Chapter 615 - 610: The Breath (Edited)

Chapter 615: Chapter 610: The Breath (Edited)

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

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

Realm:Lower Realm

At dusk, before anybody flew, Isha had marked their palms.

He did it in the workshop, at the end of the bench, with the six of them standing in a line in front of him as children stand for a doctor, and nobody laughed, not even Xinglong. One at a time, he took each right hand in his own furred ones and turned it palm up, and put the tip of one finger in the middle of it, and said a word in the tongue nobody alive still used, and where his finger had been there was nothing to see at all. Jayde felt it go in like the warmth of a cup held too long. It did not fade. It sat in the palm as a coin sits in a pocket, a small certain weight that was not there when she looked, and was there every time she stopped looking.

"One night," Isha said, to each of them, the same words every time. "When the mouth is shut, and not before, you put this hand flat on the air of that room and open the door. They go through. They are on the mountain before they have finished blinking, and they will not remember the door, because there will be nothing to remember." He let go of the hand. "And if anything in white is still standing in that valley when you open it, you do not open it."

Heiteng looked at his own palm for a long time after Isha had let it go.

"What is between?" he asked.

"Me," said Isha. "For less than a breath. I will not keep them."

Green was last. She held out her hand without being asked and looked at the wall while it was done, as she had looked at the wall while the band went on, and when it was over she closed her fingers on the mark as if it were a thing she might drop.

"Eighty-five," she said, to nobody.

Isha did not ask her what it meant. He put his hands back in his sleeves and stood aside, and the six of them went out to the dragons in the dark.

+++

One minute.

Xinglong had read the floor from above.

It was the only way he knew to read a working. His grandfather had taught it to him in the high gallery of his father’s court when he was very young, standing at the rail looking down at a lattice drawn in sand on the floor of the yard below: Not from inside it, child. Never from inside it. From above, as a shape on the ground. Then you see where it wants to come apart.

Not above it now: kneeling in the middle of it, in the dark, with his hands on the stone. But he had held the shape in his head from above for four days, from the moment Isha had laid the drawing on the bench, and he could see it now, behind his eyes, the eleven nodes and the threads and the empty heart, and he could see where it wanted to come apart.

The eleventh node. The hook.

Every working had a place where it was tied off. This one was tied off there, in a stroke no longer than a grain of rice, where the thread from the far hand came down and turned back on itself and held. That was the knot. Close the knot, and the rest of the shape would have nothing to hang from.

He set his right thumb on the hook, and spread the other four fingers flat on the stone round it, as his grandfather had taught him to steady a line before cutting it.

Forty seconds.

He thought, for no reason, of his grandfather, who had served a silver queen and failed her and carried it for ten thousand years. Of the silver on his own spine, which had woken on the night a silver queen’s pulse went out across three realms, and which he had never once known what to do with.

Twenty.

He knew what to do with this.

+++

Thirty seconds.

Jayde knelt on the floor of the room at the back of Huifu’s valley with both hands flat on the stone and the lattice under her palms, and listened to her own pulse against the band on her left wrist, and did not look at it.

From the yard she had counted it down without looking, as she always had been able to. Sixty years of clocks that agreed with each other, and four years on a continent where nobody did, and her body had never once forgotten what a second felt like.

[Here,] said Reiko, from the door. He was at full size, and he filled it, melded into the dark of the doorway so that nothing in the yard could have told him from the night, and his back was to her, and his hackles were up at it. [Nobody coming. Here.]

[I know.]

Twenty.

Kazren, very dry: [Breathe out before the one. Not on it. You always hold it on the one.]

She let half the breath go.

Ten.

Under her right thumb she found the hook, and the empty heart under her left palm. Then what Isha had shown her on the bench, eleven times, with a cold lattice drawn in ink: attention on the knot, very lightly, not pushing, feeling for the place where the far hand’s thread came down and turned back, ready to take it away.

Five.

Inside her, a long way down, under everything, the thing that was hers and had always been hers stirred and turned toward her hands.

It was coming, as she had told them it would. Phoenix flame has no small version.

Two.

One.

+++

The breath.

In the north, Xinglong pressed his thumb down on the hook and drew it, a hair’s width, toward the empty heart, the way you draw a loop through a knot to close it, and the shape in his head from above came apart along the line where it had always wanted to, and the floor under his hands was only stone.

Green, in the garden, put eighty-five percent of everything she had into the tip of one finger set in one small cut in a stone floor, and the other fifteen into not letting anybody see that she had, and it closed.

In the far west, the load went off the valley so suddenly that Heiteng’s hands, set against a weight that was no longer there, went through it, and he pitched forward and caught himself on his palms on the bare floor, and knew, without knowing how, that somewhere a long way east the fox had just reached through him and closed it.

On the coast, the queen felt the hundred and sixty-four small hands come off the cloth all at once, and the cloth fall, and the thin hair of the far thread go slack and drift and be gone, and said aloud into the cold, to a fox who could not hear her, "Now. It is down. It is down," and did not know until afterward that she was weeping.

