Chapter 549 - 548: Nothing to Push Against

Chapter 549: Chapter 548: Nothing to Push Against

Location:Wild Confederacy — Settlement Windbreak; The Northern Flats

Date/Time:TC1857.02.01 – TC1857.02.04

The cold at Windbreak got in through the soles first.

Raven had come down outside the gate rather than inside it, because arriving over a wall was a thing you did to people you were not asking anything of, and the moment her boots took her weight, the ground handed her the winter entirely. Frozen to a hand’s depth and no further. Under that, something that took the print of her heel and kept it.

The gate woman looked at her for the length of a breath and then went away and came back with a bowl.

Sour milk with turf in the back of it. Cold roast bird, the leg, still on the bone. Raven stood in the wind with her hands full and ate it, and did not ask for a chair and was not offered one, and the woman waited until the bowl was empty before she said anything at all.

"You’ll be the one who wrote the pages."

"I am."

"Then you’ll want the Speaker." She took the bowl back. "He’s been up since the middle of the night. Not on account of you."

***

Kael-Ren read the three pages standing, in the open, with his coat unfastened and the wind taking the corners, and he read them twice. Builder’s hands, cracked across the knuckles. He did not sit, and he did not invite her to.

When he was done, he squared the sheets against his thigh and gave them back.

"You wrote the part about not being cleared."

"I did."

"By hand."

"By hand." Raven put them inside her coat. "Somebody was going to fair-copy it and improve it. Nobody’s hand between what you were told and what you’re told next. That was the whole reason."

He considered that with no expression she could read. Behind him, the settlement was already at work in the half-light, and the sound of it was ordinary — planking, a cart axle, somebody arguing with an animal.

"The fourth page." He had not asked about it and had clearly been waiting to.

"That one isn’t for you. It’s for Marn’s sister, and I’d rather deliver it myself, if she’ll have me. If she won’t, it goes with whoever she’d rather take it."

"She’ll have you." He looked past her at the gate. "She’ll be unpleasant about it."

"She’s entitled."

"She is." He started walking, and she went with him because that was evidently the shape of it here. "You brought the mortal."

Kairos was standing at the edge of the trodden ground where the cart tracks came in, looking at the northern flats with an expression she had learned to distrust. He had a hand pressed flat under his ribs on the left side, which he did when he thought nobody was watching and had done since the turn of the year.

"He brought himself," Raven answered. "I lost the argument in about a minute."

***

"The healer cleared me on the twenty-second," Kairos said when she reached him. "You may verify it. She wrote it on a card, which I found unnecessary."

"You’ve been holding your side since I got out."

"That is a separate matter, and it is the cold." He said it the way another man might report a structural failure. "The cold has an opinion about the ribs. The ribs have an opinion about the cold. Neither of them consults me. I want it understood that I am cleared."

"Understood."

She put her arm through his, and he let her, and they stood a moment looking north at nothing.

Because there was nothing. That was the difficulty with looking at it. The northern flats went out from the last of the Windbreak fences and simply continued, and the eye kept sliding off because there was no place for it to catch. No hummock. No stone. Nothing broken through and nothing standing up.

"You’ve got that face."

"I’m looking at ground."

"You are looking at the ground the way you look at a room with somebody in it you have not decided about."

She did not answer that, and he did not push it, and after a while he moved his shoulder until it was against hers, which was as near as he got to insisting.

***

Torva took her out along the pegged line the next morning with a dozen of her own on it and two of Marcus Vale’s.

"Vennik, you know from the paper," Torva said. "Halla, you know from the paper as well. She’s been told to sit down, and she hasn’t."

"I sat down for a week," Halla said. Ditch-digger’s shoulders on her, a limp on the right from a hip that had gone into a trench and come out again. "The hip’s mine to sit on. I’ll sit on it when I’ve walked the line."

Vennik shook Raven’s hand and did it too hard, the way a man does when he has spent a long journey rehearsing. Narrow through the chest, a permanent apologetic stoop, and a satchel of rules and sieve trays strapped so tightly across his back that it made him look like something being delivered.

They walked out.

