Chapter 619: Six Lies

Location: The Pavilion — The Workshop

Date/Time: 29–30 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Grindday night to Restday (outside)

Realm: Lower Realm

Eden said nothing on the dragon. She said nothing when they came down in the dark behind the long shed at Kaelport, and Huifu folded her wings and went away up the slip without a word, and nothing on the stairs, and nothing in the shed itself, with the brazier banked and the board in shadow and the order still pinned to the frame. Jayde had come up behind her from the yard and seen her face in the light from the door, and had not asked. Jayde had put her left hand on the Pavilion door and opened it, and Eden had gone through, and Jayde had gone through after her, and the door had shut.

Then Eden said, “Is there anybody in here who isn’t ours?”

“No.”

“Nobody from any valley. Nobody at all.”

“Nobody.”

Eden stood in the long hall with her bag still strapped to her chest, and Zhi wound so tight round her forearm that the shape of him showed through her sleeve, and breathed out at last, a breath Jayde suspected she had been holding since noon.

“Then get everybody,” Eden said. “Now. Please.”

+++

They came to the workshop. Isha from the bench by the synthesis unit, where he had been sitting with his tails gathered, waiting for nothing in particular. Yinxin from the sanctuary in her human shape, barefoot. Cangwei from the wall, with the ledger. Reiko was already across the door at dog size, and he lifted his head when Eden came in, and his nose went once, hard, and his hackles came up along his back.

[She smells of nothing,] he said. [A little. On her hands.]

[I know.]

[Wash them,] Reiko said, and put his head down, and kept his eyes open.

Eden did not sit. She put the slate on the bench under the lamp, face up, where they could all see the numbers on it, and stood with both hands flat on either side of it, and told them.

All of it. In order. The four readings, steady as a line in ink, not fading. Seven. A village. A man with a coat. A horse with a white face. Kept back. Twenty years, maybe twenty-five; the wall mended twice. We just know. It comes. You hear it. The name Corra, and the door where the other name should have been. Before what?

And the yard. The cart sister turning south at the breath. Twenty years fed and told, until nothing of the girl was left. Thirty-odd women in white in six tents on a dead field, sitting on benches, smiling.

“That part is a guess,” Eden said. “I want that understood before anybody does anything with it. I have one woman. I have four readings an hour apart. I have nobody who’s ever measured a thread running anywhere.” She looked at the slate. “It isn’t a measurement. And until somebody tells me it’s wrong, I’m treating it as one, because if I’m right and I treat it as a maybe, then every word that’s been said in front of those women since the night has gone straight up the thread to whoever’s holding the other end.”

Nobody said anything.

Jayde was at the end of the bench with her right hand held against her chest in its dressing and her left flat on the wood, and did the arithmetic.

First Company in the yards on the night, carrying children past the doors of the linen houses and talking to each other the way men talk when the worst is over. Dunmore, who had tried to question Corra. The men on the flaps at North Kessig for five days. Eden herself, in the tent, that morning.

The Temple’s young man, who had stopped counting.

“Who has been in front of them?” Jayde asked.

“Everyone,” said Eden. “Everyone but us.”

+++

“No,” said Yinxin.

They all turned.

She was standing by the door with her arms folded, and her golden eyes were on the slate, and her face had the look it got when she was going to say a thing she did not like and say it anyway.

“I was on the coast,” she said. “With my hand on the stone. I felt the thread come down. And I felt it go.” She did not look away from the slate. “The hundred and sixty-four small hands came off the cloth. The far thread went slack. It drifted, and it was gone. Not cut. Gone. There was nothing coming down any more.” She paused. “If there were a thread still running into a woman on a bench in that valley, I would have felt it. I was there. I had my hand on it.”

“You had your hand on the mouth,” Isha said quietly. “Not on her.”

Yinxin turned her head.

“I am not saying you are wrong,” Isha said. His tails had gathered very close round him. “I am saying that what you felt was the thread coming down into the floor. The anchor. The wall. And that went, and you are right that it went.” He folded his hands in front of him. “But a woman under that wall for twenty years is shaped to it, and it is shaped to the thread. The sisters hear. Eden has that from the woman herself: it comes, you hear it. The names. The breath. The gap where the mouths were.” He paused. “What none of us knows is whether anything goes the other way. Up. Through them. Hearing is not telling.”

“Then which is it?” Eden asked.

“I would like very much to say that it is only hearing,” Isha said. “I would like that more than I have liked most things this year.” He looked at Eden, and then at Jayde. “I cannot.”

“Then we don’t know,” Eden said.

