Chapter 503: Grey Coats

I asked.

Mother said to, so I did. I asked everyone I could think of, and some people I couldn’t, and it took nine days, and at the end of the nine days I knew what to do, and it wasn’t anything I’d have thought of on my own.

I want to put that down first. I didn’t decide this. I asked, and other people decided, and I did what they said.

I asked Corvan first.

Dory sent it. On the thin band, the one his packets come on, locked by shape. She wrote it at the long table with me sitting beside her, and she read it back to me before she sent it, the way she reads everything back.

We can come for the people in the halls on Velle. Or we can come for you. We can’t do both. Not yet. Not quietly. I’m asking you which. Dory.

She didn’t put Lucas. She said he’d know.

The answer came on the fourth night. Not in a crate. Not on the Hesta. On the band, straight back, locked by the same shape, very short. Dory said he must have written it the moment he read hers.

The halls.

There are fourteen thousand of them and one of me. That’s not a question. I don’t know why you asked it.

C.

And then, under it, smaller, the way he always puts the true thing at the bottom:

Thank you for asking it anyway.

I asked Lio. She read Corvan’s answer twice and said, “He’s right,” and then went and sat on Sefa’s terrace until dark.

I asked Hen. She’d already told me. I’d want to know somebody was coming.

I asked Okafor what she’d got for the halls. She said it was not good. She said she’d show me when I’d finished asking everyone else, because she didn’t want what she’d got to get in the way of what anybody said.

And on the seventh day I asked Dovi.

He was on the long ward, by the window, where he sits with Hen. I sat on the floor next to them, which is where you sit on the long ward now. And I told him what Okafor had told me: that we couldn’t go in quietly, Dory and I, because there’s no great song on Velle any more to be quiet under, and the houses can feel the silver in us from across the Reach, and if we go anywhere near the halls they’ll know.

Dovi listened all the way through. Then he looked at Hen.

And Hen said, “Then don’t send anyone with silver.”

I didn’t understand at first. Hen had to explain it twice.

“They can feel silver,” she said. “Given or taken. That’s how they know where you are. That’s how they’d know Dory. That’s how they knew all of us, in the halls, when they put it in.” She held out her hands. Ordinary hands, with the clerk’s ink still faint on the fingers. “There’s none in me now. You asked it out. It went home.”

“Yes.”

“So they can’t feel me.” She put her hands in her lap. “They can’t feel any of us. The two hundred and sixty-three. We’re just people now. We’re quieter than anyone in the Hedge.”

Dovi said, very slowly, “And we know the halls.”

“We know the halls,” said Hen. “We know the corridors and the doors and which way the beds face and where the Refined stand. We know how the made walk. We know the grey coats.” She looked at me. “The Refined at the halls don’t look at the made. Nobody looks at the made. They’re just grey coats.”

I didn’t say anything.

“We’ll put the coats back on,” said Hen. “And walk in.”

Okafor’s plan was the same.

I found that out on the ninth day, when I’d finished asking, and went to her room at the top of the long hall in Commonhold. She took a single sheet off her desk and turned it round.

No silver. Grey coats. The 263.

“I wrote it on the second day,” she said. “I didn’t show you. I didn’t want it to be me who asked them.” She put the sheet down. “It had to be them who offered. Otherwise it’s sending.”

“They offered.”

“I know,” said Okafor. “Hen came to me on the eighth.” She looked at the sheet. “All two hundred and sixty-three of them. Every one. Not one of them said no.”

So that’s what we did. I’ll put it down the way it went. I wasn’t in most of it. That’s the point. That’s the whole point of it.

Marrach built three ships in nine days. Not warships. Supply ships, the plain white kind the Collective uses to carry food and blankets and the long grey coats to places like the halls. Tavish Orne knew exactly what they look like. He’s built hundreds. He built these three with Ister engines in the belly and holds you could put a town in, and he painted them white and wore the white in with sand so they looked as though they’d been flying supplies to the inner arm for years.

Mattick flew the first. Aune the second. The third was flown by a woman from Marrach’s yards with burned forearms, the one who came to the first Table with Tavish Orne, whose name is Cass, and who said she’d built the engines of nine of the Refined’s white ships herself and would very much like to fly one the other way.

