Chapter 616 - 611: First Light

Chapter 616: Chapter 611: First Light

Location:The column road north · Hearthwell, in the Ironspine · The Pavilion — the workshop

Date/Time:25 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Kindleday, the second bell after midnight to first light

Realm:Lower Realm

Wheels, on frozen ruts, in the dark, a long way off.

Takara heard them before he smelled anything, which was a reversal of the usual order and which he noted for his report. Iron tires on ruts gone hard as stone with the cold, a creak of ash boards, one horse, walking. Half a day short of the gate at the head of the column road, by Canirr’s map, which Canirr had made him memorize before he left and then made him recite.

There, said Suki, beside him. She was not beside him. She was somewhere in the black of the hedge-bank to his left, and he only knew she was there because she wished him to.

Confirmed.

They had run north since dusk. Amaya had given them the scent at the foot of the workshop wall, eleven of it, laid into their noses one by one with great precision and an expression that suggested she would hold them both personally responsible for every child it belonged to. It had taken them four hours to find the road and two more to close on the cart, and for the last of those two Takara had been aware of an indignity that he had decided not to mention: that he, the head of Lord Fahmjir’s elite guard, was lying on his belly in a frozen ditch behind a farm cart, at full size, with frost in his mane, waiting for a signal nobody had been able to give him.

The others had bands. None had been issued to him. There were six, and they had gone to the six who would close the six mouths, and that was correct, and he accepted it. It meant that at the second bell after midnight, when the breath came, he would not know.

He had decided he would know anyway.

The cart came up out of the dark. A farm cart, old ash boards and new rope, the bay horse with the cracked hoof; he knew that hoof from Amaya’s report. A man walking at the horse’s head with a lantern, in white. In the bed of the cart, on straw, under blankets, small shapes. Eleven. They were not asleep. Two of them were sitting up against the side boards with their heads together, perfectly quiet, watching the dark go by. And at the front of the bed, on a plank seat with her back to the children and her hands in her lap, a woman in white with her hood down.

Takara breathed in, slowly, across the whole of the wind.

The children smelled of porridge and woodsmoke and the soap from the valley. The man smelled of a man. The woman smelled of nothing.

Wait for my order, Takara said.

I always do, said Suki, which was not true, and which he let pass.

+++

He knew the moment because she did.

The woman on the plank seat sat up straight, all at once, as if somebody had spoken her name in an empty room. Her head came round. Not toward the hedge. Toward the south, toward nothing at all, toward six valleys days of road away that she could not possibly have seen. Her mouth opened. Her hands came out of her lap.

The woman had felt it. Whatever held her, whatever thread ran through her that made her smell of the room and the jar, had just gone slack in six places at once, and she had felt it go, and her face in the lantern light had stopped being calm.

That is the breath, Takara said. Now.

The woman was on her feet on the moving cart-bed before he had finished saying it. Not to the hedge did she turn, but to the children behind her, and she drew in her breath through her nose, long, and held it, and her lips began to move without a sound.

Takara came out of the ditch.

Not as a guard did he come out of it, but as what he had been made to be before anybody had ever put him on a post: three strides, belly low, the frozen ground coming up hard under his forepaws and his hind feet driving it away behind him, and on the third stride he called the storm.

It came up from the base of his spine, where it always lived, a tightness like a held breath that ran forward along his back under the skin and into his shoulders and up the back of his neck. His mane rose. Every strand stood off his neck at once, and between them the first sparks came, small and blue-white and spitting, and the air round his head went sharp with the smell of a struck flint. On the fourth stride his forepaws set wide, his head dropped between them, and he let the charge pour forward into the mane until every strand was lit and the light jumped from one to the next to the next in a crackling ring.

On the cart-bed the woman’s right hand came up, palm out, fingers spread wide and stiff, and drew in, all five, to the center. The bead of light came up in the cup of them. Then the coal.

Takara loosed.

The lightning went off his mane in one white-blue arc, from the crown of his head to the iron tire of the near wheel, and the iron took it and threw it up the spokes into the boards and the boards threw it into everything touching them. The cart-bed jumped under the woman’s bare feet. Her light came off her palm a breath too early and a hand’s width too high and went over the children’s heads into the night, a bar of white the width of a wrist, and hit the hedge on the far side of the road and set it smoking.

