Chapter 564 - 563: The Fourth Chair

Chapter 564: Chapter 563: The Fourth Chair

Location:Seven Peaks — The Hall; The East Terrace

Date/Time:TC1857.05.28 – TC1857.06.22

Revision ten made a noise when Thorne put it on the table, which revisions one through nine had not.

It was the sound of a document that had stopped being a draft: thirty-one leaves, sewn at the spine rather than pinned, with a cover sheet of the heavy stock the Empire used for things it expected to still exist in fifty years. It came down flat, and it did not shift afterward, and everybody in the room looked at it and then looked at each other, and somebody down the table laughed once, very briefly, without meaning anything by it.

"He’s sewn it," Marcus Vale observed.

"He’s sewn it." Raven put her hand on the cover and did not open it yet. "That’s a message, and it isn’t to me. That’s what a thing looks like when it goes in front of the Emperor."

***

She read it that night and most of the next day and came back to the Hall in the afternoon with three fingers in three places.

"Two things he’s done that I asked for. Six he hasn’t. And one I didn’t ask for and would not have thought of, and it’s the one that’s going to cause the trouble."

"Start with the one you asked for," Taron told her.

"The border clause. I asked for eight months instead of twelve." She opened it to the first finger. "He’s given me six."

Thorne looked up. "Six."

"Six, and a line underneath it explaining why, which is that a term you have to renew twice a year is a term nobody can forget about, and a term you renew once a year becomes a thing that gets renewed. He’s right, and I’d have argued the other way for an hour before I saw it."

She turned to the second finger.

"And he’s put the publication requirement in the strongest form there is. Numbers, locations, purpose, in advance, to every other signatory in the same words. Then monthly. Then a sentence I have read about nine times." She read it out. "A signatory who has entered another’s ground and failed to publish in any month shall be held to have withdrawn, and its people on that ground shall be without standing from the last day of that month."

"Without standing," Coop put in. "Meaning what, in a field?"

"Meaning that on the first day of the seventh month my forty-five people in the north become forty-five foreigners with weapons, legally, if somebody at this end forgets to send a page." Raven closed it on her finger. "He’s made the paperwork load-bearing. If we stop writing it down, our own soldiers stop being ours."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"That’s cruel," Marcus Vale allowed.

"It’s the only clause in there that can’t be argued with in a room, which is why it’ll survive. Every government at that table is going to hate it, and every one of them is going to want it applied to the other three."

***

"And the six he hasn’t done," Thorne said.

"He’s refused to name the enemy." Raven found the place. "Every draft I’ve sent back has had a word in it for what we’re fighting, and he’s taken it out of all of them, and he’s written a note about it. The document must be signable by a party that does not believe in the thing. If we describe it, we invite four governments to disagree about the description, and they will do that for a year. It says the hazard throughout. Thirty-one leaves and not one noun."

"That’s wrong," Taron said.

"It’s wrong, and it’s survivable, and the other way round is right and isn’t." She turned a leaf. "He’s also refused every clause of mine that put a duty on somebody to come when called. All of them. He’s replaced all of it with a requirement to publish what you know within nine days and nothing else. Nobody has to send anybody anywhere. They only have to say what happened."

Coop’s eyes flickered. "That’s your own doctrine."

"That’s my own doctrine handed back to me with the teeth in it." Raven did not look pleased about it. "I published sheets for five months because I thought it was decency. He’s made it the only obligation in the treaty, which means the first time somebody doesn’t do it, they’ve broken a compact instead of being rude."

***

The thing he had not been asked for was on the ninth leaf, and it took up half a page.

Signatories.

The Eastern Empire. The Unified Federation. The Wild Confederacy. Seven Peaks.

And then, in the same hand, below it, not in the list:

The clans of the northern ranges are a party to everything in this document and cannot sign it. I have left this on the page rather than solving it, because every solution I drafted was a way of signing on their behalf.

Raven put it down.

"He’s right again," Raven admitted. "And I’d not seen it."

