Chapter 512: Brannock

The war started on a Tuesday, officially, with a sheet of paper.

The Prime read it on every band. The Collective was in a state of war with the Hedge. All trade was ended. All arches were closed. Any Hedge citizen found on a Collective world would be detained. Any Collective world found trading with the Hedge would be protected.

And then nothing happened.

No white ships came through any door. No batteries fired. Okafor stood at her board in the Arch Hall for nine days with her slate, and the General stood beside her, and Gilgamesh stood at the edge of the north field with his axe across his back, and nothing came.

“He doesn’t want to fight us,” said Okafor, on the ninth night. “Not yet. He wants everyone to know he could.”

“That’s a war, though,” said Mother. “Isn’t it?”

“It’s the kind where everybody stands very still,” said Okafor, “and waits for somebody else to move first.”

She wrote one word on her slate, under Reach. Wren copied it later.

Cold.

It was cold for most of a season.

Nobody moved. The arches stayed shut. The Collective’s white ships sat in their skies and ours sat in ours, and on the old bands the Prime said terrible things every night, with the light behind him, and Senna answered every morning in her plain voice, and in between, everybody waited.

But not on Carrow.

On Carrow, the Sorn came.

Not the houses. The houses are in the rock under Velle, still blind, still listening. These were the ones who walk. Tall and grey and identical, the ones Holdfast was made for, the ones that catch a sword bare-handed and get up. They came down out of the white ships onto Carrow’s square in the first week of the war, in a long grey line, and stood at the edges of it.

And with them, others. Not grey. Small and pale and thin, in long coats, with slates. Ferro Hale said they were the ones from the rooms. The ones who’d made the Vessels and the made soldiers on Isselt and the thing with the collar that took Tiel’s moon apart along lines.

Scientists. That’s what the Prime called them, on the band, when he gave them Carrow.

He didn’t give them Carrow. He gave them carte blanche. That’s the phrase he used. A Collective phrase, very old, from the Assize. It means a blank sheet. It means: write whatever you like on it.

They did.

The square kept sitting. That’s the thing. Every morning, from the steps to the fountain and down every street. The old woman at the front with her hands folded. The grey ones standing round the edges, very still, and the small pale ones walking along the rows with their slates, looking.

Choosing.

Every morning they chose somebody. One. Never more. They walked along the rows until they found what they wanted, and they pointed, and two grey ones came and picked that person up off the stones the way you’d pick up a parcel, and carried them out of the square, and up into a white ship.

Nobody came back.

The square kept sitting.

The first was a boy who could sing so high the fountain shook. The second was a woman with a hand that was warm when she was frightened. The third was an old man nobody knew anything special about at all, and the small pale scientist who chose him stood looking at him for a long time first, with its head on one side.

On the eleventh morning they came for the sisters’ houses.

Not in the square. In the night. In the old quarter behind it, where the doors open straight onto the street and the lamps stay lit in the windows. They knew. Somebody had told them, or they’d worked it out, or the Prime had simply decided that the houses that hid his son should pay for it.

They took forty women in one night. Every sister, every aunt, every grandmother who’d ever had Corvan at her table. They took them out of their beds in their nightdresses and carried them up the narrow streets to the square, and the grey ones held them there in a row on the stones until dawn, so the square would see them when it came to sit.

Bess was the ninth in the row.

Mattick told us. He’d been on Carrow with the Hesta that week, with a hold full of rabbits. He’d been in the square at dawn. He’d seen.

He sat at the long table with his cap in his hands and told it very plainly, the way sailors tell things, and didn’t look up once.

The square came to sit, he said. And saw the forty women in their nightdresses on the stones, with the grey ones behind them. And sat anyway. All of it. From the steps to the fountain and down every street.

And the old woman at the front, with her hands folded, looked at the forty women for a long time.

Then she got up.

She’s very old. She got up very slowly. She walked across the stones to the row of forty and stood in front of Bess, who mends shoes, and who had sixty pairs on her bench that week, Mattick says, and whose name is in the long record on Ister on a baby girl.

And the old woman sat down. In front of her. On the stones. With her back to the grey ones and her face to Bess.

And then the whole square of Carrow got up, and walked across the stones, and sat down in front of the forty women. Hundreds. Thousands. Back to knees. Between the women and the white ships. So close you couldn’t see the women at all.

The grey ones stood there.