Screaming, the horse went up. The man at its head was jerked off his feet by the halter and went down on his back in the rut with the lantern spinning away across the frost.

Suki was under the cart.

Takara never saw her go. She was in the hedge, and then she was a shadow between the wheels, and then she was coming up out of the dark on the far side of the man in the rut. The man had rolled, a knife out, short and broad, and was getting a knee under him. Suki took the knife hand at the wrist in her jaws, not closing them, only holding, and turned her head, and the man’s arm went with her head and his body went with his arm, and he was on his face in the frost with her forepaw between his shoulders and the knife lying a pace away, and she had not made a sound.

The woman on the cart-bed had her balance back.

She was standing over the children with her feet planted wide on the jumping boards and her left hand coming up now, and Takara saw the coal start in it, fast, faster than the first, and saw where it was aimed. Not at him. At the straw. At the eleven small shapes.

He went over the side of the cart.

One leap from the rut, the whole of his length going up and over the side boards with his hind feet scraping the top board, and he came down in the bed of the cart between the woman and the children, and the cart-bed bucked under his weight and threw her half off her feet. The coal in her left hand went off as she staggered. It took him in the right shoulder.

It was cold. That was the first thing. A hard white cold that went in under the fur and the skin and into the muscle, and then it was not cold at all; it was burning, and the smell of his own singed coat filled his nose and the whole right foreleg went weak at the shoulder and nearly folded.

He did not let it fold.

Instead he set it, and put his weight onto it, deliberately, because the children were behind him and the leg was the only thing between them and the woman, and it held, and he lowered his head and the last of the charge in his mane came off in a short ugly spitting arc into the planks at her feet, and she went backward over the front board of the cart and landed in the road on her shoulders and lay there.

Takara stood in the cart over the children with his right shoulder smoking and his mane still crackling, and breathed.

Report, he said.

The man is dead, Suki said, from the road, as flatly as she said everything. He saw your face, and mine, and the Commander’s order is the Commander’s order. The woman is not moving. She is breathing. A pause. She is one of them. One of the taken. She comes with the children, and she does not go back. Another pause. You are burned.

I am aware.

It is bad.

I am aware of that also. He did not look at the shoulder; that could wait. The children.

He turned round.

They were all sitting up now in the straw, the eleven of them, in a ragged huddle against the back board, with their blankets round them. Not one of them was crying. Not one of them had run. They were looking at him, a very large black cat standing in the middle of their cart with lightning still running in its fur and one shoulder on fire, and their faces were quiet. Still under it, a little. Still a little calm.

And then one of them, at the front, a girl of about eight with her hair in two plaits, began very slowly to frown.

Takara saw it happen. The last of whatever had been on her came off, as frost comes off a window when the sun gets to it, from the edges in, and her eyes went from him to the road, to the hedge burning on the far side, to the woman lying on her back in the rut, and back to him.

Her mouth started to shake.

Takara had kept a great many watches nobody cared about, and he had never once in all of them had any idea what to do with a child who was about to cry. What he did was the only thing his training had ever given him for a moment when a situation was beyond his station.

He lay down, in the cart, carefully, on his good side, so that his head was level with hers. His mane damped to nothing. His voice, in her head, he made as plain and as formal as he knew how.

My name is Takara, he said. I am the head of the guard of the Lord of Beasts. I am here on the orders of the Commander. You are safe. Please state your name for my report.

The girl stared at him. Her mouth was still shaking.

"Tilla," she said, in a very small voice. "From—" She stopped, and frowned, and could not find the rest of it.

Thank you, Tilla, said Takara gravely. The rest can wait. That is one. Who is beside you?

She looked at the boy beside her. "That’s Bram."

Bram. Two.

It went round the cart. Eleven names, and not one village among them, in eleven small voices getting slowly louder as they went, and Takara repeated every one of them back with exactly the same gravity, and at the ninth one a very small boy at the back said his own name and then said, at the top of his voice, "I want my mam," and burst into tears, and after that they all did, all eleven at once, and Takara lay in the bed of the cart in the middle of them with his shoulder burning and let them.

Somebody put a hand on his nose; he did not know which one, and he did not move.