The survey line ran northeast, following the long axis Naida’s overlay had found, and it was pegged at fifty-pace intervals with cord strung between, and the cord was the only thing on that whole plain that had a shadow.

Raven felt it in the second kilometer, the thing Naida’s report had described from the inside. The corrections stopped. On any ground, a body made a thousand small adjustments a minute and never noticed one of them, and out here there was nothing to adjust to, and the walking became a repetition rather than a negotiation. Her stride came out the same length every time. It was restful in a way that made the back of her neck crawl.

But that was not the thing she noticed, because she had never in any life walked anywhere without also reading it for a fight.

She stopped and set her back foot and turned into it, hard, the way she would to come off a line into a strike.

The ground took her heel and kept it and gave her nothing back.

"Hm."

Torva watched her do it a second time. "What are you finding?"

"It doesn’t push." Raven shifted her weight and felt the whole small history of the movement arrive nowhere. "Every step you take, the ground shoves you back the same amount you shove it. That’s what walking is. That’s what everything is. You don’t get it here. You get about half of it, and then the rest goes off sideways into the material."

"It’s the grading," Vennik offered. "There’s no key in it. Nothing’s locked to anything. It’s builder’s fill that nobody’s ever compacted, all the way down to a meter eighty and probably past."

"Is it dangerous?"

She should have asked it as an open question. She heard herself do it as she did it and did not correct it, because she had already made her mind up, and that was where it went wrong, and she would think about it for a long time afterward.

"It’s dangerous to cut," Vennik answered. "We’ve paid for that. Standing on it is only — awkward."

"Awkward." Raven took two more steps and disliked all of them. "It’s a nuisance. It’s a floor. You’d not want to run on it."

"You’d not want to run on it," Torva agreed.

And that went into the day’s record, in Vennik’s hand, on the second sheet, because he wrote down everything anybody said out there: ground reads as a floor; footing awkward, not hazardous; no action. Raven watched him write it. She let it stand, and never asked for a question mark after it.

She had bound herself in writing, twice inside a month, to hand people her guesses along with her findings.

That was a guess. It went out as a finding, and she was the one who made it one.

***

They came on the second evening, and the sky still had color in the west.

Raven felt them before anything else on the plain did — nine of them, moving on the long axis out of the northeast, and the reason the warning was short was that there was nothing else alive out there for them to be mistaken for. Empty ground reads clean. She got perhaps forty seconds.

She was already turning. "Nine. Northeast. On us."

Then she was running, and the plain took that away from her too.

Her first stride went down, and the material moved under the ball of her foot, and her second stride had to be spent recovering from the first. She could not drive. She could not lengthen. She was running the way a person runs in a dream, at speed, going nowhere near fast enough, and the far peg where Vennik was working was two hundred paces out and might as well have been in another province.

They came out of the dusk with no sound.

None. Nine animals crossing frozen fill toward people strung out over half a kilometer of cord, and the only sound out there was the survey cord in the wind.

Wet-slate plates, offset and staggered, the dorsal built up half again over the spine and the shoulder ridge and the whole upper surface. Flanks gone thin where the plate turned under. Sensory hairs standing out around the head-plate in a fringe. The size of a big dog and the mass of something that had no business moving that quietly.

Raven had a sheet of fire in her hands before she had finished the thought, and did not use it.

Her people were in among them. Halla was six paces from the nearest animal, and Vennik was under one, and there was no line she could burn that did not have somebody standing in it, and she had come out onto a plain with no cover, no stone building, no walls, and no place to put anybody where fire would not also go.

She had spent a month telling other people not to be clever privately. She could hear the exact sentence in her own voice.

She threw one narrow line, low and flat, at the animal furthest from anyone. It went in at the flank where the plate turned under, and the thing came apart in the middle and the smell of vinegar and hot metal rolled downwind, and that was one.

Then she was still a hundred and eighty paces away.

***

Windbreak had the measure. Naida had carried it north with her and read it out at the pavilion on the day she arrived, twice, both paragraphs, in the same size, the warning included. Halla could have recited it.

