Chapter 614 - 609: Second Bell (Edited)

Chapter 614: Chapter 609: Second Bell (Edited)

Location:The Pavilion — The Workshop · Six Valleys of the Lower Realm

Date/Time:24 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Restday, dusk to the second bell after midnight

Realm:Lower Realm

There were twelve of them in the locker behind the second bulkhead, in two rows, in a case lined with something gray that gave under the finger, and Cangwei had watched the doctor lift seven of them out one at a time and lay them on the workshop bench in a line, as a smith lays out the tools for a job, and not one of them looked like anything.

A band. Dark, smooth, the width of two fingers. A flat face no bigger than a thumbnail, black, with nothing on it. They did not look like a thing that could keep time. They did not look like a thing at all.

"Nine," the doctor said.

"Setting," said Nine, from the far hall, as near as if it stood beside her. "Seven. Six to go, and one for the wall. Now."

The seven faces on the bench lit at once. Not brightly. A thin pale line of marks on each, very small, in no hand Cangwei could read, and as she watched, the last mark on each of the seven changed, and changed again, all seven together, as if one finger were touching all of them at the same moment.

Cangwei had seen the dwarves’ water clocks at Vor Hakkun, and the Temple’s sand glasses in a row on a shelf at Ashmarch, and none of them had ever agreed with another, and she stood at the bench and watched seven small black faces agree with each other, perfectly, silently, again and again, and felt the back of her neck go cold.

"Hands," said the doctor.

They came to the bench one at a time.

The doctor did not let anybody buckle their own. Each wrist she took in her own small, steady hands and turned it over, palm up, and laid the band across it and closed it, and pressed the clasp with her thumb until it clicked, and said the name aloud as she did it, and wrote it in the book. Cangwei, at the wall, wrote it in the ledger at the same moment, because somebody should, in a hand that was not the doctor’s.

"Xinglong. North." Click.

"Green. The garden." Green held out her wrist and looked at the wall while it was done.

"Heiteng. The far west." Click.

"Yinxin. The coast." The queen in her human shape, golden eyes on the doctor’s face. "It will not come off in a fight, I take it."

"It won’t come off unless I take it off," the doctor said, "or you do. Don’t."

"Isha." The fox held out a furred wrist, and the doctor had to close the band one notch tighter than the others, and said so, and wrote that down too.

"Jayde."

The doctor’s hands stopped for a moment over the band. Then she buckled it on, and pressed the clasp, and did not say the caveat; Cangwei could see her thinking. Eden looked up, and Jayde looked back, and something went between them in that fast, hard tongue that did not use words, and then the doctor wrote Jayde. South. in the book.

The seventh she set on the bench by the wall, face up, and wrote that too: The wall. Stays.

Six bands on six wrists, and one on the bench. Seven faces, agreeing.

Heiteng came past the wall on his way to the door. He stopped beside her, a little behind, where she could not see his face without turning.

"Good day or bad day?" he asked, very low.

She did not turn.

"Tomorrow," Cangwei said.

He stood a moment longer. Then he went out, and she heard the door, and she did not look up from the ledger until she was sure he could not see her do it.

+++

Five hours.

Green had never once ridden a dragon.

Most of the last long while she had stood in a garden, not wanting to go anywhere, and had not expected to be sitting on the back of a dragon in the dark, with her knees locked round a spine as wide as a trestle and her hands flat on cold scale, eight hundred feet over a continent she could not see.

Xingteng flew low and fast and did not speak. Green counted.

Wingbeats. One in every two seconds, near enough, and the air came off the trailing edge with a sound like cloth tearing slowly, and she counted every one of them because a number was a thing she could hold. Three hundred. Six hundred. Below, nothing. No light anywhere. A black continent under a black sky, and somewhere to the left a long faint line of gray where a river caught the stars.

Nine hundred.

At nine hundred and twelve Xingteng banked, very slightly, and the line of gray swung under them and was gone. Green adjusted her grip by the width of a finger and did not otherwise move.

Up was nowhere she looked. Only down, at the dark, at the place where in a little under four hours there would be a fold of hills and a wall and a bell and a garden somebody had planted with marigolds, and a building against the hill with one door.

Eighty-five percent. It had been said, and it was the truth, and she had not said what the other fifteen were. Nobody had asked.

Nine hundred and thirteen.

+++

One hour.

The gate in the far west had two men at it in white, as Amaya had said, and both of them were asleep against the gatepost under one blanket.

Prota went first.

