Chapter 584 - 579: The Order We Can Do

Chapter 584: Chapter 579: The Order We Can Do

Location:Kaelport — The Long Shed, and the Pavilion

Date/Time:21 Infernorest 9943 AZI, Temperday

Realm:Lower Realm

Eden had put a second line on the boards, and Jayde had been refusing to look at it for four days.

The first line is the queue. Twenty-three coins in the new order with Ardh chalked 1, and that line is honest and hard, and Jayde had made her peace with it in a single afternoon in Scorchwind.

The second line is underneath, and it is a graph, and Eden had drawn it without being asked.

Along the bottom, the clearings in the order they were done. Up the side, days — from the morning Yinxin put her hands on a face to the morning she was a person again. Twenty-two points, because Eden had only been measuring properly for the last twenty-two and would not plot the ones she had reconstructed from memory.

The line goes up.

Not sharply. It is not a cliff. It is a long shallow climb from the left of the board to the right, with a scatter on it, and Eden had drawn the scatter too rather than smooth it.

Jayde made herself look at the right-hand end of it.

"Eleven days at Harl’s Bottom," said Eden. "Nine at the one before, ten at the one before that." She put the chalk down. "I will not give you a slope. Twenty-two points with that much scatter does not have a slope I would defend. What it has is a direction, and the direction has not changed since the first point."

***

The arithmetic is not complicated, and that is the worst thing about it.

One caster. One weave, thirty-six to forty minutes, and the forty minutes does not shorten for a small nest or lengthen for a large one — the weave is the weave, and it kills everything in the chamber, or it does not happen.

What changes is what it costs her.

A bigger chamber means more of them pressing, and more pressing means a harder hold, and a harder hold means more days flat on a workshop floor afterward. Yinxin had come back from Harl’s Bottom in eleven. She had come back from the second nest they ever did, eight months ago, in two.

And every single thing left on that board is bigger than Harl’s Bottom.

"Twenty-three," said Eden. "At eleven days of recovery and four of travel and two for the shaft, that is seventeen a nest if nothing goes wrong, which it does. Call it a nest every three weeks. Twenty-three nests is sixteen months."

"And the recovery is climbing."

"Then it is not sixteen months. At fourteen days it is eighteen months. At twenty it is two years." She set the chalk down on the rail. "And I cannot do the sum past that, because I do not know where it stops, and neither does anybody in this room."

***

Nobody said anything for a while.

It was a good room to say nothing in. The long shed with the doors open at both ends and the afternoon coming through, Xinglong on the end of a trestle with his arms folded, Eden at the boards, Isha on the bench with his tails gathered, and Reiko lying across the doorway at about the size of a large dog, which is his size for listening.

"Three of them are rising," said Xinglong, eventually. "And the three that are rising are three of the four biggest, and the biggest of those is the one you have chalked a 1 against." He unfolded his arms. "So the order you have written is the right order, and it is also the order that costs her the most, soonest, at the point where she has the least left."

"Yes."

Xinglong waited.

"I do not know yet," said Jayde. "That is why you are all in here."

***

Meifen of First Company brought the survey in at the second bell and did not come past the door.

Four parties, six each, a day inside each margin and out before dark, exactly as she had said in Scorchwind and three days inside the date she had given. They had gone out while she was at Loam Hollow. She had been back four days and had spent two of them with the party leaders, going over every line they had walked.

"Ruvin Flats first, because it’s the worst." She had the slate against her chest and did not hand it over until she had said the whole of it, which is how she does it. "No water on that route after the fifth day, and we’d been told that. What we hadn’t been told is there’s a spring line along the east scarp that nobody’s written down, and it’s running in Infernorest, which means it runs all year. That’s twelve days down to about eight for anybody who knows it’s there."

She turned the slate round at last.

"The country’s empty. Properly empty, not nobody-wrote-it-down empty. Four herders in eleven days. One of them had been up there thirty years and had never seen anybody. North Kessig’s got a hamlet at four days that isn’t on anything, eleven houses, and they’re all right, and they’re not short, and the party left them alone and didn’t say who they were."

"Good."

"Hessen Bar’s the one you want." Meifen tapped it. "Nothing within three days in any direction. Not a hut, not a track, not a grave. If you were choosing one to be undisturbed at, that’s it."

Jayde looked at the slate for a moment.

"That is the best piece of work anybody has brought me this month."