And in the holds, in grey coats, sat the two hundred and sixty-three.

The grey coats were the hardest part.

They’d burned theirs. All of them. The night they came through the arch from Isselt, Halloway’s people took the grey coats off them on the plain and Hen asked if she could have them, and she took them down to the river below the north field and burned them, every one, in a pile on the bank, with the two hundred and sixty-three standing round it, and nobody said anything.

So the Lantern weavers made new ones. Exactly the same. Hen described them. Dovi drew them. The weavers made two hundred and sixty-three long grey coats in four days, so like the ones from the halls that when Hen put the first one on, she sat down very suddenly on the floor of the weaving room and couldn’t get up for a while.

Then she did get up.

“It’s just a coat,” she said. “It’s just a coat. It isn’t them.”

She wore it to the ship.

Dory and I went with them. Not to Velle. To the cold rock past Velle’s outer moon, where the Hesta waited last time. As far as we could go and not be felt. Mattick had the Hesta there again, an ore ship waiting for loading, and Dory and I sat in its hold, in the quiet coats, with the lumen holding the silver close, and waited.

Corin and Thessaly and Elin and Goldie were in the hold with us. Not to make doors. Doors can be felt. Okafor said no doors at Velle at all. They were there in case. In case of what, she didn’t say.

The three white ships went on without us.

Waiting was the worst thing I’ve ever done.

I’ve been afraid before. I’ve been on the plateau on Root on the second day, and in the room under the building on One, and on the frame-plain on Isselt with four hundred people coming at me crying. None of it was like sitting in the hold of the Hesta in a coat that kept me quiet, past a moon, while people I’d asked to go walked into the place I couldn’t.

I kept standing up. Every few minutes. I’d stand up, and walk to the window, and look at the dark where Velle was, and sit down again.

Corin hummed. He does that when he’s mending something. He wasn’t mending anything. He was humming at me.

On the ninth time I stood up, Dory took my hand without opening her eyes and pulled me back down onto the floor beside her.

“You asked them,” she said. “Now you have to let them.”

“I know.”

“That’s the other half of asking, Dad. Letting.” She put my hand flat on the floor, under hers. “Sit.”

I sat. And I stayed sat, for the rest of it, all nine hours, with her hand on mine on the floor of the hold. It’s the hardest thing she’s ever asked me to do.

Dory listened to all of it. Not with the net. The net would have been felt. She listened the other way. The way she listens for the forge, past the Watch. Very faint, from a very long way off, through the coat, with her hand flat on the Hesta’s floor.

She told me as it happened. The way she always does. I’ll put it down the way she told it.

The three ships came down at the edge of the gardens, by the long white halls, in the morning, by Velle’s clock. A supply day. Ferro Hale’s case had the supply days in it. The Assize keeps very good records.

The Refined at the halls didn’t look up. Nine of them, at the doors, in their white. Bored. The ring’s been down for a season and a half. Nothing has happened at the halls since. The houses in the ground don’t talk to the Refined, and the Refined don’t know what’s going on, and they stand at the doors in their white because they’ve been told to.

The ramps went down. The two hundred and sixty-three walked out, in grey coats, in rows, with their eyes on the ground.

The way the made walk.

The Refined at the doors didn’t look at them. Nobody looks at the made. They walked straight past nine of the Refined, in through the doors of the long white halls, into the corridors, and the Refined stood at the doors and looked at the ships and the gardens and the sky.

Hen was first. She said afterwards that it was the longest walk of her life. She said every step she took, she thought, they’ll know. She said she could hear the houses under the gardens, talking, like the crowd in the next room, angry and blind, and she walked over the top of them in a grey coat and they didn’t know.

They didn’t know. She had nothing in her for them to feel.

Inside, there were rows.

Long rows. Beds in rows down both sides of every hall, all the way along, so many that the far end of each hall was too far to see. And in every bed, someone asleep.

Fourteen thousand, two hundred and six. Every household found twice, from every world in the Reach. Old and young. Grandmothers. Boys Dovi’s age. A great many of them still wearing the clothes they’d been taken in. Tithe-office clothes, and ore-ship clothes, and the long patched dresses of the grain worlds.