He came off the top of the wall in a single drop, no run-up, the three good legs folding under him and the metal one reaching ahead, and he landed on the frozen ground beside the gatepost with his weight already rolling forward through his shoulders so that the impact went into the turf and not into the night. The nearer man’s eyes came open. His mouth started to. Prota’s metal foreleg came across in a flat short arc and settled on his chest and pressed, once, without any hurry at all, and the breath went out of him in a soft collapse and did not come back in time to make a sound.

The second man was faster. He had his feet under him before the blanket had finished falling, one hand going to his belt, the other coming up open with the fingers already curling, and Heiteng, coming through the gap behind them, saw a faint pale light begin to gather in the cup of that palm, like frost forming on the inside of a window.

Hulong was already inside it.

Hulong had come in low from the left, stepping long, weight dropped almost to his knees so that his head passed beneath the man’s raised elbow. As the light gathered, Hulong came up through the guard in one rising line, inside the cupped hand, and drove the heel of his palm up under the gateman’s chin. The gateman’s head snapped back. The light in his fingers smeared sideways, lost its shape, and went out like a breath on glass. Hulong’s other hand closed on the man’s wrist and turned it outward and down; Hulong’s hip went into the man’s hip; and the gateman went over it and onto his back in the frost, the wind knocked out of him, with a knee settling on his sternum before his shoulders had finished landing.

Neither of them had made a sound louder than a man turning over in his sleep.

By the time Heiteng reached the gatepost, both men were lying in the shadow of the wall, and neither of them was breathing. Prota stood over them on three good legs and the metal one. Hulong was already lifting the nearer one by the shoulders. Neither of them looked at Heiteng, and he did not ask. He knew the order; every one of them had been given it at the workshop wall in the same flat voice. Nobody in white who sees a face goes back to the Temple. Nothing of ours is left behind. Not a body, not a thread, not a footprint. The Commander could not afford to meet the Temple in the open yet, not until the passage up to the Mid Realm was hers, and until then the Temple would find six empty schools and nothing else at all. And First Company’s eight were already along the inside of the wall in the dark, one every twenty paces, as Meifen had drawn it. They had been lying out in this valley since Hammerday, in the bracken, with a chain and a staff and nothing else, waiting for a night nobody had told them the date of.

The yard was swept. The long hall was dark. In the low buildings along the east side, behind small square windows, two hundred and three children were asleep.

Heiteng could feel the working.

Not the way the fox felt it, or the queen. He did not read craft. But he had stood at the bottom of the weight of things for twenty-eight thousand years, and he knew when there was a load on a place, and there was a load on this one: a faint steady pressure over everything inside the wall, like the weight of snow on a roof before anybody has noticed it is snowing. It sat on the yard and on the hall and on the low buildings with the sleeping children, and it was very light, and it was everywhere.

He went round the end of the hall to the back, where the ground rose to the hill.

The building was there. Stone, no windows, a single door, low, set into the slope so that half of it was under the turf. The door had no lock. Nobody had ever needed to lock it.

He opened it and went in.

It was empty. That was the first thing. A room of bare gray stone, square, the height of a man, cold, with nothing in it at all. No altar. No lamp. No jar, no chain, no bed, no child.

And the floor.

He knelt and put his palm on it. The stone was smooth, and under his palm, cut into it so finely he could barely feel the edges, ran a line. He followed it with his fingers in the dark. It went round, and joined another, and went across, and came back, and he knew the shape of it before he had finished tracing it, because he had seen it drawn on off-world paper on the workshop bench three nights before.

Eleven nodes. A ring. Threads to an empty heart. And on the eleventh, very small, a hook.

Heiteng knelt in the middle of it and put both hands flat on the floor, one on either side of the empty heart, and spread his fingers, and set his weight.

He looked at the band on his wrist. The pale marks changed.

The marks meant nothing to him. The doctor had shown him which mark was which and he had not understood her, and she had seen that, and she had shown him something else instead: When the last one is all the same shape as this one, she had said, and drawn it on his palm in ink, that is the breath.

He looked at the shape on his palm and the shape on his wrist, and settled to wait, with the load of a whole valley under his two hands, and did not move.

+++

Ten minutes.

On the coast the wind came in off the water, cold and salt, and the queen stood at the back of a building against the hill with her hand on the stone of its doorframe and listened.