The small pale scientists stood there with their slates.

Nobody moved for a very long time.

Then one of the scientists made a note. And the grey ones walked into the square. Through it. Over it. Over everyone. Not hurrying. Not angry. Stepping on people where they had to. Hands, knees, backs. Mattick heard bones go. He said he’ll hear it for the rest of his life.

They picked up the forty women from behind all those people, one at a time, the way you’d pick up parcels. And carried them out of the square. And up into the white ship.

And the square sat there. With its broken hands. And didn’t get up.

Corvan heard it from Mattick at the long table, with the rest of us.

He didn’t say anything at all. He stood up and went out of the kitchen and down the hill road, and Lio went after him, and Sefa, and they didn’t come back that night.

In the morning Lio came up the hill road on her own. She said he was sitting on the floor of the narrow house in the dark with his back to the wall and he wouldn’t talk and he wouldn’t eat and he wouldn’t let her light the lamp.

Mother put the pot down and went.

She was there three days. She didn’t tell us anything about it. When she came back she looked very old, and went to bed in the afternoon, which she never does.

Okafor wanted to go.

She didn’t say so. But she stood at her board in the Arch Hall for a whole night with her slate, and in the morning there were six sheets on it with Carrow at the top, and then she put a line through all six and turned the slate face down.

“There are hundreds of millions of people on Carrow,” she said. “And white ships over every city. And the scientists can take a world apart along lines from the sky. And they want us to come.” She put her hand flat on the back of the slate. “They’re doing it so we’ll come.”

“So we don’t,” said Dory.

“So we wait,” said Okafor. “Until we can go and get all forty and not lose Carrow doing it.” She looked at Dory. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. Waiting. I’m told it’s the other half of asking.”

She wrote on the slate. One word.

Forty.

And then Brannock.

Brannock’s on the very edge. Past the third arm, where the Reach thins out and the Hedge begins. It was never a Collective world. It was never a Hedge world either. It’s Reach, technically. The houses’ tithe-takers came once a generation and took what they took and went away again, and the rest of the time Brannock got on with being cold and rocky and stubborn and minding its own business.

It’s got four queens.

Nobody knew that. Not the Collective. Not us. Four queens under one world, in four deep places a long way apart, singing to each other through the rock. Dory says it’s the only world she’s ever felt besides Avalon and Root that sounds like a choir.

The Refined knew.

They came on the fortieth day of the cold. Nine white ships. And on the old band, so the whole Reach would hear it, they told Brannock what they wanted.

All four queens. And all the children. Every child on Brannock under twelve.

They said it was for safekeeping.

Brannock said no.

Not on the band. With rail guns. Old ones. Mining charges. Long rifles their grandmothers had used on the rock-cats in the high passes. Every man and woman on Brannock who could stand up, standing up, on the hills round the four deep places, with whatever they had, in the snow.

They shot down one of the nine white ships. Nobody knows how. Okafor still doesn’t know how. A woman called Hesper Daine, who runs a quarry, put a mining charge on the end of a long cable and swung it up into the open landing door of a white ship as it came down over the first deep place, and the ship came apart in the air and fell into the pass, and the pass was on fire for two days.

Then the other eight ships opened.

Brannock’s First called us on the old band that night. A big grey-bearded man called Tolland Rusk, with blood in his beard that wasn’t his. He was standing in a doorway with the snow coming in behind him and a long rifle across his chest.

He didn’t say hello. He didn’t say his name until Senna asked.

“They’ve got the children’s hall at Fell,” he said. “Three thousand. In a white ship on the ground. They’re loading them now. They’ve got the queen under the second hill on a frame. We’ve lost the pass and the first hill and most of the people who were on it.” He stopped. “I don’t know you. I’ve never once asked anybody for anything. But I’m told that’s how it’s done with you.”

Okafor was at the board. She’d been at the board since the Refined spoke.

“Are you asking?” she said.

Tolland Rusk looked at her. At the steel side of her face.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then we’re coming,” said Okafor. “Hold the other two hills. Get your old people underground. We’re coming.”

She turned round.

Gilgamesh was already standing up.

They went through four doors. Elin, Goldie, Corin and Thessaly, from the north field, at the same moment, the four of them standing in a square with their hands up. The doors opened onto Brannock’s snow at four points round the second hill, a mile out, in the dark.

