Chapter 623: The Ticket

Location: The Terrace — the Temple seat, Radiant Realm

Date: 5 Emberwane 9943 AZI, Grindday, first light to evening

Realm: Upper Realm

The pins went in one at a time, each with a small dry click against the comb beneath, and Sharlin read between them.

There were two women behind her. There were always two. One held the pale gold of her hair up off her neck in a twist that had to be kept exactly as it was for the better part of an hour, and the other set the pins, and neither of them spoke, because in the first year either of them had worked for her they’d learned that the hour was for reading. The light came in low across the terrace and through the long window and lay on the paper in her lap. It was cold. The air up here was always thin first thing, and it smelled of stone and of the lavender the women washed in, which was the smell of the Temple’s linen in every house it kept in three realms, and she had stopped noticing it some thousands of years ago.

The dispatch was four sheets. Lanhua’s hand, small and even, written at Hessen on Temperday night and carried up the column road and through the gate at Ashmarch, and on through the Temple’s own crossing into the Radiant Realm, by a rider who’d been told not to stop. The wax had cracked in the cold on the way.

Sharlin had read it once already, quickly, as she read anything that arrived in the dark. Now she read it slowly.

Six schools. All six empty.

The column due at the gate on the morning of the twenty-fifth of Flamefade had not come up the road. Eleven children from the coast school, a sister and a driver, half a day short of the gate, and then nothing. Lanhua’s riders had reached all six schools by the first of Emberwane. They had found the gates open. The bells on their posts. Washing on the lines. Slates on the long tables. Beds slept in and left.

Nothing burned. Nothing broken that a child couldn’t have broken. Nothing taken out of any of the six but the children and the women.

Click. The pin went in behind her left ear.

The gatemen at the far-west school are gone. The driver of the coast cart is gone. None of them has been found, and I don’t expect to find them. There was no blood on the ground at either place, or none the riders could see. The men are simply not there.

The women in white are alive. The coast fact proved that much. Somebody has them, and somebody has been talking in front of them, and what was said in front of them was false. The shed was empty, and the dust on the floor was whole. Nobody was ever there. We were meant to go and look, and we did.

Sharlin turned the sheet.

The rooms at the back of all six are shut. Not broken. Shut. Nothing comes out of them now. I believe it was done in a single moment. I can’t tell you how anybody did it.

Page seven was served at Kaelport on Hammerday, as you asked. Neither girl was there. I was told so by a captain of the corps, a blacksmith’s daughter I once taught, and she was telling the truth. Half the town came up the hill and stood in the yard while I was there. Nobody said anything. Nobody threw anything. I left the paper on the table.

There’s a woman, they say.

The last sheet was figures. Sharlin didn’t need them. She’d had the figures in a book on her own desk for years, four-figure tally numbers in columns, one to a line, and she’d counted that book down to the last line on the evening of the twenty-fourth of Flamefade, because it had seemed worth knowing exactly how much was standing in six valleys waiting for the columns to start.

Eleven hundred and forty-two.

Every one of them a number cut into the back of a disc. Every one of them on a line in her book, and the line still there, and nothing on the end of it.

She had been short since spring. Three hundred and eleven short, at the last count, and the six valleys had been meant to cover it and most of the next quarter besides, three columns a day from the second of Emberwane until the walls were empty. She had planned it the way you plan a harvest you’ve already seen standing in the field. The quarter had turned on the first. It was five days old now, and there was nothing in it from below, and there was not going to be.

She stood up.

She didn’t decide to. The twist went out of the first woman’s hands, and the pins that weren’t yet seated went down onto the stone in a small bright scatter, and the pale gold came down round Sharlin’s shoulders all at once, the whole hour of it gone.

“Six,” she said. Her voice had gone up. She heard it go and didn’t bring it down. “Six. Eleven hundred and forty-two, in one night, and she writes to me that she can’t tell me how anybody did it.”

The woman with the pins was on her knees on the stone, gathering them. The other stood with her empty hands still raised at the height of the twist, as if it might come back to them.

