Chapter 608 - 603: Where the Children Are

Chapter 608: Chapter 603: Where the Children Are

Location:The Pavilion — The Workshop

Date/Time:12 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Restday, mid-morning to afternoon (outside) — her sixtieth to sixty-second day inside

Realm:Lower Realm

Lamp oil, and ink, and the cold, sharp smell of the paper the doctor used, which came from somewhere outside this world and did not smell like any paper Cangwei had ever handled.

And under all of it, the jar, which smelled of nothing.

Nobody had told her that. Cangwei had found it herself, the first evening, when nobody was in the room: picked the jar up and held it close and breathed in. Sealed glass, and beyond the glass three small bright things the color of a summer evening, and no smell at all. Everything in the world smelled of something. A thing that smelled of nothing had been made to.

Cangwei had put it at the far end of the bench, face down, so that the pills were against the wood and not looking at her, and had not touched it since.

+++

The file did not go end to end.

Jayde had laid it out like a battlefield, from the jar at one end to the empty map at the other, and it was a good way to lay it out if you wanted to see what had been done. Cangwei did not want to see what had been done. Enough of that had been seen in the first hour to last her the rest of her life. What she wanted was what was missing, and for that it had to be a column.

So she took a clean sheet and ruled it down the middle, and at the head of the left side she wrote IN, and at the head of the right she wrote OUT, and she began.

IN. A village hall. A man with no name and the coat. A list read out, a child who reads well. Told four months. Meifen’s egg woman: Ostrey, the hall on Kindleday, the cart this Grindday. Jayde’s notes, four provinces, the same words in every one of them: since the testing. Three years and no letters.

OUT. Ashmarch. The southern gate. Thirty children, six to eleven, in a column of two, four adults in white. Past eight desks. One line in a ledger, for all thirty. The date she knew because she had written it in the other ledger at the time: the tenth of Sparkfall.

Then, further out, the jar.

For a long time she looked at the two columns, the in and the out, and then did what she had been doing for sixty days on the rise above the pond: stopped looking at the things in the columns and looked at the space between them.

A cart came on Grindday in Flamefade. A column went up through Ashmarch in Sparkfall.

On her fingers she counted it, which she had not done since she was a girl, because she wanted to be sure. Flamefade. Emberwane. Frostforge. Voidmarch. Ashwhisper. The five days. Emberrise. Sparkfall.

Half a year, if that cart went to that column. One cart and one column were not a pattern, and she knew it.

But told four months was not a lie that tried very hard. Between a cart and a gate there was time, and in that time the children were somewhere, on this continent, being fed and kept and walked out at the end of it calm and unfrightened and in a good order of two.

In the space between the columns, in the middle of the sheet, she wrote:

Months. Here. Where?

And beside months, small, she made a cross, the mark she would use from then on for anything that was not a fact.

Then she sat back on the stool and put her live hand flat on the bench and thought about Dalgate.

+++

She had been the Temple since Sparkfall.

Not in name. On a dead woman’s papers, with Marit Aldren’s ink-stained sleeve and Marit Aldren’s grievance about the ink, walking the eastern road with a ledger and a pass that said she was entitled to count things. And she had counted them. Every Temple holding on the Lower Realm she had been able to reach. It had taken her nine days to count all of it.

Four grain sheds. A shrine at a crossroads. Two road-warden posts. A cellar at Dalgate with eleven jars in it.

That was all of it. None of it garrisoned, none of it built inside living memory, nobody in white anywhere except two bored road-wardens at the post outside Dalgate who had not had a visitor from the order in so long that they had made Marit tea.

She had written at the time, in the other ledger, under the count: That is not neglect. That is what an institution leaves lying in the open when the thing it came for is somewhere else.

At the time she had thought she meant the mines and the timber. The things the Mid Realm houses wanted. She had been wrong, and had audited the evidence, again, and not the frame.

Four sheds, and she had stood in all four. Grain, to the rafters, and mice, and a clerk’s slate with the tally on it that was a season out of date. Nobody slept in them. Nobody had eaten in them. You could not hide a child in a grain shed for months; you could not hide one for a night. The shrine was a shrine, open on three sides. The cellar at Dalgate held eleven jars of lamp oil and a broken lectern.

None of it.

So the months were somewhere she had not been. Somewhere not on the Temple’s estate, because the estate was what the Temple left lying in the open. Somewhere nobody counted, because Marit Aldren’s pass had given her the right to count every holding of the order on this continent and nobody had ever told her there was anywhere else.

Under Where? she wrote:

Not on the estate. Not in any book I was shown.

And then, smaller, in the margin, because it was not a fact:

More than one. Thirty is one column. Eleven off a district. Four provinces. Several places, not one.

It got the cross.

+++

The doctor came in early on the second inside day, with the roll.

Cangwei was in the doorway when she arrived, because she had gone to the door to look at the long hall and think, and so the doctor had to stop, and Cangwei had to step aside to let her through, and for a moment they were both standing there, which neither of them liked.

