Chapter 560 - 555: The Wrong Way Up

Chapter 560: Chapter 555: The Wrong Way Up

Location:A shelf of bare rock on the northern margin of the Scorch, then above

Date/Time:3 Ashbloom 9943 AZI, Temperday, before dawn

Realm:Lower Realm

The deck plates flexed, once, and everybody in that cabin who was not Jayde turned around.

The Pavilion’s entrance opened onto the aft of the cargo space because that is where the height is, and Ashborn came through it the way Ashborn comes through anything, which is without hurrying and without any evidence of effort, and folded down onto the deck with the blade-arms tucked and the great flat head low.

Nobody had told the dragons.

"Why is Ashborn coming?" said Hulong.

It was not hostile, and it was not a small question. It was the only rule on that ground that had never once been bent since Frostforge. Nothing about this ship was made safer by a charling being on it, and Hulong had spent seven months watching Jayde refuse to spend that rule on anything, including the two occasions when spending it would have been worth it.

"Because Ashborn is coming," Jayde said.

"That is not an answer."

"No."

Hulong waited, as a man waits when he is owed one and has worked out that he is not getting it. Then he inclined his head about a finger’s width and went back to what he had been doing, because there is a point at which you either trust the person flying or you get off.

It was not a sight anybody had earned. Ashborn is not seen. Ashborn is the Pavilion and a nest and the road between them and nothing else, and that had been true for two years and would go on being true tomorrow, and the exception standing on the deck of that ship was a promise.

Jayde had made it in the dark of a containment a year ago, with her hand on chitin and a voice in her head that was not a voice, to something enormous and alone that had been under a mountain since before the Academy had a first stone. I will take you to see the world. She had said it out loud, at the time, mostly to hear how ridiculous it sounded.

Ashborn was the road. Whatever went in through those sensory pits went somewhere else, to something that had never once in a hundred thousand years been outside, and Jayde had never fully understood the mechanism and had long ago stopped requiring herself to.

She crossed the cabin and put her hand on the plate above the pits, which was permitted.

"You are going to want to be facing the port side," she said.

***

The shelf was nine days east and south of anywhere, on the northern margin of the Scorch, and getting there had taken eleven days because Ashborn does not use roads.

Jayde had chosen it in Voidmarch off three criteria and had not moved off any of them.

Nothing lives there. Not thin population — nothing, for four days’ ride in every direction, because the ground is black glass and old ash and the water comes up tasting of sulfur and kills anything that drinks it twice. No herdsmen. No charcoal burners. No hunters, because there is nothing to hunt. The nearest human being on the night they went up was a Temple road-warden asleep at a post a hundred and sixty miles north, and Xinglong had confirmed that personally from twelve thousand feet, twice, on two different nights.

Nobody had ever seen the ship. The ship had gone out of the Vel’thari in a ring and had been rebuilt inside the Pavilion, and it had come out onto that rock through the Pavilion’s entrance, at night, with four people present, and it would go back in the same way before the sun was properly up. There is no wagon to see, no road to be rutted, no long season of a strange shape under a tarpaulin at the end of somebody’s valley. As far as the world was concerned, there was a shelf of bare rock in the Scorch on Grindday and there would be a shelf of bare rock in the Scorch on Kindleday.

And the third thing was the sky.

They went up at the sixth bell, two hours before any light, on a night Jayde had waited nine days for — the Bright Crown down under the horizon, the Pale Watcher not yet risen, Ashenmoon gone dark and the other two too small to matter. Full black, over a country that has no lamps in it.

Which left the drive.

A drive is a great deal of light going in one direction very fast, and you cannot hide light on an open plain. What you can do is put it where light already lives. The Scorch throws fire into the sky every night of the year out of a thousand vents and has done for as long as anybody has kept records, and a column of flame going up off the northern margin at the sixth bell is the single least remarkable thing that could possibly happen there, and would be noticed by nobody, and reported by nobody, and believed by nobody if it were.

Isha had laid his wards over the nine miles anyway.

"It is not for the seeing," he had said, when she asked why he was bothering. "It is for the hearing. And for the other one." He had not elaborated on the other one, and Jayde had let him have it, because in four years the only times Isha had ever declined to explain a working were the times she had afterward been glad of it.

***

The first ten seconds were ordinary.

Then the ship remembered what it was for, and Jayde discovered that she had never once, in four years of describing this to people, managed to describe it.

The noise arrived first. It came up through the deck and into her spine and it was not a sound the cabin made, it was a sound the cabin was inside of, and somewhere behind her Yinglong said something in dragon-tongue that had probably been a prayer four thousand years ago and was now just the noise a person makes.

