Chapter 610 - 605: Anything That Hides (Edited)

Chapter 610: Chapter 605: Anything That Hides (Edited)

Location:Ostrey — The Village Hall, The East Road, a fold of hills · The Pavilion — The Workshop

Date/Time:17 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Grindday, first light to past midnight (outside)

Realm:Lower Realm

Eleven bowls of porridge, in eleven kitchens, along one street, in the cold before first light. Every house could have been named from the hedge-line by what was in the pot. Oats in all of them. Honey in three, which was more honey than Ostrey could afford in Flamefade, which meant somebody had been saving it. Milk in nine. In one, at the end of the street by the well, there was an egg beaten into the porridge, as a mother does when she wants a child to have something to remember.

Amaya lay along the top of a dry-stone wall at the edge of the churchyard opposite the hall, in a shape she had not worn since she was a cub: a barn cat, gray and white, ordinary, the kind that sat on every wall in every village on three worlds and that nobody had ever once looked at twice. Her mismatched eyes were half shut. Her nose was not.

Woodsmoke. Frost on the grass. The horse in the hall yard, a bay with a cracked hoof and a liking for windfall apples, which somebody had given it, because it smelled of them. The cart behind it, old ash boards, new rope. And the three people beside the cart, which was the part she had come for.

Two men in white. One woman in white. The white was wool, good wool, washed with a soap that had lavender in it and came from somewhere that was not Ostrey and not the Lower Realm at all. Under the lavender, the men smelled of ordinary men who had been on a road for two days. The woman smelled of almost nothing. Of the soap, and of clean linen, and of nothing underneath it, as if she had been washed down to the grain.

Amaya did not like that, and noted it, and kept it.

It was the most interesting morning she had had since the mountain, and she had not once wanted to ask anybody what was happening. That was new. It got noted as well.

+++

The children came at first bell.

They came down the street from the houses with their mothers walking beside them, and the mothers were smiling. Amaya had been told they would be, and had thought she was ready for it, and was not. They were smiling because their children had read well in the hall on Kindleday and been chosen, and because a cart is an adventure, and because they did not know what else to do with their faces.

Eleven of them. The youngest was perhaps six, a boy with his hair wetted flat and a bundle tied in a cloth. The oldest was a tall girl of eleven or twelve who carried her little sister’s bundle as well as her own, and kept turning to say something to the sister, who was not coming.

The woman in white knelt in the frost and spoke to each child by name. Nobody had told her their names. Amaya had been on the wall since before the first pot was put on, and nobody had told her anything. The woman knew them anyway, every one, and said them softly, and touched each child on the shoulder, I see you, and each child looked up at her face and went still and warm and pleased, as a cat goes when it is stroked by somebody who knows how.

Amaya’s claws came out into the wall, and went back in.

The children climbed up into the cart. They were not frightened. One of them, the boy with the wetted hair, waved to his mother with both arms, and his mother waved back, and laughed, and wiped her face with the back of her wrist and went on laughing.

Then the cart went.

Amaya waited until the street was empty and the mothers had gone back in to the porridge pots that would now be one bowl short. Then she went down off the wall, along the bottom of the churchyard hedge, and out into the frost on the far side of the field, and turned east.

+++

Their scents she took on the first stretch of road, and kept.

That was what she was for. Anything that hides, you find. Lord Fahmjir had said it in front of the whole guard, a long time ago, and she had been so proud she could not sit still, and Takara had told her to sit still, and she had not. She was sitting still now, in a manner of speaking, going across four fields and a beck at a cat’s trot, low, downwind, a field’s width off the road, and her mind was perfectly quiet and perfectly full.

Eleven children. Eleven scents. The egg-and-porridge one. The honey ones. The tall girl, who smelled of her sister’s hair because she had been sleeping in the same bed with her all her life and would not again. Amaya would know every one of them now in a crowd of ten thousand, in the dark, in the rain, in a year. Nobody had told her to do that. It was done before she thought about it, the way you take hold of a hand.

The cart did not go to a Temple shed. It went past one, the grain shed on the Hessen fork that Cangwei had stood in and counted, and did not slow. It went east and then north, onto a track that was not on Meifen’s map, through a gate in a hedge that somebody had made to look like no gate at all, and up into a fold of hills where the road went between two shoulders of gray rock and the wind could not get in.