"You wanted the tiers," the doctor said.

"I do."

"Why?"

Cangwei had expected the question and had the answer ready, and gave it.

"Your children came to the school from villages. Some of those villages have been tested. Some of them have not." She went back to the bench and turned the roll copy so that the doctor could see where she had marked it. "I want to know whether any of yours come from villages that were tested before they came to you. And whether they are the ones who read well."

The doctor looked at the marks for a long moment.

Then she put the original case down on the bench, opened it, and set the tier column beside Cangwei’s copy without a word, and stood back.

Cangwei went down it with her finger.

"Seven hundred," she said, after a while, half to herself. "Out of seven hundred, I make it—"

"Six hundred and eighty-three on the first morning," the doctor corrected. "Forty-one since. Seven hundred and twenty-four."

Cangwei amended the figure in the ledger, cleanly, with a single line through the old one, and did not look up.

"Seven hundred and twenty-four," she said. "Of those, ninety-one from villages that have had the testing. Of the ninety-one, every one came to you in the first month the school opened, or the second. None since." She turned the page. "And of the ninety-one, none came in the year they were tested. All came the year after, or two years after. From families who had already had a child go."

The doctor did not say anything.

"They had already lost one," Cangwei said. "To the cart. And the next child read well too, and they did not put that one on the cart. They put it on the road to you."

The doctor put her finger on the roll, beside one of the names, and held it there.

"That’s right," she said quietly. "I knew some of them. I didn’t know it was all of them." She took her finger away. "I didn’t have the villages next to the tiers. I’ve never put them side by side."

"You were not looking for that."

"No." The doctor’s mouth did something at the corner that was not quite a smile and was not quite anything else either. "I was looking at how fast they went up. You were looking at why they came."

The doctor left the case open on the bench when she went. Cangwei noticed that, and filed it, and did not know yet where it went.

+++

She found the second thing at the end of the second day, and she found it by accident, and she did not like that she had.

Cangwei had gone back to her own ledgers. Not this one. The other, the one that was not the Temple’s, which she had kept on the road. Back to it she had gone for the date of the Ashmarch column, which she already knew, and she had read on past it out of the habit of a woman who does not trust a figure she has only seen once, through Ashmarch and Ottilie and the bronze coat burning in the rain, and into the Lower Realm, and Dalgate.

The post outside Dalgate. The two bored road-wardens, and the tea.

They were in the ledger because everything went in the ledger. Their names, which were common. Their complaint, which was the ink, which Marit Aldren had shared with them. And a thing the older one had said, idly, with his boots on the table, that she had written in the margin under the tea because it was the only thing either of them had said that was not about the ink.

Has to learn page seven by heart by Emberwane. Thinks it is a waste. Says he is told to watch the eastern road for two girls off the Academy books and send if he sees them, not stop. "The small one’s a healer, they say. Doesn’t say what the other one is."

And under it, in her own hand, at the time: Not mine. Not relevant. Filed.

Four times she read it.

Then she went down the bench to the place in Jayde’s file where the copy of Meiling’s transfer lay, the custodial clause, the one the Academy’s founders had written in a better century when the Temple could be trusted. Turning it over, she looked at the top of it, where the clerk had written the reference.

Page seven.

She sat very still.

Two girls off the Academy books. One small, a healer. Doesn’t say what the other one is.

There was no need to look at the roll for that. Sixty-two days in this place. Sixty-two days of watching the doctor go up and down the long hall with her slate and her ink-stained thumb, and the other one crouch in the grass beside a child who did not speak.

Jayde Ashford and Eden of Millhaven were still on the Academy books. They had never been taken off them. And the Temple had a clause on page seven that had already walked one girl out of that Academy in white, with her head high, to a facility nobody had found.

And it was teaching it to road-wardens. By Emberwane.

Further than that she did not let herself go. It went down in writing, twice, once as what the road-warden had said, word for word, and once as what it meant, and she put the cross beside the second one and beside by Emberwane, and not beside anything else.

Then she sat on the stool in the warm lamplight of the workshop with her live hand flat on the bench and found that it was shaking, and that she was not frightened, and that she had not known until that moment how it felt to be this angry and this certain at once.

+++

She gave it to them in the afternoon, outside time, by which she meant the inside evening.

Jayde was at the end of the bench with her hands flat on it. The doctor was on the stool by the case. Cangwei stood. Not in the doorway: at the bench, in the middle of the room, with the ledger open in front of her, and gave it to them as an inventory, because that was the only way she knew to give anything.

The column, in and out. The months between, and the cross. The estate, which held none of it. Several places, not one, and the cross. The doctor’s ninety-one, and what the families had done with their second children.

And then the road-warden at Dalgate, word for word, and page seven, and by Emberwane, and the cross.

What it meant she did not say. The transfer and the margin note went side by side on the bench, and she let them read it.

It was very quiet in the workshop.

