Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 16, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
She did not get up.
One hour produced that and nothing else.
Aeryn lay on the cot in the gray and ran the inventory without moving, because moving was not among the things available, and the inventory came back empty.
Then she reached, to find out how empty.
Nothing came.
Not thin.
Nothing, and reaching a second time put a headache in behind her eyes that had not been there before she tried, and she stopped and lay still until it went.
Do not do that again today.
Sitting up took until what she guessed was midmorning, and it took two attempts, and the second one worked because she stopped trying to do it with her middle and rolled instead.
The wet end and back was eight paces.
She counted it as the day’s walking because it was going to be the day’s walking.
The band she could hold.
The cup she could not, and she stood at the wet end with her hand shut on nothing and made herself put the figure in the column rather than argue with it.
Sit-to-stand at two, the second with a hand on the frame.
Wall push at one, and the one was not honest, so it came out and nothing went in its place.
The dagger came out of the ring and went back in without leaving her hand.
The boy came and went and said Skarr’s hip had gone black all down the side and that the Long Count said black was what it did.
Two men off the second box were not working.
Nobody was under the bank.
This is what the twenty-six cost.
Not the girl.
The twenty-six.
Which was a distinction with something in it, because the twenty-six paces had been a decision and the fifty afterward had not, and if she was going to empty herself again she wanted to know which half had actually done it.
There were no figures to answer that with.
The question went into the column instead, underneath the ones that had answers.
***
They came up together after that, and she heard three sets of boots on the gravel and had the whole of it before anybody spoke, because nobody in this village had ever come up that slope in a group to see her.
Vekka came in.
Belloch and Torrin stopped in the doorway with the light behind them, cap in hand, the way Vaelith stopped, and for the same reasons.
“You’ll stay where you are,” Vekka said.
“That’s not manners.”
Then start.
“The apron’s gone.”
I watched it go.
“You watched a bank come down.
That’s a different thing.” She took the crate.
“Belloch.”
***
“Stone comes off the face on the runs and out of the bores by hand,” Belloch said.
“It’s sorted on the apron.
It’s weighed on the apron.
It’s loaded off the apron onto the road, and there’s no other flat ground on this face a wagon can stand on.
Been that way since before the mine shut.”
What is left of it.
“Forty paces at the low end, under about a man’s height of spoil.
The top of it’s off the mountain.”
Clearing time.
“Two turns of the moon.
Every man on the face, nobody down a shaft.”
And under the spoil.
“Most of a season’s cut, sorted and stacked and ready to weigh.” He turned the cap over once.
“I’ll not put that closer than a tenth.”
A tenth is better than anybody else on this face could give me.
When is the tithe due.
“Turn of the season.
Thirty-one days.”
***
Nobody said anything.
“There it is,” Vekka said.
Say the sentence, one of you.
Belloch looked at the wall plate rather than at her.
“We’ll not make the weight.”
***
Aeryn took a moment before she started, because there was a shape she wanted, and going at it in the wrong order would get her a room full of men explaining the obvious.
Who sets the weight.
The three of them looked at each other.
“The Covenant,” Torrin said.
That is not an answer; that is a direction.
Who sets it.
“The wagon comes at the turn,” Belloch said.
“Nineteen years, same man.
He gives me the weight for the season coming and takes the weight for the season gone.”
And where does he get it.
“Never asked.”
Who weighs the stone.
“I do.”
On what.
“The apron beam.”
Does he check it.
Belloch stopped.
“No,” he said, slowly.
“He watches me do it.
He’s never once put a hand on that beam.”
So the empire’s figure for what came off this face for nineteen years is your arm and his memory.
Nobody in the room had anything to put against that.
***
When did the weight last change. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
“It went up,” Belloch said, “the year the second shaft closed.”
By how much.
“I’d want to think.”
Then think out loud and let me have all of it, including the parts you are not sure about.
He did, and it came out badly, which she had expected.
It came out in the order a man’s memory produces things and not in the order the seasons happened, and twice he put a figure against the wrong year and corrected himself, and once he did not correct himself and she let it stand rather than break his run.
The second shaft.
Then something about a wet Growing and a road washed out.
Then Gharn’s father, who had died, and a rise the year before that, and Belloch was clear that it was the year before and not the year after because of a thing about a funeral.
Then a rise he could not place at all except that his own boy had been small.
Then the bores.
Four of them driven in one season because the upper workings had stopped giving, and a rise after.
