Chapter 628: Nine Months

Location: Corran — the Temple grain store, and a barn on the Kaelport road

Date: 11–12 Emberwane 9943 AZI, Grindday to Restday

Realm: Lower Realm

Barley went into a sack well or badly, and you could tell which with your hand.

Vukan Sered had his palm flat on the fortieth sack in the Corran store and was feeling for the give in it. A sack filled well was firm all the way down, the grain settled and packed, and it took the weight of a hand without moving. A sack filled badly had air in the top quarter, and the air was where a carter’s thumb went, and after a season of thumbs there was a column on a page somewhere that did not agree with the floor.

This one was firm. A mark went in the ledger, and he moved on to the forty-first.

It was the second time through. The steward had done the first count with him on Hammerday and had got sixty-three, and Vukan had got sixty-three, and the book said sixty-four. One sack was a small thing. It had taken him a long time to learn that the small thing was the only thing anybody ever tried to hide, because the large things could not be hidden and so nobody bothered.

The store was cold. Frost had got in under the door in a gray fan, and nobody had swept it. His breath went out white over the sacks and his hands were stiff, and he did not hurry, because a man who hurried a count was a man who would have to do it a third time.

Sixty-three. Down it went, and under it, in the small hand he kept for things that were not yet findings, one short, cause not known. Then he sat down on the end of the bench by the door and looked at the number for a while.

“You do it properly,” a woman said from the doorway. “I was told you did.”

Her step had not reached him. That happened to him less than it used to. Since the mountain, he heard most things, as a man who has slept a year in a bad place hears every board on a stair, and he did not like that she had got as far as the door.

She was a small woman in plain good wool, dark hair put up simply, no Temple robe and no mark of any house on her. There was one gold thread at the cuff of her left sleeve. From the thread his eyes went to her face, and her face was warm, and the warmth went all the way up into her eyes.

“Sered,” she said. “Vukan Sered. Provisioning, the Corran circuit. Four years on the roads, and the other half of every year with us.” She came in a step and stopped, as though the store were his house. “My name is Lanhua.”

The name he knew. He had known it at the Academy, from the back of a lecture hall, and everybody on the eastern roads knew it now, since Hammerday at Kaelport. Because she had not sat down, he stood up and put the ledger under his arm.

“Instructor.”

“Not anymore.” She smiled. “I read your report, you know. The one about Anseth.”

The Anseth report had not gone to the Temple. It had gone to seven houses, and only seven, and he had burned the first two drafts himself. How she had read it, he did not ask. More likely than not, one of the seven had sent it on, and he found that he minded that less than he expected.

“Nobody argued against the Temple at Anseth,” she said. “That is the finding. I’ve thought about that sentence a great deal. I’ve been thinking about it for most of the year.”

“It was the finding.”

“Yes. It was.” She looked at the sacks. “Is it short?”

“One.”

“Will you find it?”

“Probably. Or I will find that it was never there, and somebody wrote sixty-four because the last book said sixty-four.” He put his hand flat on the ledger. “Instructor, why are you in a grain store in Corran on a Grindday?”

She laughed at that. It was a real laugh. It did not sound practiced, which he had expected it to.

“Because you’re the only man on this continent I can ask a question about flour,” she said. “And I’d like to ask it somewhere warmer. Is there a fire anywhere in this town?”

+++

There was a fire in the back room of the waystation, which was where the carters drank, and at that hour on a Grindday the carters were all on the road. The keeper brought two cups of something hot and went away. Lanhua held hers in both hands and did not drink it.

“Six schools,” she said. “Do you know about the schools?”

“The Temple keeps schools. For the ones who test well.”

“Yes. Six of them, in this realm. In valleys, out of the way. The children who read well went to them, and were taught, and were kept warm, and were fed.” She turned the cup a little. “On the night of the twenty-fourth of Flamefade, all six were emptied. In one night. The children were taken out of every one, and the women who taught them, and nothing was burned, and nothing was broken, and nobody has seen two of the gatemen or a carter since.”

