Chapter 555 - 554: A Thing With a Date On It

Chapter 555: Chapter 554: A Thing With a Date On It

Location:Seven Peaks — Thorne’s office; the Hall; the North Camp; Medicine Hall

Date/Time:TC1857.03.15 – TC1857.03.22

The bell rope on the north gate had a bad splice in it, and when a rider came in hard, the sound went flat on the second stroke instead of running clean.

Raven heard it flatten from the Hall and knew before anybody told her, because the last three riders who had come in at that speed had all been carrying the same kind of paper, and because she had spent a month and a half learning what her own settlement sounded like when it was about to hand her a list of names.

Thorne brought it up himself rather than sending it.

Two sheets in Silas’s hand, which was small and even and did not change under any circumstance she had ever seen, and a third sheet folded inside them that was not in Silas’s hand at all.

She read the casualties first because she always read the casualties first.

Ilva Merrit. Maren Holt. Two of the nine engineers, named. Four of the fourteen Millford road people, named. Seventeen hurt, listed. Alek Voss, right arm, from the elbow down, no function.

She read it twice and then put it down on Thorne’s desk and stood with both hands flat on either side of it for a while, and Thorne did not say anything and did not leave.

"Say it," she said eventually.

"You sent her."

"I sent her."

"She said no and went anyway, and you knew she’d go when you asked." Thorne had his hands behind his back, and his voice had not changed at all. "That’s all of it, and there isn’t a version where you get to feel better about it, and you’re going to want one by about tomorrow evening, so I’m telling you now that there isn’t."

***

The technical sheet was worse than the casualty list, which she had not expected.

The flank measure is dead. Not compromised. Not conditional. Dead, and dead for a reason that had nothing to do with the ground: they had done it correctly, from wood, with footing under them, and the knife had stopped.

The neck joint still works. That is the whole of what we have.

Raven sat down with that and made herself go through it properly instead of reacting to it, and the shape of the thing came up out of the page in about four minutes and was not pleasant.

Two months ago there had been a measure that farmers could use in a barn. Then it had needed a correction. Then it had needed ground. Now there was one method left in the world for killing these things, and it required a person to get inside the reach of something built entirely around reach, and put an edge into a joint behind the head-plate, and be right the first time.

She turned to the third sheet.

It was Alek Voss’s hand, left-handed, enormous and slow and painful to look at, and it said one thing.

The seam on the belly is tidier than the seam on the back. The back is old work. This is new. Whoever is doing this has not lost interest.

***

The amendment went out in the afternoon, and it was the shortest thing she had ever put her name to.

She wrote Silas’s three lines and did not improve any of them, and she put his third one at the top rather than the bottom, in the same size as the rest, and she did not attribute it because Silas had asked her not to and had given a reason she could not argue with, which was that a thing signed by a formation master reads as an opinion and a thing signed by nobody reads as a fact.

We did the measure correctly. Every one of us. It was correct five weeks ago. Being correct is a thing with a date on it.

Then: no flank. Then: the neck joint, and nothing else. Then a line she added herself, at the end, and made herself keep it short.

Any sheet from us is out of date on some day we cannot name in advance. Read every one as if it is the second-newest thing you have.

Thorne read it over and put it in the bag for the riders.

"That last line is going to frighten people more than everything above it."

"Good."

***

She went up to the north camp herself and did not send Coop, and she told Sera Vahn about Maren Holt standing in the command tent with the flap open because it was warm for the third month and the tent smelled of wet canvas and lamp oil.

Sera Vahn listened to the whole of it without moving. When Raven finished, she said, "Where," and Raven told her, and then she said, "Doing what," and Raven told her that too — the casing stock, the edge made in her hands on the way off the deck, the nosebleed, neck works, pass it down.

"That’s the whole of the doctrine we’ve got," Raven answered. "She made it and gave it away and then went to the narrow place."

"Yes." Sera Vahn was looking at the wall of the tent. "She’d have done that. That’s the thing about her, and I’d like it understood by somebody who never met her — she’d have done that if there had been a hundred people watching or nobody at all, and it is not a thing I can put in a letter home, because I cannot say where she is buried and I cannot say what she was doing, and her people believe she deserted."

"That last part won’t be true forever."