Neither of them looked up. Neither of them had ever, in all their years with her, heard her voice do that, and they knelt and stood in the lavender with their eyes on the floor, and waited to find out what it would do next.

It came down. She made it. She stood at the window with both hands flat on the cold stone of the sill until the voice was back where it lived, warm and pitched to carry, and then she sat down again.

“Again,” she said. “From the beginning.”

The woman behind her lifted the hair. The first pin went in.

+++

Corvane came up from the Mid Realm at the second bell with his coat wet at the shoulders, because it had begun to drizzle on the road from the crossing and he wasn’t a man who sent ahead for a carriage. He smelled of wet wool and of the ink they used at the district offices, which went sour in damp weather. He stood where he’d been put, just inside the door, and waited to be spoken to.

Sharlin let him wait while the last three pins went in. Then she sent the women away and stood, and the hair stayed exactly where they’d left it the second time, which was the whole point of an hour.

“You’ve read it,” she said. She’d had a copy sent down to him at first light.

“Yes.” His face did nothing. It never did. He’d been born with it, flat and pleasant, the face of a man who’d be kind to you at a counter and send you to the benches. He looked once at the floor by her chair, where a single pin lay that nobody had found, and then at her. “The Lower Realm has had a bad week.”

“So, it turns out, have I.” She went to the window. “What would you do?”

He always started with the cheapest thing. It was why she kept him.

“Make the quarter up in the Mid Realm,” he said. “From the districts. It can be done. It would cost us the four halls for good, and possibly a fifth, but it can be done.”

“The four halls already have people standing in them on Restdays.”

“Fewer than in Infernorest.”

“Fewer isn’t none.” She didn’t turn round. “If I take the quarter out of the Mid Realm, I take it out of the same districts that are already asking where last year’s went, and by Frostforge I’ll have a synod. I don’t want a synod. I want five hundred a quarter for a very long time, and I want nobody in the Mid Realm to have to wonder which road they came by.”

“Then from below. Another school.”

“Built where? Staffed by whom?” Now she did look at him. “I had six, Corvane. They took longer to make than most of those sisters have been alive. Every sister in every one of them was put there at seven and kept there until she was ready. I can’t buy that again before Shaolin opens, and I’m not going to try.”

He waited. He was good at that, too.

“And five hundred is a floor,” she said. “It has been five hundred for as long as anybody has kept the book. It has never once asked for less, and it will ask for more. I want a thousand a quarter, and the farms carrying it inside ten years, and enough over that to make pills for something besides the quarter.” She came away from the window. “That’s forty thousand children before the farms can stand on their own. And somebody to breed the farms from.”

“From the Lower Realm.”

“From the Lower Realm. Once.” She let that sit. “We don’t go and fetch them any more. That’s the mistake. We’ve been going down that road with carts and sisters, and a hall in every village for longer than anybody here remembers, and paying for every yard of it, and it took somebody one night to take it off us. So we stop going. We let them come up. All at once. And then we shut the door.”

“They won’t come up.”

“Some of them will. The ones who can pay.” She stood in front of him. “How many houses on that continent would buy a passage into the Mid Realm tomorrow, if they could?”

Corvane didn’t have to think. “Most of the ones with anything to sell.”

“And why don’t they?”

“Because the Temple holds the passage, and the Temple’s leave costs more than most of them can find. And because the ones who could find it like it down there. They’re large, down there.”

“Then we make it cheap. And we make it urgent.”

She’d had most of it worked out before the second pin, the first time, and the rest by the time the women had done it again. She gave it to him the way she’d have given it to a council, all at once and in order, because a man told a thing in pieces starts arguing with the first piece before he’s heard the last.

A noble house of the Lower Realm, any house, could buy the Temple’s leave to pass up through the gate. Its family. Its household. Everything it could carry. The price was not coin. The price was five of its own people under the age of twenty-five for every member of the family who went up, brought up the road with the household, and given into the Temple’s care at the top.

“Five a head,” Corvane said.