Forty thousand of the Standing went through. Gilgamesh at the front of the north door. Varra at the front of the east, with the Kasrai behind her, nine thousand of them, their ropes tied up, their blades loose in their hands. Andraste at the front of the south, with Holdfast. Kyria at the west, with the Hyrrani.

And over the second hill, coming down out of the dark like the sun going across a field, Aramaeis and Tiamat.

Arcturus brought the Wings through behind them. Four hundred fighters.

And I went through the south door behind Andraste. With Dory. And Hana and Abena behind us with their bags. Because there were four queens and three thousand children, and Okafor said, at the board, without looking round:

“You don’t fight, Cadet. You fetch.”

I’ve tried to write this part four times. I’m going to put it down the way it was. Mother says that’s the only way to put down things like this. Not making it smaller. Not making it bigger. Just what it was.

It was snowing. Hard. The kind of snow that comes sideways and gets in your eyes and your mouth and the joints of your fingers.

The second hill was on fire. Not the hill. The town on the side of it, which was called Fell, and which had been a mining town of about nine thousand people, stone houses with turf roofs going up the hill in rows. Every roof was burning. The snow was coming down into the fire and turning to steam, so the whole hill was standing in a white cloud lit from underneath, orange.

At the top, on the flat ground where the mine head had been, there was a white ship on the ground. Its landing door was open. There was light coming out of it, very white, very clean. And a line of children going up the ramp into it, walking, very slowly, in the snow, in their nightclothes, each one with a thin black collar round its neck.

They weren’t crying. That was the thing I saw first. Three thousand children and not one of them crying. The collars don’t let you.

Between us and the ship there were the grey ones.

I’d seen them before. On One. On Hyrran. I’d never seen so many. They were standing in rows down the hill, through the burning town, between the houses, very still, with the snow settling on their heads and shoulders and not melting. Tall and grey and identical. Hundreds. Then, as the cloud moved, more. A thousand. More than that.

And in front of them, on the slope, coming down towards us through the fire, the made.

The made soldiers. Like Isselt. Like the ones Hen had been. People. People the houses had taken and put silver into and finished, the way Ithel said they’d always been trying to finish things. Every one of them had been somebody. Every one of them had a collar.

They had weapons. Long white lances that spat a thin blue light. And they came down the hill through the burning town at a walk, in a line, firing.

Dory stopped dead in the snow beside me.

“Dad,” she said. “Dad, they’re awake. In there. Some of them. They know.”

The Kasrai went into them first.

Varra, at the front. Very old. First blade of the last wall. She went up the slope through the snow at a run with her rope swinging and her blade low, and the nine thousand went behind her, and the blue light came down the hill at them like rain.

I saw the blue light hit a Kasrai woman in the front row. In the chest. It went through her. Not like a bullet. Like a hot wire through wax. She kept running for three steps with a hole in her you could see the fire through, and then she fell in the snow, and the snow round her went red and then black.

Then the Kasrai reached the made.

I’m not going to say I didn’t look. I looked. Dory says I should put down that I looked, because otherwise it’s a lie.

The Kasrai blades went in under the collars. That’s where you have to go. Varra taught them. Under the collar, up, into the throat, because the collar keeps them standing and the only way to stop one of the made is to stop whatever’s holding the collar on. It’s very close work. You have to be near enough to smell them.

The made smelled of nothing. Clean. Like the inside of the white ship.

They didn’t make any sound when the blades went in. They just stopped. The light went out of the lances. And they knelt down in the snow, slowly, one at a time, all along the line, as if somebody had finally told them they could.

And the Kasrai behind the front line stepped over them and kept going, up the hill, into the town.

The grey ones were in the town.

The Kasrai went up between the burning houses and the grey ones came out of the doorways and the alleys and the smoke, and caught the Kasrai blades in their bare hands, the way they do, and twisted, and the blades broke. And then the grey ones took hold of the Kasrai. By the arms. By the necks. And pulled.

I saw a grey one take a Kasrai man by both arms and pull them in different directions until something went, and drop him in the street, and turn round, and pick up the next one.

I saw Varra’s great-granddaughter’s father go down under three of them in a doorway with his blade broken in his hand.

I saw a grey one with no head stand up again.

Then Andraste came up the south side of the hill with Holdfast.

The grey ones turned round. They know it. They know that blade. Odra forged it in her deepest forge on Hyrran out of Kyria’s first blade, out of iron Kyria’s grandmother dug from the ridge, and it’s the only thing anyone’s ever found that cuts them so they stay down.