Low. From the side. Under the body where the plate turns beneath. Two fingers of feathered edge, then hide. In bent, not straight, and open it pulling.

Vennik did it correctly.

Raven saw the whole of it, running and getting nowhere, and there was not one thing wrong with what he did. He dropped his satchel, went to one knee, ducked his head and shoulder under the turn of the animal’s body with his elbow bent the way eight survivors of the settlement on the Millford road had told the continent to bend it. He had his knife in the right place. He was pulling.

He set his back foot to drive.

And the ground took it.

Not a slip. There was nothing so honest as a slip. The fill simply accepted his weight and moved, the same way it had accepted a trench wall and moved, smooth and fast and all at the same speed, and Vennik’s whole drive went off into a meter of screened material and never came back, and instead of coming up under the animal he stayed exactly where he was with his arm inside it and the animal on top of him.

It killed him while he was doing the correct thing.

Halla reached him. She had a ditching hook in her fist, and she went in the way she had gone into every cut of ground since she was seven, low and sideways, hip first, and she opened the animal’s flank from the turn of the plate to the shoulder in one pull. It went down over Vennik, and she got her hook into the second one behind it and opened that too.

The third one took her from the side while she was still turned.

She got her boot down to brace, and the plain gave her the same nothing it had given Vennik, and she went over onto the bad hip, and she was still working when it came onto her, and Raven was ninety paces away.

***

Torva did not go to them.

Raven saw her make the decision and understood what it cost her and did not have breath to say so. Torva turned and ran the other way — back down the cord to the peg cart, and she came off it dragging boards.

Planking. The cheap sawn stuff they used for shuttering the peg holes, ten of them strapped in a bundle, and she cut the strap with her belt knife and started throwing them flat on the fill in a line, and she was shouting while she did it, and what she was shouting was not help and was not run.

"On the boards! Get on the boards! Nothing holds out here, get on the wood!"

Raven hit the near end of that line of planks at a dead run, and the wood took her weight and gave it back, and it was like being handed her own body.

She had ground. It was three fingers thick, and it moved under her, and it was ground.

She went off it into the animal that had Halla, took it through the flank with a line drawn so tight it made the air over it shake, and came down out of the follow-through onto a plank Torva had thrown a half second before she needed it.

Kairos arrived at the same moment and did it badly.

He came in with the sword high because he did not know any better. He was strong past anything on that plain, and he had no more idea what to do with a blade than a man who had spent a very long time watching other people use one, and the edge came down on the dorsal lamination and did precisely what a mattock did. A flat chock. No crack in it. The whole force going somewhere other than through.

The animal turned into him. He got his shoulder into it and put it over, which no swordsman would have needed to do, and no swordsman could have done, and then he simply knelt on it and drove the point down into the flank two-handed until it stopped, and his ribs made him pay for the second and third and fourth of those, and she heard it in the sound he made.

"Cleared," he reported, from the ground.

"Not now."

"Cleared on the twenty-second."

They killed three more off the planks.

Torva threw the boards. That was the whole of it. She stayed at the cart end, and she threw them where people needed to stand, one at a time, and every one of them was thrown to a place a person had not reached yet, which meant she was reading the fight fast enough to be a half second ahead of it.

The final animal came down the cord line behind her while she was turned away with her arms full.

Raven crossed forty paces on wood and got there in time to kill it and not in time to make that matter.

***

Nine carcasses. Three dead.

They carried them in on the peg cart, and Windbreak came out through the gate to meet it, and nobody at Windbreak asked anybody anything before the bodies were down.

Raven stood at the pavilion end while it happened, and did the arithmetic, and made herself finish it.

Nine animals. Three of Windbreak’s and Marcus Vale’s dead — Vennik, Halla, Torva — and six others hurt, two of them badly. Sixteen carcasses opened at the flank by farmers on the Millford road in about a minute, on flagged floor and frozen field. Two opened at the flank here, both of them by Halla, both of them in the first ten seconds before the ground had finished teaching anybody anything.

The measure had not failed. It had worked exactly as written, everywhere it had been physically possible to perform it, which on that plain was almost nowhere.

