Chapter 543 - 542: The Turn of the Year

Chapter 543: Chapter 542: The Turn of the Year

Location:Seven Peaks — Residential Quarter, Command Center

Date/Time:TC1856.12.28 – TC1857.01.03

Elian was allowed out of bed on the twenty-fourth and was in the corridor on the twenty-fifth, which was three days earlier than Mira had written down and four days later than he had intended.

He could not stand for an hour any more. He managed about a quarter of one, and the corridor gave back every sound he made while he did it — the drag of a heel, the small wet click of a swallow, the long breath he took before he stopped pretending. Then he sat down against the wall with his legs out, which Mei permitted on the grounds that nobody had specified a posture, and which Aldis Stell reported without comment.

The stone was cold through his trousers. He did not mention that either.

What he told his mother, on the twenty-eighth, was that it had not got any bigger while he was in bed.

"You’re sure?"

"No." He was honest about it in the flat way he had learned from every adult he admired. "I’m sure it isn’t much bigger. I couldn’t check for two weeks, and I don’t know how fast it goes, so if it moved a little I wouldn’t catch it. That’s the true answer, and the other one would just be me wanting to give you good news."

The corridor smelled of lamp oil and the gray soap they used on the dormitory floors, and under it, faintly, of a nine-year-old who had been washed that morning and had been in bed for two weeks.

Raven put her hand on the top of his head for a second. His hair was still damp and warmer than the rest of him.

"That’s exactly the answer."

+++

Tianlei turned three at the turn of the year and there was a party, because Aldis Stell had raised the question at a staff meeting in the tone she used when she had already decided, and because nobody had been able to produce a reason against it that survived being said aloud.

The whole residential quarter smelled of hot sugar an hour before anybody arrived. The kitchens had produced a quantity of small cakes without being asked and had then produced a second batch on the grounds that the first had come out uneven, which nobody had complained about and which everybody ate.

It was held in the common room in the afternoon with the door open. There were fourteen children, and the noise came down the corridor in waves with troughs in it that were somehow louder, and a game involving a length of rope that Aren organized and then lost control of within four minutes.

Raven ate one of the cakes standing up. It was too sweet and still warm in the middle and she could not remember what she had eaten before it.

Nobody watched the birthday child in any way he could have noticed. That had been Raven’s only instruction and Mei had enforced it by the simple method of standing outside in the corridor being extremely bored.

Kael came.

He came late and stood at the back and did not approach, and when his son eventually noticed him and crossed the room at a dead run with cake in one fist, he crouched down and caught him and said something into his hair that nobody else in the room heard. The cake went onto the shoulder of a coat worth more than the room’s furniture. Kael did not appear to register this at any point in the following forty minutes.

He stayed forty minutes. He left before the game finished, which Raven noticed, and which she understood — a room stops being ordinary the moment the important person in it is being observed, and he had spent three years learning that lesson from the other side of it.

She passed him on the stair.

"Thank you."

"For what?"

"For the door being open."

Raven considered several answers and used none of them.

"He liked the rope game," she said, and went up.

***

The dispatch came in on the second of the new year, out of the northwest, and it did not come through the branch network because it did not belong to the branch network.

It came from the Wild Confederacy in a rider’s oilskin still cold from outside, still holding the smell of the animal and the road, with three separate seals on it and a covering note that made it clear the seals had been argued about. The wax had cracked across two of them and been thumbed flat again by somebody who had not been gentle about it. The oilskin creaked when Raven opened it, the way stiff leather does in a warm room.

Naida brought it up herself.

"You’ll want to be sitting down for page two."

"Give me page one, and I’ll decide."

"Page one is Speaker Kael-Ren’s compliments and a great deal of throat-clearing about the terms of the observation agreement." Naida handed it over. "Page two is a survey report from a place called Windbreak. Their people have been walking a section of the northern flats since the harvest because a cart track stopped being where they’d put it."

Raven read the second page standing up, and then read it again sitting down, which Naida noted.

Four kilometers of ground north-northeast of the settlement have gone even. No slump at the cut edges. No washout at the low points. The cattle track that ran across it for sixty years has straightened. Two of the old boundary cairns have settled into the surface and one of them is now flush with the ground and cannot be levered out.

We have measured it three times and the measurements agree.

We are told by our own people that this is not possible and we are not able to argue with them, so we are asking you instead, because two of your sheets described something like it and neither of them said it happened anywhere but under your mountain.

***

The council met on the third, in the hard white light of a room with too many windows and a winter standing behind all of them. Marcus had the continental survey out across two tables because it would not go on one, and the draft from the door kept lifting the western edge of it, and he kept putting cups down on the corners.