Aeryn held all of it.
That part was not difficult, and she had not expected it to be.
A man’s memory arrives in the order it happens to arrive in, with the digressions left in and the dates attached to the wrong things, and the work is not remembering it.
The work is deciding which of the things he has said are events and which are how he feels about events, and then putting the events on a line.
She built four columns while he talked.
The season.
What the weight had been.
What had happened to this face that year.
And the one she kept empty on purpose, which was what she thought about it, because a column you fill while a witness is still speaking is a column that starts telling you what to hear.
By the time he stopped, she could have handed any part of it back to him from either end.
Then she sat and looked at what she had, and did not say anything for long enough that Torrin shifted in the doorway.
***
Belloch.
The year the second shaft closed.
Did this face send up more stone that year or less.
“Less.
Half a shaft’s worth less.”
The year the bores went in.
“Less.
You’ve four crews driving bores and not one of them cutting.”
The wet Growing with the road out.
“Less.”
And Gharn’s father.
“He was the best cutter on this face, and he went down a hole,” Belloch said it and then stopped, and stood in the doorway with his cap in both hands, and Aeryn watched a man arrive somewhere on his own and did not say one word to help him.
Torrin got there first.
“They put it up,” he said, “when we’re short.”
***
The room went quiet in a way that had nothing polite in it.
“That’s four,” Torrin said.
“That’s four times, and every one of them a bad year.”
“Five,” Belloch said.
“There’s the one I can’t place.”
“Then five.”
Vekka had not moved.
“Say the rest of it, Torrin.”
“There isn’t a rest of it.
That’s the whole.” He stopped, and started again somewhere else.
“It’s never gone down.
Nineteen years and it’s never gone down, and there’s been good years in there.
There was the year we opened the west drift, and everybody was fat, and it didn’t move.”
Not once?
“Not once,” Belloch said.
***
They were all looking at her, and she understood that the next thing she wrote was going to travel down that slope inside an hour, whatever any of them intended, and she took her time over it.
I do not know what that means.
“You know what it looks like,” Torrin said.
I know what the numbers do.
I do not know why they do it, and those are not the same thing, and a village that confuses them ends up shouting at a man on a wagon in thirty-one days with nothing in its hands.
Torrin’s jaw worked.
“Then what’s it worth, all this?”
It is worth knowing that the figure moves, that it moves in one direction, and that it moves when this face is weakest.
She turned the band round.
That is three facts, and I would not have had one of them without Belloch, and none of them tells us who to be angry with.
She had three facts, and no name, and no mechanism, and no answer to the question underneath all of it, which was the one she had asked first in every investigation she had ever run and had not been able to ask once here.
Who is better off.
Somebody was.
A figure that has moved five times in one direction has moved because moving it did something for somebody, and until she knew what it did and for whom, she had a pattern and not a case.
What she did not put on the band was the rest of it, which had assembled itself somewhere around the third column and had been sitting there since.
A quota, as she had been taught to read one, was a demand for a quantity.
It went up when there was more to be had and down when there was less, and the quantity was the whole of the point of it, and every one she had ever worked against had behaved that way.
This one did not behave like a demand for stone at all.
It behaved like a demand for effort, set against whatever effort this face had left, and it had been set five times in nineteen years by somebody who evidently knew what this face had left.
She had seen supply lines run that way twice in her own service, both times on purpose, and on neither occasion had the purpose been the supplies.
Which was her framework and not necessarily this world’s, and she wrote that underneath it, because a woman fifteen days into a civilization does not get to decide what a word means in it.
There was nothing she could do with that in this room.
It rested on one man’s memory and five dates, one of which he could not place, and she had built worse cases and been right and had also built better ones and been wrong.
Into the empty column, then, where it could sit until it had something under it.
***
Now the question nobody has asked.
What happens to a face that comes up short.
Belloch looked at Torrin.
Torrin looked at Vekka.
“Don’t know,” Vekka said.
Somebody knows.
“Somebody somewhere.
Not on this face.” She said it evenly.
“There’s never been a short season here.
And up the valley.
“You hear things,” Belloch said.
“It’s always somebody’s cousin, and it’s always a different ending, and I’ll not repeat any of it to you as though I knew it.”
Aeryn sat with that.
There was no worse answer available and she had half expected it, and she made herself take the whole of it rather than the part she could work with.
Then that is the actual problem, and it is not the weight.