“Not today.”

“And we have to act as if we do.”

“Yes,” said Isha. “I am afraid that is exactly where we are.”

+++

Cangwei had not said anything.

Jayde had been watching her. She was at the wall with the ledger open against her forearm, and she had been writing since Eden began, small and fast, without looking down. Twice she had stopped and struck a line through something. Once she had made a cross. Now she had stopped writing altogether, and was standing very still, looking at the six rings on the map with their six struck squares.

“Cangwei,” Jayde said.

Cangwei did not look round at once. When she did, her face had the look Jayde had seen on it in the workshop on the sixtieth day, over the road-warden’s margin note: the look of a woman who has just found the thing in her own ledger that she did not want to find, and is going to say it anyway.

“It is a ledger,” she said.

Nobody answered, and she did not seem to need them to.

“Six valleys. Six sets of sisters. One question: does anything go up the thread?” She closed the ledger on her finger. “You cannot measure the thread. Nobody can. So you do not measure the thread. You measure the Temple. The far hand does not sit at the end of a thread for its own amusement. If something comes up to it, it acts. And when it acts, it acts in the world. On a road. At a shed. At a post. Where it can be seen.”

Jayde was very still.

“So you give it something to act on,” Cangwei said. “Six things. One in each valley. Each one false, and each one different, and each one said aloud, plainly, in front of the sisters in that valley and in no other place on this continent.” She looked at the map. “And then you watch. Every road post, every Temple shed, the column road, the Hessen fork. Every place the Temple might move if it believed a thing. And when it moves, you look at what it is moving toward, and you look in the ledger, and you know which valley said it.”

“And if it moves toward none of them?” Eden asked.

“Then nothing went up. And you were wrong, and the women on the benches only hear.” Cangwei did not lower her eyes. “That would be a good day.”

“And if it moves toward one?”

“Then that valley is a mouth. And so are the other five, because they were all made the same way.” She paused. “And everything said in front of them in the yards on the night, and on the flaps since, has been in the Temple’s hands for five days.”

It was very quiet.

Cangwei spoke more quietly. “It is not a new thing. The house used it. Eight thousand years. A clerk tells six stewards six different dates for a council, and waits to see which date the bronze sect turns up for.” She almost smiled. “I did not know that was what I was doing, either. I thought I was keeping a calendar.”

+++

Jayde stood at the map.

It was a good plan. It was the best plan anybody had put in front of her in a month, and she knew it was, and she knew within a breath of hearing it what it would cost, and it was not a cost in lances or men.

“Six lies,” she said.

“False facts,” Cangwei agreed. “Six.”

“I do not lie.”

The workshop was very quiet. Cangwei did not look away.

It was true. It was the one thing about herself she had never had to think about. A smaller truth, when a whole one would hurt somebody who did not need hurting. A silence, when a truth would cost more than it bought. Never an invented thing. Not in the pits, when a lie would have bought her a meal. Not to Qin, not to the Temple’s young man, not to Ren across a world on a stone. She had built a corps that did not lie to its own people about a number, and she had never once asked one of them to.

[To let a thing be believed is not to say it,] said Kazren. [You know that. You have simply never liked knowing it.]

“I know,” Jayde said aloud.

Cangwei watched her. Then she opened the ledger again, and turned to a clean page, and picked up the pencil.

“Then you do not have to,” she said. “I will write them. Six. In my hand. I will choose what they say and where they are said, and each one will be the kind of thing the Temple would act on if it believed it, and none of them will put anybody in front of anything they cannot walk away from.” She did not hurry. “First Company will say them. Only at the sisters’ flaps, at the change of watch, two men handing over, as men say things to each other on a cold morning. One line at each tent. Each valley’s women hear their own, and nothing else, and nobody else hears it at all.” She paused. “And after that, nobody says anything in front of them again.” She looked up. “You will not say one word that is not true. You will only sign it.”

“That is the same thing.”

“It is not the same thing,” said Cangwei. “But it is close.”

Jayde heard her own words come back to her across the workshop, from a week ago, at this bench, to a fox who had promised a cat. Not between. It is close.

She looked at Cangwei a long time.

“Write them,” she said.

+++

It took Cangwei less than an inside hour.

Standing at the wall, she wrote, with the map in front of her, and she wrote the way she had written every inventory she had ever made, without hurry and without crossing out. When she had finished, she turned the ledger round and laid it on the bench in front of Jayde, and stood back.

Six lines. Six tents.

North: The doctor goes up to the Academy by the north road on Quenchday the fourth, with two men.