What she had said went into his head as a column, because it was the only way he knew to hold a thing that size. Six schools. One night. Nothing burned. Two gatemen and a carter, not seen.

“How many children?” he asked.

“Eleven hundred and forty-two.”

He looked at her. She did not look away, and she did not soften it, and he gave her credit for that.

“Who took them?”

“I don’t know.” She did not soften that either. “Nobody broke a door. Nobody was seen on a road. Whoever did it knew those valleys better than we did, and I’m not going to sit here and give you a name I can’t put in front of a magistrate.” She put the cup down. “Here is the part I came about, Sered. It’s been seventeen days. Not one mother of those eleven hundred children has been told where her child is. Not by anybody. Not one.”

Something else had been on his tongue. It stayed there.

“Whoever has them has not told them,” he said.

“Not by anybody,” Lanhua repeated. “Not by us, and not by whoever has them. They have them somewhere. And there are eleven hundred families in four provinces who haven’t been told a single thing.”

A word had come into his head while she spoke, and he did not say it. He kept it for the columns.

Somebody should have been asked. That sentence he had written once, in the last line of a report, and had nearly burned the report for it, because it was not a finding and he did not put things that were not findings in reports. It had stayed in because it was true.

Hollis came into his head, on the street at Anseth, perfectly welcome and perfectly unnecessary, saying it is no trouble to people who had not needed him to take any. Then the square with no heat in it. The baths and the road and the herbs he had seen with his own eyes, and not once had he thought them bad things. He did not think so now. A good thing done to people who had not been asked was still done to them.

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

“I want to know where they are.” Lanhua leaned forward a little. “Eleven hundred children eat. Every day. Bread, and porridge, and oil in the lamps, and wool, and soap. That doesn’t come out of the air. Somebody is buying it, and somebody is carting it, and somewhere on this continent there’s a number that doesn’t agree with another number.” She smiled at him. “You read numbers that don’t agree. It’s the only thing anybody has ever said about you that wasn’t about your manners.”

“My manners are adequate.”

“They’re very good. I’ve been watching you be polite to a sack of barley.”

He did not smile, because he did not as a rule, but he found that he wanted to, and he marked it.

“I am not quick with figures,” he said. “I should say that before you go any further. If you want it by tonight, you want another man.”

“Then I want it right.”

“That I can do.” He turned his cup on the table. “I will not be paid for it.”

“I wasn’t going to offer.”

“Somebody will. I am telling you now so that when they do, you will already know the answer.” He put his right hand flat on the table between them, the one with the white scar across the palm, and looked at it rather than at her. “I have never taken a coin from the Temple for anything that was not my wage. I will not start over children.”

“Yes,” Lanhua said. “Which is why I came to you.”

She reached into her coat then and took out a folded sheet, and smoothed it on the table, and turned it round so it faced him. It was a copy of something legal, in a clerk’s hand. At the head of it was the old seal of the Academy, and under that the words Page seven. The custodial provision. And under that, two names.

Jayde Ashford. Eden of Millhaven.

“These two are on the Academy’s books,” Lanhua said. “Students, in law. The Temple has the right to take them into its care. We think they know where the children are. We think one of them gave the order.” She tapped the first name, lightly, with one finger. “That one.”

Vukan looked at the name, and something in his chest went still.

He knew it, and not from a page. He knew it from a long way down and a long time ago, from a voice in the dark saying a number, and a slight figure at the front of the line with her back to all of them. The set of her shoulders he knew, and the way she had of standing on the left foot when she was thinking. He had stood behind that back for nine months.

“I know her,” he said.

Lanhua went quite still. “From where?”

He opened his mouth to say it, and it was not there.

The shape of the sentence was there. It began with the place, and the place had a name, and he knew the name as well as his own. When he reached for it his hand closed on nothing at all, as it did every time, and the sentence went out from under him like a step in the dark. It had been happening for most of a year. Long ago he had decided that it was some kind of grief, or the bad air down there, or his own poor schooling, and that it would mend. It had not mended.