The thread was there. From the top of the slope she had felt it, coming in on Yinglong’s back with the sea under them: a working, very faint, so faint it was hardly more than a pressure behind the eyes. Here, with her hand on the stone, it was clearer. It came down from somewhere a very long way off, thin as a hair, and went into the floor of this room, and from the floor it went out through the wall into the dark yard and the low buildings, and it was held there, held up, the way a cloth is held up by many small hands under it.

A hundred and sixty-four small hands. Every one of them, she could feel.

Yinxin closed her eyes and did not let herself feel any more than that.

Somewhere a long way east and a little north, in a valley she had never seen, the fox was waiting for her to tell him what the last hand sounded like when it came off.

The band on her wrist ticked. Ten minutes. A little less.

Then Yinglong, behind her, said "Down," in a voice the queen had never heard her use, and the queen was down, flat on the turf, before she had decided to be.

Something went over her. Light. Hard white light, from the corner of the hall, in a line, aimed not at her but past her, at the door of the room behind her, at the stone under her hand. It hit the lintel a hand’s width above where her head had been, and the stone there went white and then black and spat a spray of hot grit across her back.

The woman in white was awake.

The woman stood at the corner of the long hall in her nightshift with her hair down and her feet bare in the frost, and her face was perfectly calm. No shout. Only a breath: one long breath in through the nose, held, and on the hold her lips moved without sound, and the queen, flat on the turf, felt the thread above the room twitch as if somebody had plucked it. The woman’s right hand came up from her side, palm out, fingers spread wide and stiff, and then the fingers drew in, all five at once, toward the center of the palm, as if she were closing her hand round something the size of an egg. Where they met, the light gathered. It came up white and cold out of nothing in the cup of her fingers, a bead, then a coal, then a fist of it, so bright the frost on the yard threw shadows backward from it.

Killing was not what she wanted. Breaking the mouth was. Early. Now. Ten minutes before the breath, so that the thread would feel the gap and every other mouth on the thread would know.

Yinglong moved.

Yinglong reached for nothing. No working, no essence, no metal out of the ground. There was eleven paces of frozen yard between her and the corner of the hall, and she crossed the first four of them in two long strides, low, her boots biting through the frost into the turf, and on the fifth her back foot hit a skin of ice where the pump had dripped and went out from under her.

Rather than fight it, she let the foot go and turned the fall into a dive, tucked her head, rolled once across the frozen ground over her right shoulder, and came up out of the roll on one knee three paces from the woman with the frost flying off her in a white spray.

The woman’s fingers opened.

The light came off her palm in a bar, straight and hard and the width of a wrist, and Yinglong was not there for it. Up off the knee she had driven, and over it, into the air, tucking, a full turn with her heels over her head, and the bar of light went under her and into the turf behind and dug a black trench a yard long, and the frost round it went to steam with a sound like a kettle.

Yinglong came down on her feet inside the woman’s reach, close enough to smell her. Lavender, and under the lavender, nothing.

The woman’s left hand was already coming up, fingers already spread, a second bead of light already forming in the cup of them, faster than the first.

Yinglong took the right arm instead.

Both hands. One on the wrist, one above the elbow. Her whole body turned into it, a quarter-turn from the hips, stepping across in front of the woman with her back to her and the arm drawn over her own shoulder like a rope, and kept turning. The arm went with her as far as an arm goes, and then it went further than an arm goes, and the sound it made carried out across the yard and off the water.

The second light went off the left hand as the woman’s balance went, wild, not aimed. It caught the cuff of Yinglong’s sleeve and the skin under it, and went on into the frost at their feet, and Yinglong smelled her own wrist burning and did not let go.

Yinglong dropped her weight. The woman went over her hip and down onto her face in the steaming frost, the broken arm still held up and back in Yinglong’s grip, and Yinglong came down after her with one knee between the shoulder blades and took the left wrist too, and pinned it flat to the turf, palm down, fingers spread, where it could not close round anything.

The woman did not scream. Her cheek turned on the frozen ground, and looked up sideways at Yinglong, and smiled.

"She smells of nothing," Yinglong said. Her voice was shaking. The rest of her was not. The burned cuff was smoking. "My queen. She smells like the room."

"I know," Yinxin said.

The queen got up off the turf. Her hands were shaking. The right one went back on the stone of the doorframe, beside the black scorch on the lintel, and closed her eyes.

The thread had not noticed. The light had gone into the stone above the door and the ground in the yard, not into the floor. The hundred and sixty-four small hands were still under the cloth, still holding.

"Nine minutes," she said aloud, to nobody, to the fox a long way east who could not hear her and did not need to. "We are still here."