There were other cart-tracks on that road. Fresh ones. Amaya put her nose down to them as she crossed the track behind the cart, and read them, and lifted her head.

Two other carts had come this way today. One from the south, one from the west. Not from Ostrey.

Without stopping, she went up the side of the fold, through bracken gone red with the season, to where a shelf of rock looked down into the valley beyond, and lay flat on it, and looked.

+++

It was a school.

That was the first thing and the worst thing, and she lay on the rock and made herself look at it until she was sure.

A wall round it, old stone, the height of a man. A gate with no sign over it. Inside the wall, a long hall with a slate roof and smoke going straight up from three chimneys, and a yard swept clean, and a bell on a post by the door. A row of low buildings along the east side with small square windows, and washing on a line, small washing, children’s washing, shifts and stockings and a scarf. A vegetable garden. A pump.

Through the open door of the long hall she could see long tables, and children sitting at them in rows, bent over slates. There was a woman in white walking slowly between the rows with her hands clasped behind her. While Amaya watched, the woman stopped, and bent, and corrected something on one slate, and put her hand on the child’s head for a moment before she moved on.

The bell rang. The children got up from the tables and came out into the yard in good order, two by two, and ran about in the cold, and shrieked, and played a game with a ball made of rags, and nobody stopped them.

Through the gate came the Ostrey cart.

The sister in white who had been by the pump came across the yard and lifted down every one of the eleven, one at a time, and said every one of their names, and the children who were already there came crowding up to look at the new ones, and the boy with the wetted hair was taken by the hand by an older boy and led away to see something, and he went, laughing.

Amaya lay on the rock and counted.

Not with her eyes. With her nose, down the valley on the breath of the wind that could not get into the fold but came over the top of it and went down. Children. A great many children. She sorted them as she sorted anything: by the smell of their skin and their hair and what they had eaten, by where they had come from. Mountain children, with the smell of goat on their hands. Valley children. Children from the coast, still faintly salty. Children who had been here a long time and smelled of nothing but this place, its soap, its porridge, its woodsmoke, as if everything they had been before was being washed off them a little at a time.

Two hundred and three. Twice she went through it, because she did not believe it the first time. Two hundred and three, and the eleven from Ostrey on top.

The guard was small. Two men at the gate in white, bored. The sisters, five she could count, perhaps six. A man with a dog who walked the wall twice an hour; the dog was old and had a bad nose and would not have smelled Amaya if she had sat on its head. Nothing else she could see.

There was something along the wall she could not see. It came to her through the whiskers rather than anything else: a hum, very faint, like a fly in a shut room, running along the top of the stones all the way round. A working. Not a ward to keep anything out. Something that sat on the place and made it quiet. Made it calm. Made children who had been taken from their mothers on a Grindday play ball in the yard the same evening and shriek with joy and not ask once to go home.

She lay very still.

Then the wind turned a little, and came down the valley from the back of the place, from behind the long hall, from a building she had not looked at properly because there was nothing about it to look at. Stone, no windows, a single door. Set apart, by itself, against the hill.

And it smelled of nothing.

Not of soap, not of stone, not of the hill. Not of anything at all. Never in her life had she smelled nothing. The whole world smelled of something; even the inside of a stone smelled of the rock it had come out of. Once she had heard about it, from Takara, who had had it from the shadowbeast, who had smelled it in a sealed jar in the Commander’s workshop and said so exactly once, and then said nothing else all evening, which for the shadowbeast was the same as shouting.

Doesn’t smell like anything. That’s what’s wrong.

Amaya’s lips came back off her teeth on the rock, all the way, silently, and stayed there.

Her body was already moving. She felt it go, the long muscles along her back gathering, the barn cat shape starting to come apart at the edges into what she actually was, and she was a quarter of the way to the edge of the shelf before she understood what she was doing and stopped.

Follow to wherever it stops. Do not go in. Do not go near.

If a child is in danger in front of you, you do what you would do. If not, you do nothing at all.

Down in the yard were the children playing ball. The boy with the wetted hair had been given a piece of bread by the older boy and was eating it in the doorway, and was not in danger in front of her. Not today. Not this evening. Not, if Cangwei’s columns were right, for months.