Andraste didn’t stop. She went into them in the narrowest street in Fell, between two burning houses, on her own, with Holdfast in both hands. And she cut. Low and high and low, the forms Kyria does on the snow terrace at dawn, the loose grip first, the way she’s done them every morning since she was four. Every cut went all the way through. The grey ones came apart in the street and lay in pieces in the slush, and didn’t get up.

Forty. Then sixty. She didn’t count. Kyria counted, from the west side, from the bottom of the street, with her own blade in her hand and the tears running down her face, out loud, every one.

Andraste went up the street through them. The fire on both sides. The snow coming down into it. Grey pieces behind her in the steam.

She got to the top. She turned round. She was covered in it. Grey stuff, like ash, like wet dust, all down her front, in her hair.

She held Holdfast up so everyone on the hill could see it.

And the Kasrai, all down the hill, in the burning town, in the snow, shouted. Nine thousand of them. One sound.

Gilgamesh held the north side.

The grey ones came round the hill at him in a wave. Hundreds. He stood in the snow in front of the north door with his axe and he didn’t go forward and he didn’t go back. Okafor told him: the north door doesn’t shut. So he stood in front of it.

I didn’t see most of it. I saw the end. I saw him standing in front of the north door with the axe in both hands and a ring of grey ones lying round him in the snow in pieces, and a grey one hanging off his left arm by its hands, and another one on his back, and his face perfectly calm. And I saw him put the axe down. Very carefully. In the snow. And reach round and take hold of the one on his back by the head with his free hand, and take it off him, and throw it.

It went a long way. It went into the burning mine head.

He picked up the axe again.

Then the white ships came down.

Seven of them. The eight that had opened on the pass, less the one Hesper Daine took down. They came out of the snow cloud over the second hill, very low, very white, with the light coming off their undersides, and they opened.

Not lances. The thing the Refined have that the made don’t. A wide white light, like a door opening onto the inside of the sun. It came down on the east slope where the Kasrai were in the town.

And the town went.

The houses, the turf, the stone. The street Andraste had just cut her way up. The people still in the houses. The Kasrai in the street. All of it, in a line two hundred yards wide, down the side of the hill. Just gone. Glass where it had been. The snow coming down on the glass and steaming.

Dory screamed. Not out loud. In the net. I felt it go through every person on the hill. She’d been holding them, the way she does, all of them, and four hundred of them went out at once like lamps.

Aramaeis took the first white ship.

He came over the hill from behind it, enormous, silver, faster than anything that size should be able to move, and he opened his mouth and breathed light. Not the Refined’s light. Hers. Old light. The kind the dragons have had since before the Aldri started running.

It went through the white ship from end to end. The ship hung in the air for a moment with the light coming out of every seam, and then it folded, very slowly, like a sheet of paper somebody had decided to throw away, and fell into the burning pass.

Tiamat took the second. Then Arcturus brought the Wings in under the cloud, four hundred of them, very low, and went for the open doors, the way Hesper Daine had. They lost eleven fighters on the way in. They put charges into two of the ships through the landing doors and the ships came apart from the inside, white light spilling out of them like water out of a broken jug.

Three left.

They went up. Into the cloud. Out of the sky. Gone.

The fourth white ship, the one on the ground at the top of the hill with the children going into it, started to close its door.

I went up the hill.

I don’t remember deciding. I was at the bottom with Dory and then I was going up through the glass where the town had been, and it was still hot, and the snow was steaming on it, and Dory was beside me, and Hana, and Abena, running.

The children were still on the ramp. Two thousand had gone in. The rest were still walking up. Very slowly. In the collars. Not crying.

There were two of the Refined at the bottom of the ramp. In their white robes. Very tall. Very calm. One of them saw me coming up the glass.

I asked the ramp.

That’s all. I didn’t do anything big. I didn’t take the ship apart. There were two thousand children in it. I just asked the ramp, very politely, if it would mind very much not being a ramp. And it said yes. It was glad to. It was white stuff from Marrach’s yards and it had never once been asked anything in its life.

It went soft under the two Refined, like warm wax, and they went down into it to the waist, and stuck.

And the children on it stopped walking.

Dory went for the collars.