"It’s four parties walking and writing things down. It isn’t clever." Meifen was already turning to go, and stopped, and did the thing she does about once a year, which is to say the quiet part. "They’ll all keep. The slate’s yours, the country’s on it, and I’ll be at the yard."

And she went, and the shed door got shut behind her, and nobody in that room remarked on it, because remarking on it would have turned a year of her not asking into a favor she had done them, and it is not a favor. It is the arrangement, and she keeps it better than anybody.

***

They were in there two hours, and the useful part took about twenty minutes of it.

What they established first was what could not be moved, and Jayde made Eden write that column separately so that nobody would spend the rest of the afternoon finding clever ways round a wall.

The weave cannot be shortened. It is total, or it is nothing.

There is one caster, and there is a reason, and the reason is not going to change. The weave is Ala’s own. It does not come out of a person; it comes through one, and the only thing on this continent it will come through is a silver queen, and there is one silver queen on this continent. Nobody in that shed said a word about it. They had all looked at it from every side months ago and come back with the same nothing.

Yinxin cannot be interrupted. Not for a wounded man, not for a flank folding, not for anything.

And she cannot be asked to go more often. That had been tried once, in Ashbloom — eight days between two holds instead of thirteen, because a field was close and the weather was good and it had seemed like sense at the time. The weave landed. Yinxin spent three weeks on a workshop floor and was not right for two months after that, and the next clearing went out five weeks late, so the thing they had saved five days on cost them forty. Jayde had written the whole of it out in her own hand and did not intend to read it again.

"So what is left," said Eden, "is the line."

***

That was the twenty minutes.

If the thing that is lengthening is what the hold costs her, and the hold costs her according to how much is pressing — then the lever is not the caster. It is how much reaches the caster.

"The field halves it," said Eden. "That is established. Harl’s Bottom is the only full-length hold we have it for, and it came in at eleven days, and the one before it was nine and smaller, and I want to be extremely clear that I cannot tell you whether the field bought us a day. One point is not a measurement."

"But it is the only lever on the board."

"Yes. And I would rather say that than pretend I know what it is worth."

Isha spoke for the first time in an hour.

"It can be stronger."

Everybody looked at him.

"Not by me being cleverer." He said it flatly, which, from Isha, means he has already lost an argument with himself. "The lattice is as good as Eden can draw it, and I would not change one line of her work. But a formation is fed. I have been feeding that one out of myself, because there was nothing else to feed it out of, and I have been doing it for three nests and I did not mention it."

The shed went quiet in a different way.

Jayde did not say anything. She looked at him and went on looking.

"No," said Isha, as if she had. "The alternative was not to have a field I was managing, and I have a very old habit of deciding what other people need to be told." His tails had not moved. "I am mentioning it now because you have just asked a room full of people what the lever is, and I am the lever, and I would rather you knew that before you built a campaign on top of me."

***

Jayde sat down on the trestle.

"How bad."

"Not bad. Expensive." He turned one hand over. "I am ninety-eight thousand years old, and I have been in cessation for a great deal of it, and I do not tire the way a person does. But it is not free, and at three nests I can feel the shape of the bill, and over twenty-three I would be able to feel a great deal more than the shape."

"Then we feed it from something else."

"Yes. That is the whole of what I am saying, and it took me three nests to say it." Isha looked at Eden. "Crystals. The same kind the corps buys for the rankers’ issue, in quantity, racked round the formation and swapped out between holds. It is not elegant. The crystal does the drawing instead of me, and the formation does not know the difference."

"Can you build that?"

"Eden can build that. I can tell her where it goes." A pause. "And if it works, the field does not get stronger because I have got cleverer. It gets stronger because we spent money."

"We have money," said Jayde.

***

They put the shape of it on the second board before the light went.

Crystals racked round the formation, swapped between holds. A line of four again as soon as Takara’s leg is a leg. The chosen door at every site, which they now have for all twenty-three. And a standing rule that nothing goes to the top of the queue until Eden has thirty passes on it, which Eden had asked for in Scorchwind and had been given in the same breath.

And then the other thing, which was Jayde’s and which she did not put to the room until Xinglong had gone out to see about the horses.

"We do not go to Ardh first."

Eden put the chalk down very slowly.

"It is rising."