“Go on,” Vekka said.
You have thirty-one days, and you are going to spend all of them shifting spoil so that a thing does not happen.
Nobody in this village has spent one hour on what to do if it happens anyway, because nobody here has ever seen it happen, and the reason nobody has ever seen it happen is that four hundred people have broken themselves every season for a hundred years making sure of it.
Nobody answered that either.
“Aye,” Belloch said at last, to the wall.
***
Vekka got up.
“You’ll leave the wagon man where he is,” she said.
“That’s not a discussion.”
Agreed.
“Just like that.”
You are right, and I have been wrong about this village three times.
“Four,” Vekka said.
“But you’re learning.”
She went to the door and stopped there and did not turn round.
“Belloch walks the face tomorrow and counts what’s still in it.
Proper figures, not a tenth.
Torrin gets me a number for how many men I can put on spoil without the fires going out.” A pause.
“And the pair of you bring it up here.”
***
Torrin stayed after they had gone, which she had not expected.
“Two of us went up to the hole this morning,” he said.
“The one in the new face.”
Report it.
“It’s a channel.
Cut square, mortared, older work than the mine by the look of the stone.
Runs back about nine paces and then there’s a fall, and it’s blocked.” He was giving it the way a man gives a report to somebody who has asked for one, and neither of them remarked on it.
“Water’s coming through the fall.”
How much.
“Don’t know.
Thread of it.”
Steady or falling.
“Don’t know that either.
It’s been a day.”
Where does it go.
“That’s the bit.” He rubbed his neck.
“It doesn’t run down.
It runs across, and it runs north, and there’s nothing north of that face but mountain.”
Aeryn sat forward, which cost her something and was worth it.
Then that is where we start.
“Start what.”
There was no answer to that yet, and she did not pretend to know.
North was the wrong direction for water on this face, and every person in Thinblood knew it without ever having had to say it.
Everything came off the shoulder and ran down, because there was nothing underneath and never had been, and a channel that took water across, and north was a channel that somebody had built to take water somewhere.
Which meant somewhere had wanted water, a long time ago, in a place that was not this village.
And a made channel with a fall in it is a channel that was working until the fall happened, and a thread coming through a fall is what a fall lets through and not what the channel carries.
And it was the second old thing to come out of this mountain in two days, in a place where the mine had been failing for a hundred years and the weight owed on it had gone up five times.
She looked at that for a while and then put it down, deliberately, the way a person puts down a tool they have picked up too early.
Three things being old and in the same mountain is not a connection.
It is three things being old and in the same mountain.
She had watched better officers than herself lose a season to a pattern that turned out to be nothing more than everything in one place having been built at once.
But she did not strike it out either.
Can you get past the fall.
“Not without props and not without men, and every man on this face is going to be on that spoil by tomorrow.” Torrin put his cap on.
“I’ll tell you what I’d do, and it’s nothing, for thirty-one days.”
Understood.
“Aye,” he said.
“I thought it might be.”
***
Vaelith came at dark and looked at the crate before he looked at her, and at how far out from the wall it was standing.
“You have had the three of them up here.”
And Torrin twice.
“I know.
Four people told me, and this time three of them thought they were telling me something.” He came in and took her wrist without asking for it, which he had not once done in eight weeks, and put it down again without opening the case.
“Do nothing tomorrow.”
I was not going to.
“You were, and your hands talked you out of it before I could.” He straightened.
“The Long Count has given you a piece of work.”
She has.
“Then I will say my one thing and go and sit down.” He was already turning.
“You have spent two weeks trying to buy a place here with what you can do.
She has given you one because of a thing you noticed.
Those are not the same transaction, and I would not confuse them if I were you.”
***
She went over the whole of it once before she slept, in the order the day had produced it rather than the order she wanted, because that was how you found the thing you had walked past.
Thirty-one days to a weight that has never once gone down.
Nine days until three men came off the Raw.
Two days at her own guess, and nobody’s to confirm it, before her hands would hold a cup.
And nine paces into the mountain, behind a fall nobody had men to shift, water going north.
She could not do one thing about any of it tonight.
The crate was still out in the middle of the floor where Vekka had pushed it, at the distance a person sits at when they have come to be answered rather than to look at somebody.
Getting up to put it back was beyond her, and she was not going to ask anybody, and in the morning three people were coming up that slope with figures.
Aeryn left it where it was and went to sleep faster than she had in two weeks.