And every one of them dreaming.

Dovi said you could see it. You could see it on their faces. The dream. Their faces moved in their sleep, all the way down every row, the same way, at the same time, as if they were all watching the same thing.

They were. Dovi knew what. He’d watched it himself for nine days.

Me. Coming up a hill road. Coming for their children.

Here’s the hard part. The part Hen hadn’t been able to explain until she was there.

You can’t just wake someone from the dream.

You can’t shake them. You can’t shout. If you wake them hard, Dovi said, they wake up in the dream. They wake up and they think you’re him. The man on the hill. Come for them. And they fight.

You have to wake them softly. You have to sit down by the bed, and put your hand on them, and say their name, very quietly, over and over, until they come up out of it on their own.

And they had to do it fourteen thousand times. In a day. Before the supply ships were missed.

So they did.

All two hundred and sixty-three. Down every row. Sitting on the edge of every bed. Saying every name. Dory had found them. On the night on Velle, with her hand on the wall of the first hall, she’d looked all the way down and found every one, and written them all down when she came home. Mara Quell had matched them to Ferro Hale’s case. Every one of the two hundred and sixty-three had a list, in the pocket of their grey coat, of the names in their row.

They sat down. And put their hands on them. And said their names.

And the people in the beds came up out of the dream, very slowly, one after another, all the way down every row, and opened their eyes, and saw somebody in a grey coat sitting on the edge of their bed, saying their name.

And then, Hen said, the person in the grey coat said the other thing. The thing they’d all agreed on.

“I was in here too. I’m one of you. It wasn’t real. He isn’t coming for your children. He came for us. Get up, very quietly. We’re going home.”

It took nine hours.

Fourteen thousand people, waking. Getting up. Being given a grey coat each, from the holds of the supply ships, which were full of them. Putting it on. Walking out of the long white halls in rows, with their eyes on the ground. The way the made walk. Past the Refined at the doors.

The Refined didn’t look.

They stood at the doors in their white for nine hours and watched fourteen thousand grey coats walk past them in rows out of the halls and up the ramps of the three white ships, and they thought it was the made going somewhere they’d been sent. Because nobody had told them anything. Because nobody ever tells them anything. Because nobody looks at the made.

Mattick said afterwards he’d never seen anything like it. He said he sat at the front of the first ship with the ramp down and watched them come up it in rows, all morning and all afternoon, grandmothers and boys and girls in grain-world dresses with grey coats over the top, and every one of them went past him with their eyes on the ground, and every one of them, as they came into the hold and found somewhere to sit, looked up for the first time.

And saw a painted crooked blue Wing on the back of the hold door, very small, where only Sorrel was meant to know.

Not all of them came.

I want to say that plainly, because it’s true, and because I promised to say it plainly every time.

There were three hundred and nine who wouldn’t wake.

They were the ones who’d been in the halls the longest. The first ones, from the first searches, from before the ring came down. They’d been dreaming for a season and a half. And when the grey coats sat down on the edges of their beds and said their names, they didn’t come up out of the dream.

They came up into it.

They woke up, and saw somebody sitting on their bed, and screamed. And fought. With nothing in their hands, because there was no silver in them yet, nothing to fight with but their hands and their teeth. They fought the grey coats sitting on their beds and called them by my name.

Dovi was right. If you leave them long enough, they’re just the dream.

Hen tried for an hour, in the last hall, with the three hundred and nine. Her and Dovi and forty of the others. They tried everything. Softer. Slower. Saying the names over and over. Holding them down, very gently, so they couldn’t hurt themselves, and saying the names.

Some of them came back. Forty-one. Hen says she’ll remember every one of the forty-one for the rest of her life, the moment each one stopped fighting and looked up at her and said, very small, you’re not him.

The rest didn’t.

And the screaming had been going on for an hour by then. In the last hall, at the far end of the halls, a long way from the doors.

But not far enough.

The Refined at the doors heard it.

Dory heard it go through them. She said it was like the moment in the next room when the music stops. The nine of them, at the doors, in their white, turning round at once to look down the corridor.