The building against the hill smelled of nothing.

Amaya put herself back into the barn cat’s shape, one muscle at a time. It was the hardest thing she had ever done. Harder than a year kept a short run from the Commander, unseen, every day, with nobody in the world to tell. Down on the rock again, chin on her forepaws, she made herself look at the valley until she knew it: every wall, every door, every path, the stream, the ford, the angle the light came in at, the time the man walked the wall with the old dog.

Then she went back down through the bracken, and through the false gate in the hedge, and west toward the water, as fast as anything on four legs had ever crossed that country.

Her teeth ached all the way. Since the rock they had been clenched, and she could not make them stop.

+++

They came back into the workshop one at a time, after dark, outside, which inside meant over the course of a night and a day, and Jayde stood at the wall with the chalk and put down what they brought. Isha sat on the bench by the synthesis unit with his tails gathered round him, as he had sat by her at the rail all the cold night before, and said nothing, and missed nothing.

Xinglong came first, in his plain coat, with the frost still in his hair.

"It went where it went," he said, and put one finger on the map, high in the north of the second province, in a valley that had no name on it. "Here. A walled house with a hall and a bell. Children in the yard." He took his finger away. "A hundred and eighty-seven. I counted at the evening meal; they eat at long tables, and the door was open. Then I counted the bunks through the windows of the low buildings, because the tables did not hold them all. Three carts in today. I followed one. The other two were on the road ahead of it before I reached the turn."

He did not ask what it meant. He stated where it was and stepped back from the wall.

Jayde drew a ring on the map round his finger-mark, in chalk, and wrote beside it, small: 187.

Hulong had the far west. Two hundred and three. Yinglong, the coast road, a hundred and seventy-five, and her face was white rather than red, and she said nothing else at all. Huifu the south, a hundred and ninety-two; she had sat on a hillside and listened to them singing at the end of the day. Xingteng came last of the five, and stood silent at the wall a good while before she found the place, and then put her finger on it hard enough to dent the paper.

"A hundred and seventy-one," she said. "They had a garden. Somebody had planted marigolds."

Then the cats.

Canirr had the reports from Meifen’s surveyors as well as her own, because she had gone round them on her way back, all of them, in the dark, without being asked. Twenty-nine halls had a surveyor near them on Grindday. Twenty-seven sent a cart. Two did not; one had been tested on Hammerday and sent its cart on Temperday, and one had not been tested this year at all. The pattern held, mostly. Cangwei, at the bench, struck a line through one cross in the margin and wrote a word beside it, and did not look up.

Suki came in out of the shadows by the door, which nobody had seen her approach, and stood at the wall without touching it.

Were they fed? she said.

It was the first thing she had said. The assassin, Jayde had learned, was always the one who asked the kind question.

"Yes," Jayde said. "Every report says so."

Good, said Suki, very softly. Then they will be strong enough to walk out.

Prota came after her. He had never spoken in Jayde’s hearing. He stood at the wall on his three good legs and the metal one, and looked at the map a long time, and when he did speak it was low and short, like a stone set down.

Mine went to the place Huifu found. Two carts there before it. They know the road. They have used it many years.

That was all. He went and lay down by the door, and put his chin on the metal foreleg, and closed his eyes.

Reiko came in at dog size with his hackles still up, and did not lie down.

[Smelled them,] he said. [All of them. Every place.] He looked at the wall, at the rings and numbers. [Lots of children.]

[I know.]

[They’re happy,] Reiko said. He said it as if it were the worst thing he had ever had to report. [Why are they happy, Jayde?]

She did not have an answer for him that she could say in four words, and so she did not say anything, and he leaned against her leg, hard, and stayed there.

Takara made his report formally, from the door, through the bond, with every figure in its place. He had followed two carts and seen both into the same valley. He did not say anything about it that was not a figure. His mane was perfectly still the whole time, which Jayde had never seen it be.

Amaya came in last.

+++

Small, in the barn cat shape none of them had seen her wear, she came across the workshop floor and up onto the bench by the jar without asking, and sat down beside it, and looked at it, face down on the wood. Then she looked at Jayde.