Suki, he said, after a time.

Here. She was at the side boards, looking in. Her purple eyes in the dark had the gold in them.

Ask them, he said. You are better at it.

Suki looked at the eleven crying children for a while. Then she put her chin on the top of the side board.

Are you hungry? She asked them.

They were.

Isha came for them a little before first light, out of the dark along the hedge-bank, with his tails gathered and a mark in the palm of one hand. He looked at the eleven in the straw, and at Takara lying among them with his shoulder burned, and at the driver in the ditch and the woman in the road, and said nothing about any of it. He opened a door in the dark beside the cart, where nobody on the road could have seen what it opened onto, and the eleven went through it holding Suki’s tail and each other’s hands, and were on a mountain, in the warm, with the old nurse in front of them before any one of them had finished blinking.

+++

Eden went to the mountain through a door in a corridor of the Pavilion that opened onto snow.

The cold came through it in one long breath, and then she was on the other side, on the black rock under the real stars with her bag strapped to her chest, and the long pale house was in front of her with every window lit. Smoke going straight up from three chimneys. The gold lines along the tops of the walls, faint under the moss. And noise.

She had never heard the house make a sound before. It had been empty and swept and waiting every time she had walked through it with Green, counting basins.

Eleven hundred children were crying in it.

Not screaming. Not any more; she could hear that the screaming had been and gone and left behind it the long tired hiccuping sobbing that comes after, the kind that goes on for hours because a child has forgotten how to stop. Under it, old voices. Dozens of them, saying the same things in the rooms along the south side, there now, there now, the way nobody under sixty says it. And under that, something that was not crying. A sound she had heard once before, in a Federation evacuation bay, when the doors had opened on the other side.

Somebody was singing.

Eden went in toward it with her arms held away from her sides, the way she always walked toward a thing that needed her.

+++

Jayde was in the kitchen doorway.

She was sitting on the stone step between the kitchen and the long hall with her back against the doorpost and her right hand held up against her chest in her left, and there was a child asleep across her knees. She was in her corps coat and her own disguise, black-haired and brown-eyed, the wings put away wherever the artifact put them; whatever she had been in the room at the back against the hill, nobody in this house had seen it. Sixty-eight old people were in it, and they were not hers to show. A boy, perhaps six, with his face blotched from crying and one fist knotted in the front of Jayde’s coat. Reiko was lying against her other side at dog size, a large black dog that anybody might own, with his head on his paws, and every time the boy moved in his sleep, Reiko’s ears moved too.

Eden stopped in front of her.

"Doc," Jayde said.

It was not quiet enough, and there were people in the hall, and Jayde had said it anyway. Eden heard that, and knelt down on the frozen step and held out her hand.

Jayde gave her the right hand.

Eden turned it over, very gently, in the gray light. A great many burns she had seen, in two lives. This one she looked at for a long time, and her face did nothing at all, and then she opened the bag and began.

"You didn’t call him," she said, cleaning it.

"He was holding three."

"That isn’t a reason. That’s a fact." Eden did not look up. The dressing went across the heel of the hand, where the burn went through, wound firm and quick and exact, round the palm and between the thumb and finger and back. "It’ll close. Not well. You’ll have a scar across the whole heel, and you’ll lose some grip for a while, maybe a long while. Don’t use it." She tied it off. "I’m aware you’ll use it."

"Yes."

"Then use it less." Eden sat back on her heels. Her hair had come all the way out of its tie somewhere between the workshop and the mountain, and she had not noticed. "That’s the only treatment I’ve got for you."

She looked at the boy asleep across Jayde’s knees.

"Him first," she said. "Before anybody else wakes. I need to know."

+++

The instrument was the size of her palm, and it had come off the ship, and it would go back on the ship before the day was out, under the same six rules as the bands, and she had written it into the book with one hand on her way out of the workshop. Over the sleeping boy’s chest she held it, cupped in her palm where nobody in the hall could have seen what it was, not touching him, and watched the small face of it, and waited.

It did not wait long. The reading came up at once, strong, and it was not coming from the boy.

It was coming from under his shirt.

