Chapter 560 - 559: Nobody Walks

Chapter 560: Chapter 559: Nobody Walks

Location:Seven Peaks — the north gate; Medicine Hall; the Hall; the forge

Date/Time:TC1857.04.28 – TC1857.05.02

The children smelled of the road, and Raven stood at the gate and got the whole road off them in one breath.

Wet wool. Woodsmoke in the outer layer and nothing in the inner. Grass — the sweet green rot of a great deal of grass, crushed and slept on and carried in the seams — and under all of it the flat cold-iron smell that comes off people who have been frightened for long enough that it has stopped being an event and started being a condition.

Seven of them. She had been told seven on the sheet the rider brought, and she counted them anyway, twice, the way everybody did now, and then she stopped looking at the children and looked at what was behind them.

Six had gone north. Four came back.

Jace was walking, which he should not have been, with his left arm strapped across him in a way that told her Mira was going to be unhappy before Mira had even seen it. Bjorn was carrying a pack that was not his. The Corps man had his arm in a splint that somebody had made out of a spoon handle and a bootlace and was extremely proud of.

And Mei came in last, on foot, at the back, where the person who watches the head walks.

She did not come and report. She took the seven children up to the east barracks first, past everybody who wanted to speak to her, and got them fed and got their boots off and found out which of them had feet that needed looking at, and it was the better part of three hours before she came down.

Raven let her have the three hours. It was the only thing she had to give her that afternoon, and it was not much of a thing.

***

She got the whole of it in Thorne’s office in two hours, and she did not interrupt once.

Mei told it, because Jace was in the Medicine Hall by then and because Bjorn had said, in front of both of them, "She saw it. I was busy," and had gone out.

It came out in order and it came out flat, which Raven recognized and did not comment on, because the flatness was the only thing holding the sentences together and she was not going to be the person who took it away.

The camp. The shirts on the line. The seven sets of prints and the line beside them at twenty paces. The voices on the wind. The fire with meat on it. The folds.

The head.

Mei got through that part in about four sentences, and then stopped, and then said the fifth one anyway.

"She heard me. I want that in whatever you write. She heard me, and she was under it, and she finished it anyway, and she was right about all of it, and she couldn’t say it in a room because nobody asked her the question."

"It’ll be in it."

"And the exile hasn’t got a name and Bjorn says he never will have and I asked him what to write." Mei had the small book on the desk in front of her and had not opened it. "He said to write that he stood in front and did not turn around."

Raven took the book when it was offered and read the back page and did not say anything for a while.

Two entries, in a fifteen-year-old’s hand, on a page ruled for barracks linen.

***

"It’s not doctrine," Lin Yue observed, in the Hall, the next morning.

"No."

"It is a thing one dead woman would have done, written down by one living girl, from one demonstration at a campfire, and it has been tested exactly once in the world and the person who devised it was killed while using it." Lin Yue had her hands inside her sleeves. "And you are going to publish it continentally this week, because the alternative is that people go on using the two-person version, which we now know has a hole in it."

"Yes."

"Then I want the whole of that on the sheet and not a summary of it. Including tested once. Including the author was killed while it was being used." She did not blink. "Somebody is going to survive because of that page, and somebody else is going to die doing exactly what it says, and both of those people are entitled to know what they were holding."

Ostrek had the sheet in front of her already.

"And the attribution," Ostrek put in.

Raven had been turning that over since the gate.

Silas had asked not to be named, and had given a reason: a formation master’s signature reads as an opinion, and no signature at all reads as a fact. This was the opposite problem, and it had no clean answer anywhere in it.

"She hasn’t got a name," Raven answered. "Not one anybody is permitted to use, and Bjorn tells me that isn’t sentiment, it’s law, and the law took it off her when her clan put her out. So we can’t put a name on it and I’m not inventing one and I’m not writing a Northern woman, because in six months that reads as folklore and people discount folklore when they’re frightened."

"Then what?"

"We put what she did." Raven took the pen. "This was worked out by somebody who watched three men die doing it wrong, and one man die doing it right, who had no way to write it down, who was told at home that it was not her business to say how men die, and who said it anyway to a fifteen-year-old at a fire four nights before she was killed using it. That goes at the top. In the same size."

Lin Yue thought about it.

"That’s longer than the measure."

"Yes."

"Good," Lin Yue allowed.

***

Mira took Jace’s arm apart on the third day in the sense that she took apart the question of it, which was worse to watch.

"The bone will do," Mira reported, at the end, to both of them, with Jace sitting there. "It’s not the bone. He’s got the carcass of an animal that weighs what a cart weighs across the forearm, and what that does is not a break; it’s a crush, and the hand is the part I can’t promise you."

"Say the number," Jace asked.

"I haven’t got a number. I’ve got some of it comes back and I can’t tell you how much, and I’ll know better at eight weeks. That’s the honest one, and you’ll hate it more than a bad number."

"He’d hate a good one more," Raven put in.

"I would." Jace was looking at his own fingers, which moved and did not move very well. "Put me on the list."

Nobody said anything for a second.

"Not for the arm," he said. "I’m not having one while the arm’s on me. I know the amendment and I know why it’s there and I’m not going anywhere near it. I want to be assessed. Written down. Where everybody can see that I went on at whatever place I go on at, and I didn’t go on at the top, because I’m the one who’s been on this mountain longest, and people watch what happens to me."

Mira picked up her pen.

"You’ll go on low," Mira told him. "You’ve got a hand. It’s a bad hand, and it’s going to stay a bad hand, and there are forty people on that wall who haven’t got one at all."

"Then write it low and write it where they can see it."

***

The sheet went out on the fourth day, and Raven had a rider gone before the ink on the second copy was dry.