Kael-Ren came out with a lamp and stood over Torva for a while without saying anything, and then came down the line to where Raven was.

"Say it out here," he said. "Whatever it is. You’ll not do it in a room and hand me the paper after."

So she said it standing, in the cold, in front of about sixty people, with the cart still being unloaded behind her.

"I walked that line yesterday morning, and I tested the footing with my own feet, and I said it was a nuisance. Vennik wrote that down because I said it, and it went in the day’s record as a finding, and it was not a finding. It was a guess I made in about ten seconds because I have fought on a great deal of ground and I assumed this was ground." She kept her hands at her sides. "The measure we published requires you to close, get low, and drive off your back foot. There is no back foot out there. I am the person who published the measure, and I am the person who walked the ground, and I did not put those two things next to each other, and three of your people did it correctly and died doing it correctly."

Nobody said anything. Somewhere behind her, a board was set down.

"It goes out tonight, everywhere, over my name," Raven said. "The flank measure does not work on the flat ground. Anyone standing on this material fights off planking or does not fight. And the second line on that sheet is going to say that we found this out because I was asked whether the footing was dangerous and I answered the question instead of leaving it open, and I would like that printed the same size as the rest of it."

Kael-Ren looked at her for a long moment with the lamp down by his knee.

"That’s the one you’d have been tempted not to say."

"That’s the one."

***

They buried them the next day, which was how it was done here, and Windbreak fed everybody at the gate first, including the people carrying the shovels.

Raven found Naida afterward at the pavilion wall, where the settlement map and the overlay were still weighted flat on the boards with stones from somebody’s wall, because there were none to be had from the ground.

"Silas asked for her by name," Naida said. "Four days ago. She’d have said yes."

"I know."

"She threw boards at a problem for eleven seconds and worked out how to hold that material back with three fingers of sawn pine, and then she died at the wrong end of the cart." Naida did not take her eyes off the map. "Somebody is going to have to build the casing rig without her."

"Somebody is." Raven put her hand flat on the boards and left it there, and the wood pushed back against her palm, and she stood for a moment, simply feeling a thing push back. "We’ll write to Ferrow’s Rest tonight as well. Everything we’ve said about that ground was said by people who were walking on it. Nobody has ever fought on it."

She did not say the other thing.

The other thing was that nine animals had come down the long axis in the last light and gone into the exact places where the footing was worst, and none of them had gone anywhere near the wagon road where the fill ran out, and the country turned back into country. She had watched it happen, and she had known the answer to it before the first one reached anybody, and the knowledge had come with a quality of attention attached to it that she recognized and could not report — the attention of something that had watched people stand up, for a long time, and had thought carefully about what standing up requires.

She took her hand off the boards.

***

Kael-Ren walked her out to the gate before she went.

"You’ll be going to the others now," he said. "The Empire. The Federation. The clans in the north, if they’ll have anybody, which they won’t."

"Eventually all of them."

"Then I’ll say this before you go, and you may do what you like with it." He stopped at the gate post with his hand on it. "Not two weeks ago Naida stood in my pavilion and told two hundred people that a thing of yours in my ground might have made all of this, and that she couldn’t prove otherwise. Last night you stood in my cold and told sixty people you’d got three of them killed by answering a question you should have left open. Neither of those had to be said out loud, and both of them cost you, and neither of them bought you anything."

"They weren’t meant to buy anything."

"I’m aware. That’s the difficulty with them." He let go of the post. "The Empire won’t believe it of you. The Federation will assume it’s a position. So I’ll write to them myself, over my seal, as a Speaker of the Wild Confederacy who has no reason on this earth to flatter your mountain, and I’ll tell them what was said here and who was standing in the field when it was said. They’ll not take it from you. They may take it from me."

Raven looked at him.

"Why?"

"Because it’s spread," Kael-Ren said. "That’s all. It was in the east, and now it’s a thousand kilometers northwest in my cattle country, and my people have started asking me who else is out there and how long they’ve got, and I have not got a single answer that isn’t yours." He looked past her at the flats, gray now to the horizon and perfectly, terribly even. "There are three more doors after mine. I’d rather they were open before somebody has to kick one."