"About a hand’s width a season, and we have two years before that means anything, and I have checked that twice with you and once with Isha." Jayde had her hands flat on the trestle. "And it is the largest chamber on this continent, and we would be taking it with a line of three, a caster who needs eleven days from a middling nest, and a field we cannot yet feed. That is not a campaign. That is a woman wanting the hardest thing done first because it frightens her."

Nobody disagreed.

That was the part she had not expected, and it took her a moment to get past it.

Eden picked up the chalk and held it out.

"Hessen Bar. North Kessig. Then four of the middle ones while the crystals come in and Takara’s leg mends, and the Ruvin flats once we have the water for it." Jayde took the chalk, rubbed out the 1 against Ardh, and put it against Hessen Bar, and then stood looking at the board. "And Ardh, when we are a thing that can take Ardh."

"And if the rise speeds up."

"Then we go at Ardh with whatever we have on the day, and I will not pretend to any of you that it will be enough." She put the chalk down. "Write that in the record as well. Both halves."

***

She went into the Pavilion before the light went, because she goes in most evenings now and had told herself it was for the wyrmlings.

Huaxin was in the afternoon corner with her chin on the boards, which is where she is. Ashborn was at the edge, thirty paces off, facing away. The crate had not changed in forty days, and Eden’s note on it was still the same four words in the small hand: drawing. ambient. no change.

Isha was sitting beside it.

"You have been here since the shed," said Jayde.

"I have been here since the shed because I have been here every evening since the eleventh of Blazepeak, and tonight I would like you to think about the two things at once instead of one at a time." He did not get up. "I feed the field. I also listen to these. I have been doing both and telling you about neither, and I have now told you about one of them in front of a shed full of people, and I am going to tell you about the other one in a workshop with nobody in it, which is cowardice, and I am aware of it."

Jayde crouched down by the crate.

"They have not changed."

"Not at all. That is the part." Isha did not take his eyes off the crate. "Forty days of exactly the same thread out of the air, no more and no less, like a tap left running at a quarter turn." His tails were very still. "A thing that is growing takes more as it grows. A thing that is waiting takes the same amount forever."

"And you cannot tell which."

"I cannot tell which, and I will not be able to tell which until it changes, and when it changes I would like to be at my full strength rather than three nests into paying for a formation out of my own pocket." He looked at her properly for the first time. "That is the whole of why I said it in the shed. Not the campaign. This."

Jayde put her hand flat on the nearest egg. Warm. The same warm it had been in a dead chamber forty days ago, and under it the same slow enormous rhythm, no nearer and no further.

"Then we buy the crystals twice," she said.

"Yes."

"Write it down for Eden tonight. All of it, in your own words, including the part you have just called cowardice."

"I had already decided to," said Isha. "I was waiting to see whether you would make me."

***

She found Yinxin afterward on the steps, which is where she is at that hour.

"How much of that did you hear?"

"All of it. The doors are open at both ends, and I am not deaf, and I sat down out here specifically so that nobody would say the careful version." Yinxin had her feet up on the step below and her hands around a cup. "You were right about Ardh."

"I know."

"You were right about Ardh, and you got there by calling yourself frightened in front of a room, which is a thing I have never once managed, and I have been doing this longer than you have been alive."

Jayde sat down on the step.

"Eleven days," she said.

"Eleven days." Yinxin turned the cup round. "It was two at the start. I have known it was going up for about half a year and I did not say so, because the first time I say it is taking longer out loud, it becomes a thing in the plan. And I have watched that happen to people. They stop being asked and start being scheduled, and nobody ever decides to do it to them — it simply turns out one day to have happened." She drank some of it. "Eden put it on a board anyway."

"Eden put it on a board four days ago, and I did not look at it until this morning."

"I know. I watched you not look at it." Yinxin was almost smiling. "I thought that was rather sporting of you, actually."

They sat there a while.

Down the yard somebody was shutting the shed, and further off there were children going home from the school in a long untidy line, and the light was going the color it goes in Infernorest.

"It will keep going up," said Yinxin.

"Yes."

"And at some point it will go up past what is useful, and on that day you will have to decide something about me, and I would like it to be a decision and not a thing that happens." She did not look round. "That is the whole of what I came out here to say, and I have been working on it since Harl’s Bottom."

"It will be a decision."

"Good." Yinxin put the cup down on the step. "Then I am going to bed, because I have four days before Hessen Bar and I intend to waste every one of them."