Chapter 613 - 608: Six Mouths (Edited)

Chapter 613: Chapter 608: Six Mouths (Edited)

Location:The Pavilion — The Workshop, The Far Hall

Date/Time:22–23 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Quenchday to Grindday night (outside)

Realm:Lower Realm

One small square of black chalk, drawn hard, sat at the back of the sixth ring on the workshop wall, a little east of Huifu’s valley and a little north. Amaya’s valley. Two hundred and fourteen children and a building against the hill that smelled of nothing.

The other five rings had no square. Jayde had stood in front of the wall long enough on the first inside morning to see that the empty backs of five rings were not five answers but five questions, and that every plan she made before Grindday would be built on the one she could see and four she could only guess at, and made it anyway. There was nothing else to make it on.

"It is the same breath, or it is nothing," she said. "So we start with the breath."

+++

"A runner can’t carry it," Eden said. "That’s the first thing."

Eden was on the stool by the case with her slate on her knee, and her hair had come out of its tie and been put back and come out again. Zhi lay along her forearm, blue and steady, and watched the stylus.

"Six valleys. The nearest two are half a day apart on a good road, the furthest four. You can send everybody out with the same time written on a sheet, and the same bell to count from, and by the time they’ve walked or ridden to where they’re going, there won’t be two of them on this continent who agree what time it is to within a quarter of an hour." She tapped the slate. "The village bells don’t agree with each other. Kaelport’s bell doesn’t agree with the Academy’s. Nobody here keeps time. They keep the morning. It’s never mattered."

"It matters now."

"To the breath it does." Eden did not look up. "Isha says inside the same breath. I asked him how long a breath is. He said a breath, which I’ve decided means two seconds, and I’ve told him so. So six people in six valleys four days apart have to do one thing inside two seconds of each other, on a continent where nobody has ever once in history known what second it was."

Cangwei, at the bench, wrote it down, with no cross beside it.

"Then we take the time with us," Jayde said.

Eden’s stylus stopped.

Eden looked up. Her mouth did something at the corner, the quirk, the ghost of one, and went still.

"You know what that means," she said.

"I know."

"Nine’s stores. The wrist sets. There are twelve in the locker behind the second bulkhead, sealed, and they’ve never been out of the ship." Eden put the stylus down. "They’re the only things on this world that agree with each other about time. Nine sets them to its own clock, and they’ll hold it to the hundredth of a second for a year. Six people put them on in this room, and at the second bell after whatever midnight we pick, every one of them will say the same thing at the same moment, and they’ll be right."

"Every word of it."

"And every one of them is a thing this continent can’t make and can’t explain and must not have." Eden looked at her steadily. "You’ve never once let one off the ship. Not for a nest. Not for the mountain."

"Not for a nest," Jayde agreed.

Jayde’s hands went flat on the bench. The wood was warm from the lamp.

This was the line. She had drawn it early, before she had anything to draw it with, and she had kept it through everything since. The roads were roads. The drying sheds were boards and a draft. The plow angle was an angle. Everything she had put into the hands of this continent was a thing it could have found on its own, a little later, by people who would never know anybody had shown them the way. The platforms stayed in the sky. The ship stayed in its hall under its cloth.

Eleven hundred and forty-two children were in six valleys, being taught a shape.

"They go out sealed," Jayde said. "Six of them. On six wrists. Each one written into your book by name, the hand it goes on and the hand that brings it back. They come off the moment the mouth is shut. Not after the children are out. Not after the night. The moment. They come back into the ship before first light, and they are never out of it again." She did not move her hands. "If one is lost, we go back for it. If it is taken, we go and take it back. Nobody on this continent sees one, or holds one, or is told what one is."

"That’s six rules," Eden said.

"Write them down."

Eden picked up the stylus and wrote them down. When she had finished, she looked at what she had written for a while, and then at Jayde, and did not say anything, and Jayde understood that she had been told something by it that she would not have been told any other way.