“I knew her,” he said. “Some time ago. I do not—” He stopped. “I cannot tell you where. I am sorry. I find I cannot.”

Lanhua didn’t answer at once. Her face did not change. The warmth stayed exactly where it was, and he had the sense, which he did not enjoy, of a woman writing something down without a pen.

“All right,” she said. “It doesn’t matter where. It matters that you’d know her.” She folded the sheet again, and put it away. “Will you look at the flour?”

“Yes,” he said.

+++

He worked through the night, because there was no reason not to and a good many reasons to.

The keeper’s back room was his, with a lamp and the bench, and he had his own books, which were four years of them, and the book he had been keeping since Cinderfall, which was the one he did not show anybody. Since Cinderfall he had been watching the eastern supply as a man watches a river he means to dam, and he had written down every cart on the Corran and Anseth roads that he could see or hear about. Most of the carters he knew by the sound of their loads, and he knew which factors paid on time and which paid in paper, and which paper was good.

No hurrying. It went into columns, as it always did, and through every column twice.

Grain bought at the Corran market by factors with good paper. Grain bought at Anseth. Oil, salt, lamp oil, soap. Wool in plain undyed lengths, a great deal of it, more than the corps had ever bought in one season, in lengths that were wrong for a man’s coat and right for something smaller. Carters hired by the week. And every one of those carts went the same way, on the Kaelport road, and unloaded at the same place, which was the long shed at the bottom of the corps’ yard.

That was not strange in itself. The corps ate. Three months he had spent learning exactly how much the corps ate, because it was the thing he had been trying to make harder.

So he took what the corps ate, which he knew to within a few sacks a week, and he took away what went into the long shed, and he looked at what was left over.

The first time through, he did not believe it, and he did it again.

On the second pass, the number was the same. Since the third week of Flamefade, the long shed at Kaelport had been taking in bread and oil and wool for the corps, and for something over twelve hundred people more, and none of it came out again. No cart left that yard carrying what had gone in. Nothing went up the north road or the coast road heavier than it had come. It went into the back of the long shed and it stopped.

He sat back on the bench and looked at the lamp.

It was the eighteenth of Flamefade when it started. Three times he checked that, because it mattered, and it did not move. The schools had been emptied on the twenty-fourth. Somebody had begun feeding twelve hundred extra mouths six days before there were any mouths to feed.

That was not a mob. That was not angry fathers with a cart. That was a column somebody had set out properly, ahead of time, as he would have set it out himself.

Admiring it surprised him, and he wrote that down too, in the small hand, because it was true and he did not leave true things out.

When the gray came into the window, he wrote the finding out in full. The first draft was too long and had an adjective in it, and he burned it in the lamp. The second draft said what the columns said and said nothing about what he thought of the people who had made them, and he read it over and decided it was correct, and he did not burn it.

The third copy was for him, folded into the back of his own book, the book buttoned into his coat.

Lanhua came at first light. She did not knock. She sat down across from him, and he slid the second draft across the table, and she read it twice, once fast and once slowly, and then she looked up.

“More people are eating than live anywhere,” Vukan said. It was the whole of it. “They go into the long shed at Kaelport. I cannot tell you where they go after that. Nothing comes out.”

“Nothing at all?”

“None that weighs what went in.” He touched the date in the margin. “And it started six days before the schools.”

Lanhua looked at the date for a long time. The warmth did not leave her face, but something under it moved, and settled, and he watched it settle.

“They had somewhere ready,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Thank you.” She folded the sheet and put it away with the other one. “I’d like you to come and meet some people. They’ve come a long way. They’ll want to hear it from you.”

+++

The barn was on the Kaelport road, an hour out of Corran, a hay barn with the hay mostly gone and a good roof. There were horses in the near end, eight of them, good horses, not post horses. The men were at the far end.