She can’t do what Ash does. Ash undoes them for good. But she can feel them, every one, and she can find the place in each one where it’s holding on, and she can tell the person inside, It’s all right, I’m here, you can let go now, and some of them do.

She stood at the bottom of the soft ramp in the snow, with her Dusk glasses off and her black eyes open, and she opened the net as wide as I’ve ever felt her open it, and she held a thousand children at once.

And they started to cry.

All of them. On the ramp. In the snow. Their faces crumpled up and they cried, out loud, the way children cry when they’ve been very frightened for a long time and somebody’s finally come. Hundreds of children crying at once. It was the worst sound and the best sound I’ve ever heard.

Abena and Hana were on the ramp. Picking them up. Breathing for the ones who’d forgotten how. Carrying them down two at a time onto the glass and putting them in the snow and going back for more.

The ship’s door was nearly shut.

I put my hand on it. I asked it to stop. It didn’t want to. Something inside it was telling it to shut, very hard, the way the made are told. I asked again. It stopped. Half shut.

And Gilgamesh came up the hill from the north side with his axe, and grey stuff all down his front, and his left arm hanging wrong, and he put the axe through the gap in the door and leant on it.

The door opened.

There were two thousand and sixty children in the ship. In rows. In a long white room, very clean, very bright, sitting on the floor in their collars with their hands in their laps.

At the far end there was another door. Open. A real door. Elin says it was the kind the houses make. And through it, very far off, I could feel Velle. The rock. The houses.

It had been open the whole time. Since the first child walked up the ramp.

The first four hundred and ten had already gone through it.

I stood in the white room and looked at the open door at the end of it, and felt the houses on the other side of it, very far off, very satisfied, and I couldn’t move.

Dory came up behind me.

She looked at the door. Then she looked at the two thousand and sixty children in the room. Then she put her hand on my arm.

“Dad,” she said. “Dad. These ones. Now.”

We brought them out. All two thousand and sixty. Down the soft ramp onto the glass and through the south door, a hundred at a time, Corin holding it open with both hands and his whole face grey with the effort, for an hour.

Ash came through on the second trip and started on the collars. One at a time. By the door. Undoing every one of them for good. She did nine hundred before Halloway made her sit down.

Elin closed the far door in the white ship. The houses’ door. It fought her. She closed it anyway. Then she sat down on the floor of the white room among the empty rows and put her face in her hands.

The queens.

I went down to them when the children were out. Me and Dory. With Kwame, who can find the way down through rock faster than anyone, because the ground tells him.

Three of them were all right.

The one under the first hill, and the one under the third, and the one under the fourth, a long way off, very deep, singing. Frightened. Not touched. The Brannock people had held the first and third hills all night with their rail guns and their grandmothers’ rifles in the snow. The fourth the Refined had never got near.

The second one was on a frame.

We were too late for her.

I’ll put that down plainly, the way Mother says. We were too late.

They’d had her on the frame since the first night. They’d dug down to her and cut her heart the way they did on the world where Abena and Efua came on the third day, and then they’d put her on the frame and started taking the silver out of her, and they’d been taking it for two days while Brannock held the other hills and we got there.

She was very small. She was the youngest of the four. Dory says she was the one who sang the high part.

When I put my hand on her she knew me. She knew who I was. Everybody does, now.

You came, she said. Very faint.

I’m sorry, I said. I’m sorry. We’re here. I’m sorry.

No, she said. You came. My sisters are singing. I can hear them.

Dory was holding her. The way she holds queens. Abena came down the shaft behind us and put her hands on the rock and breathed into it, into the cut, the way she did on that other world, as hard as I’ve ever seen her breathe.

It wasn’t enough. It had been too long.

The small queen of Brannock sang her high part one more time. Her three sisters answered her through the rock from very far off. I heard it. Everybody on Brannock heard it, Tolland Rusk told us afterwards, every person on every hill, in the snow, in the dark, a sound coming up out of the ground like a choir with one voice going quiet.

Then she stopped.

Abena sat on the floor of the shaft for a long time with her hands on the rock. Dory sat next to her.

I went up.

The Standing lost one thousand one hundred and eighty-four on Brannock.

Six hundred and two Kasrai. Four hundred in the line of white light on the east slope, all at once. Varra tied the knots herself, in her own rope, that night, on the glass, by a fire somebody made out of the mine head timbers. It took her until dawn. Her rope’s very long now. She says she’ll need a new one.