Then the hand.

That is the only thing it has ever been like, and Jayde had never found anybody who disagreed. A wide flat palm, coming down on the breastbone and staying there — firm, entirely steady, exactly as heavy as a large dog that has decided to sleep on you — and a corresponding weight in the jaw and the backs of the arms that makes a person want to swallow and not be able to do it comfortably.

That was all of it. That was the whole of what a Federation transport passes through to the people inside it.

The ship was doing considerably more than that. What was actually happening to that hull, out past the deck plates, would have taken a human spine apart at the fourth vertebra and would have done interesting things to a dragon, and none of it came through, because a great many people had worked very hard on that problem a long time ago and had then solved it and died and been forgotten, the way nobody in Arvia thinks about the roof.

But they let some of it in. Deliberately. A fixed fraction, passed through on purpose, because a crew that feels nothing has no idea what its ship is doing and will sit there placidly while it kills them — and after a thousand years of that argument the answer the Federation had settled on was: give them the hand.

So the floor was a floor, and the light did not change, and nothing squeezed anybody’s blood anywhere it should not go, and twelve people stood in a cabin with a palm on the breastbone while a world came off them at a rate none of their senses would accept.

That was the difficult part. Jayde had known it would be and had still underestimated it.

Every dragon on that ship had spent their entire life with one unbroken agreement between their body and the ground. They can tell their height in cloud. At night. Asleep. It is not a skill, it is a sense, and it had been correct every single time any of them had ever consulted it.

And it was not silent now. That was the unbearable part. It was reporting — it was telling every one of them, steadily and with total confidence, that they were making a firm but unremarkable climb, of the kind a dragon does after a heavy meal, and that they had perhaps gained a thousand feet.

"I do not know how high I am," Xinglong said.

He said it quite calmly, which made it worse.

"No."

"I have always known how high I am."

"I know," said Jayde. "You are going to go on not knowing for about four minutes. Then I am going to show you, and it is not going to help."

Heiteng made one sound, low in the chest, and stopped.

"Thirty," said Eden.

"Holding."

"Thirty-one. Draw at ninety-six and profile says eighty-five."

"That is correct," said Nine, pleasantly. "Draw is eleven percent above profile and has been since ignition. All other parameters are nominal. I have no explanation."

"You have never said that to me before," said Jayde.

"I have not had occasion to."

"Eleven over."

"Eleven over, and it should not be. Thin air and the lightest ground of the three." The datapad came up. "It should be under, Jayde."

"Cause."

"I do not have one." Eden’s voice did not move at all. "I want that on the record, because I have had a year and I would have preferred to have one. It is not the frame, it is not the cells, and it is not the profile arithmetic, and I have checked all three more times than is dignified."

"Are we inside margin?"

"We are a long way inside margin. We built margin for exactly this reason, and I am extremely pleased with us." A beat. "It is not a danger. It is a question, and I am going to want the first three passes before I so much as guess at it."

"Then go."

"Then go," Eden agreed, and went back to the numbers.

Behind them somebody was breathing very carefully and somebody else had not made a sound in ninety seconds.

Heiteng had put one hand on the frame beside him and had not taken it off. Not for support — Jayde watched him do it and knew exactly what it was, because she had done it herself at twenty-six and had been embarrassed about it for a decade afterward. He was holding onto the ship. The way you put your hand on a horse.

***

Four minutes is a long time.

The ship shook in the manner of a thing doing precisely what it was built to do while the world disagrees, and Jayde flew it, and the shelf fell away, and the dark stopped being above them and became all around.

At two minutes the noise began to thin.

That is the part nobody who has not done it believes, and she watched the cabin not believe it. It does not stop. It leaves, gradually and from the outside in, as the thing carrying the sound gets thinner and then stops being there at all, until what is left is the hull and the cells and a dozen people breathing in a quiet you could put your hand into.

"Two hundred and forty miles," said Nine, conversationally, to nobody. "Four hundred and ten. Six hundred and eighty."

"What is it doing?" said Yinglong.

"Telling us how high we are."

There was a pause of about two seconds.

"Say the last one again," said Xinglong.

"Six hundred and eighty miles," said Nine. "Eight hundred and ninety. We will settle at nine hundred and four."

Nobody spoke.

Xinglong had flown, Jayde knew, higher than any of the five of them had ever gone. It was a thing the quintet did not discuss and Hulong had let slip once, in the third year, and it had involved a storm and a bet and had nearly killed him and the number he had reached had been nine miles.

"Nine," said Yinxin, from the second row. She said it carefully, as you say a word in a language you do not have.