"Distance," Raven said.

Marcus had it ready. "Windbreak to the eastern edge of the hive is a little over eleven hundred kilometers. To the deep chamber, further. To the pressure point Silas put east of Ferrow’s Rest —" He stopped. "I’d want to say this carefully. The pressure point is east. Windbreak is northwest. If those two things are the same phenomenon, then the phenomenon is not radiating from a center that we have located."

"Or there’s more than one," Coop said.

Somebody’s chair moved. Nobody at the table had an answer for it.

"There’s a third option, and I want it said before anybody gets attached to the first two." Lin Yue had not sat down. "The northern flats may have been like that already. Not new. Just never measured, because who measures a cattle track. If somebody laid that much floor under this continent for reasons nobody can guess at, I would like to know how anybody at this table is confident that four hundred is the number."

"That’s not comforting."

"It isn’t intended to be. It’s the alternative that requires the fewest new things to be true, and I’d rather say it than have somebody else say it in six months."

***

Raven let it run for an hour and then closed it, because the useful part had finished and the part where frightened clever people build documents had begun.

"Three findings and an order.

"One. We do not know whether Windbreak is the same phenomenon, and we are not going to guess. Marcus, put a survey team on the Confederacy’s ground — a survey team, not a formation team, and they go with the Confederacy’s people and not instead of them, and everything they find goes to Windbreak first and to us second. This isn’t generosity. If the ground under their feet is doing something, it is their ground and their information, and I am not having this settlement be the place that decides what other people are allowed to know about their own country.

"Two. Silas, I want the eastern array extended west and north. I know what that costs. Do it anyway, and take the crystal out of my reserve rather than out of the wall allocation, and if anybody complains about the wall allocation, send them to me.

"Three." She stopped. "The Pillar Soul search is now the highest priority we have, above the walls, above the array, above everything except the sick and the children. We have three. We need five to seven more, and they have to be spread out, and we have been running a continental search through a dozen branch offices and a network of Guild riders, and that was adequate when I thought the problem was four hundred kilometers wide.

"It is not adequate for a continent, and I cannot make it adequate on my own authority, because most of the continent is not mine."

Nobody spoke for a moment.

"You want a summit," said Thorne.

"I want something worse than a summit. A summit is where sovereign powers agree to cooperate." Raven put both hands flat on the table, which was cold, which was the point of the room. "I need four sovereign powers to let me search their populations — to send strangers into their villages and their orphanages and their prisons, to find their people and then to tell those people to stay exactly where they are and never come here. I need the Empire to accept that some of its subjects are strategically decisive and will never be moved to the capital. I need the Northern Clans, who have no magic whatsoever and know exactly what everybody thinks about that, to believe there might be an anchor standing in one of their valleys.

"That is not cooperation. That is asking four governments to hand me a category of person they have never heard of, on my word, forever."

"And the argument you’d make?" asked Naida.

"That it doesn’t work any other way. Distributed or nothing. And that they can check the arithmetic themselves, because they get all of it — including the parts that are guesses and the parts where I was wrong." She looked around the table. "There’s one person in this settlement who can get me into those rooms, and he lives two floors above the diplomatic annex and has been doing his job in good faith for three years while I declined to speak to him.

"I’m going to speak to him now. That is a professional decision, and I’d like it minuted as one, because it is going to be misread up and down this mountain inside a day and I would rather the record be clear."

***

She sent for him properly — through Marcus Vale, in writing, at a stated hour, with the subject named — because doing it any other way would have made it a personal event, and it was not one.

Kael came at the hour and read the Windbreak survey, and for four minutes the only sounds were paper and, twice, the noise a man makes when he has decided not to say a thing yet. Two floors below, somebody was moving furniture in the annex, and it came up through the boards the whole time they talked.

He put the survey down.

"You want the Compact."

"I want the search."

"You want the search, and the search requires the Compact, and the Compact requires four governments to sign something none of them will sign." He said it without any relish at all. "I’ve had a draft of it in a drawer for three years."

Raven looked at him.

"Say that again."

"I wrote it the winter after the golden rain. Not this — a defense compact, mutual survey rights, shared response. It was a bad draft, and it was premature, and there wasn’t a single power on this continent that had a reason to sign it." Kael’s hands stayed still on the table. "I’ve revised it nine times since, and it’s better, and it still doesn’t work, because a compact is a thing you build when everybody is already frightened of the same object, and until this month there hasn’t been an object that all four of them could see."

"And now?"