[You smell like you just put something heavy down,] said Reiko, from the floor by the door.

[I have not put it down.]

[Then you smell like you’re about to,] said Reiko, and put his chin back on his paws.

+++

Isha had the second half of it, and he gave it standing, which he did not do unless a thing mattered.

"The queen is right," he said. "She is right in the way that matters, which is that she has the shape of it and not the method. It is carried by the children. The far hand holds it so lightly it barely knows it is holding. If the children’s hands come off it, it falls." His tails were gathered very close. "But we cannot take eleven hundred children out through six walls inside one breath. Not even through the door that is ready for them. The door is for after. They are asleep. They are in beds. They are small."

"Then not the children," Jayde said.

"Not the children. The mouth." Isha turned to the wall, to the one black square. "A working on a wall must be anchored, or it blows away. That building is where the anchor is. It is where the far hand’s thread comes down and where the children’s small hands are gathered up and tied to it. Close the mouth, and the thread has nowhere to come down, and the children’s hands have nothing to hold. It does not break. It simply is not there any more." He folded his hands in front of him. "Six mouths. Closed inside one breath. I do not yet have a better way, and I am very much afraid there is none, and only this."

"And to close a mouth?"

"Somebody who knows how a working is built, standing at the door of that building with their hand on the stone, at the moment the clock says." He paused. "I can close one. I have said so. I can perhaps close two, if they are near. That leaves four."

Nobody said anything.

"The rest of us," Jayde said, "who know how a working is built."

Her eyes went round the room.

Xinglong had come in at some point and was standing by the door. He met her eyes and stated it, as he always stated things.

"Formation theory. My grandfather taught it to me from above, because that is how the old ones saw a working: from the top, as a shape on the ground. It is the only thing I was ever better at than everyone else in my father’s court." He did not smile. "Nobody has ever needed it. Give me a mouth. It is the thing I am for."

"The northern valley. Your own."

Xinglong inclined his head, once.

Green was at the far end of the bench, where she had been sitting through all of it with her arms folded and her face perfectly neutral, which Jayde had learned a very long time ago was worse than anything Green could say. Green unfolded her arms.

"I have not been outside the garden in some time," Green said.

"Not for a long time."

"Eighty-five percent," Green said. "That I close one mouth. On my own, at a run, in a breath, on a lattice I have drawn and never touched." She looked at Jayde with her fractured emerald eyes, and there was nothing in her face at all, and Jayde could not remember when she had last seen Green offer anything. "That is enough. Give me the one with the garden."

Xingteng’s valley. The marigolds.

"It is yours," Jayde said.

Heiteng had said nothing. He was standing at the back of the room with his hands in his belt, as he always stood, as he had stood at a rail above the water for longer than anybody could count. Cangwei was at the bench beside Eden, with her ledger open, her pencil moving, and had not looked round at him once in an inside hour. Jayde had watched him notice.

"I do not build workings," Heiteng said quietly. "I never have. I hold them."

Isha turned his head.

"I can bear a thing," Heiteng said. "A load, a door, a weight that wants to come down. If the fox is closing one mouth and the thread fights him, I can hold the mouth open on my side while he shuts it on his, so that he is not doing two things at once." He looked at the wall, not at Isha. "That is all I can give. I do not know if it is worth a valley."

"It is worth the far west," Jayde said. "Hulong’s. You hold Hulong’s mouth still while Isha reaches it from where he stands, and he closes it and his own in the same breath, two that are not near, with you holding one of them for him."

Isha was silent a while. His tails moved, very slowly, and settled.

"That would work," he said. "That is a good version. I did not think of it." He looked at Heiteng. "I have never once had anybody offer to hold the other end."

Heiteng nodded once, the way he conceded to a carter, and said nothing more. But Jayde saw him look across the room at Cangwei, bent over her ledger, a long way off on the far side of the bench, and then away.