Eleven pilots. A hundred and ninety Hyrrani on the west side. The rest from every people in the Standing.

Brannock lost nine thousand and something. Nobody knows the exact number yet. Fell’s gone. Most of the people who held the pass are gone. Hesper Daine is alive. She came down off the first hill on the second morning with her cable over her shoulder and walked up to Gilgamesh, who was sitting on a rock having his arm set by Halloway, and looked at him for a long time, and then sat down next to him on the rock without saying anything.

They sat there an hour. Then Gilgamesh gave her a piece of bread.

Four hundred and ten children went through the door to Velle.

Okafor wrote the number on her slate. Under Forty.

Then she wrote one more word under it.

Fetch.

The Prime called it a police action. On the band. He said the Refined had been conducting a lawful safekeeping operation on a Reach world under protection and the coward on his hill had attacked them with his animals and his dragons and his witch-daughter.

Then he said Brannock was a Hedge world now, as far as he was concerned. He said it had chosen. He said every world that harboured the coward’s soldiers had chosen.

He was right about the first part. Tolland Rusk asked the Table the next morning. The Caddi grandmother said yes before he’d finished asking.

The day after Brannock, Kwame went to see Okafor.

Kwame Dask. Hana’s. Who the ground talks to. Who found the way down to the queens in the dark faster than anyone and stood at the bottom of the shaft while the small one stopped, and didn’t say anything, and came up with his hands shaking.

He stood in front of her board in the Arch Hall. He’s very tall now, and broad, and he still stands like a boy who’s not sure he’s allowed in the room.

“Fell had no hollows,” he said.

Okafor looked at him.

“Nine thousand people on the side of a hill,” said Kwame. “In houses with turf roofs. And nowhere to go. When the white light came there was nowhere to go.” He put his hands in his pockets, and took them out again. “On Caddoc they live in hollows under the salt. The light can’t get down there. When the Hungry came, the deep hollows all survived. Every one.”

“I know,” said Okafor. “I was there.”

“Then let me make them,” said Kwame. “Everywhere. Every world in the Hedge. Every town. Hollows and bunkers and ways down. Deep. With water in them and air coming in and doors that open the right way.” He stopped. “Not me on my own. I can’t do every world. A regiment. People who can dig. People the ground talks to, and people it doesn’t, who’ll dig anyway. And the Lake House children, when they’re old enough. The ground ones.”

Okafor didn’t say anything for a long time.

“And drills,” said Kwame. “For the little ones. On every world. So when the bell goes they know where to run, and they don’t have to think about it. Like the Caddi children with their drill ladders.” He looked at her slate. “I don’t want any more children walking up a ramp because nobody ever showed them where to run.”

Okafor turned her slate round. She wrote one word on a new sheet.

Ground.

“You’ll want a rank,” she said.

“I don’t want a rank.”

“You’ll have one anyway,” said Okafor. “It makes people dig faster.”

They’re called the Ground. Officially. Okafor wrote it on the wall of every post. Everybody else calls them the Diggers.

Kwame has nine thousand already. Miners from Thole and Kessry and Ilith and Brannock. Quarrymen. Caddi from under the salt, who know more about hollows than anyone alive. Old Kwame Osei, who says he’s too old to be in a regiment and goes to every single dig anyway. Teva’s father, who draws the hollows. Rory, who planes the doors so they shut properly, and checks every one.

They dig under every town. Kwame finds the place, and asks, and the ground opens, and the Diggers do the rest. Deep enough that a white ship’s light can’t reach. With springs. With air. With room for everybody in the town and a kitchen at the bottom. Mother insisted on the kitchen.

And on every world, once a week, a bell goes. And the children run. Down the steps, holding hands in twos, into the hollow, in order, the little ones first, and sit down on the floor at the bottom.

They practise until it’s boring. Kwame says that’s the point. He says it has to be so boring they could do it in their sleep. He says that way, if it ever happens, they’ll be bored all the way down.

Imre made a soft Okafor.

She’d been asking for three years. Okafor kept saying no. Then, after Brannock, Okafor came to Imre’s workshop on the second city’s market square, on her own, without being asked, and stood in the doorway.

“Do it properly,” she said. “The face.”

So Imre did.