“Five for every name on the family roll.” She stepped closer to him, as she always did, and he didn’t step back, which was one of the few things about him she’d never decided whether she liked. “The houses that matter down there run to two and three hundred of the family. Their vassals and their bondmen and their knights’ sons run to thousands. Fifty of those houses is sixty thousand young people, and not one house in the fifty will miss them. The little ones are the quarter. The older ones are the farms.”

“The gate takes thirty at a time,” Corvane said. “Past eight desks.”

“Then the gate will learn to take more.” She didn’t look away from him. “The houses that owe us tithe will find the notes cancelled the morning they’re through. The houses that want a name in the Mid Realm will get one. And the houses that have a son in the Mid Realm at one of our schools will be told, very kindly, how well he’s doing, and how much he’d like to see his mother.”

Corvane wrote nothing down. He never did. “And the urgency?”

“The passage closes in one year,” Sharlin said. “And never opens again.”

He looked at her for a moment. It was as close as his face came to a question.

“Does it?” he asked.

“It does.” She smiled. “After that, the farms carry it, and I never have to send another cart down that road for as long as I live. Think about it from where they’re standing. A house on that continent has heard, its whole life, that there’s a war coming one day, and that it won’t be fought in the realms above. It’s heard it every winter at the table. It has never had to decide anything about it, because the door was always there and the price was always too high. Now the door has a date on it, and a price they can pay.” She spread her hands, the long nails catching the light. “I’m offering them their lives, Corvane. Whoever’s been mending that corps of theirs can’t offer them that. I can.”

“The young people.”

“Come up with them. Fed, in carts with roofs on, and written into your books at Ashmarch as part of a noble household. Your registrars write everything that comes in. Let them. A house through Ashmarch with its family, its servants, and twelve hundred young people of the household, under Temple escort. That’s one line, isn’t it?”

“One line,” Corvane agreed.

“Good.”

The drizzle had got heavier. It hissed on the stone outside, softly, across the terrace where nothing grew yet.

He was looking at the rain, not at her. “Who does the collecting?” he asked.

“They do.” She went back to the window. “Their own bailiffs. Their own levies. Their own stewards with their own lists. They know every family on their land, and which ones have children, and which ones owe them. They’ll be far better at it than we ever were. And when somebody’s son goes up the road, it’ll be his lord’s cart he goes in, not ours, and his lord’s name his mother curses.” She watched the water run off the wall. “We stop being the thing that takes. We become the thing that lets you leave.”

“When?”

“Now. A seal on every gate on that continent before the end of this month. The first carts on the road before Frostforge is out.” Her hand had closed on the sill. “I’m not waiting for spring with an empty quarter.”

+++

He didn’t go. She hadn’t dismissed him, and he’d read the last sheet as well as the first.

“There’s the other half of it,” he said.

“There is.”

“Lanhua asks who.” He left a pause, the length he always left, in case she wanted to fill it, and when she didn’t, he went on. “I’d say a house. One of the larger ones down there, that wanted the schools’ children for itself, or wanted the land the schools stood on. Or the villages. Somebody’s father finally went up to a gate with a pitchfork and found out how easy it was.”

Sharlin laughed. It wasn’t unkind. It was what she did with a wrong answer when the man who’d given it was useful.

“Read it again. Not what’s there. What isn’t.”

She’d done it with the pins going in. She did it again now, aloud, because Corvane was a man who believed what he heard said more than what he read.

“A village goes up to a gate with a pitchfork. What does it leave?” She didn’t wait. “It leaves a gateman with his head broken in the road, and it leaves him there, because it’s frightened and it’s angry and it wants us to see. It burns something. It takes the bell, or the good blankets. It talks about it in the taproom the same night. Lanhua’s people have been in every taproom in that province for a week, and there isn’t a word.”

“No.”

“A house.” She turned her hand over. “A house can’t afford a dead Temple man on its land. Every house down there pays our tithe and asks our leave to build a granary. It knows exactly what we do to a house that kills one of ours. So a house doesn’t do it at all, or it does it with a dozen hired men who drink the money afterward and tell somebody. And one of them always tells somebody.” She closed her hand. “Six schools. One night. The men gone, not left. Nothing taken. Nothing burned. Every woman taken alive, and then, a week later, somebody clever enough to sit them down and lie to them, and wait, and watch who comes to the shed.”