And under the gardens, the houses. Blind, and angry, and listening for anything at all. They couldn’t feel the grey coats. They couldn’t feel the fourteen thousand. They had nothing in them to feel.

But they could hear screaming.

Where, said the voice. Under the gardens. Dory heard it from the Hesta, from past the outer moon. Where. What. Who.

Hen was in the last hall with two hundred and sixty-eight people who wouldn’t wake. And the Refined coming down the corridor.

She told me afterwards what she did. She told me very simply.

She looked at the two hundred and sixty-eight. She looked at the forty-one who’d come back, standing behind her in grey coats, shaking. She looked at Dovi.

“We can’t take them,” she said. “Not like this. They’ll fight all the way to the ship and the Refined will see and the houses will hear and nobody’ll get out.”

Dovi said, “I know.”

“We’ll come back for them.”

“I know.”

“We’ll come back,” said Hen, again, to the room. To the two hundred and sixty-eight, screaming in their beds. “I promise. I’ve seen every one of you.”

Dory’s words. Hen had heard them from Dory, on the long ward. She said them to the two hundred and sixty-eight, and then she turned round and walked out of the last hall with the forty-one, and Dovi, and the rest, in rows, with her eyes on the ground.

The Refined passed them in the corridor. Going the other way. Towards the screaming.

They didn’t look.

Nobody looks at the made.

The three white ships lifted off from the edge of the gardens at dusk, by Velle’s clock, nine hours and fourteen minutes after they came down. Full. Fourteen thousand, two hundred and one, Mara Quell says. Thirteen thousand, nine hundred and thirty-eight, from the halls. And the two hundred and sixty-three.

They turned very slowly, the way supply ships turn when they’ve finished unloading. And went.

Nobody followed. Not one ship. The Refined were in the last hall with the two hundred and sixty-eight, and the houses were under the gardens shouting where, what, who at the dark, and nobody knew that the three plain white supply ships lifting off from the edge of the gardens were carrying away every person the houses had been keeping to make into the thing that would come through the door onto my mother’s hill.

They came to the cold rock past the outer moon an hour later.

Dory was standing at the Hesta’s window when they came. She’d been standing there for an hour, since she heard them lift. She didn’t say anything when she saw them. She just put her hand flat on the glass.

The three white ships came in beside the Hesta, close, and Mattick put out a line, and Cass put out a line, and Aune put out a line. And then the four who make doors went to work.

Not on Velle. Out here, past the outer moon, past the scanners, where the houses couldn’t feel anything. Corin and Thessaly and Elin and Goldie. Four doors. From the holds of the three white ships to the plain on Avalon, below the hill, where Halloway was waiting with every one of her people and every healer in the Hedge. And Mother, with her pot.

That’s what they were there for. Okafor knew. In case. In case fourteen thousand came out. In case they’d need to come home faster than a ship could carry them.

They came through onto the plain at night. In rows. In grey coats. Fourteen thousand of them.

And on the plain, waiting, there were people.

Not just Halloway. Not just the healers. The whole of Commonhold had come out. The whole of the hill. The north field, and Thera, and New Hearth across the singing bridge. Everyone who’d heard. Halloway had asked for blankets, the day before, very quietly, and Commonhold had heard, and come.

They stood in a long line on either side of the place where the doors came out. All the way down the plain. Holding blankets. And cups. And soft ones.

And as each person came through the door in a grey coat, with their eyes on the ground, the way the made walk, somebody stepped forward from the line, and put a blanket round them, and took the grey coat off them, very gently, and said:

“You’re home.”

And they looked up.

Hen came through last. With Dovi. With the forty-one who’d come back in the last hall.

Mother was at the end of the line. Right at the end. With her pot.

Hen walked down the whole of the line, past everyone, with her grey coat still on. She didn’t let anyone take it. She walked all the way down to the end, to Mother, and stopped.

“Two hundred and sixty-eight,” she said.

“I know, love.”

“We left two hundred and sixty-eight. In the last hall. They wouldn’t wake.” Her voice went. “I said we’d come back. I said it to them. I don’t know if they heard.”