"Seen what?" Taron asked.

"There are four chairs at that table, and there are five people in this war." She sat back. "The Clans can’t sign. They don’t write. It isn’t that they haven’t got a scribe — there is no writing. A mark on a page means nothing to them, and a mark on a page from them means nothing to us, because nobody up there has any concept of a thing you sign once that binds people who weren’t there."

"Then somebody signs for them," Marcus Vale offered.

"Who?"

"Bjorn."

"Bjorn is an exile. An exile is dead to a clan." Raven did not raise her voice. "If Bjorn puts a mark on that page, then in a year the Empire has a document saying the north agreed to something, signed by a man the north does not consider to exist, and the first time anybody in the Empire wants to do something to the north they will hold that page up. That is not a technicality. That is how it will actually go."

"So we leave the chair empty."

"An empty chair at a table of four is a thing everybody stops seeing by the second afternoon." She tapped the leaf. "Kael Xuán has put it on the page precisely so that nobody can stop seeing it. That’s the whole of what he’s done, and it’s more than I managed."

***

Shen Wuyan spoke for the first time in the third hour, which was about her usual.

"Where does it meet?"

That was the question everybody had been walking around since the riders went out, and Raven had been waiting for somebody who was not her to put it in the room.

"There’s a second half to that."

"You will say it. You wrote it to all of them four days ago, and it would be absurd for anybody at this table to pretend the sentence does not exist." Shen Wuyan folded her hands. "You published that they come for you. Then you told your own holdings not to send for you. Now you propose to sit in one room for six days. Say where."

"That’s why I’ve not ruled it."

"Then rule it badly in front of us, so we can improve it. That is what a room is for."

Raven stood up, which she did when she was going to say something she disliked.

"I have four, and all of them are bad. Imperial City: the best walls on the continent, the largest standing force, and the deepest sublevels — and there is a thing sitting beside a sealed door down there that has not moved in two years, and I will not put myself and three foreign delegations on top of it and find out what it was waiting for. That’s not a guess. That’s a refusal."

"Noted," Thorne said, writing.

"Windbreak. Speaker Kael-Ren would say yes inside a day, and it would cost him everything at home, because his people would be housing the thing that draws sixty. Their ground has no cover, no stone building worth the name, and the flats will not let anybody plant. If they come there, Windbreak is gone, and the Confederacy signs nothing afterward, and I’d not blame them."

"Three," Coop prompted.

"Seven Peaks. Our walls, our teams, our ground, and every argument for it is an argument that ends with three governments travelling to the doorstep of the one person the enemy is built to reach. And there’s a nine-year-old in a bed in the middle of it."

"Four?"

"Four is that we don’t meet at all. Four is a Compact agreed by rider, over a season, with no one in a room together." Raven put both hands on the back of the chair. "And that’s the one I’d take if this were only about the animals, and it’s the one that gets us a piece of paper nobody defends when it’s expensive. Kael Xuán has spent three years learning that lesson at his father’s table, and he’d tell you the same thing: people keep agreements they made in front of each other. They post agreements they made by letter."

***

It was Naida who broke it, and Naida had come south for exactly this and had said about nine words in three hours.

"You’ve listed the places you’d go," she said. "That’s a list of places to be attacked in. It’s the wrong list."

"Then give me the right one."

"Assume they come. Stop trying to pick a place they won’t. Every one of them is you choosing who pays. So choose on a different question. Not where is safest.Where can we hold sixty for twenty minutes with people who are already there and already trained, without anybody having to send for anybody."

The room went quiet the way it did when somebody had turned a thing over.

"That’s Seven Peaks," Taron answered. "That’s not even close. Eighty at the frame every morning. Nineteen from the Corps. The Millford road people. The wall teams. It’s the only ground on this continent with enough threes standing on it."

"Yes."

"And it puts everything we’ve got in one place on one week."