Corvane said nothing.

“You don’t leave no witnesses because you’re cruel,” Sharlin said. “Cruel people leave a great many. You leave no witnesses because you can afford to. Because you’ve done the arithmetic on what we’d do if we knew your face, and you’ve decided we don’t get to. And then you have the discipline to make every man in six valleys keep to it on one night, without one of them losing his head.” “That isn’t a village, and it isn’t a house. That’s somebody who’s already decided we’re the enemy, and doesn’t need us to know it yet.”

Corvane took his time over it. “The corps.”

“Possibly. Lanhua thinks so. A corps of what? Road-menders. Ditch-diggers. A school with a wall round it. They’ve been very good, down there, at being too dull to look at. Somebody’s been making them dull on purpose.” She thought about the last line before the figures. There’s a woman, they say. “Lanhua can stop testing their facts. Tell her to find out who taught them to be that tidy. Who has the discipline. And every man who stood on a door in those six valleys that night. Every one.”

“And when she has them?”

“I don’t want them dead.”

He waited.

“Dead is a morning’s work,” Sharlin said, “and then it’s over, and nobody down there learns anything from it but how to dig. I want them here. Every one of them. Alive, and brought to me, and put in the rooms under this house, and kept there.” Her voice was all the way up now, ringing off the stone of the window bay, and she didn’t care who in the corridor heard it. “I want them corrected. For years. I want them to understand, one at a time and very slowly, what it was they took. I want every one of them to wish he’d never heard the word Temple, and then to spend a long time being taught to say it properly. And I want that continent to know it’s happening. Not where. Not how. Only that it’s happening, and that it doesn’t stop.”

Corvane stood very still.

Then the voice came down again, all at once, back to warm, and she smiled at him as if he’d said something kind.

“Dead men teach nobody anything, Corvane.”

“Lanhua will need people,” he said.

“She’ll have them. I’ll send them down to her from here. Good ones.” She looked at him. “Alive. Tell them that before they go. All of them, alive.”

He didn’t ask which; he never did. “And page seven?”

“Stays live.” She said it lightly. “They’re students in law, and they’ll be students in law next year, and the year after. A paper doesn’t spoil. They have to come home sometime.”

She didn’t tell him it was the line in Lanhua’s four sheets she had read twice before the women came, or why. Corvane had never needed to know why, and he had never asked.

“It’ll be read as the Temple running away,” he said. “The ticket.”

“It’s the kindest thing the Temple has offered that continent in a thousand years,” Sharlin said. “Write it so they can see that.”

He bowed, which he did badly, and went out into the rain.

+++

At dusk she poured a glass of the dark wine from the north, and didn’t drink it, and stood at the long window with it in her hand. The drizzle had cleared. The cloud had pulled back off the hills below the terrace in long torn strips, and the sky had opened behind it, black and cold and very clear, the way it only was after rain at this height, and the first stars were out over the edge of the hills.

She had spent longer than she cared to count filling that continent with schools, a hall at a time, a sister at a time, and in one night somebody had emptied every one of them and closed the doors behind them and gone home, and hadn’t left so much as a footprint for her to be angry with.

“Who are you?” she asked the glass.

Nobody answered. The room was empty.

“You took eleven hundred and forty-two of mine in one night,” she said, “and you didn’t even want them. You don’t need them. You don’t know what they’re for.” Her voice was rising again, and there was nobody to hear it, so she let it go where it liked. “You think you saved them. You think you’re good.”

The wine shook in the glass. She looked at her own hand until it stopped.

Down there, by now, in every house that had the Temple’s tithe on its books, a lord would be sitting at his table not yet knowing what he’d be offered. Before the month was out, there would be a seal on his gate and a price he could pay. She’d made a great many people a great many offers, in a great many years. They nearly always took them. It was a mercy, and nobody had ever thanked her for one.

She set the glass on the sill, still full, and stood there with the pins still in until the stars had moved.