of them.”

“Yes.”

Eden was quiet for a moment.

“I would like to be very clear,” she said, “that I have no idea what is going to come out of those.”

“Neither have I.”

“That is not reassuring.”

“It was not meant to be,” said Jayde.

***

Jayde stayed there longer than she should have.

Behind her, the chamber was coming back to itself. Hulong was getting up. Isha on the stairs saying something to Takara in the dry voice that means he is worried and would like it treated as irritation. Reiko breathing, and Yinxin not saying anything, and somewhere up the long spiral of the shaft the sound of wind across the mouth of a hole that had not existed that morning.

And in front of her, five eggs, warm, with something moving in one of them and a thread of something very old running under all of them, in a hollow a charling had cut into the floor of a dead nest with the same arms she had used to kill.

Ashborn was still looking at her.

Jayde put her hand up — slowly, the way she had put it up a thousand times — and laid it flat on the plate above the sensory pits, which was permitted.

“You could have told me,” she said.

Nothing came back. Nothing ever had. But the great head pressed, very slightly, into her palm, and stayed there, and Jayde knelt in the corner of that chamber with her hand on a creature she had been wrong about for seven months and five eggs at her knee, and understood that whatever came next was not going to be a thing she had planned for, and that she was going to have to plan for it anyway.

“All right,” she said. “All right. We will work it out.”

Behind her, very quietly, Eden began to write again.

Jayde could guess what. The time of the landing, to the second. The field’s holding figure, which nobody on this world had ever written before. A dragon’s shaft that had come down through a roof and not taken the roof with it. A lightning cat who had burned a filament out of his own leg before it could root, which had never been done and might never be done again.

And at the bottom of the page, in the small hand Eden kept for things she did not want in the middle of it: five, and warm, and a line under both.