Cangwei did not look up. Here, in the workshop, on the night, with Eden, at the wall, with the clock: that was where she would be. She had asked for it, the only one of them who could not go out, and she had asked to be the one who knew where everybody was. Heiteng would be on the far side of the continent.

Jayde filed it, and let it go.

"The coast," Jayde said. "Yinglong’s. A hundred and seventy-five children."

"Mine," said Yinxin, from the door.

Yinxin had come up from the sanctuary on two feet, as she did more often now, and she stood in the doorway with her arms folded and her golden eyes on the wall, and she did not come in.

"You said a door," Yinxin said. "You said whole. I am whole. Green has said so, as a number." She looked at the coast ring. "I cannot close a mouth. I do not know how. I do one thing. But I can stand in front of that building with my hand on the stone at the moment the clock says, and I can feel the thread come down through it, and I know what a weave sounds like when the last hand comes off it." She paused. "Let Isha close the coast from where he is, and let me be his ears on it. Then he is not reaching blind. Please."

Isha looked at her, and kept looking.

"That," he said, "would make it three. Not two. And it would be the first time a silver queen has ever helped me close anything."

"Then it will be the first time," Yinxin said.

That left one.

Jayde looked at the wall. At Huifu’s valley, in the south, a hundred and ninety-two children. At Amaya’s, a little east and a little north of it, two hundred and fourteen, and the one black square.

"Huifu’s," she said. "Mine."

The room went still.

Then everybody spoke at once.

Eden said, "No," flatly, and stood up off the stool. Isha’s tails went up all nine at once, rigid, which Jayde had never seen. Yinxin said, "You are the one with no small version," in the court register, cold. Reiko was on his feet at full size, which he had not been in the workshop in months, and his hackles were up, and what he was saying in her head did not have words in it at all. From somewhere behind her eyes, dry as old paper, Kazren said: [Of course she has.]

Jayde let them finish. She did not raise her voice.

"Phoenix flame has no small version," she said. "I know. I am not going to burn it. I am going to put my hand on it and do what Isha does, which he has shown me, on a lattice I have looked at under glass for three summers, and nobody in this room knows it better than I do except him. If I get it wrong, it does not go quiet. It goes up." She looked at Isha. "And Isha will be in Amaya’s valley, a little east and a little north, close enough to reach. Closing his own, and Hulong’s through Heiteng, and the coast through the queen. And mine, if mine goes wrong."

"That is four," Isha said. "That is too many."

"Then I will not get it wrong."

Isha looked at her a long time. His tails came down, slowly, one at a time.

"I promised a cat," he said quietly, "that I would be between you and anything that came for you."

"You will be. A little east, and a little north."

"That is not between."

"Not between," Jayde agreed. "It is close."

+++

Amaya went out at dusk on Quenchday, outside, alone, in her own shape, without the barn cat, and came back at the end of Grindday, after dark, and it was the run she had been made for.

Jayde watched her come into the workshop and did not ask how far she had gone. From the far west of the second province to the coast of the fourth and back to the south and then north again she had gone, in a day and a night, six valleys, every one of them on the far side of a back wall in the dark, and she came in low and fast with her coat dulled and her flanks going in and out, and she did not stop at the door.

Straight to the wall she went, and put her paw on the far west.

There, she said. One.

Jayde drew the square.

The north. Two. The garden. Three. Huifu’s, the south. Four. The coast.

At the coast she stopped. Her paw stayed on it.

Five, she said. And then: There was a cart.

Jayde waited with the chalk.

At the coast. On the column road, north. Not a cart in. A cart out. Full. Amaya’s mismatched eyes came round to Jayde’s face. I smelled them as it passed. Eleven. Children. Long-held. They smelled of nothing but that place. Her tail moved hard, once, against the floor. Going north. To the gate.

The workshop was very quiet.

