Chapter 56 - The Canal Road

The House of Measures still existed. Its roof didn't, according to the first letter. The second letter said the roof had been repaired. The third said the whole place had burned down twenty years ago and anyone collecting tuition in its name ought to be hanged.

Ilyen read all three. Then she sorted them by date and source.

"The third correspondent," she said, "failed his final examination there."

"How long ago?"

"Twenty-three years."

"A disciplined grievance."

She set that one aside.

The other two had come through Isera's contacts in Harrow. One from a physician who'd used the college library before the war. One from a paper merchant whose brother supplied the town. Between them: a surviving school, a damaged western wing, and a collection that had been moved more than once.

The catalogue we needed might still be there. So might the original purchase records.

I looked at the map. Edrath lay beyond Harrow, across the river and inland along an old canal road. Six days in good weather, the merchant said. Neither letter defined good weather.

Aoi leaned over the table.

"We go."

Ilyen's face suggested that youth remained a recurring technical difficulty.

"We ask whether they admit foreign researchers."

"We've asked whether the place exists. It does."

"And if we arrive without permission, we may spend the journey's entire allowance discovering what its gate looks like."

Aoi drew back. She didn't argue. She started counting days on her fingers instead, which was worse.

---

We'd reached a stage with Kaito where his letters sometimes contained objections. I thought that was healthy. Aoi thought it was annoying when they were about her.

His answer came four days later. He wanted the work pursued. He didn't want to join an expedition until someone worked out whether it was an expedition or an attempt to get arrested with notebooks.

Aoi read that sentence aloud in an insulting imitation of his voice. Ilyen laughed. I hadn't heard her laugh properly before. It improved the room.

Kaito had enclosed questions for the college. He'd also found a problem in Ilyen's translation of a workshop term. It might mean *paired receivers*, but in a later manual it meant matched devices calibrated against each other.

Not necessarily devices located far apart.

Ilyen corrected the working copy. Aoi watched her.

"Does that make it less likely to be about returning?"

"It makes one interpretation less secure."

"So yes."

"So we should not spend six days walking because we enjoy one translation more than another."

Aoi pushed her chair back and went outside.

I waited for the door to close.

"She knows."

"Yes," Ilyen said.

"She wants something she can do."

"So do I."

The ritual master looked down at her hands. I'd been thinking of Aoi's impatience as a thing about her age. Across the table sat a woman who'd spent nineteen years with failed apparatus. Maybe it wasn't about age. Maybe it was just about wanting something you can't reach.

Ilyen picked up the disputed passage.

"We will ask them to preserve the material while permission is considered."

---

Permission came with a price. The House of Measures would admit two outside investigators for seven days, under supervision, to examine specified holdings. No lending. No unsupervised copying of diagrams. No use of active skills in the restricted stacks. Payment in silver or approved supplies.

The supplies list included lamp oil, clean paper, medicinal alcohol, and copper wire of a fineness Gerren described as deliberately offensive. The silver price was worse. I stared at it.

"Do they intend to educate us or adopt us?"

"They have lost most of their public funding," Ilyen said.

She took out her purse. There was less in it than I'd expected. That hit me somewhere I didn't have a word for. Aoi opened hers, and I stopped her before she emptied it; we'd need to eat on the way back. Ilyen could cover the oil and alcohol from what was left of her professional allowance. Aoi would pay for the paper. I worked out travel against my wages and the survey fee still owed to me personally. It would be tight. It would also be ours.

No village reserve. No medical trust. No clever reading of the accounts that made people who wanted safe houses pay for our hope of leaving them.

I put the figures on the table. The discussion ended with a sum we could actually meet.

---

Only two visitors were allowed. Ilyen couldn't travel safely at the pace we'd need. Her knee had gotten worse in the damp and she wasn't willing to spend the journey drugged enough to stand it. She'd send us with letters, exact questions, and a list of measurements.

"I will also send instructions concerning what you must not touch."

"An extensive appendix?"

"For you, yes."

Taken from NovelPhoenix, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Aoi smiled. Then Ilyen turned to her.

"You are not exempt."

