Chapter 212: The Leaf and the Lattice (2)

Chapter 212: Chapter 212: The Leaf and the Lattice (2)

Chapter 212: The Leaf and the Lattice (2)

Lyra stared at him for a second.

Then she scrambled for her instruments.

And what happened after was one of the strangest things that has ever happened in the courtyard.

She sat cross-legged on the flagstones under a glowing tree.

It was three in the morning and she was reading numbers aloud in a steady, unbroken cadence.

"Point four up. Holding. Point one down. Holding. Point three up."

CLANG.

Cole struck.

Not on a beat of his own. On hers.

CLANG.

The way he was trying to shape the Star-Iron was completely different from the normal ways of smithing. Normally, a smith tries to shape the metal to a fixed form.

He was going with the flow of the metal. Meaning he was letting the metal take a form that would flex well with the frequency. An art in the making!

Every strike matched a fluctuation he could not see and she could not hear. Both of them were working in such a synchronized pattern that could move an Artist’s heart.

"Point two down. Holding. Point five up, that is a big one."

CLANG!

Sparks came off the anvil and died in the wet grass.

The nine spirits had drifted down out of the canopy without anyone noticing.

They hung in a loose ring around the two of them, watching, and the Warden’s light had gone from dim green to something warmer.

’It is singing back,’ Cole thought, and the thought did not feel like his own.

’The metal is singing back.’

After four hours, the thing on the anvil looked completely different!

It looked like a nest.

The sky went pale.

Lyra seated the living leaf into the cradle and locked it down.

"OK! If this fails," she said, "I want it recorded that I asked politely and the tree still let us waste a leaf."

Cole snorted.

"Enough nonsense! Feed it."

She fed the lattice.

HUMMM.

The array was working.

Ten seconds. The Miasma in the sealed chamber began to shred.

Twenty seconds. Lyra’s readings showed the drift, clear as day. The note was climbing and sliding exactly as it had before.

The cradle was moving with it.

The Star-Iron flexed on a scale too fine to see, following the leaf up and down and back, and the lattice never lost the note for a fraction of an instant.

Forty seconds.

The last of the gray broke apart and vanished, and the chamber went clear.

"It is holding," Cole said.

"It is holding," Lyra whispered.

A minute. Two.

Then Cole leaned closer to the glass and went completely still.

"Lyra."

"I see the numbers, they are beautiful, do not interrupt me."

"Lyra, look at the floor of the chamber."

She looked.

At the bottom of the sealed glass, where the Miasma had sat for a month, there was a small dry crust of dead moss that had been scraped off the test site with the original sample and never cleaned out.

It was green.

Damp and living and spreading, visibly, in slow soft creep across the glass.

Lyra put both hands over her mouth.

"That never happened with the core," Cole said hoarsely. "Not once. Not in any test we ran."

"No," a voice said from behind them.

The Warden had drifted forward to the edge of the chalk.

"A King’s heart is corruption," the Warden said.

"The device you built before did not clean anything. It struck the opposite of rot, and rot cannot survive its own inverse. That is all it ever did."

The old spirit looked at the greening moss.

"This is not the opposite of rot. This is what rot was the opposite of."

Draven had been standing at the garden gate since the fourth hour.

Nobody had noticed him arrive. Blank Canvas sure was a broken skill.

He walked forward into the chalk and looked at the moss spreading across the floor of the chamber.

The part of him had spent a lifetime reading terrain and force. He knew the happenings in the Novel and never have they achieved such an amazing result under the guidance of Neville Hennessey.

’A tower that runs on a monster core requires a King-level beast to work,’ he thought.

’A tower that runs on a leaf takes a gardener. Undermining the World Tree Leaf as some normal leaf should be a crime. But this alone will ensure fifty miles of breathable air as well as the pure, fertile soil can be used again by the humans! I should buy some farmlands too. A sweet retirement plan!’

Bastion Seven would stop importing. It would stop rationing. Within two years it would stop needing the Capital for anything at all, and the Capital would understand that faster than the citizens would.

’This is the thing they will kill us for,’ Draven thought.

He looked up into the canopy.

"How many?" he said.

The Warden turned toward him.

"You are asking how many leaves she can give."

"Yes."

"One," the Warden said. "Every seven days."

Cole’s head snapped up. "One?"

"She is a sapling," the Warden said, and there was an edge in the old light now.

"She is four days old in this soil. You are standing under a child and asking her how much of herself she can spare. That’s just wrong in so many ways! That’s child labor!"

The spirit drifted closer to the trunk.

"Take one every seven days and she will not feel it. Take two and she will feel it. Take four and you will have a stick in a courtyard and a great many towers that stop working in the same week."

"And when she matures?" Draven asked.

"Then it changes," the Warden said.

"A grown World Tree is not a plant. It is a place. She will feed her own soil, and she will hold her own weather, and in time she will begin to make spirits of her own, the way the old forests did."

The nine points of light hovering in the ring seemed to brighten slightly at that.

"We nine are wardens," the Warden said.

"We kept the Sanctum. We measured those who came for the legacy and we turned away the unworthy for nine centuries, and when the last of Thaldrasil fell we went into a jar in a boy’s pocket."

The green light flickered with something that might have been humor.

"We are not hers. We are borrowed. Hers are not born yet."

Draven absorbed all of it.

One leaf. Seven days. One tower a week, and not one hour faster, no matter how much steel Halvers poured or how many credits Cole spent.

Every tower the Capital burned would cost weeks. Not money.

’They will work that out eventually,’ Draven thought.

’Let us build enough of them first that it stops mattering.’

He turned toward the gate.

Across the city, in the pale gray light before sunrise, a horn sounded twice at the northern wall.

Halvers had the convoy assembled. Forty tons of Star-Iron, two hundred workers, and a site garrison waiting on a road eleven kilometers outside the Great Wall.

"Cole," Draven said. "Bring the cradle."