"Yes." Naida did not move. "That’s the cost, and I’d want it said out loud rather than discovered. But the alternative is that we pick a place with fewer threes because it feels less arrogant, and then sixty of those things arrive there anyway, and we all sit in a room having chosen the second-best ground for a reason nobody can write down."

Raven looked down the table, at all of them, one at a time.

"Seven Peaks," Raven ruled. "And it goes to the other three with all of that reasoning attached, in order, including the part where I say plainly that the meeting may be attacked and that I am the reason. Not a summary. The argument as it was had, with Naida’s name on the part that’s hers."

"They’ll read that as weakness," Marcus Vale warned.

"Some of them will." She sat back down. "And then they’ll come, because the alternative is hosting it themselves."

***

Kira Desh had come off the twelve weeks in the middle of the month and had been on the east terrace at the frame every morning since, and Raven knew it because she was on the terrace herself at that hour and had been most mornings since Ferrow’s Rest.

She watched her go through it four times with the arm.

It was not good. It was not bad either. The arm worked, and it worked in a way that made her plan around it, and she went in on the third position twice and on the side once and then stood out of the line and watched other people do it, which was the part Raven had not expected.

"You’re not queuing," Raven said.

"I’m counting." Kira Desh did not take her eyes off the frame. "Commander Vahn’s got nineteen who can do the third position, and she picked them out of three hundred and seventy-five. There’s about eighty people on this terrace every morning, and I want to know how many of them are actually watching the head and how many are watching the animal and thinking about the head, because those look the same from here and they are not the same thing at all."

"How many?"

"I’ve done sixty of them over five mornings." She said it without any weight on it. "Eleven."

***

Speaker Kael-Ren’s answer came back in nine days, which was faster than the distance allowed and meant a relay, and it was four sentences long.

Seven Peaks. Obviously Seven Peaks. You are the only one of us with a wall people have already died on.

I will bring twelve, and two of them will be the men who set the pegs at the flats, because I want the Empire to have to shake hands with a man who digs.

I have read your letter about being the reason. I read it out at the pavilion, in full, because you sent it to me and not about me.

Nobody left.

***

The Federation’s reply took nineteen days and came from a name nobody at Seven Peaks recognized, on Federation stock, with a Federation seal, and it said that a delegation would attend and gave a number and gave no names.

Sera Vahn read it standing in the Hall doorway with her coat still on.

"Four," Sera Vahn reported. "They’re sending four."

"Is that good or bad?"

"It’s neither. It’s a number that means they haven’t decided what this is yet." She handed it back. "A delegation of four is small enough to be deniable and senior enough to bind, which is what you send when you want both. I’d have sent four."

"And the fact that there are no names on it?"

Sera Vahn’s expression did not change at all, which by now Raven could read.

"That’s for me. That’s so that on the day, I don’t know who is walking through that gate until they’re through it. They’ve had two and a half years to work out that I would want to know, and they have decided I’m not going to, and I’d like it written down that I said so in advance and that I am going to be standing at that gate anyway."

***

The Empire’s answer arrived last and was one line on a card, from the Imperial secretariat, in a hand nobody at Seven Peaks had ever seen.

The Imperial Heir will attend. The Emperor has read the border clause.

Raven turned it over. There was nothing on the back.

"That’s two sentences with nothing between them," Thorne observed.

"It’s two sentences with a great deal between them." She put the card down on the sewn document, on the ninth leaf, on the half page about the chair nobody could fill. "He’s read it. They’ve not said what he thought. That’s either because he hasn’t decided or because he has and the Imperial Heir has been told not to tell us, and I’d guess the second, and I’m not going to write that down anywhere."

She looked at the leaf under the card for a moment.

"Send to Bjorn," Raven told him. "Tell him what the ninth leaf says, in Old Northern, out loud, to whoever’s standing in front of him, and tell him I want to know what they say back, and I want it word for word and I don’t want it improved. And Thorne — tell him I am not asking anybody to sign anything and that he is to say that first, before the rest of it, twice."