A small dark soft Okafor in her plain grey coat, very straight, with her hands behind her back. And one side of her face is steel. Real steel. Imre had a smith on Kiln make the pieces, very thin, very smooth, shaped exactly like the steel that Trevor made for her jaw when she was seventeen and had been shot in the face and the first thing she saw was his eyes. And in her hand, a tiny slate. With a tiny piece of chalk on a string. That writes.

Children write one word on it. Every child. Imre says that’s what they do first, before anything else. Every one. They pick up the soft Okafor and they write one word on her slate.

She sold a hundred thousand in a week. Then nine hundred thousand. Then Mattick took crates of them into the Reach and the children on the edge worlds started writing on the tiny slates too.

Quenby put the soft one on her cover. The steel side catching the light. The headline is one word. Wren says it’s the shortest headline Quenby’s ever run.

Now.

It went a very long way away. Bell found a copy on a world nobody’s ever named, past everything, eleven weeks later, pinned to the door of a hollow somebody had dug on their own.

Okafor hasn’t said anything about it. But Halloway says there’s a soft one on the shelf in her office in the Arch Hall, behind the board, facing the wall. And every morning, when she comes in, it’s facing the other way.

And Taveth.

Taveth is Kyria’s husband. He’s very tall, Hyrrani, with a long braid, and he’s good at nothing, he says, except the soup. Which is terrible. Which is the worst soup anyone has ever tasted. Which takes four days and has things in it nobody can identify, and which every child on Hyrran has been told is wonderful since before they could talk, because it’s what the safe place smells like.

After Brannock, he went to Mother.

“Every hollow,” he said. “Kwame’s going to dig them on every world. A hollow on every world.” He had the great iron pot under his arm. “They’ll need to smell like somewhere.”

Mother looked at him for a long time.

“Taveth,” she said. “Are you asking to teach the soup?”

“Yes,” said Taveth. “To the grandfathers. It has to be the grandfathers. It’s a grandfather soup. It doesn’t work otherwise.”

So he taught it.

In the long kitchen at the Lake House, because Mother wouldn’t let him do it in hers. Every Thursday. Nine pots. Nine grandfathers.

Konrad, who took notes. Rory, who planed the edge of the chopping board while he was waiting for things to boil. The General, who stood up the whole time and stirred like he was on parade. Old Kwame Osei, who said he’d been eating Abena Osei’s cooking for sixty years and had never once had to make anything and wasn’t about to start, and then made the best batch of all of them, which made him very cross. Teva’s father, with a slate, trying to work out the proportions, which Taveth said was cheating. And Holt, who sat in the corner and didn’t cook and said he was there to supervise.

Four days. Every pot. With the windows open.

The Lake House children came and stood in the corridor outside and held their noses.

On the fourth day, Taveth tasted every pot.

He went down the row very slowly with his spoon. Konrad’s. Rory’s. The General’s. He tasted each one and stood very still and thought about it, and the grandfathers stood behind their pots in a row with their arms folded, waiting.

At the end he put the spoon down.

“Terrible,” he said. “All of them.” He looked down the row. “Well done.”

The General, Luna says, has never been so proud of anything in his life.

There are grandfathers making it on two hundred worlds now. In the hollows, every week, when the bell goes and the children come down the steps holding hands. A great pot at the bottom, bubbling, smelling like nothing anybody’s ever smelt.

The children sit down on the floor. And somebody’s grandfather gives them a bowl.

And they say it’s wonderful. Every one. Because that’s what you say.

Imre’s selling a soft pot. With a soft spoon. It smells faintly of something, Imre won’t say what. The children take it down the steps on drill days.

Taveth’s name is in the long record on Ister four hundred and eleven times now. Kyria says that’s more than the General.

The General says that’s because of the soup.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Seven hundred and forty. Brannock’s three said it together, from the rock, the way they do, like a choir. With a space in the middle where the high part used to be.

Wren left a space on the slate too. In the middle of the count. Nobody asked her to.

And under it:

Brannock: three.

Forty. Four hundred and ten.

Ground: digging.

Days 11703–11815. Brannock.

The war began cold; on Carrow the scientists chose one person a day, then took forty women from the sisters’ houses, Bess among them, over the whole sitting square. On Brannock the Standing broke the Refined, but four hundred and ten children had already gone through a door to Velle and the youngest of four queens died on her frame. Kwame raised the Ground to dig hollows and drill the children on every world; the soft Okafor came out with her steel jaw and slate; and Taveth taught the grandfathers his terrible soup.