Isha, in the east, in Amaya’s valley, knelt in an empty room with his tails spread across the floor round him like a fan, a tip on every node, all nine of them, and his two hands flat on the empty heart, and spoke one word in a tongue nobody alive still used, and on the word the tips of the nine tails lifted off the stone together, and he closed his own, and the far west through a black dragon’s two hands, and the coast through a silver queen’s one, inside the same breath, and felt all three go, and did not let himself feel anything else yet, because there was a fourth.

And in the south, the fire came.

It came up out of Jayde from the bottom of the world. First it was heat behind the breastbone, then a pressure along the inside of both arms like water rising in a pipe, and then it was in her hands, gold and amber, and the skin of her palms went bright from underneath, the bones showing dark through them like the leads in a window. It went for the stone. It went through her hands into the lattice, and the lattice took it like dry grass. The first node caught, a point of gold in the cut under her thumb. The light started round the ring toward the second, and the stone under her palms go from cold to warm to hot, and the skin on the heel of her right hand split, and the fire went into the split. A long way east and a little north, Isha felt it start, and turned toward her.

No.

Isha, she did not call. He was holding three. He had promised a cat.

She took her attention off the knot, which was already closing, and put all of it into the fire, which was not.

It did not have a small version. It never had. So she did not try to make it small. She curled her fingers, slowly, against the floor, until the nails were in the cut lines of the lattice, and she drew the fire back up through her palms as it had come, out of the stone and into her hands, and closed her hands round it on the stone, and held it. Not out. In. She held it in her two hands the way she would have held a child who was trying to run into a road, with everything she had, and she did not let it go into the lattice, and she did not let it go into the room, and she did not let it go into the dark yard where a hundred and ninety-two children were asleep in low buildings with small square windows.

The heel of her right hand burned through to something she did not look at.

Node by node, the lattice went dark. Then it was only stone.

She held on for one more breath after the knot was closed, to be sure, and then she let the fire go back down to wherever it lived, slowly, a little at a time, and it went.

Then she was on her knees in an empty room with her hands flat on a cold floor and the smell of her own burned skin in her nose and Reiko’s whole weight pressed against her back, and outside, in the dark, the hum had stopped.

+++

And in the quiet where it had been, across six valleys, at the same moment, in the dark, the children woke.

Not all at once. One here. One there. A small sound in a low building in the south, behind a square window, and then another. A boy in the north who sat up in his bed with no idea where he was. A girl in the far west who had played ball in the yard every evening for four months without once asking for anything, and who now, in the dark, with the quiet gone off her and nothing left to stop it hurting, began to cry for her mother, and could not have said who her mother was.

In the garden valley, under the marigolds, somebody else began. And on the coast, and in the east, where a boy who had come in with his hair wetted flat a week ago woke and did not know the room and called out for somebody, and did not know who he was calling.

Eleven hundred and thirty-one children who had not cried for months, waking, one after another, into a hurt they had not been let feel, and crying in six valleys at once for mothers whose faces they could not find.

Jayde, on her knees on the stone in the south, heard it start in the low buildings across the yard. Getting up was not yet possible, quite.

She listened to it, and it was the best sound she had ever heard.

Then she got up, because there was one more thing to do before anybody in white could be missed, and put her burned hand flat against the air of the dark room with Isha’s mark in the palm of it, and opened the door. In five other valleys, in five other dark rooms against five other hills, five other marked hands were doing the same, where nobody in any yard could see what the doors opened onto. First Company carried the small ones through it two at a time, and the bigger ones walked, holding hands, crying, and on the far side of a breath that was not quite a breath they were standing in a warm hall on a mountain with three fires lit and bunks of new pine in rows, and an old woman in a gray shawl in the doorway with her sleeves rolled up, who looked at the first of them and said, "There you are. Come in out of the cold."

Not one of them saw anything in between. Behind them, in six valleys, the gates stood shut, and the bells stood on their posts, and there was nobody in the schools at all.

+++

In the workshop, nobody heard anything.

Cangwei stood at the wall with the doctor beside her and the seventh band on the bench between them, the one that stayed, and watched its small pale marks come to the shape the doctor had drawn on everybody’s palm, and hold it, and change.

The breath.

There was no way to know. There was no runner and no bird and no word. There were six black squares on a map on a wall, and six people in six valleys four days apart who had either done it or had not, and she would not know which until one of them came back through the door.

The chalk was on the ledge, and she picked it up.

Through the first square she drew a line. Then the second. Then all six, one after another, steady, the way she would have struck six entries from an inventory once the stock was counted.

And beside each of the six lines, small, she drew a cross.

The doctor looked at it. Then at her.

"Until somebody comes back," Cangwei said. She did not lower the chalk. "It is a guess."

The doctor did not say anything. After a moment, she reached out and laid two fingers on the seventh band on the bench, very lightly, the way she would have taken a pulse, and left them there.

They stood like that at the wall, the two of them, and waited for the door.