The smile went away. What replaced it was a pout, aimed squarely at a ritual master with a bad knee. Ilyen looked delighted.

We got ready over the next week. I finished the reviews already brought to me and told Ressa how long I'd be gone. She made no attempt to turn the journey into village business. She only wanted notice if the return date changed, not an explanation three days after. Pell took temporary custody of the review requests. Dalis kept his shortened teaching schedule. The ridge signal came in twice a day.

Ordinary things kept going. That was the only reason we could leave.

---

On the last evening I went to see Tamasin. She was loading cloth into a hired wagon. I waited until she finished counting.

"I need to purchase passage east from Harrow."

She wiped her hands.

"For how many?"

"Two. Edrath."

"Cargo?"

"Personal packs and one box of research supplies."

She gave me a carrier's name. Then the likely fare. No offer to arrange it. No special rate. I wrote both down.

"Thank you."

She nodded.

I could have left. I should have, probably.

"Would you prefer I asked someone else about routes?"

She looked at me.

"No. I sell route information. You can buy it like anybody else."

I turned that over. Then asked what I owed for the carrier's name. That almost made her smile.

"Nothing for that. If you want the current canal-road conditions, those are copied every sixth day. Pell knows the fee."

I paid it. The report came the next morning. Accurate, specific, and worth more than its price.

---

Aoi packed the blue cloth Kaito had kept wrapped around the signal lamp. I saw her tuck it inside her jacket. Then she caught me looking.

"He said I could keep it."

"I wasn't going to ask."

"Yes, you were."

"Not that."

"What, then?"

I thought about it.

"Whether you are frightened."

She sat on the edge of the bed.

"Of the road?"

"Of finding the book."

Aoi rubbed the mended cuff between her fingers.

"Yes."

I nodded.

"What about you?"

I thought of the black stone under my hands. The closed hall. The chance that a picture in an old catalogue might make the first impossible moment make sense. And then what? What did I do with myself if it made sense?

"Yes."

She stood and lifted her pack.

"Good. We can be irritating about it together."

We left before dawn.

---

The eastern ferry smelled of tar, fish, and wet animals. Aoi loved it. She denied this when asked, but she spent most of the crossing at the rail while the rest of us tried to keep the luggage out of the spray.

The river was wide here. Barges moved between painted channel posts. On the eastern bank, long houses stood above the floodplain on stone legs with boats tied underneath. One had a garden growing across its roof. Another had a small tree.

I stared at the tree. The ferryman followed my eyes.

"Good roots."

"Apparently."

"Bad roof if it dies."

I hadn't thought of that.

Aoi pointed past the prow.

"What are those?"

White shapes moved under the water. Too big for fish.

The ferryman leaned out.

"Glassbacks."

One rose close enough for us to see its smooth shell and the long dark body under it. Water poured off its back in a clear sheet. Smaller ones followed behind.

"Dangerous?" I asked.

"If you throw food."

Aoi lowered the bread in her hand. The ferryman looked at her. She put it away. He nodded.

A catastrophe prevented without anybody drawing a weapon. I was starting to collect those.

---

Our carrier was Pera. She drove a covered wagon along the canal road with paper, dyed wool, and three passengers.

The third passenger was a student going back to Edrath after failing to convince his family that one more examination fee was an investment. His name was Lio. He sat beside the paper bundles and complained about the college. Its food. Its tutors. Its grading. Its unreasonable insistence that answers be correct rather than promising.

Aoi listened with the patience of someone hearing a song she knew.

"What are you studying?"

"Applied measures."

"What does that mean?"

"Everything that needs someone to tell it how much it is."

I looked at him.

"An ambitious discipline."

"Mostly bridges."

"Does it require much arithmetic?"

He sighed. "All of it."

I liked him. That didn't mean I'd trust him with a bridge.

---

The canal road ran through country that had learned to use water instead of just surviving it. Small wheels lifted irrigation into stone channels. Terraced gardens climbed above the bank. At one village a woman opened a carved gate in a cistern wall and the water climbed a short slope before it flowed out toward the fields.

Uphill. It went uphill.

I sat forward. Pera saw.