Mother put the pot down. She reached up and took the grey coat off Hen’s shoulders, very slowly, and folded it over her own arm. Then she put her hand on Hen’s face.

“They heard,” she said. “Somewhere in there, love. They heard.”

Hen put her face on Mother’s shoulder. Mother held her. On the plain, in the dark, with fourteen thousand people behind them in blankets, and the whole of Commonhold standing in two long lines with their cups.

Dory says Hen didn’t cry. She says Hen just stood there, for a long time, being held.

They’re on Avalon now. Most of them. Some have gone on already, through the Arch Hall, to worlds in the Hedge that asked for them. Isselt asked for two thousand. Hollen asked for nine hundred, and Hollen’s First stood at the Hollen arch for a whole day with her granddaughter and a box of soft Elins and soft Goldies, giving one to every child who came through.

The rest are in Commonhold, and Thera, and New Hearth, and the north field. In houses the Aldri built in a week. Halloway has them on the chart. All of them. She says she’s run out of chart and Bell’s making her a bigger one.

The children on the plain gave away their soft ones. Nobody asked them to. The night the doors opened, the children who’d come out with their parents to hold the blankets walked up and down the lines of grey coats coming through and gave away whatever they had. A soft Dory. A soft battery. A rabbit. Mother says she saw a little Thera boy give a soft Mother to an old woman from an ore world and the old woman stood there holding it and couldn’t speak, and the little boy patted her arm and said, “It’s all right. I’ve got another one at home.”

Konrad has a new sheet. At the top it says The halls. It has three columns. Home. Not yet. And a third one, very narrow, that he hasn’t put a heading on, with two hundred and sixty-three names in it. The ones in the grey coats who went in.

Quenby had the plain on the front. From a very long way away. The two long lines in the dark, with the blankets, and the grey coats coming through between them.

There were no words on it at all.

And Corvan.

I said I’d put him down. I nearly can’t. I’ll try.

Dory heard it. Not that night. Three mornings later, at the red glass, with her hand flat. She’d been listening for him every morning since his answer. The halls.

At dawn by Carrow’s clock, she said, the doors of the great house opened.

Not the Prime. One man. In an ordinary coat. On his own.

He came down the great steps. The ones the whole Reach has seen on every band. And he walked out into the square.

The square was full. It always is now, every morning. Carrow’s own people, sitting on the stones, all the way across, from the steps to the fountain and down every street. Waiting for the Prime to notice.

Corvan walked through them.

Down the path. The path they leave every morning, the width of one man, with their knees at the edge of it. All the way to the front. To where an old woman sits, every morning, with her hands folded in her lap.

He stopped beside her.

And he sat down.

Dory said the square went very quiet. Quieter than it already was. She said she could feel every one of them, tens of thousands, all at once, turning to look at him without moving their heads.

The Prime’s son. In an ordinary coat. Sitting on the stones of the square of Carrow, at the front, next to the old woman who’d told his father no.

The old woman looked at him for a long time.

Then she reached out and took his hand. And held it, in her lap, with her other hand on top. And looked back at the steps.

And Corvan sat there. With her. With all of them.

The Prime came out at noon.

He stood at the top of the steps, in the white. With the Assessors behind him. What’s left of them. Dory says there are nine now. And he looked out at the square.

At his son, sitting at the front.

He stood there for a very long time. Dory says she could hear him. Not words. Just him. She says it was the first time since the Assize that she’d heard the frightened kind and the decided kind at exactly the same time, both at once, so loud she nearly had to take her hand off the glass.

He sent the Refined.

Nine of them, down the steps, in their white. To the front of the square. To his son. To stand him up.

They lifted Corvan by the arms. And stood him on his feet.

Corvan sat down again.

They stood him up. He sat down.

And then the old woman stood up, very slowly, which she has never done, not once, not in all the mornings since Senna read. She stood up, and put herself between Corvan and the Refined, and sat down again in front of him. Right in front. So close her back was against his knees.

And the next one along did the same. And the next. And the next.

Dory says that by the time the nine Refined looked up, there were a hundred people sitting round Corvan. Close. Back to knees. So close you couldn’t see him at all. So close nobody could reach him without standing every one of them up first, one at a time, by the arms.