"Now four kilometers of a Confederacy cattle track have gone flat, and the Confederacy has written to you about it rather than to their own geologists, and that is the single most useful diplomatic fact I have had in three years." He looked up. "But you should understand what you’re asking me to do, because it isn’t what you think it is.

"You think I’m going to get you into rooms. I can do that. The Empire will receive you because my father will make it receive you, and the Confederacy is already talking to you, and the Federation will come because they always come. That’s the easy part, and it’s the part everyone assumes is hard."

"Then what’s the hard part?"

"The hard part is that you are going to have to sit at a table with the Emperor of the Eastern Empire, and I am going to be in that room, and everybody in it will know what stands between us." Kael’s voice did not change. "There is no version of this where that is not the loudest thing in the room. Not the flattening. Not the Pillar Souls. That. And if we do not decide in advance how we are going to handle it, four governments will spend the summit reading it instead of reading the survey."

Raven sat with that for a while.

"You’ve thought about this before today."

"I’ve thought about it for three years," said Kael. "It’s why the draft is in a drawer."

***

She went up to the terrace afterward. The cold took the skin off her face in the first three steps, the way it did at the turn of the year, and the rail was cold enough through her sleeves that leaning on it was a decision rather than a habit.

Kairos was there with his ribs still strapped and an expression she could not immediately place.

"You were listening."

"I was two rooms away and making no effort not to." He handed her the cup he had been holding, which was, for once, still hot, and which meant he had been timing it. "How was it?"

"Efficient." Raven wrapped both hands around it and let them hurt for a moment. The tea had been left too long and tasted of the iron in the water, and she drank it anyway. "He was right about all of it, including the part I hadn’t got to. He’s been carrying a draft treaty since the winter after the golden rain and never once mentioned it, because there was nobody to sign it and mentioning it would have looked like asking me for something."

"That is a considerable quantity of restraint."

"It’s three years of it." She drank again. "Say the thing you came out here to say."

"I have two, and you will like neither." Kairos leaned on the rail, and then stopped leaning on the rail, because leaning turned out to involve the ribs. "The first is that this is the correct decision and that you will be extremely bad at it, because you are about to spend a year doing the one thing you have never once managed on any world I have watched, which is to ask a great many powerful people for permission.

"The second is smaller and worse." He looked northwest, where a very long way off a cattle track had straightened. "You have spent four months learning to think about a floor four hundred kilometers across. Everybody in this settlement has. We have all of us built our heads around that number." A pause. "And a Confederacy surveyor with a rule and a cart track has just suggested that the number was never four hundred. It was only as far as a nine-year-old could reach."

Raven did not say anything for long enough that the tea went from too hot, to right, to only warm.

"Say the rest of it."

"There is no rest of it. I have nothing." He reported it the way he reported everything he could not do, flatly, as a matter of stock. "I have stood on that floor. I have put my hands on it. I cannot tell you who laid it or how long ago or what it was for, and I am not going to invent something to fill the space, because you would build on it, and then other people would stand on what you built."

"I know."

"You know, and you will ask me again in a month."

"I’ll ask you again in a week."

He laughed, which was a mistake and which he recognized as a mistake roughly half a second after committing to it. One hand went flat against his side. He breathed through the consequence in short, careful amounts, with his eyes shut, and did not accept the arm she offered because accepting it would have required admitting the arm was necessary.

"Mira said six weeks," Raven said.

"Mira said six weeks in the tone people use when they have added two on for a specific patient."

"She had. She told me she was going to."

The wind moved along the terrace and took the steam off the cup and went on down the mountain. Raven shifted along the rail until she was against him — on the unstrapped side, because she was not an idiot — and stayed there, and after a moment his arm came around her shoulders and settled, and the weight of it was the first thing in four days that had asked nothing of her.

"A year of asking permission," she said.

"At minimum."

"In rooms with him."

"In rooms with him, and with an Emperor, and with a Confederacy that has just discovered it prefers writing to you over writing to its own geologists, which you should understand is the most dangerous compliment you have ever received." His thumb moved once against her shoulder. "They will all want to know what you are. Every one of them. And you will have to give them an answer that is true and is also not the true one, in front of four governments, for a year."

She opened her mouth.

What came out, after a while, was: "Four hundred was a comfortable number."

"It was an arithmetical number. That is not the same thing, and you knew the difference at the time." He did not turn his head. "You are permitted to have wanted it to be four hundred. It cost you nothing and it let you sleep for a season, and I would not give that back either."

Her hand had closed hard on the iron. She made it let go.

The wind came up off the eastern slope and, for the first time in a great many months, Raven found herself turning to look the other way.