"Not all of them wait," Cangwei said. Her ledger was open at the column she had ruled on the sixtieth inside day, IN and OUT, and the months in the middle with the cross beside it. "I said so. I marked it." She did not look up. "The coast is emptying."

Not all, Amaya said. A hundred and sixty-four still inside. I counted. One cart. But it was going. Her ears went flat. And there is more. The man in white at that gate said it to the woman in white while the cart was loading, plainly, the way you say a thing everybody already knows. All of them. Every school. Up the column road in groups of thirty, three groups a day, starting in ten days. Orders from above. She said the next word as if it tasted of the jar. Stock. He said stock is wanted, and quickly.

"Stock," Jayde said.

Nobody in the workshop answered her. She said it once more, very quietly, as if she were setting it down somewhere she would find it again.

"Then they will go without," she said. "From here, they will go without."

Jayde drew the fifth square, at the coast, and stood with the chalk in her hand.

Six mouths. Six squares. Six breakers, and a clock that would agree with itself to the hundredth of a second, and a cart on the column road going north tonight with eleven children in it that nobody had followed, because nobody had been there to follow it except a cat with orders to do nothing at all.

I let it go, Amaya said. I did what I was told.

"You did," Jayde said. "I know you did."

If I had gone after it, they would have known.

"They would have."

So I let it go. Amaya lay down at the foot of the wall, very suddenly, as if her legs had decided it for her. Takara rose from the door without a word and came and lay down beside her, close, flank to flank, and his mane gave one small crackle and went still, and she did not tell him to move. I have its scent. All eleven. I will know them anywhere.

Jayde turned from the wall.

She had known for three inside days that the night would come when the map was finished or when a building at the back of a valley told them they had run out of time. Nobody had thought it would be a cart.

"The coast will not wait for the map," she said. "So the map does not get to finish." She did not look away from the wall. "Ten days is when the columns start. The coast has started already. Tomorrow."

At the bench, Cangwei’s ledger lay open at the page that said WHERE THE CHILDREN ARE, with GO struck through above it and the columns and the crosses and Jayde’s own two lines at the bottom: Grindday. Ostrey. Follow the cart. And under it: The same breath.

The pencil lay square across the cover. She picked it up, and under the second line, in her small plain hand, pressed hard, she wrote a third.

Restday. 24 Flamefade. Second bell after midnight.

Tomorrow night, outside. Less than a day.

"The far west is four days on foot," Eden said, very evenly. "The coast is three."

"Not on foot." Jayde put the pencil back across the cover, square to the edge. "In the dark. Everyone who can fly carries everyone who cannot. The quintet. Heiteng. The queen. Green on Xingteng’s back. Isha on Huifu’s. I go on my own wings. We leave at dusk and we are at the walls before the second bell." She looked at Cangwei. "Your rule is by day."

"My rule is by day," Cangwei said. "At night, a black shape is a black shape against black. It is still a shape. If anybody is awake on a hillside and looks up at the wrong moment, it is over."

"Then nobody looks up," Jayde said. "That is the risk, and we take it, because it is the only dark we get before the coast is empty." She turned to the breakers. "And when the mouth is shut, nobody carries a child anywhere. Isha puts his mark on your palms at dusk. You open the door where you stand, and they go through it, and they are at Hearthwell before they have finished blinking. Not one child walks out of a gate. Not one cart. They are simply not there."

Nobody argued. She looked round the workshop: at Eden with the stylus already moving, writing the six rules over the top of a sheet, sealed, by name, the hand it goes on; at Isha, standing, his tails very still; at Green, with her arms folded again and her face neutral; at Heiteng in the doorway and Cangwei at the bench, not looking at each other; at the cat at the foot of the wall with her flanks going in and out.

"Nine," Jayde said, to the room and to the far hall beyond it. "Open the locker behind the second bulkhead. Six wrist sets. I will sign for them."

From the far hall, faint, pleasant, at exactly the volume of a person standing beside her:

"Understood, Commander. Six. I will need the names of the hands."