Ostrey, she said. East, then north, through a gate made to look like a hedge. A fold in the hills between two shoulders of rock. A school.

One paw went on the map. It was a little east of Huifu’s, and a little north.

Two hundred and three when I counted. Two hundred and fourteen now, with Ostrey’s eleven. A boy with his hair wetted flat. A girl who carries her sister’s bundle and her sister did not come. I have all their scents. Every one. I will know them anywhere.

Jayde wrote 214 beside the ring.

There is a working on the wall, Amaya said. All the way round. It does not keep anything out. It sits on them. It makes them quiet. Her mismatched eyes did not move from Jayde’s face. They do not ask to go home.

Jayde did not say anything.

There is a building at the back, Amaya said. Against the hill. Stone, no windows, one door. She stopped, and when she went on her voice in Jayde’s head had gone very low and very level, with nothing in it of the cat who had bounded into the workshop four days ago asking what was happening. It smells of nothing, Commander. Like the jar. I have never smelled nothing in my life.

The workshop was very quiet.

Not in, Amaya went on. Not near. I lay on a rock and learned the valley until I could walk it blind. I wanted to go down. I was a quarter of the way down before I stopped. She looked at the jar again. I did what you told me. I did nothing at all. She looked back. It was harder than the year.

"I know," Jayde said.

You do not, Amaya said, know. But you will.

She was not angry any longer. Jayde could hear that, under the words. Something else had come in where the anger had been, and it was larger, and colder, and pointed the same way as Jayde’s own.

I will go back next Grindday, Amaya said. And the one after. Until there are no more carts on that road that I have not followed. Her tail curled round her feet. And on the night, I want that valley.

"You have it."

Good. She got down off the bench and went to the door, and lay down beside Prota, small and gray and white, and put her chin on her forepaws, and did not close her eyes.

+++

Nobody went to the wall.

At the bench, Cangwei had already written it. Jayde could see the line from where she stood, in the small fair hand, set apart from everything else on the page:

One building, one place, smells as the jar does. Store, or mill. Unknown.

And beside it, the cross.

"If it’s a mill," Eden said, from the stool by the case, and stopped, and made herself finish it, "then the months are wrong. Not for all of them. For some of them. Some of them aren’t waiting for a column." She did not look at the jar. "Some of them are waiting for that door."

Nobody answered her. Reiko’s weight against Jayde’s leg did not change.

"Then next Grindday," Jayde said, "Amaya does not follow a cart. She walks the back wall of every valley on that map, and tells me which of them has a building that smells of nothing."

From the door, without lifting her chin off her paws: Yes.

"And if it is more than one," Jayde said, "we do not wait for the map to finish."

Eden looked at her. "Then the night comes when?"

"When we know what that building is," Jayde said. "Not before. Not one day after."

She stood back from the wall.

Six rings. A hundred and eighty-seven. Two hundred and three. A hundred and seventy-five. A hundred and ninety-two. A hundred and seventy-one. Two hundred and fourteen. Every one of them off the Temple’s estate, every one in a fold or a valley or a high place with one road in, every one with a wall and a bell and long tables and, in one at least, a building at the back with one door.

She added them in her head before she looked at Cangwei’s ledger, because she always did, and then looked at the ledger, and the sum was the same.

Eleven hundred and forty-two.

Nobody in the workshop said anything. Cangwei, at the bench, had stopped with the pencil above the page. Her guess had been four hundred, perhaps five, and she had marked it, and nobody had thought she was wrong.

Jayde did not look away from the number on the wall. She had planned for five hundred. Every sheet she had was written for five hundred.

Eden wrote it down. Rather than say it was wrong, she said: "Six places. Eleven hundred and forty-two children. One night." She looked at the wall. "And that’s only the halls we knew."

"Yes."

"Then every Grindday."

"Every one," Jayde said, "until no road on that map leads anywhere we have not already drawn a ring, or that building tells us we have run out of time."

At the bench, Cangwei had found the line in the margin of her ledger where, more than fifty inside days ago, she had written in her small fair hand: Several places, not one. And beside it, a cross.

She looked at it for a moment. Then she took the pencil from where it lay square across the cover, and struck the cross through, cleanly, once.

It was known.