Eden put the instrument down on the step and, very gently, so as not to wake him, drew a cord out from his collar. On the end of it was a disc of pale metal the width of her thumb, warm from his skin. A ring of eleven nodes was engraved into its face, threads running inward to an empty heart, and on the eleventh, a hook. Set into the heart, where the drawing had always been empty, was a chip of something clear that held the light like water: spirit stone. High grade. Better than anything this continent cut.

She turned it over.

There was a number on the back. Four figures, stamped, not engraved, with a mark in front of them like a farrier’s. A tally number, the kind you burn into a hide.

Eden looked at it.

"Commander," she said, very quietly.

Jayde looked. Eden watched her read the number, and watched her face do nothing at all, and watched her good hand close, very slowly, in the front of the boy’s blanket, and stay closed.

"It’s feeding him," Eden said. "Not the wall. This." She held the instrument over the disc and the reading climbed. "The stone is the store. The engraving pulls it in through the skin, all the time, day and night, straight into the core. That’s what’s in the jar. That’s why it works." She moved the instrument down, over the boy’s chest, slowly, and stopped. "And it’s pulling it in faster than he can carry it. His meridians are frayed. All of them. Like a rope run too fast through a block." She checked twice more before she let herself say it. "Not torn through. He’s six, and six mends." She breathed out. "We got them out in time. Just."

"The wall?"

"Keeps them quiet while it happens. Keeps them from feeling it." Eden’s mouth went flat. "And this keeps it in them when they’re nowhere near a wall. It’s the same instruction, both ends."

The boy stirred against Jayde’s knees.

Eden looked at Jayde. Jayde nodded once.

Eden lifted the cord over the boy’s head, so carefully that he did not wake until it was off, and then he did. He opened his eyes and looked up at Jayde, a stranger in a corps coat, and did not cry. He frowned instead, as a child frowns when he is trying to remember where he put something.

"Mam’s called Dorrit," he said. "She does the bread." His face crumpled. "I want Mam."

Jayde did not answer at once. She looked at him, at the small frowning face with its mother’s name in it again, and did not say the easy thing.

"You are safe," she said. "Here, nobody takes you anywhere." She kept her voice low and even, as she would have given a soldier the truth. "She cannot come yet. When it is safe for you, and safe for her, and safe for everybody in your village, she will come, or you will go to her. That is a promise, and I keep them."

He looked at her the way children look at a grown person to see if the words and the face match.

"Later?" he asked.

"Later," said Jayde. "Not tomorrow. But later."

Eden had already turned to the hall. "First Company," she said, not loudly, and three of Meifen’s men, who had carried children through six doors and not asked one question about any of them, turned. "Every child wears one of these. On a cord, under the shirt. They come off. One at a time, and I see every one before it does, and nobody throws a single one away." She held up the disc so they could see it. "And somebody find me whatever the sisters gave them to eat in the evenings. There’ll be pills. There’ll be a box."

"And the names," Jayde said, from the step.

Eden looked round.

"Every disc that comes off, the child’s name goes beside its number. Before anything else." Jayde did not raise her voice. "Name. Age, if they know it. Village. Mother’s name, father’s, whoever was at the door when the cart came. Which valley they were in. Which hall." She looked down the long room at eleven hundred children who had numbers and no names written anywhere in the world. "The Temple kept a number. We keep a child."

Meifen had come up the mountain in the night with the last of the old people. She was at the long table in the kitchen within the quarter-hour, with a corps ledger open in front of her and the first of the discs in a tray at her elbow, and Orsa beside her with a child on each knee, asking the questions in the voice nobody under sixty uses. And what’s your name, my love? And your mam’s? And where’s home? Meifen wrote it down in her hard round hand, line under line, and put the disc’s number at the end of each line, and turned the disc face down in a second tray when she was done with it, as if she could not bear to have it looking at her.

The first line was the boy on the step. Dorrit’s boy. The bread. He did not know his own age. Orsa guessed six. Meifen wrote six? and went on to the next.

There was a box. First Company had carried everything out of the six schools before the doors shut, every slate and every crate, so that nothing was left for the Temple to find, and one of Meifen’s men found it among the sacks a quarter of an hour later: small brown pills in waxed paper, one to a twist, hundreds of them, and a slate with columns of four-figure numbers down one side and ticks against every evening.