"It’s true now, and now is where her mother is." She turned back around, and her face had done nothing at all, and Raven understood, not for the first time, that this was not composure and was a very long habit. "I picked her. She wasn’t on a roster. I sat in a tent and thought about who would go into a hole in a foreign country and be useful in it, and I put her name down with my own hand because she was the best one, and being the best one is what put her at the narrow place."

"That’s correct," Raven allowed. "And you’d do it the same way tomorrow, and so would I, and that isn’t a comfort, and I’m not offering it as one."

"No." Sera Vahn picked up her page and her pen. "Three hundred and seventy-eight. It’s three hundred and seventy-five now. Her and two of the engineers."

***

Kairos found her on the steps below the Hall that evening, sitting where she should not have been sitting, in the cold, with the sheets still in her hand.

He did not ask whether she was all right, which she had braced for and would have handled badly. He sat down beside her on the step with the deliberate slowness of a man whose ribs still had opinions, and looked at the same nothing she was looking at, and said, "The farmer."

"Ilva Merrit."

"I only met her once. She corrected me about a knife." He put his hand out flat, palm up, on the step between them, and left it there without comment. "She was right, and she was extremely rude about it, and I have thought about it perhaps a dozen times since, which for me is a great deal of thinking about a farmer."

Raven put her hand in his and let it stay there.

"I sent her to teach people a thing that stopped being true while she was walking to them."

"Yes." He did not argue with it. He also did not agree in the way that people agree in order to be kind, which she had always found to be the most restful thing about him. "You will want to say that it makes the sending wrong. It does not. It makes it late, which is a different failure and a worse one to fix, because you cannot fix it by being a better person. You can only fix it by being faster, and you are already going as fast as a person goes."

"That’s not comfort."

"No. I have never been able to do comfort." His thumb moved once across her knuckles. "I can sit on a cold step. That is the whole of my range."

***

Alek Voss came home on the sixth day after the sheet, ahead of the cart, riding because he could not work and would not sit still, and Mira had him in the Medicine Hall inside the hour.

Raven watched the examination from the end of the room because he had said she could and because she had wanted to say no and had decided that was cowardice.

It was worse than the sheet. The arm was warm — properly warm, better colored than the left, because the vessels were fine and the blood went where it always had. It just did not answer. Mira went down it with a pin from the shoulder to the fingertips, and he reported honestly at every point, and the reporting stopped in the middle of the upper arm and did not start again, and he watched his own fingers not move with the same professional interest he had apparently applied to it on the deck.

"Can he have one?" Raven asked, at the end.

Mira put the pin down.

"That’s the question, isn’t it?" She did not look up. "No. Not as he stands. A made limb goes where a limb isn’t. Varden puts it on a stump. She has never in her life put one on an arm that’s already there, and I don’t believe she could, and I’m certain nobody should be finding out on him."

Alek Voss said, from the table, "Then take it off."

The room got quiet in a way that Raven felt in the back of her neck.

"I’m not doing that today," Mira told him.

"I didn’t say today. I said take it off." He was flexing his left hand slowly, which she had noticed him doing since he came in. "It’s dead weight on that side, and it’s going to get in the way and it’ll get infected the first time I burn it on something and don’t notice. And a clean cut at a level of your choosing, done in a warm room by somebody who isn’t in a hurry, is the best thing anybody’s ever going to hand your maker to work with."

***

It was Mira who followed it through, twelve hours later, standing in the Hall at an hour when nobody should have been standing anywhere.

"He’s right," she reported. "That’s the problem. He’s completely right, and I need you to hear the rest of it before you agree with him."

Raven had known it was coming since the moment he said it on the table. She had spent the twelve hours trying to find the place where it wasn’t true and had not found one.

"Say it anyway."

"Your criterion is how much use can be given back, soonest." Mira put both hands on the table. "A clean surgical amputation at a level chosen by me, on a healthy body, with no crush damage and no burn and no infection and no nine-year-old scar tissue, is the best possible candidate. Better than every war amputation on that wall. Better than Elspeth Nyland, and hers is the best one I’ve got." She let that sit for a second. "So the fastest way onto the top of that list is to hand me a limb to cut off. And I have sixty-two people in a camp whose Federation hardware is failing, who all know that, who can all read, and who are all going to work it out inside a week."

"They’ll do it."

"Some of them will do it. Not most. But some of them will present with a knee that’s seizing and a very calm request, and I will be standing there holding a saw and a set of criteria that you signed." Mira’s voice did not rise. "I’ve been a healer for a long time, and I have never once been part of an arrangement where the way to get treatment faster was to be worse off on purpose. I’d like it undone by somebody who isn’t me."