There were eight of them as well. Vukan counted them twice, because it was what he did.

They were in plain coats, traveling coats, the kind any factor wore on the eastern roads, and they were standing. Not one of them was sitting, though there were bales enough to sit on. They had been standing when he came in, and they did not change it. Their packs were along the wall in a straight line. Not one of them carried a ledger. Vukan looked for one, because a man going a long way to do a thing usually carried a book to do it in, and there was none anywhere.

Lavender came off them. Faintly, under the horse and the hay. The Temple’s linen smelled of lavender in every house it kept, and he had slept in enough of those houses to know it in the dark.

And the air at that end of the barn was wrong.

It was close. It was the closeness before a storm, when the sky is clear, and the dogs will not come out from under the cart. Once before he had felt it, a long way down, coming off the ones at the front of the line who had more in them than the rest. Not once since. Now it came off eight men at once, standing in the hay in their factors’ coats, and the hair rose along both his arms and stayed up.

Never in his life had he been afraid of a man, and he observed, carefully, that he was not afraid now. He was something else, and he did not have the word for it yet.

Lanhua did not come down to the far end. She stopped in the middle of the barn by the last of the hay, where the light from the door ended.

“This is Sered,” she said. “He found it.”

One of the eight came forward a step. Older than the rest, gray at the temples, with a narrow, ordinary face. His hands hung at his sides and did not move at all. Vukan could not remember when he had last seen a man’s hands that still.

“From the start,” the man said.

Vukan gave it to them from the start. Plainly, as he had written it, adding nothing. The long shed. The twelve hundred. Nothing coming out. The eighteenth of Flamefade. When he was done, nobody said anything for a moment.

“Thank you,” the man said. “That’s very good work.”

“It is adequate work,” Vukan said. “It was a column. Anybody who sat down with it could have done it.”

“Nobody did.” The man looked at him. “You’ll come with us. We’d like somebody who knows the roads and the yard. Somebody who’d know a face.”

So Lanhua had told them that too. Vukan looked at her, in the light by the door. She did not look away.

“What are your names?” he asked the man.

“We don’t give them.”

“Then I will call you what I call you.” He took his book out of his coat, and his pencil, and opened the book to a clean page at the back. “Before I go anywhere, I have conditions. I set them out for the seven houses in Cinderfall, and they signed them, and I will set them out for you.”

Somebody behind the older man moved a fraction. The older man did not turn his head, and the movement stopped.

He nodded once.

Vukan wrote, and said it as he wrote, because a thing said aloud while it was being written was harder to argue about afterward.

“One. I take no money. Not now and not after. If anybody offers it to me, I will refuse it in writing and send the refusal to whoever made the offer.

“Two. Nobody is hurt. Not a child, not a woman, not a man of the corps. I will take you to the yard and show you where the carts go. I will not be part of anybody being hurt.

“Three. The mothers are told first. Before anything else is done with the children, every family is told where its child is. Every one.

“Four. I write down everything I see, and I keep the copy.”

He turned the book round and held it out, with the pencil.

The older man took the pencil. Not once did he look down at the page; his eyes stayed on Vukan’s face the whole time, and he wrote something at the foot of the four lines without glancing at them once, and handed the book and the pencil back.

Vukan looked at the page. There was a mark at the bottom, small and neat, that was not a name.

The man had not read it. Vukan noticed that very clearly, as he would have noticed a sack with air in the top quarter. Then he closed the book, and buttoned it into his coat with the finding, and did not examine what he had noticed, because the man had signed and there was nothing in the column to say a signature was worth less for being made quickly.

“Thank you,” the older man said. “We leave in an hour.”

By the door, Lanhua turned and went out into the light without saying anything. Vukan watched her go. For a moment, he thought, she had looked as though she meant to come back down the barn and say one more thing. She had not.

The air at the far end was still close. He went and stood in it anyway, because he had said he would come, and he did what he said.