"Lift-stone."

"Enchanted?"

"Unless she's persuaded the water."

"How long does it last?"

"Depends who made it. That one's older than me. Lethren stone, by the bands. They'd tell you it works harder at home."

"Why would it?"

"Their crown blesses the works. The Keeper of Nine Bridges. Anything made and kept under her charter pulls harder there." Pera flicked the reins. "Out here it's just a good stone."

"The same stone does more in Lethren?"

"The same stone does more under a crown that looks after it."

I thought of the trough at Rookstead, humming under its copper pins all the years nobody lived there, and wondered which crown it had been working for.

I watched until the wagon carried us past it.

Aoi was smiling.

"What?"

"You look like the children at market."

"I have discovered a serious flaw in my previous understanding of irrigation."

"Yes. That's what they looked like."

I settled back. A world could be cruel and still have things in it worth being amazed by. I was glad the road didn't give me time to make a philosophy of that. Pera hit a rut and I nearly bit my tongue.

---

At the second toll station a guard asked our nationality.

"Otherworlders," Aoi said.

His pen stopped. He called someone from the booth, and a woman in a dark blue coat came out, read Ilyen's introduction, and asked what weapons and combat skills we carried. A sword, Aoi told her, and defensive skills only. The woman looked at me.

"None," I said. It was even true. She hadn't asked about the other kind.

She stamped the papers and told us Edrath's gate would ask for the copy.

That was it. Nobody mentioned the Demon King. Nobody asked us to declare allegiance. I'd been braced for something for six days and it turned out to be a woman in a blue coat doing her job.

The road went on. Aoi watched the station shrink behind us.

"I expected worse."

"So did I."

Lio leaned on the bundles.

"You'll get worse at the college."

"Because we're foreigners?"

"Because you're visitors and they can't give you homework. They'll find something."

---

On the third afternoon the wagon stopped under a ruined aqueduct. Pera wanted the animals rested before the climb. Lio disappeared to wash in a pool. Aoi sat on the broken parapet reading Kaito's questions.

I walked under the arches. The stones had shifted but held. In one place a pale band ran through the masonry along no natural seam.

I touched the edge. Cool. Smooth.

Aoi called down from above.

"Don't."

"Ilyen said not to touch experimental apparatus."

"She also said you'd find an interpretation."

I took my hand back. The band gave off a faint hum as a wagon crossed the surviving channel overhead. Not visible magic. Something you felt through the fingers more than heard.

Pera came over with a water flask.

"Weight-binding," she said. "Still works where the stones match."

"And where they don't?"

She pointed at a collapsed arch farther down.

"Clear."

"People keep taking pieces. House foundations. Road repairs. Then the whole line weakens."

"Do they know?"

"Some. Others think one stone can't matter."

I looked at the missing blocks. The ruin hadn't failed all at once. That stayed with me longer than the hum did.

---

That night we slept at a canal inn with low tables and mattresses on a heated floor. Aoi sat cross-legged like she'd been waiting months for furniture to make sense.

Lio complained that the stew had too many roots. Pera told him roots were what happened when students traveled with no money.

I ate quietly. The food was rich and peppery and unfamiliar in a way I'd started to enjoy. Somewhere in the last few months, "unfamiliar" had stopped meaning "threat" every single time. I don't know when that happened. I didn't notice it until the stew.

After supper Aoi spread the research notes between us.

"We should decide what we're doing if they don't have it."

"The catalogue?"

"The catalogue. The purchase record. Any of it."

"We ask what survived and where missing holdings went."

"And after that?"

I looked at her. She wasn't asking for a research method.

"We come back," I said.

She nodded.

"If we don't find anything."

"Yes."

She folded one page.

"I keep making the next place into the place."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"I've been doing it too. With different things."

The throne. The marches. A profitable road. A title that would finally make uncertainty somebody else's problem.

Aoi watched me for a second. Then she picked up the next page.

"We still go look."

"Yes."

She passed me Kaito's list of material names. I started memorizing the ones I could pronounce.

Under the inn floor, water moved through the heating channels. The sound helped me sleep.