Far west: First Company strikes the camp at North Kessig on Hammerday the second and leaves two men.

Coast: Twenty of the children are being kept in the old grain shed on the Hessen fork until Temperday the third.

Garden: The Lower School at Kaelport closes for the month of Emberwane. The roof.

South: The Commander goes back to the south valley alone on Grindday the fifth, to see the empty school for herself.

East: The sisters are to be taken to Kaelport on Restday the sixth and put on trial in front of the corps.

And beside every one of them, small, a cross.

Jayde read them twice.

The south one was about her, as she had known it would be. The Commander goes back to the south valley alone. Of course it was. If the far hand wanted anything on this continent, it wanted that. It was the line most likely to make the Temple move, and the most likely to show which valley was a mouth, and Cangwei had put it there because it was right, and had not asked.

Eden said, very flatly, “The south.” She was reading over Jayde’s shoulder.

“It is,” said Cangwei.

“That one puts her at a place on a day.”

“It puts a lie at a place on a day,” Cangwei said. “She will not be there. Nobody will be there but whoever watches the road.” She did not look at Eden. “If the Temple comes to the south valley on Grindday the fifth looking for a woman alone, then the south tent is a mouth, and so is every other one, and we will know it without anybody standing anywhere.”

Eden looked at her. Cangwei looked at the ledger.

“Fine,” Eden said at last. It did not sound fine. “Fine. It’s the right one. I hate it.”

“So do I,” said Cangwei.

Eden looked at her a moment longer. Then something happened at the corner of her mouth, not quite a smile, the ghost of one, and was gone.

Jayde picked up the pencil.

Her right hand was in its dressing against her chest and could not have closed round anything. She held the pencil in her left, awkwardly, the way she had been holding everything for five days, and put the ledger on her knee, and under the sixth line, in letters that leaned the wrong way, she wrote her name.

J.

That was all. It was all she ever signed.

Jayde looked at it. It was a very small thing to have cost so much.

+++

“And after?” Yinxin asked.

“After the lies are said, nothing is said in front of them again,” Cangwei said. “Not a word, by anybody, for as long as they are held. The flaps are kept by men who do not speak.”

“For how long?”

Nobody answered at once.

“I am aware,” Isha said quietly, “of what it is to keep them on a dead field in a tent, in silence, after twenty years of a wall telling them to be quiet. I would not suggest it if I had a better place.” He looked at Eden. “Do you have a better place?”

Eden did not answer for a long time.

“No,” she said. “Give them blankets. Light. Food. Somebody on the flap who won’t talk.” She looked at the slate, at four flat numbers in a row. “And I’ll go back to Corra in ten days with the instrument. In the tent. Where it’s quiet.” She paused. “I want to see if anything changes when nothing’s listening.”

+++

Takara was waiting at the long shed door when Jayde came out, in the last of the dark before Restday’s first bell. His right shoulder was strapped in a sling of corps linen that somebody, probably Green, had wound round his chest and over his back, and he was standing at full size on three legs with the fourth held off the ground, and his mane was damped flat.

The roads, he said. Six lies. Every post. Every shed. The column road. The Hessen fork. He did not look at his shoulder. Canirr has the map. Suki and Prota are already out. Amaya is at the fork.

“You are not going.”

I am going.

“Takara.”

Commander. His voice in her head was formal, flat, and perfectly level, the voice of a man reading out a garrison roll. I have a shoulder that does not work and three legs that do. There are six lies on six roads and not enough of us to watch them. I have stood a great many years of posts that mattered to nobody. A pause. This one matters. I am on duty.

She held his eyes.

Then she put her left hand out, flat, and he leaned his great head into it, very slightly, the way he had always done, and she felt the faint prickle of the damped lightning under the fur.

At last she said, “Then go.”

He went, down the slip and along the water on three legs, low and dark and slower than he had ever been, and she watched him until the dark had him.

Behind her, in the shed, the order was still pinned to the frame. Nothing comes to me. It was the thirtieth of Flamefade. On Kindleday it would be Emberwane, and somewhere on a road a man was learning page seven by heart, and six lies were going out on the morning wind to six valleys in Cangwei’s small fair hand, each one crossed and a single letter under the last of them that leaned the wrong way.

She went back in, and shut the door, and put her hand flat on it.

The air in the long shed tasted of cold brazier and old ink and nothing else. Amaya was at the fork. Jayde stood with her hand on the door and found that she was waiting for the faint taste of metal and rain anyway, as you reach in the dark for a step that has always been there.

It was not there. She stood a while longer all the same.