Raven stood with that for a while.

"I built it," Raven admitted. "Four weeks ago, in this room, and I signed it so that people would know where to be angry, and I stood there and thought it was the honest version because it wouldn’t reward being useful to me." She put her hand flat on the table the way she had on the boards at Windbreak, and this time nothing pushed back. "It rewards being ruined. I didn’t see it. Nobody in the room saw it, and I’m not going to pretend somebody warned me, because nobody did."

"What do you want to do?"

"I want to think about it, and I haven’t got time, because he’s asked and somebody will ask tomorrow." She straightened. "Bench in the morning. Everybody who was in the room the first time, and Sera Vahn, and Varden."

***

She ruled at the second hour after dawn, and she made herself say the whole of it, including the part that made the list worse.

"Three amendments. All of them go on the wall under the original, in the same hand, and the original stays up with them so anybody can see what I got wrong.

"One. A limb that does not answer counts as a limb that is gone. Alek Voss is on that list today, as he stands, with the arm still attached, and nobody has to cut anything off him to earn a place." She did not soften into it. "That’s the one that costs. There are sixty-two people in the north camp with Federation hardware that is failing, and no parts on this continent, and a fair reading of that sentence puts a great many of them on the wall who were not on it yesterday. Mira’s going to have to assess every one of them, and the list is going to get long enough that some of the people currently on it are never going to reach the top of it in their lives. I’d rather that than a queue you can climb with a saw.

"Two. Where a limb has to come off, the level is decided by the healer alone. Not by the patient, not by me, not by anybody’s commander. And the level chosen can never improve a place in the queue. If Mira takes more, you do not move up. If she takes less, you do not move down. The queue does not notice what was cut, and the sheet will say so in those words."

Varden said, "And if somebody comes to her having already done it themselves."

The room went very still, because it was the right question and because it had not been asked out loud.

"Then they’re treated, obviously, and they go on the list where the criterion puts them, which will be near the top, because a thing done badly to yourself in a shed is still an amputation." Raven did not look away from her. "I can’t build a rule that punishes a person for something they did in the state that makes people do it. So I’ll tell you what I’m actually doing instead of pretending I’ve solved it: I’m making it slower, I’m making it not obviously worth it, and I’m putting on the wall in my own writing that this is a thing I am worried about and cannot fully prevent. If somebody does it anyway, that’s on the wall too, and it’ll have my name at the bottom of the page."

"Third amendment?"

"Third." She looked at Sera Vahn. "Nobody’s Federation hardware gets assessed by anybody outside the Medicine Hall. Not by me, not by the Corps’ own officers, not for any purpose. Sixty-two failing augments is an inventory, and I’m not having one of those exist in this settlement in a form anybody could carry out of it."

Sera Vahn nodded once, slowly, and did not say what she was thinking, and did not need to.

***

The wall took the amendments that afternoon.

Raven wrote them herself, standing on a stool, with the original criterion above them and everything in the same size, and Alek Voss’s name went on at the position the criterion put it, which was eleventh, and Elspeth Nyland stayed at third and nobody moved her.

She was on the last line when Bjorn came up behind her, which you noticed with Bjorn because the floor did.

He waited until she had finished the sentence.

"Maren Holt," he said. "That’s true, then."

"It’s true."

"She came down to the forge for two years. Every week she wasn’t on duty." He was looking at the wall and not at her, and his voice had gone down into the register where it stopped being loud at all. "I never taught her the awakening. I’ve got no more of that in me than a rock has. I taught her metal — what it does when it’s cold, what it does when it’s tired, why a weld goes where it goes. She learned it properly. Then she went away and did the other thing with it and came back and told me she still couldn’t make a decent hinge."

"She made a weapon in her hands off the deck of a rig and killed a thing with it. Then she told them how, and gave the tool away, and went to the narrow place."

Bjorn stood there for a moment.

"Two of my people are coming down from the north," he said. "Not clan. Exiles, like me, and they’ve been three years getting here, and they came through the passes in the third month, which you don’t do unless the thing behind you is worse than the weather." He turned to go. "I’d have told you next week. I’ll tell you now, and you can decide when you want to hear the rest of it, because I don’t think you’re going to like the shape of it, and I’d rather you heard it standing up."