Eden broke one open and smelled it, and put it on her tongue, and spat it out.

"Medicinal," she said. "Bone and muscle. Good work, too." She folded the twist shut again. "They were building the bodies to carry the cores. Every evening. With a tick by the number." She looked at the slate, at the columns, and set it face down on the step. "They didn’t care what it did to the pathways. They wanted the core, and they wanted it fast."

"Can you mend them?"

"Green and I can." Eden was already counting it. "Baths. A formula for the meridians, made up fresh, every day for weeks, maybe months, and nobody cultivates while it’s working. They’ll heal." She looked at the boy, who had his fist in Jayde’s coat again and was asleep again, with nothing round his neck. "They’ll heal stronger than they came. That’s the part the Temple won’t forgive us for."

Jayde looked down at the child asleep on her knees, with his fist in her coat. She did not say anything. With her left hand, the good one, she reached down and very carefully moved a piece of his hair off his forehead, and left her hand there.

Eden had never once seen her do that.

She did not say so, only sat down on the step beside them, close, her shoulder against Jayde’s, and watched the sun come up over the snow of the Ironspine, and the cloud two thousand feet below the windows going from gray to gold.

+++

Huifu was the first through the workshop door, long before any of the bands, with no band on her because she had never worn one, and the cold coming off her in a cloud.

Cangwei was at the wall. The doctor was beside her, two fingers still on the seventh band.

"It is shut. All six," Huifu said. "The Commander is at the mountain. Her hand—" She stopped, and found the rest of it, and gave it plainly. "The Commander’s hand. The doctor."

The doctor was gone before Huifu had finished. Bag from under the bench, the instrument out of the locker, the book pulled open with one hand and a line written in it with the other as she went, and then the door, and then Cangwei was alone at the wall with the seventh band and the six crossed lines and nobody to wait with.

She waited.

The bands came home before first light, one at a time.

Xinglong first, still in his plain coat, frost melting on his shoulders. Without a word, he unbuckled the band from his wrist and laid it on the bench beside the seventh, face up, and its small pale marks agreed with the seventh’s exactly, and the doctor’s book lay open beside them where she had left it, and Cangwei wrote Xinglong. Returned. in it in her own hand, because the doctor was on a mountain holding an instrument over a child.

Then she went to the wall, and found the cross beside the line through the north square, and rubbed it out with the side of her thumb.

Green came next, and laid her band down without a word, and looked at Cangwei once with her fractured eyes, and went out again to her garden. Cangwei rubbed out the cross beside the marigolds.

Yinxin came with Yinglong behind her, Yinglong’s right wrist wrapped in a strip of somebody’s shirt, and the queen laid her band on the bench, and looked at the wall a long time before she went. The coast.

Isha brought two, his own and Jayde’s, with a dark mark on the clasp that Cangwei did not look at too closely, and laid them down side by side.

"She will not leave the children yet," he said. "She sent it with me. She said to tell you six rules, not five." His tails were very still. "Her hand is burned through. The doctor has it."

Cangwei wrote Jayde. Returned, by Isha. She rubbed out the cross beside the south. Then the cross beside the east, which was Isha’s own, and which he watched her rub out with an expression she could not read.

One cross left. The far west.

Heiteng came last, because the far west was furthest, in through the door with the cold still on him and his hands in his belt, and said nothing at all. The band he unbuckled and laid on the bench with the others, and its marks agreed with every one of them, and Cangwei wrote his name in the book.

Heiteng. Returned.

At the wall, she put her thumb on the last cross, beside the far west, and rubbed it out.

Six lines through six black squares. No crosses.

"Nine," Cangwei said.

"Seven," said Nine, from the far hall, pleasantly. "Received. Thank you."

Heiteng was still standing by the bench. He had not asked her anything, and was looking at the wall, at the six lines, and not at her.

"Good," Cangwei said.

He turned his head.

"Yesterday," she said. "You asked. I said ask me tomorrow." She did not look away from him, which she had not managed once in two days. "It is tomorrow. Good."

Heiteng looked at her. Then he took his hands out of his belt, and crossed the workshop, and stood beside her at the wall, near enough to touch, and they looked at the six lines together while somewhere far off, in six valleys, the sun came up.