Three-person form. The head rotation, described as it had been seen, twice, by two parties. The attribution at the top, longer than the measure. And the line she had added to every sheet since the third month, which people had complained about and which nobody complained about anymore: read every one as if it is the second-newest thing you have.

Then she sat in the empty Hall for a while with the thing she had not put on the sheet.

Seven children walked north for five days, unharmed, on open ground, at a child’s pace, on a line you could see from a long way.

Nobody had gone for the children. Four animals had come up out of the folds at the people who came for them.

She had spent three days making herself say it in the plainest possible words, alone, before she said it to anybody, because she had learned in the second month that the sentence you avoid writing is the sentence that kills people. So she wrote it out on a single sheet in her own hand and did not show it to anyone yet:

It has learned that we come for children. Everything that follows from that is worse than everything that came before it.

***

Taron said it in the Hall on the fifth morning before she had to, which she was grateful for and did not say so.

"Close the road."

"Say the whole argument."

"You told the north that any child who reaches a Seven Peaks gate gets taken. Bjorn said it out loud up there in their own language because they don’t read." Taron had his arms folded and he did not soften any of it. "So now children walk. In small groups. Days apart, nineteen days on open ground, with one adult, on a route that’s the same every time because there’s only one way through. You have built the most reliable thing in the north — and the thing up there has just demonstrated, in front of witnesses, that it knows what people do about children." He let that sit. "We are feeding it. Not on purpose and not knowing. But we are."

"That’s correct," Raven allowed. "Every word of it. Go on to the part where you tell me to close the road and I’ll tell you what happens then."

"Then children stop walking."

"Then children stop arriving, which is a different sentence, and the difference is where they are instead." She stood up. "Two hundred and six children under twelve in the middle country. There’s an argument at home about what to do with them, and I took a side in it in Bjorn’s yard, and the other side of that argument is the old thing. If I close the road, I don’t save one child. I hand the argument to the people who want to give something back to the ground, and I hand it to them with a reason."

Nobody in the Hall said anything.

"So we don’t close it," Taron conceded. "Then what? Because I’m not going to sit here and be the man who only says no."

"Nobody walks."

Shen Wuyan looked up.

"Say more."

"We stop asking them to come to us. We go and get them." Raven put both hands on the table. "Three-person teams, permanently, in the north, sitting on the route at fixed points and moving the groups between them. Nobody crosses nineteen days of open ground with one adult ever again. A group goes one leg, hands over, and the team that took them turns around and goes back for the next one."

"How many teams?"

"Enough to hold a route two hundred kilometers long against a thing that lays up in folds. Five points, minimum. Three to a team for the form, which means nine to a point if you want them to sleep. Forty-five people, in a country that cannot feed them, that we have been asked explicitly not to enter."

"You are describing a garrison in a foreign country," Shen Wuyan observed.

"I am."

"In the north. Before the summit." Shen Wuyan did not raise her voice and did not need to. "You will be in a room in the sixth month explaining to four governments why Seven Peaks has soldiers in a sovereign territory that did not invite them, and the Empire will ask it first, and the Empire will be right to ask."

"They will."

"And your answer?"

"That it isn’t a garrison, it’s a road crew, and that distinction is going to sound exactly as thin in that room as it sounds in this one." Raven did not look away from her. "So I’d rather it went into the Compact draft now, in writing, as what it is, before anybody discovers it. Revision ten comes to me before it goes to the Emperor. I’m going to write to Kael Xuán and tell him what I am about to do in the north and ask him to put it in the draft himself, in his own words, in the section about crossing borders."

Thorne’s pen had stopped. "You’re asking the Imperial Heir to write your worst clause for you."

"I’m asking the person who has to sell it to draft it before it happens instead of after." She sat back down. "If he says no, I do it anyway and he’s been told. If he says yes, then the first time Seven Peaks puts people in somebody else’s ground, it happens on a page four governments have read."

***

She went to the forge afterward because it was the only conversation left and because it should not have been done by letter.

Bjorn was not working. That was how she knew before she had crossed the yard.

Freya was there, sitting on the end of the bench with her hands in her lap, and Aren was not, and Raven understood that this had also been arranged.

"Forty-five people in the north." Bjorn had not turned round. "I’ve heard."

"I want you to go and set it up, and I want to say the rest of it before you answer. You’re the only person here who speaks it, you’re the only one they’ll take anything from, and you are also a man whose clan is dead and whose wife’s people are dead in the same month, and I am about to ask you to go back to the country that did both of those things and build something in it." She stayed where she was. "You can say no, and I’ll find a worse way of doing it, and it will cost more."

Bjorn looked at Freya.

Freya answered for him. "We’ll both go."

"Freya —"

"I’ve had a month to think about it, which is most of a month more than either of you have had." She had not moved her hands. "Sigrun kept a count on a strip of bark because there was nobody else to do it. She wrote down every child every day, and nobody wrote hers. I’m not going up there to be brave about my family. I’m going up there because somebody has to walk at the back of every group that moves, and I would rather it was somebody who knows what that costs."

Raven let that stand for a moment.

"And Aren?"

Bjorn and Freya looked at each other, and it went on long enough that Raven understood she had walked into the middle of something that had been going for days.

"He asked to come," Bjorn told her. "This morning. In Old Northern, which he did on purpose."

"He’s nine."

"He’s nine, and he’s the only person on this mountain who was on the list and got taken off it, and he has worked out that there are two hundred and six children up there who haven’t been." Bjorn picked up the hammer and put it down again without using it. "I told him no. He said all right, and he meant it, and then he asked me a question I couldn’t answer, and I’d like you to answer it instead of me."

"Ask it."

"He wants to know what he’s supposed to do with being the one who got out."