"Yes?"

Every head in the cabin came round.

"Have you done this before."

"Forty-one thousand, one hundred and six times," said Nine. "This will be the forty-one thousand, one hundred and seventh."

"How long have you been doing it."

"I was manufactured one thousand one hundred and forty years ago, by Doha reckoning. I was installed in this hull eight hundred and sixty-two years ago. There is a gap of four hundred and eleven years in my log which I am unable to account for, and which I would very much like to." A small pause, entirely pleasant. "Thank you for asking. Nobody has."

Yinxin sat back in a seat that had quietly shaped itself around her while she was not paying attention, and looked at the ceiling, and did not ask it anything else.

At three minutes forty the shaking stopped.

At three minutes fifty-eight, Jayde took the drive off, and the only thing in the entire cabin that changed was that a light went amber and a note somewhere under the deck came down a tone.

Xingteng, who had not spoken once the whole way up, said, "Is that all of it?"

"That is all of it."

"We have stopped."

"We have not stopped at all. We are going faster than anything you have ever seen move." Jayde reached up and put two fingers on the overhead. "There is nothing out there to slow us down, so we will keep going at exactly this speed until something makes us not. That is what out there is."

Nobody had anything to say to that, and Green, at the aft bulkhead, put her hand flat on the deck beside her and left it there — checking, as you check a step in the dark.

She put her hands off the board.

"Nine," she said. "Take the hull."

"Of course, Commander."

And the ship stopped being there.

It is not a window. That is the thing every person aboard got wrong in the same half-second, because every one of them had spent a life in a world where you see out of a thing through a hole in it, and what happened was not a hole.

The hull simply stopped being opaque.

The deck stayed. The seats stayed. The frame members stayed, as thin bright lines with nothing hung on them, and the light panel over the aft bulkhead stayed, and everything else — every plate, the whole curved shell of the thing, the roof, the walls, the floor out past the deck grating under their boots — went to nothing at all, at once, in complete silence.

Green sat down on the deck.

She did it fast and without any dignity whatsoever and she did it because her legs had stopped participating, and nobody laughed, because four other people were holding onto something.

White did not move. White had not moved since he came aboard and did not move now, and Jayde looked back down the cabin once and found him standing against a bulkhead that was no longer a bulkhead with his arms folded and his face doing absolutely nothing, which from White is a scream.

"You are standing on a floor," Jayde said, into a cabin that had entirely forgotten this. "The floor has not gone anywhere. Nothing has changed except what you can see. I want that said before anybody tries to walk."

"It is under us," said Hulong.

"Yes."

"It is under us."

"Yes."

And it was. It was under the deck and under the grating and under the soles of nine pairs of boots that had spent every previous second of their lives with something between them and a fall, and the something was still there, and no part of any of them believed it.

"Nine," said Jayde. "Leave it. Do not put the hull back for anything short of me asking."

"Of course, Commander."

***

Nobody said anything at all after that, for a while.

Jayde had been braced for noise. She had built a whole private expectation around what a cabin full of dragons would sound like at this moment, and she had been completely wrong, because what actually happens to a person is that everything stops — all of it, the entire apparatus of having opinions — and there is a gap of some seconds before any of it comes back.

It came up amber.

That was the first thing, and it was the thing none of them had been ready for, because from the ground the sky over the Scorch is red and the sky over Arvia is blue and nobody had ever put those together into a color a world could be. Amber, and rust, and the long black scar of the obsidian range running north to south down the whole of it like a seam in something poured.

East of the range, a hundred thousand years of everybody.

West of it, the Dark Forest — four million square miles of it, and from up there it was not a forest; it was a single dark object lying on a continent, and it had an edge as clean as a coastline, and it had that edge because something was maintaining it.

South, the Scorch, still throwing its red up into the night in a scatter of vents so fine it looked like something breathing.

And ocean. Everywhere else, ocean, black and faintly silvered under a sky they had chosen for having nothing in it, with the terminator coming across it in a curve — an actual curve, a physical bend, the arc of a small world going about its business beneath them.

"That is Doha," Yinxin said.

It did not come out as a question, and Jayde did not answer it, and nobody else did either.

Somebody was crying quietly at the aft end, and Jayde did not turn round to find out who, because there is a kind of courtesy you can only offer by looking the other way.

Ashborn had not moved.

The great flat head was up and the sensory pits were wide open and turned out at all of it, and whatever was going through them was going through them the entire time, down the road to a mountain on the other side of the world, and Jayde had absolutely no idea what was arriving at the far end of it — and knew, in the way you know weather coming, that something there was awake and receiving.