And there are a great many people in the square of Carrow.

The Refined stood there for a long time.

Then they went back up the steps.

The Prime went in. The doors shut.

At dusk, the square got up, the way it does, and went home. And Dory says she listened, as hard as she’s ever listened, and she couldn’t tell which way Corvan went. Because the hundred people round him all got up at once and went home in a hundred different directions, very fast, close together, and somewhere in the middle of them was a man in an ordinary coat.

And then he was gone.

A line came on the thin band two nights later. Locked by shape. Very short.

Somebody’s sister’s house. I don’t know whose. They won’t tell me. They say it’s better if I don’t know. They gave me soup.

I’m all right.

I sat down.

C.

Sorrel rubbed out the question mark under the N on her wrist. She didn’t write anything instead.

She drew a very small circle. With somebody sitting in it.

Lio read the line twice. Then she went down to Sefa’s terrace, and sat, and did her knot. And when Sefa came out, a long time later, Lio was crying, and didn’t stop doing the knot, and Sefa sat down next to her and didn’t say anything.

“He sat down,” said Lio.

“I know.”

“Like the rest of them. Like the old woman.” She finished the knot. “I’d still like to meet him.”

“You will,” said Sefa.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Four hundred and sixty-eight. Seven more. Wren says one of them said it the way you’d say it with soup in front of you.

At the top of the slate, the way she does, Wren wrote the count.

And under it:

The halls: 13,938 home. 268 not yet.

C: sitting.

Morning: 177.

Days 11041–11090. Grey Coats.

I asked. Corvan: the halls; fourteen thousand and one of me isn’t a question; thank you for asking it anyway. Hen: then don’t send anyone with silver; there’s none in us now, they can’t feel us; we know the halls, we know the grey coats, and nobody looks at the made. Okafor had written the same on the second day and waited for them to offer; all two hundred and sixty-three did. Marrach built three white supply ships in nine days, flown by Mattick, Aune and Cass from the yards; the Lantern weavers remade the coats Hen had burned on the riverbank (it’s just a coat; it isn’t them). Dory and I waited past the outer moon with the four, no doors at Velle; waiting was the worst thing I’ve ever done; Corin hummed at me; Dory pulled me down: you asked them, now you have to let them; that’s the other half of asking. On a supply day from Ferro Hale’s case they walked in past nine bored Refined with their eyes on the ground. Rows and rows of beds, fourteen thousand two hundred and six dreaming the same dream of me on the hill road; you can’t wake them hard; they sat on every bed with Dory’s lists and said every name: I was in here too; he isn’t coming for your children; he came for us; we’re going home. Nine hours of grey coats in rows up three ramps, and the Refined didn’t look. Three hundred and nine wouldn’t wake; they came up into the dream and fought, calling the grey coats by my name; forty-one came back (you’re not him); the screaming brought the Refined and the houses’ blind where, what, who; Hen told the two hundred and sixty-eight we’ll come back, I’ve seen every one of you, and walked out past the Refined going the other way. Thirteen thousand nine hundred and thirty-eight came out; the four held doors from past the outer moon to the plain, where all of Commonhold stood in two lines with blankets and took off every grey coat and said you’re home. Isselt asked for two thousand and Hollen nine hundred; the plain’s children gave away their soft ones (it’s all right, I’ve got another one at home); Konrad’s sheet has three columns, the third for the two hundred and sixty-three; Quenby’s cover had no words. Hen kept hers on all the way to Mother: two hundred and sixty-eight; they heard, love, somewhere in there. Three dawns later Corvan walked out of the great house and sat down at the front of the square beside the old woman, who took his hand; the Prime sent nine Refined to stand him up; the old woman stood for the first time and sat down in front of him, and then a hundred more, back to knees; at dusk they went home in a hundred directions and he was gone. Somebody’s sister’s house; they gave me soup; I sat down. Sorrel drew a circle with somebody sitting in it. Lio: I’d still like to meet him. Four hundred and sixty-eight. The halls: 13,938 home, 268 not yet. C: sitting. Morning: 177.