"By Emberwane," the doctor said at last. "That’s next month."

"That is a guess." Cangwei did not soften it. "He said Emberwane for learning it. That is not the same as Emberwane for using it. I have marked it."

"And the rest isn’t a guess."

"The rest is what he said, and what is written on the top of that sheet." Cangwei kept her voice level. "The Temple is teaching its road-wardens the custodial clause, and a description, and to send and not stop. It is not looking for a woman any longer. It knows which woman. It knows where the books are kept. It is waiting until everyone who needs to know the clause knows it." She paused. "And then I think it will walk into Kaelport with a paper, and ask for the two of you, by name, under a law your own school wrote."

Nobody said anything.

Jayde had not moved. Her hands were flat on the bench. Cangwei had watched her for sixty-two days and had seen her angry once, on a beach, with a phoenix strike built over a kneeling dragon, and this was not that. This was quieter. This was a woman who had been standing very still for a long time, listening for one particular sound, and had just heard it.

"That is it," Jayde said.

The doctor turned her head.

"I have been waiting two years for them to move," Jayde said. "Not to probe. To move. To commit to something they cannot take back." She looked down at the bench, at the transfer, at the road-warden’s words in Cangwei’s small, fair hand. "A paper with my name on it, served in front of the corps, is a thing they cannot take back."

"So we refuse it," the doctor said.

"No," Jayde said. "So we are not there when it comes."

Jayde took her hands off the bench and turned to the map at the end of it, the corps survey with every road and river and village on it and not one mark to show where a child went. She looked at it for a long time.

"They do not keep them in one place," she said. "Cangwei is right. Thirty is one column. Eleven off a district. Four provinces. There are several places, and they are filling now, this month." She put one finger on the map, on Ostrey, where Meifen’s egg woman came from. "Ostrey’s cart goes Grindday. Meifen says the villages she has heard of all say Grindday. That is a pattern from four mouths, not a fact." She glanced at Cangwei’s ledger. "Mark it."

Cangwei understood a breath before the doctor did.

"Follow them," Cangwei said.

"Every cart we can find. This Grindday, every one we can reach that leaves a village hall in four provinces, followed by somebody it will not see, to wherever it stops. And the Grindday after that, and the one after that, until the map stops getting new marks." Jayde’s voice did not rise. It never rose. It went flatter and more exact, as if every word were a measurement. "Then we know every place. Not one. All of them. And we do not touch one of them until we know all of them." She did not take her eyes off the map. "And before we touch one, I need somewhere to put a child. All of them. Somewhere nobody on this continent will ever think to look. And after that night, not one more child goes up that road. Not this year. Not ever."

"And then?" the doctor asked.

"And then we take every one of them back on the same night." Jayde looked up from the map. "All at once. Before they can move a single child from one place to the next. Before anybody with a paper reaches Kaelport. Before the next column goes up through Ashmarch, whenever that is, and thirty more children are one line in a book." She paused. "And when the Temple comes for the two of us with page seven, it will come into a continent where every place it kept a child is empty, and every child is home, and every family knows why."

The doctor was very still on the stool. Her hair had come out of its tie entirely, and she had not noticed. The small serpent on her forearm had gone a slow deep blue, and stayed there.

"That’s a lot of carts," the doctor said.

"Yes."

"And a lot of places. And one night."

"One night."

"Then I’ll need to know how many children," the doctor said, and picked up her pen, "before we’re anywhere near the night. They’ll need feeding and somebody to check every one of them over, and some of them won’t have been fed properly in months." She was already writing. "Caveat: I don’t know the number. I won’t know until the carts are followed. But I want a figure in my head before then, so give me your best one and I’ll tell you why it’s wrong."

Jayde looked at Cangwei.

Cangwei had it. It had been worked on the second inside night, and struck it out twice, and written it again, and marked it with the cross.

"Eleven off a district of fifty," she said. "Forty-odd districts, by the corps map. Three years since the villages started saying since the testing, and columns going up through Ashmarch that I cannot count, because I saw only one." She looked at the cross. "Between four hundred and five hundred in the places now. Guess. Marked."

The doctor wrote it down, and did not say why it was wrong. Cangwei noticed that too.

Jayde went to the bench, to the place where Cangwei’s ledger lay open, and looked down at the page that said WHERE THE CHILDREN ARE, with GO struck through above it and the two columns and the months and the crosses.

Then, without asking, she picked up Cangwei’s pencil, and under the last line on the page she wrote, in a hand Cangwei had never seen before, small and plain and pressed hard:

Grindday. Ostrey. Follow the cart.

And beside Grindday, small, a cross.

The pencil went back across the cover, square to the edge, exactly where it had been.

Cangwei looked at it. At the pencil, which was where she always left it, and which somebody else had put back there without being told. At the line, in somebody else’s hand, in her own ledger, which nobody had written in for sixteen thousand years but her. At the cross, which was hers, and which somebody else had learned in an afternoon.

Nothing came to her to say.